Das Gottes-handwerk

摘要

The subject of Das Gottes-handwerk is "playing God" byartificially synthesizing life in thelaboratory, and how that is perceivedhistorically and culturally and judged bysociety. In this small and excellentlywritten book, Joachim Schummer presents thehistorical, cultural, and theological backgroundfor understanding why "the creation of artificiallife" and attempts to "play God" are subjectsthat arouse great public interest and evenindignation. Sensation-driven recent reports onadvances in synthetic biology (SB), with thehelp of the popular press and mass media, havefed the public with exciting promises, just asoccurred with nanotechnology a decade ago. Asin that case, we have learned (again!) that SBwill provide solutions to all our problems in theareas of energy, health, environment, food, etc.In this review I will highlight some of the coreideas of the book.