Laboratory dramas

摘要

Why does embryonic stem-cell research cause such dramas? These books propose two perspectives. Three journalists-Eve Herold, Seth Shulman and Cynthia Fox—each suggest that this is a new topic that has been hijacked by a small group of political hotheads in America. By contrast, Hannah Landecker, an anthropologist at Rice University, Texas, charts 60 years of tissue-culture science. Over this period cells gradually came to live free from bodies, then experiments conjured them bit by bit into freezable, mass-produced objects and eventually into chimeras with parts from more than one species. Together, the two perspectives explain why all things stem cell slap the layman in the face, and why his shock bewilders many a scientist.