Polis genetica and society of the future

The most recent developments in the field of biological research are having, not only, an ever increasingly significant impact on medicine, but are potentially able to transform the very shape of politics, law and society, giving direction to, and modifying the very destiny of human nature. On an epistemological level, the scientific revolution taking place in the life sciences is determining the passage from biopolitics to a new, original dimension in which the human species is beginning to also dominate living matter. If the impact of the new biotechnologies is, on one hand, reassuring for its positive effects on the quality of human life, on health and nutrition, on the other, its troubling implications in social legitimization, genetic selection and manipulation of living matter, are worrying.
All of this, which can be defined as the polis genetica, seems, in any case to be inevitable and initiates radical modification in the social system, where genetic information is assuming an ever more important role in many aspects of human life. The argumentative style is clear and conceived for not-expert readers. The dilemmas and complexity of this scenario may therefore be understood also by people who are not accustomed to the lexicon of biology.

Mauro Giacca is the director of the Italian Component of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Icgeb) in Trieste and full Professor of Molecular biology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Trieste, Italy.
Carlo Antonio Gobbato, PhD in Criminology at the University of Bologna, and Head sociologist for the Medical Services' Specialised Projects at the Hospital Santa Maria della Misericordia in Udine, Italy, is president of the Italian Society for the Sociology of Health.