Humans in Nature: The World As We Find It and the World As We Create It

Should there be limits to the human alteration of the natural world? Through a study of debates about the environment, agricultural biotechnology, synthetic biology, and human enhancement, Gregory E. Kaebnick argues that such moral concerns about nature can be legitimate but are also complex, contestable, and politically limited.

Gregory E. Kaebnick is a scholar at The Hastings Center and editor of the Hastings Center Report. He has been coinvestigator of two research projects funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on the ethical issues of synthetic biology, principal investigator of a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities on appeals to nature in debates about biotechnology and the environment, coinvestigator in a National Institutes of Health-funded project on genetic paternity testing, and a participant in a series of other Hastings projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Rockefeller Foundation on issues concerning the application of medical technologies and agricultural biotechnology.