Abstract

The somewhat disturbing success of bioethics as a discipline is probably due to the unique nature of its subject matter. Indeed what is it that happens when scientific interest, with its particular resources and language, turns toward the study of the human body? Can this body be instrumentalized like any other object, or do the sciences have to give way here before a taboo subject? Have the sciences not, without their knowing it, taken on an unprecedented signification? The truly prodigious growth of new fields of biological knowledge has thrust biology into the public arena. Extending more than ever beyond the status of narrowly scientific knowledge, these new fields have taken on a mythological and normative character in the social imagination.