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Previous Volume 355:427-428 July 27, 2006 Number 4 Next

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By Lee M. Silver. 444 pp. New York, Ecco, 2006. $26.95. ISBN 0-06-058267-7.

Challenging Nature is a clearly written, trenchant defense of biotechnology against those who seek to limit the intentional control of nature and ourselves. Silver attacks the prohibition against "playing God," advocating instead the humanitarian use of biotechnology in medicine, nutrition, ecologic sustainability, and reproductive choices. He sees the opposition to control as rooted in unwarranted reverence for what is "natural," as opposed to "unnatural" human intervention. He shows how this reverence derives from religious and New Age notions of the immaterial soul, the Christian tradition of natural law, and the Gaia philosophy, according to which Mother Nature has our best . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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