II

Law-code and executive power - architect's plan and builder's craft.
Gene action is the prime mover, the great absolver.
Mining green gold to spill black ink, to drink it from the troft and cut in on the sugar.
Surrender the commons to the bootmarch of biotech, served by back-pocket ivory towers and pump-priming federal courtesies.
With science comes rhetoric.
Couched in terms of life-maps and holy grails, cybernetics and feedback transducers: the language of sociobiology.
All handmaidens for dangerous crossings and hand-wringing policies.
Safe guards to thrash the parliament of defects and disposed workers to the scrap heap of oblivion.
Give us perfection on polymer scaffolding.
Give us ghetto walls bricked word by word.
Give us eugenics in seasonal colours.
Give us new life over telegraph wires.

The body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule -
and also like the modern corporation or political body -
has become just another part of the informational network,
now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other.
[Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life]