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This works intends to reconstruct the Habermasian argumentative strategy concerning liberal eugenics, human cloning, research with embryos and genetic diagnostic main criticisms against it.

Science Fiction film can be regarded as a repository medium that transports and displays versatile links between the sciences, technology, contemporary history, everyday-life knowledge, society, and popular culture. Scientific discourse and visual culture complement and benefit one another. Transferring scientific contents or mental conceptions into film, and vice versa, produces synergetic effects. The Anglo-American feature film The Boys from Brazil (1978), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, focuses on the controversial topos of genetic and reproductive technology, more specifically reproductive cloning. Here, it depicts biotechnology as evoking fears and dark fantasies in a hypothetical and playful way. In the late Seventies, the belief in progress and social potential clashed with collective anxieties concerning human Doppelgänger and duplicates, substitutability, a loss of dignity and the singularity of the individual. Destabilized categories – just as blood relationship, mother- and fatherhood, family and gender roles – were debated in a controversial manner and needed to be re-defined. By combining these topoi with the dystopian vision of reactivating National Socialist concepts like racial hygiene and eugenics, The Boys from Brazil also touches on collective traumata deriving from the Holocaust, the Shoah – still active in the 1970s.

Science Fiction film can be regarded as a repository medium that transports and displays versatile links between the sciences, technology, contemporary history, everyday-life knowledge, society, and popular culture. Scientific discourse and visual culture complement and benefit one another. Transferring scientific contents or mental conceptions into film, and vice versa, produces synergetic effects. The Anglo-American feature film The Boys from Brazil (1978), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, focuses on the controversial topos of genetic and reproductive technology, more specifically reproductive cloning. Here, it depicts biotechnology as evoking fears and dark fantasies in a hypothetical and playful way. In the late Seventies, the belief in progress and social potential clashed with collective anxieties concerning human Doppelgänger and duplicates, substitutability, a loss of dignity and the singularity of the individual. Destabilized categories - just as blood relationship, mother- and fatherhood, family and gender roles - were debated in a controversial manner and needed to be re-defined. By combining these topoi with the dystopian vision of reactivating National Socialist concepts like racial hygiene and eugenics, The Boys from Brazil also touches on collective traumata deriving from the Holocaust, the Shoah - still active in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the concept of "clone" through the 20th century both in popular culture and in the life sciences. Using an approach adopted from the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck, the author traces cloning concepts from their beginnings in plant breeding circa 1900. Cloning is seen as a phenomenon exempt from evolutionary change that by the 1960s was reinterpreted as a utopian metaphor for biotechnological possibilities to reshape human nature up to cloning's becoming a reality in the 1970s and spurring ethical debates.

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The article discusses various aspects of the social risks involved in the genetic manipulation of germ cells and human cloning. According to the author, human cloning has divided the society into different biological classes, namely, the valuable and less valuable life. This means clones may be regarded as less valuable or at other times, there is a danger that uncloned organisms will be genetically left behind, and thus may be considered less valuable.

The article discusses the ethics involved in the field of biomedical research and human embryology. In this context, the author has made use of some studies based on embryonic stem cell research and cloning. These studies have posed a question on the existence and well-being of human beings in the society. In Germany, both an abortion and an embryo transfer against the will of a woman are ethically not justifiable and are considered as punishable.