Understanding, manipulating and owning life: Sheila Jasanoff: Can science make sense of life? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019, 202 pp, £9.99 PB.

Understanding, manipulating and owning life: Sheila Jasanoff: Can science make sense of life? In each of these case study chapters, Jasanoff documents the different ways in which the authority of the life sciences frequently comes to inappropriately dominate definitions of life at the expense of broader humanistic understandings. Jasanoff traces how the narrative that science itself, rather than law and regulation, should set the agenda for biotech development was promoted through key events such as the Asilomar meeting of 1975. [Extracted from the article]