The biological sciences, particularly neuroscience and genetics, are currently in the cultural ascent. Aided by advances in informatics and digital imaging, these ‘techno-sciences’ increasingly promise to provide a theory of everything in the natural and social worlds. Social policy has not been slow to conscript biology into its legitimating stories. Beginning in the United States with the decade of the brain in the 1990s, neuroscience was first on the stage, but developments in genetics, known as epigenetics (referred to in the first epigraph), also have potentially profound implications for society and culture, and the responses of the State to intimate family life and personal choices. In the chapters that follow, we aim to provide a review of these nascent technological biologies and their claims. We examine the actual and potential applications of contemporary biology in social policy, and the implications which flow for moral debate and State intervention.

Our purpose, in part, is to explore how the new technological sciences ‘think’, how their scientific practice is conducted, the issues on which they focus, and the assumptions that have to be made in the interpretation and application of their findings. If we are to perceive, question and debate their social implications, science and scientists must be part of the story. It is not simply, as we and others have argued, that the original science can be lost in translation into policy, but sometimes the preoccupations of the laboratory itself lead in distinctive, controversial directions.