Discusses possible future scientific breakthroughs in which man may circumvent nature and the legal, financial, moral and emotional problems that this may bring.

To learn more about Rowman & Littlefield titles please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

This book considers how we might think intelligently about the future. Taking different methodological approaches, well-known specialists forecast likely future developments and trends in human life.

Publisher description

Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American embryologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs successfully developed the technique of nuclear transplantation using frogs in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, and Marie DiBerardino, before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness, and when many thought the very idea of cloning was experimentally impossible. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, Nathan Crowe demonstrates how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of what was then referred to as the Biological Revolution. His book illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as providing new insights into the changing cultural perceptions of the biological sciences after Second World War.

The book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself. CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently been taken into account in this orientation. The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions therein.