Public Policy and the Life Sciences

Introduction

The physical sciences—physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and, as an applied science, engineering—have interested governments seriously for centuries. The life sciences have interested governments seriously only for decades. Today for public policy purposes, the life sciences are avidly encouraged, scrutinized, studied, and regulated, but they are also underappreciated, their past influence enigmatic, and their present abilities too hard to explain and too easy to fear.

Main Text

Political Philosophy

Public policy itself, in a Western world meaning, owes far more to the life sciences than ordinarily recognized. Political liberalism—in a fundamental civil liberties sense, not a party-label sense—was a product of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and found its clearest, most forceful, and most enduring expression in the work of the English physician John Locke, a leading coconspirator in that revolution. Not all philosophical contributions from the...