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International audience ; This article presents an artistic and political experiment as an effort to advance democratic transactions in the life sciences. Artists built a 'gender democratic labyrinth' in Maastricht, in which scientists, women's groups, people in general, artists, philosophers, politicians, journalists, clinical geneticists and many others interacted and negotiated on the creation of human embryos for medical-scientific research (a subject kept open in the Dutch Embryo Law of September 2002 to decide within a few years). By taking a gender perspective on the process of democratizing science, we aimed to create a space in which alterity and difference are constitutive elements in the public exchanges on science and technology. The idea to build a labyrinth was theoretically based on the notion of agonistic democracy - in which pluralism is the result of contestations and divisions - and on a notion of science and technology as being contextualized and socialized.

This article presents an artistic and political experiment as an effort to advance democratic transactions in the life sciences. Artists built a 'gender democratic labyrinth' in Maastricht, in which scientists, women's groups, people in general, artists, philosophers, politicians, journalists, clinical geneticists and many others interacted and negotiated on the creation of human embryos for medical-scientific research (a subject kept open in the Dutch Embryo Law of September 2002 to decide within a few years). By taking a gender perspective on the process of democratizing science, we aimed to create a space in which alterity and difference are constitutive elements in the public exchanges on science and technology. The idea to build a labyrinth was theoretically based on the notion of agonistic democracy - in which pluralism is the result of contestations and divisions - and on a notion of science and technology as being contextualized and socialized.

At the 1980 APSA meeting in Washington, a group of approximately 25 political scientists and others, out of a much larger network of contributors and sympathizers, agreed to form an Association for Politics and the Life Sciences dedicated to the advancement of an integrated biosocial perspective in our discipline. Although this short article is intended primarily to announce that fact and detail plans for the immediate future, we feel that this might also be an appropriate occasion to review briefly the history and rationale behind this intellectual activity and describe some of the objectives of the Association.The study of the relationship between biology and politics (sometimes called "biobehavioral political science" and sometimes also "biopolitics") drew its initial impetus in the latter 1960s and early 1970s from emergent developments in a number of other disciplines, particularly (a) ethology (the naturalistic study of animal behavior and adaptation), (b) psychophysiology (specifically, efforts to correlate various physiological characteristics and "indicators" with various mental and behavioral states), (c) psychobiology (including neurological and endocrine influences on social behavior), (d) behavior genetics (involving both human and non-human animal research), (e) psychopharmacology (especially the chemical manipulation of behavioral states), (f) sociobiology (the application of modern Darwinian theory to the explanation of social behaviors), and (g) ecology (the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, which gained visibility when the so-called "environmental crisis" erupted).

Politics and the life sciences—also referred to as biopolitics—is a field of study that seeks to advance knowledge of politics and promote better policymaking through multidisciplinary analysis that draws on the life sciences. While the intellectual origins of the field may be traced at least into the 1960s, a broadly organized movement appeared only with the founding of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) in 1980 and the establishment of its journal,Politics and the Life Sciences(PLS), in 1982. This essay—contributed by a past journal editor and association executive director—concludes a celebration of the association's thirtieth anniversary. It reviews the founding of the field and the association, as well as the contributions of the founders. It also discusses the nature of the empirical work that will advance the field, makes recommendations regarding the identity and future of the association, and assesses the status of the revolution of which the association is a part. It argues that there is progress to celebrate, but that this revolution—the last of three great scientific revolutions—is still in its early stages. The revolution is well-started, but remains unfinished.

The paper discusses the modern risks to global security in the context of non-proliferation of biological weapons and the problems relating to elimination of such risks. Also, the author considers a number of scientific issues that have relation to Convention on prohibiting development, production and accumulation of bacteriological (biological) and tocsin weapons and on their destruction. The author studies the dangers of scientific experiments with weapons application, as well as the issues of monitoring the life sciences, including responsibility of scholars for excluding military application of the scientific achievements.

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), under mandate from the federal government, supports the high level of science research in Switzerland by funding scientific projects and scientists' careers across all disciplines.

Arnhart's "Aristotle's Biopolitics: A Defense of Biological Teleology against Biological Nihilism" is both a valuable and yet at the same time a problematic study. Its value for political science lies in Arnhart's reminder that for many of the most important thinkers in the history of Western political thought their efforts to discover and articulate the principles of a political order necessarily presupposed a specific understanding of the order of nature itself. Given this, the fundamental political challenge of the modern scientific and industrial revolutions not only includes the new instruments and techniques of organization and manipulation made possible by the discoveries of modern science, but also those cultural and intellectual assumptions which create that very environment within which such instruments and techniques first became possible. In illustrating this intimate relationship between modern natural science and modern political science, Grant (1976:124) has written: "What calls out for recognition here is that the same apprehension of what it is to be 'reasonable' leads men to build computers and to conceive the universal and homogenous society as the highest political goal. The ways such machines can be used must be at one with certain conceptions of political purposes because the same kind of 'reasoning' made the machines and formulated the purposes. To put the matter extremely simply, the modern physical sciences and the modern political sciences have developed in mutual interpenetration, and we can only begin to understand that interpenetration in terms of some common source from which both forms of science found their sustenance."

Life science and biotechnology have become a top priority in research and development in many countries as the world marches into the new century. China as a developing country with a 1.3 billion population and booming economy is actively meeting the challenge of a new era in this area of research. Owing to support from the government and the scientific community, and reform to improve the infrastructure, recent years have witnessed a rapid progress in some important fields of life science and biotechnology in China, such as genomics and protein sciences, neuroscience, systematics, super-hybrid rice research, stem cell and cloning technology, gene therapy and drug/vaccine development. The planned expansion and development of innovation in related sectors and the area of bioethics are described and discussed.