Competing for sovereignty in cooperative committees: Bioethical debates and the development of a regulatory policy for the life sciences in Germany in the 1980s

这个项目属于科学史领域。它探讨了20世纪80年代德国新兴生物伦理话语及其制度化背景下现代生命科学风险评估的社会，政治和科学谈判。基于微观历史的方法，本研究聚焦于三个成立的政治和议会委员会，以评估生命科学新发展研究领域的伦理风险和冲突，以及社会和经济效益。这些委员会是：1)所谓的基因技术机会和风险调查委员会（1984-1987），一个由德国议会设立的专家委员会；2)一个体外受精、基因组分析和基因治疗委员会，由德国联邦司法部和德国联邦研究和技术部（1984 -1985）建立；3)一个由来自不同州的代表组成的生殖研究和基因组分析工作组（1986-1988）。在联邦司法部的领导下组织。从历史的角度来看，这三个委员会代表了20世纪80年代在政治监管机制不断演变的结构中首次举办关于现代生命科学生命伦理的辩论的机构设置。该项目旨在分析这些谈判过程中竞争与合作的复杂模式。它还考虑到了随之而来的公众对基因工程和胚胎研究的争议，这些争议在20世纪80年代中期在德国达到了顶峰。在三个不同的层面上分析了竞争和合作互动模式之间的紧张关系：首先，该项目调查了在委员会中会面的参与者（例如来自生命科学、医学、神学、哲学、政治的专家以及来自政府和社会的代表）如何谈判不同的和竞争的价值观。详细地说，它将分析通过哪些过程就进一步的政治监管机制达成共识，平衡生物伦理争论、社会风险以及有争议的新技术的科学和经济影响。其次，通过将这三个委员会作为研究案例并观察它们之间的相互作用，该项目探讨了更广泛的历史发展。它探讨了生物伦理学批评家的话语动态，以及20世纪80年代德国关于生命科学的公共争议中出现的竞争和冲突的价值观。通过这种分析，该项目有助于当代历史研究，将20世纪70年代和80年代描绘为科学、政治和公众纠缠的总体重构时刻。第三，该项目通过比较德国背景与美国和英国的公共和政治辩论，调查了20世纪80年代发展的国家特殊性。

This project is located in the field of history of science. It explores the social, political and scientific negotiations concerning the risk assessment of the modern life sciences in the context of emerging bioethical discourses and their institutionalisation in Germany in the 1980s. Based on a micro-historical approach, the research focuses on three political and parliamentary committees inaugurated to assess the ethical risks and conflicts, as well as the social and economic benefits of the newly developing research fields in the life sciences. These committees are: 1) the so-called Enquete-Kommission on chances and risks of gene technologies (1984-1987), an expert committee set up by the German parliament, 2) a committee on in vitro fertilisation, genome analysis and gene therapy, established by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (1984 -1985), and 3) a joined working group of representatives from different states on reproduction research and genome analysis (1986-1988), organised under the leadership of the Federal Ministry of Justice. From a historical perspective, these three committees represent the first institutional settings to host debates on the bioethics of modern life sciences in the evolving structures of political regulatory mechanisms during the 1980s. The project aims at analysing the complex modes of competition and cooperation in these processes of negotiation. It also takes into account the accompanying public controversies on genetic engineering and embryo research that reached a peak in Germany in the mid-1980s. Tensions between competitive and collaborative modes of interactions are analysed on three different levels: First, the project investigates how actors who met in the committees (e.g. experts from life sciences, medicine, theology, philosophy, politics, and representatives from government and society), negotiated different and competing values. In detail, it will be analysed through which processes a consensus was reached for further political regulatory mechanisms, balancing bioethical arguments, social risks, and scientific and economic impacts of the contested new technologies. Second, by taking the three committees as research cases and looking at their interaction, the project addresses broader historical developments. It explores the discursive dynamics of critics in bioethics and the emergence of competing and conflicting values in public controversies about the life sciences in Germany in 1980s. Through this analysis, the project contributes to contemporary historical research that portrays the decades of the 1970s and 1980s as a moment of general reconfiguration in the entanglement of science, politics, and the public. Third, the project investigates the national specificities of the 1980s developments by comparing the German context with the public and political debates in the US and UK.