Creating problems in the governance of science: Bioethics and human/animal chimeras

The governance of science is driven by the need to maintain public trust in conditions where scientific advance may challenge important societal values. As the traditional reliance on scientific expertise as a source of governance legitimacy has proved less efficacious, so new forms of governance have emerged, in particular public engagement and, most lately, bioethics. This paper explores the extent to which public bioethics is evolving its modus operandi in order to enhance its political utility and hence extend its governance territory. Using the case of human/animal chimeras, it shows how bioethics has begun to create governance problems to which it has the ethical and policy answers. In so doing, bioethics is evolving a new role where it actively promotes its own agenda through its construction of a specialist mediating function in the governance of science to complement its existing role of the passive interpretation of the agenda of others.