From Biobanks to Genetic Digital Networks: Why official pre-identified values may not work

The Cartesian worldview has been repeatedly evoked as an ideal deterministic simplification of the natural and social world. Indeed, the attempt to reduce the complexity of socio-technological deployment still embodies the ambitions of a consistent and persistent part of modernity. This attempt has been radicalised as technoscience has become a major form to validate and legitimize existing economic and political systems. The recent developments of emerging technologies and their governing instruments provide an illustration of how, both in the life sciences and ICT domains, technoscience and normativity have been used to sustain and justify each other, and have reciprocated in sharing and taking for granted the assumptions about control and predictability. On the one hand, the presumed physical control and predictability of new technological systems has been extended to control and predictability of the relevant values associated with them; on the other hand, ethics and law have been invested of task of normalising innovative processes. The reflections proposed in this chapter look at these seemingly parallel assumptions in the scientific and normative domains as de facto reciprocally produced, namely co-produced.