Our culture is a scientific one, defining what is natural and what is rational. Its values can be seen in what are sought out as facts and made as artefacts, what are designed as processes and products, and what are forged as weapons and filmed as wonders. In our daily experience, power is exercised through expertise, e.g. in science, technology and medicine. Science as Culture explores how all these shape the values which contend for influence over the wider society.
Science mediates our cultural experience.
It increasingly defines what it is to be a person, through genetics, medicine and information technology. Its values get embodied and naturalized in concepts, techniques, research priorities, gadgets and advertising. Many films, works of art and novels express popular concerns about these developments. In a society where icons of progress are drawn from science, technology and medicine, they are either celebrated or demonized. Often their progress is feared as 'unnatural', while their critics are labelled 'irrational'.