The scientific work of this Action is organized into three Working Groups (WGs).
These form the ‘think tanks’ of the Action:

  Working group one examines the changing boundaries of the human, nonhuman and society with the emergence of new and changing bio-objects. The urgency to study the shifting boundaries of ‘the living’ stems from the intertwined developments put forward, on one hand, by the new technologies capable of genetically transgressing what once were thought of as “natural” boundaries between categories of living, such as in the case of transpecies mice or hybrid embryos. On the other hand simultaneous theoretical and technological advancements in wide range of biosciences question boundaries within categories of living, such as the life/death border or what counts as genetic and biological and non-genetic and social. Furthermore, instead of seeing the role of biology as solving the “mysteries of life” (including the current biomedical fields) and the functioning of already existing entities, its societal mandate and praxis turn towards crafting new entities, thus producing the biological and hitherto unknown potentials within it. In light of this, Working Group 1 explores the question of how the biosciences and their products, i.e. bio-objects, challenge, change, or reify boundaries across and within categories of the living in several key sites around Europe