| Popis: |
The first scene of Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Prometheus (2012) presents an alien decomposing in order to sow a planet that could be Earth with DNA and give birth to life. We learn later on in the film that the alien is part of a species that came from space called the Engineers. Why has such a term made its way from technique to fiction via science? This chapter could indeed be an attempt to answer this question. Our conviction would be that the explanation is partly based on the increasing popularity of this word in the last few years and that expressions such as living engineering, genetic engineering, metabolic engineering and even ecosystem engineering are particularly popular, describing different study subjects and involving meanings that are very different from that of the very term, to such a point that it seems that the time has come to have a critical look at its uses. |
