Launched during the heydays of the copying machine and the U.S. sunshine laws and surrounded by controversy from its inception, genetic engineering may be the best documented technology ever to emerge from a laboratory. This essay draws on the pages that flowed forth from formal policy arenas as well as from less accessible places to examine the rise and fall of genetic engineering controls in the United States and Britain. The general argument developed here is that the settling of the issues raised by this field was achieved not through the resolution of technical problems but rather through the exertion of social interests—notably those of national governments, transnational corporations, genetic engineering firms, scientists, and sectors of the public. A synthesis of methods of analysis drawn from critiques of pluralism and from Foucault's analysis of the relation between power and discursive practice is used to assess the relative effects of these interests.

Theorists have recently argued that use of kin terms in patriotic speech appeals to genetically based predispositions and coefficients of relatedness, thereby moving one-time strangers to do things they might not otherwise do. This study has been designed to investigate the significance of kinship language in The Federalist, a project whose end was to persuade the people of New York to ratify the American Constitution. Three hypotheses were tested and supported. First, a wider variety and larger quantity of kinship language surfaced in patriotic than in nonpatriotic discourse on ratification. Second, kinship terms appear more often in papers that address the blessings one could expect from bonding in a potential union (a new family) and in papers that criticize the Articles of Confederation (the old family) than in the remaining papers that entail mundane descriptions of constitutional particulars. And third, kinship language appears significantly more frequently in the earlier papers of The Federalist than in the later ones, presumably to steal the audience's attention straightaway and thus form a bond among the people, the states, and the new Constitution.

Physician-assisted death is a particularly relevant subject for the elderly since end-of-life issues affect them sooner rather than later. This article examines both the macro (aging interest group) and micro (individual) advocacy levels, using Proposition 161, The California Death With Dignity Act, as a case study. To determine old-age interest group attitudes and activism, we explored their advocacy levels on the ballot measure. Public opinion polls and a survey that was administered exactly one week prior to the November 1992 election at the Pasadena Senior Center in Pasadena, California helped measure individual attitudes and beliefs regarding active euthanasia.