This paper presents some issues on which the field of Public/Collective Health in Brazil needs to reposition. Based on the design of biological and social consolidated in the field from the 1970s, it discusses the concept of nature and culture that has supported the debate. It shows how this debate has been historically positioned, so it deserves to be reviewed, given the context of contemporary modern societies. Biotechnology practices are the subject of analysis in that, in addition to their intensive use by health, hold the characteristics of joining biological and social factors in the same object, transforming and creating living beings and working in the biodiversity. This scenario requires from the Public/Collective Health the urgent need to review their theoretical and epistemological marks.
nature; culture; biodiversity; biotechnology; public health