Synthetic Biology

The dominant (if not unique) mode of rationality guiding the life sciences today is instrumental. The factors contributing to this orientation are diverse: the predominance of the biotech industry as an increasingly widespread model for all scientific research; the demands of funding agencies (private and public) that experimental results be immediately commercialized; the tendency to reduce the worth of science to instrumental norms and the dismissal of those who don’t accept this position; and, of course, the express desire both sincere and insincere to make science serve the common good.

As of 2008, one exemplary area of the life sciences is synthetic biology. Although for a time the term was basically a place-holder, or a hoped-for brand, during 2007 synthetic biology began to coalesce into a number of stable research programs. In its early years synthetic biology has received attention from media and funders for two principle reasons: first, the audacious claims made by some spokespersons that synthetic biology will fashion living systems into—pick your analogy—the equivalent of biological Lego sets, or plug-and-play genetic robots, etc. In this way, we are told, biological complexity will be re-factored, and rational design and composition made child’s play (that is to say, undergraduates and high school students will be doing it with increasing facility); second, the seemingly unassailable claim that the manipulation of biological systems is uniquely suited to solve the world’s most pressing and significant problems. The self-styled prophets confidently assert that synthetic biology is going to discover new therapeutics and lower their cost, afford the means to solve the energy crisis, be the key to bio-security, and repair the environment.

Most broadly, post-genomics has seen the intensification of an engineering disposition in biology: understanding through making and remaking. Living systems, and their components, are being redesigned and refashioned. The challenge, for synthetic biologists, is to take biology beyond the guild-like restrictions of artisanal savior faire and to make it into a full-fledged engineering discipline, with all this entails in terms of standardization, modularization, and regularization. Though there is disagreement about how exactly this feat might be accomplished, there is broad agreement that the goal of standardized biological engineering will require a re-assemblage of scientific sub-disciplines, diverse forms of funding, institutional networks, governmental and non-governmental agencies, legal standards, and the like. Given that in emerging problem-spaces such as post-genomic biology existing expertise is by definition insufficient and that new experts do not yet exist, how to give form to collaboration remains a central challenge whose significance cannot be over-estimated. Although this type of claim is readily accepted and supported when it comes to the life sciences, the same type of claim is rarely addressed and easily dismissed when it comes to the human sciences. We maintain that such a position is dangerous.

SynBERC: the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center

During 2006 a group of researchers submitted a proposal to start an engineering center for synthetic biology—what they eventually called the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, or SynBERC. The ambitious proposal was enthusiastically received by the reviewers and officials of the NSF. Before making the official award, however, NSF officials informed Jay Keasling, a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley and the future director of the center, that the award was contingent on including an “ethics” component. Keasling et. al. were perfectly willing to accept this proposal although neither the NSF nor the principle scientists and engineers who were to guide the Center had a very clear or well-formulated idea about what such a component would look like or what it would do.

Keasling (apparently) turned to the Dean of Public Policy at Berkeley for advice (or was approached by the Dean). The Dean proposed that an adjunct professor, Stephen Maurer, a lawyer with strong interests in economics, would be a suitable person to lead this component. Keasling, following the informal style of leadership that characterizes his approach to such matters, accepted the proposal. The short tenure of the first occupant of this ethics position was a troubled one. Maurer proposed, and argued forcefully for, two things. First, a mechanism to monitor “experiments of concern”. Second, a procedure whereby the “community” of synthetic biologists would vote on a set of regulatory controls that would govern the relations of the nascent DNA synthesis industry and the community of synthetic biologists. The substance of Maurer’s proposals was eventually worked out in a report funded by the Sloan Foundation. They consisted in drawing attention to the need to monitor the solicitation of DNA sequences that could be identified by as yet to be developed software as of possible use in known pathogenic agents. Although the substance of Maurer’s proposals were taken to be reasonable and desirable by most of the concerned actors, personality conflicts, and a battle over who set the terms for governance and potential regulation, built to a point of total breakdown. After a contentious behind the scenes set of confrontations, in June 2006, in a melo-dramatic incident, Maurer’s proposals were pulled at the very last minute, from the agenda of Synthetic Biology 2.0, at UC Berkeley. This was done without informing Maurer, and no vote was taken.

In the wake of this theatrical turn of events—one that foreshadowed a governance style and a use of unequal power relations that would linger in SynBERC—a proposal was made to Paul Rabinow, a Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley and Ken Oye, an Associate Professor of Political Science, at MIT to jointly direct the so-called ethics, social consequences, public perception, legal considerations, risk assessment, policy implications, component. Both had been speakers at SynBio2; each had found the other’s presentation interesting. The proposal made sense as there appeared to be a clear division of labor with Oye concentrating on policy issues, and Rabinow on ethics and the innovations in organizational form as well as the scientific objects to be produced by the Center. Oye and Rabinow accepted. They would henceforth be the co-Principal Investigators of Thrust IV.

In search of a collaborative venue

It is not the ‘actual’ interconnections of ‘things’ but the conceptual interconnections of problems which define the scope of the various sciences. A new ‘science’ emerges where new problems are pursued by new methods and truths are thereby discovered which open up significant new points of view.3 —Max Weber

During the period 2004-06, a group of (mainly) anthropologists (currently or formerly associated in various capacities with the University of California at Berkeley) undertook experiments designed to create modes and venues more collaborative, scientifically rigorous, ethical, and rewarding than those available in the academy as currently constituted. The impetus for these efforts was dissatisfaction—existing, we discovered in variant forms in multiple different locales—with pedagogy, research design, modes of interaction, as well as existing genres of academic production and dissemination. Experiments were undertaken and within a short period of time, these efforts were formalized as the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, or ARC. 4

In designing a venue for collaboration we took seriously Max Weber’s insight into the character of the sciences, quoted above. We sought to constitute this insight as a principle of design for our work. We wanted to design and compose innovative and remediative pathways among the human sciences, the life sciences, and ethics by attending to conceptual interconnections among problems. A number of additional design considerations followed. The first: to invent a form of collaborative work required attention to common problem formulation. This task required attention to individuation where appropriate and to de-individuation where preferable. Second, a strong and clear distinction needed to be drawn between individual projects and shared problems. A collaboratory qua collaboratory addresses problems. Individual projects are selected as means of working on shared problems. This distinction underscored an outside boundary to the space and reach of the collaboratory. But it follows that there is an inside and a specific intensity to the work of the collaboratory. A reflective and recursive return to this point of shared problems, these limits, those processes, must be built into the critical limits of a collaboratory more generally.

A third design principle for collaboration concerned concept work. Concept work consists in constructing, elaborating and testing a conceptual inventory as well as specifying and experimenting with multi-dimensional diagnostic and analytic frames. We hold that concepts are tools designed to be used on specified problems and calibrated to the production of pragmatic outcomes both analytic and ethical. As such, concepts must be adjusted to the changing topology of problem spaces. Concept work involves archaeological, genealogical, and diagnostic dimensions. Archaeologically, concept work involves investigating and characterizing concepts as part of a prior repertoire or structured conceptual ensemble. Genealogically, concept work frees concepts from their field of emergence by showing the contingent history of their selection, formation, as well as their potential contemporary significance. Diagnostically, concept work involves a critical function: testing the adequacy and appropriateness of a given concept or repertoire of concepts to new problems and purposes.

As one moves from the History of the Present to the Anthropology of the Contemporary (a distinction that will be clarified below) the challenge of further elaborating concepts is joined by the critical work of judging their limits of applicability in emergent situations. Inquiry into the contemporary will almost always require both old and new conceptual work and elaboration. Hence timeless theory or universal concepts are at best unlikely to be very helpful and at worst will function as real impediments to thought.

Given that the organization and practices of the social sciences and humanities in the U.S. university system are essentially still those of the nineteenth century (at least in their formal arrangements and methods), and that there is little motivation from within the disciplines to abolish (or even reform) these arrangements and their attendant career and reward structures, it is doubtful that the kind of work proposed can be exclusively based in the university. Nonetheless, the university remains a source of employment, of resources such as libraries, and, above all, of pedagogy. Today, more than ever, we adhere steadfastly to a sense that the mission or calling of the university is more than instrumental. In that light, we imagine new hybrid organizations, adjacent to and in many ways dependent on, the existing university.

At Berkeley, reform attempts or requests for aid had been rebuffed by recalcitrant and/or disinterested colleagues and unresponsive and dismissive administrators. So, the choices seemed to be capitulation to a desultory, if not disastrous situation—a form of complicity that compromised our vocational commitments—or what we have come to call “secession.” 5 Such a strategy recognizes the economy in minimizing academic politics and bureaucracy while maximizing those elements of the current research university world that are positive and very hard to duplicate—salaries, job security, extra-ordinary graduate students, pedagogy. Thus, the challenge has been to create and integrate other elements into a hybrid configuration, an assemblage that flanks the current university world.

Crucially such work entails a willingness to wonder what would happen if one put aside (or suspended) previously useful concepts, practices, and venues knowing that such concepts retain a certain utility. Not to fret: these tried and true concepts, methods and worldviews will not be neglected. We can rest assured that the academic world does not lack utility workers and fervent defenders of that which was. But if the task is to forge new ramifications of the recent past into the near future and by so doing to establish connections not previously cared for between that near future and the recent past, the price to be paid for the transit seems to be not that high.

Human Practices

Having been actively engaged in the experiment of developing a collaborative venue in ARC for close to two years, the unexpected invitation to become active participants in the construction of a multi-disciplinary Center was both welcome and enticing. It was welcome in that Rabinow had already contributed to the early developments in synthetic biology, albeit as an anthropological observer. He had been asked to give a presentation at the first international conference on synthetic biology, SB 1.0, at MIT, in 2005 and another at SB 2.0 at Berkeley in 2006.6 It was enticing given the programmatic statements that characterized the Center’s initial strategic plan. The Center’s stated intent to be inter-disciplinary as well as inter-institutional (UC Berkeley, UCSF, Harvard, MIT, Prairie View A&M) seemed to provide the right scale and the right set of challenges. The mandate from the NSF that ethical concerns and issues be part of the technical and scientific program for the Center from the outset equally sounded right. It was exhilarating to even imagine that the life sciences and the human sciences could create a collaborative working environment.

Rabinow proposed to Gaymon Bennett that they take the proverbial plunge together. Bennett, at the time a graduate student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, had been an active member and contributor to the formation of ARC, making especially positive and constructive interventions in the working group at Berkeley. Hence this collaboration began with two years of conceptual work under their proverbial belts; conceptual work that seemed salient to the challenge at hand. Both agreed that it would be an exciting challenge to try and think through and put into practice a form of “post-ELSI” program. What this implied is that the mandated ethical, legal, and social implications program of the Human Genome Sequencing Initiative, while valuable in a number of ways, could not serve as a direct model for the future. Essentially, the ELSI model (to simplify but not betray) had a mandate to work outside and downstream of the technological and scientific work. ELSI’s directive was to deal with consequences, specifically “social consequences.” There was a broad agreement that at SynBERC (as well as at the NSF funded nano-technology engineering centers) the ethics work should be conducted alongside and collaboratively with the engineering programs.

Rabinow and Bennett were fully aware that the power relations between the life sciences and human sciences were certain to be unequal. For more than a decade Rabinow had conducted anthropological work in the worlds of biotechnology and genomics. Bennett had spent several years engaged as a bio-ethicist working on genomics and stem cell research. Both were aware that ambitious life scientists would have had a minimum of preparation and education, not to mention even an awareness, of the issues and developments in the human sciences and ethics in recent decades. Both were aware that government officials might well be well-meaning but that they were under pressure to produce “first-order deliverables” and that their openness was likely to fade as pressures on them from within their own institutions to have such deliverables mounted. Nonetheless, against fairly large negative chances of success, the time seemed ripe to take a proverbial plunge and to see whether one form or another of collaboration could be designed (and put into practice).

Human Practices Manifesto 2006

From the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007, the post-ELSI component took shape. Rabinow suggested the title of Human Practices as a substitute for “ethical and social consequences” and the other SynBERC PIs accepted. Human Practices officially became a core research thrust of the Center—Thrust IV (parts, devices, chasses, Human Practices). As with the imagination, grant writing, and framing coming from those driving for the creation and institutionalization of a new biological discipline, it seemed appropriate that as human scientists, in a newly minted Human Practices Thrust that we ought to set to work and sketch out the broad lines of what we thought the orientation and goals of Human Practices should look like.

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Our work is oriented to the goals, practices and experiences of the synthetic biology community broadly and SynBERC in particular. We are addressing the question: How is it that one does or does not flourish as a researcher, as a citizen, and as a human being? Flourishing here involves more than success in achieving projects; it extends to the kind of human being one is personally, vocationally, and communally. As a place-holder, we note here that flourishing is a translation of a classical term (eudaemonia) and as such a range of other possible words could be used: thriving, the good life, happiness, fulfillment, felicity, abundance and the like. 7 Above all, eudaemonia should not be confused with technical optimization as we hold that our capacities are not already known and that we do not understand flourishing to be uncontrolled growth, progressivism, or the undirected maximization of existing capacities. Adequate pedagogy of a bioscientist in the 21st century entails active engagement with those adjacent to biological work: ethicists, anthropologists, political scientists, administrators, foundation and government funders, students, and so on. Contemporary scientists, whether their initial dispositions incline them in this direction or not, actually have no other option but to be engaged with multiple other practitioners. The only question is: how best to engage, not whether one will engage. Pedagogy teaches that flourishing is a life-long formative process, one that is collaborative, making space for the active contribution of all participants.

Our goal is to design new practices that bring the biosciences and the human sciences into a mutually collaborative and enriching relationship, a relationship designed to facilitate a remediation of the currently existing relations between knowledge and care in terms of mutual flourishing. The means to inquire and explore to what extent these new relationships will be fruitful consist in the invention, design, and practice of what we refer to as equipment. Equipment is a technical term referring to a practice situated between the traditional terms of method and technology. The diagnostic tables we have developed to orient our practice and our inquiry will spell out the meaning of the term equipment as far as we currently understand it.

If successful, such equipment should facilitate our work in synthetic biology (understood as a Human Practices undertaking) through improved pedagogy, focused work on shared problem-spaces, and the vigilant assessment of events:

Our initial task is to provide a set of conceptual tools adequate for an analysis of this problem-space so as to reflect in a rigorous fashion on its ethical significance and ontological status; as well as to provide equipment that contributes to solutions that are more responsive and responsible.

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Our experiment concerns the relations among and between knowledge, thought, and care, as well as the different forms and venues within which these relations might be brought together and assembled. Our commitment is anthropological, a combination of disciplined conceptual work and empirical inquiry. Our challenge is to produce knowledge in such a way that the work involved enhances us ethically, politically, and ontologically. Such a project obliges us to think. Thinking no doubt involves the work of “freeing-up” possibilities: demonstrating contingency precisely where necessity is expected. But in zones where contingency has become dominant, where heterogeneous truth claims abound, where stable relations have become unstable, and elements, old and new, are being re-assembled, thinking must shift modes. Thinking in such a case involves the work of contributing to the form of the near future, scientifically and ethically. Such form-giving, we are persuaded, should be oriented, guided, and evaluated by the hope and goal, the metric, of mutual flourishing. That today we have barely any idea of what such flourishing might consist in, only underscores the urgency and joy of undertaking the challenge.

It follows that our challenge is to invent and to practice new forms of inquiry, writing and ethics for anthropology and her sister sciences and to invite others to do likewise. The dominant knowledge production practices, institutions, and venues for providing an understanding of things human in the 21st century are derisory when measured against the ethical, political, and ontological significance of such work. Thinking requires sustained work on the self, with all this requires in terms of adjustments in modes of reasoning and the venues whose mandates are to foster thought. The human sciences are at an ethical impasse: how to connect knowledge of things human to care of things human. To use the classical term, the human sciences are in need of paraskeue—equipment. To restate the challenge: anthropology and her sister sciences are in need of new forms of inquiry and equipment. In that light, we have taken up the experimental work of: imagining, designing and putting into practice, one mode of remediating the conditions of contemporary human scientific knowledge production, dissemination, and critique. Such a mode is currently being put “to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.” 8 It is an experimental mode: an anthropology of the contemporary.

Progressing in this direction entails changing the metrics and forms of current practices, habits, and affects. Above all, it entails recursive experimentation and learning of a collaborative sort. In its initial stages, experimentation simply means trying out different configurations of inquiry, critique and co-labor and then evaluating those practices and their results in a manner such that one can learn from these experiences. Recursive means punctual assessment and re-configuration of those efforts. Collaboration means inventing new forms of work that redistribute individual and collective contributions and limitations. Redistribution alone, of course, is insufficient: such work must be remediative; it must remedy significant dimensions of current pathologies through diagnostic analysis of the current state of things, followed by the design and practice of pathways operating in a different mode and in a modified medium. Such pathways are designed so as not to inflame the wounds of ressentiment which plague the academy through more ressentiment. Rather, they are designed to realize the hope and goal of mutual enrichment, of flourishing, as we have already suggested. Here we are merely insisting that the question of what constitutes a good life today, and the contribution of the life sciences and the human sciences to that form of life must be vigilantly posed and re-posed.

Blockage and Secession

Several trends, whose significance would become apparent later on, were taking shape during this period. First, the hoped for collaboration between the two parts of Thrust IV was not becoming a reality. Fundamentally, the scholarly reference groups and career trajectories of the two PIs were quite different. The social studies of science and history of science community (fractured though it might be) in the Cambridge area is among the largest and most important in the world. Rabinow had extensive connections to the History of Science Department at as well as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also had long term engagements with scholars (spanning both senior and junior colleagues) in the history and social studies of science scholars at MIT. Oye was not actively engaged with the core activity of these groups, in fact he actively distanced himself from them, and his center of interest was more in the policy end of things. Oye was not an active researcher himself but rather had made his career as an organizer, committee member, and facilitator of other’s activities. Rabinow’s path was research and publication. Although this division of achievements and skills might have been turned into a productive division of labor, an active cooperation, this pathway was not the one taken.

Over time this fault line of style, temperament and career choices, would prove to be a significant one. On a visit to California in 2006, Oye listened attentively to an overview presentation of their view of Thrust IV by Rabinow and Bennett; translating it into his own terms, he said confidently and approvingly “OK, you are not post-modern.” The culture wars lurked in the background of that ultimately ridiculous claim. The tacit assumption that his role was to make scholarly and even moral judgments of a senior colleague rather than engage in exchange proved to be a harbinger of things to come.

Second, during the first year, our fledgling attempts at forging a post-ELSI Human Practices Thrust were met by the bioscientists and engineers either with a benign disinterest or were disrupted (or dismissed) by a self-assured demand for self-justification, rhetorically and institutionally. The bioscientists and engineers were not averse to including ethics as part of the enterprise, at least from their perspective. Synthetic biology was frequently framed as more than a set of technological challenges, but also as “perfectly suited” to solving “the world’s most significant problems.” Such framing is not new, either rhetorically or in terms of work modes. Established research habits, as well as the reward and career structures connected to them, have long included a cooperative interface with ethics. In one sense, then, the “we don’t understand what you are saying” responses were perfectly legitimate and not surprising. Our Human Practices undertaking was a new one entailing a certain amount of muddling and testing of preliminary approaches and modes of presentation.

But over the ensuing months it became clearer that more than an initial strangeness was involved. There was basically no effort made to do any of the background work that was required to make sense of some of our technical or scholarly terms. Still less effort was spent actively contributing to the work of forging collaboration. Such collaboration would require a change of work habits; and the proposal of such change was received, at best, as an encumberment to funding and career trajectories. These academically successful biologists and engineers by and large had been trained in the highly specialized American system and were rarely informed, or interested, in a broader range of topics and issues; especially if such interested required more than simply voicing opinions on matters of security and the like.

This asymmetry (and conceit) was a familiar one to both Rabinow and Bennett. After a decade or more working with people in the biosciences, Rabinow knew that their general formation was restricted and that they were very unlikely to be either aware or troubled by this state of affairs. 9 Having worked as a bio-ethicist in Washington and Silicon Valley, Bennett understood the structural positioning of ethics as either downstream and regulative, or outside and advisory. What was new in the SynBERC setting, however, was that Rabinow was not just an anthropological observer, but a Principal Investigator; Bennett was not just a bio-ethical consultant, but a Director of Ethics. Human Practices had a mandate to accomplish a certain program of collaborative work. Despite that mandate, there was an often polite, but unbending refusal to make this engagement mutual—it seemed to be taken for granted as natural that members of the Berkeley Thrust IV team were conversant with the molecular biology and eager to learn more of the chemistry and engineering. No reciprocity emerged nor was it encouraged (or discouraged) by the other PIs, it simply was not considered.

What remained therefore was a hierarchy of power and privilege. Despite a series of non-exchanges, we concluded that this exercise of power relations was not intended to oppress us but only to keep us at a distance. Basically everyone including the MIT Human Practices group assumed that the ELSI mode of external and social consequences was the norm, and a perfectly good one at that. In contrast, a post-ELSI undertaking required a change in habits, dispositions, and expectations during the process of forming the Center, orienting the research objectives, and forming the daily practices of the researchers. There were no takers for such changes especially given all the work required to put into effect the proposed biological disciplinary interfacing. When we pressed the point we were often ignored by the senior members or met with overt hostility from younger scientists who saw our interventions as an encroachment on their time and career goals. We explore and conceptualize these dynamics in Section II.

The first year site visit by the NSF required a fair amount of preparation. This preparation proved to be excessive given that the time allotted to Thrust IV was roughly twenty minutes over two days. The bulk of the materials presented by each of the Thrusts essentially recapitulated the materials in the original grant proposal. Since Thrust IV was not included in that proposal we had more work to do. Few suggestions were returned to us, none of which strengthened our position within the center. Although officials at the NSF had enthusiastically agreed that new forms of post-ELSI collaboration were needed, they had little idea of how to review and evaluate such forms. And although design and invention of experimental practices in engineering and biology were mandated and expected, the privilege of experimentation was not extended to Human Practices. Given all this, it was disappointing, though not surprising, that familiar deliverables were demanded (i.e. policy recommendations derived through the “application” of “principles”), as were additional justifications of our work according to familiar instrumental criteria.

It became clear that the labor of justifying our position within the center, our research program, and our vision for collaborative ethics constituted an ever-receding future. In early May, Rabinow “secession,” in Blumenberg’s sense of refusing predominant practices, concepts, and problems, where they prove unhelpful for work on the problematization at hand. Scientifically and ethically, relations among and between the life sciences, human sciences, and ethics need sustained re-thinking and re-working. Such labor cannot be conducted, it seemed to us, unless the adequacy of reigning habits, dispositions, and deliverables are vigorously contested. It was at that point of secession that a period of extremely intense conceptual work began, culminating several months later in the production of a diagnostic grid for re-thinking relations among the life sciences, human sciences, and ethics. The diagnostic has since become the orienting table for our work.