Dreaming of a Universal Biology: Synthetic Biology and the Origins of Life (original) (raw)

Between the possible and the actual: Philosophical perspectives on the design of synthetic organisms

Futures, 2013

A number of research projects in synthetic biology funded by public institutions sound like science fiction: for instance DARPA Biodesign project in 2011 aimed at eliminating "the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement, and designing proteins with a 99.5% precision. How should we take such claims? Are they just fantastic visions or hype meant to impress funding agencies and the public or are they symptoms of a specific epistemic attitude? In considering the visions of the future developed in synthetic biology the paper attempts to evaluate the research agendas of synthetic biology from philosophical perspectives. It will first characterize the ambition to re-engineer life and distinguish the visions of the future underlying the various research agendas assembled under the umbrella synthetic biology. Then addressing the question 'who actually believes in such futures?' the paper contrasts the complicit belief of ethicists and critical activists with the doubts occasionally formulated by synthetic biologists. Doubts however never generate scepticism within the synthetic biology community, which develops an epistemic opportunism. Finally the third section discusses to what extent, and in which sense, the futuristic visions of synthetic biology belong to the genre of techno-utopia. It concludes that imagined futures are integral part of the techno-epistemic culture of synthetic biology and that the tension between the possible and the actual is a criterion of distinction between the various trends that constitute synthetic biology.

Engineers of Life? A Critical Examination of the Concept of Life in the Debate on Synthetic Biology.

Ambivalences of Creating Life – Societal and Philosophical Dimensions of Synthetic Biology, edited by Margret Engelhard, Kristin Hagen and Georg Toepfer, Heidelberg (Springer) , 2016

The concept of life plays a crucial role in the debate on synthetic biology. The first part of this chapter outlines the controversial debate on the status of the concept of life in current science and philosophy. Against this background, synthetic biology and the discourse on its scientific and societal consequences is revealed as an exception. Here, the concept of life is not only used as buzzword but also discussed theoretically and links the ethical aspects with the epistemological prerequisites and the ontological consequences of synthetic biology. The second part of the chapter examines this point of intersection and analyses some of the issues which are discussed in terms of the concept of life. The third part turns to the history of the concept of life. It offers an examination of scientific and philosophical discourses on life at the turn of the 20th century and suggests a surprising result: In the light of this history, synthetic biology leads to well-known debates, arguments, notions and questions. But it is concluded that the concept of life is too ambiguous and controversial to be useful for capturing the actual practice of synthetic biology. In the fourth part I argue that with regard to the ethical evaluation of synthetic biology, the ambiguity of the concept of life is not as problematic as sometimes held because other challenges are more important. The question whether the activity of synthetic biological systems should be conceived as life or not is primarily theoretical.

Knowing As Making, Making As Knowing: The Many Lives of Synthetic Biology1

Biological Theory

The ways in which the various activities of synthetic biology connect to those of conventional biology display both a multiplicity and variety that reflect the multiplicity and variety of meanings for which the term synthetic biology has been invoked, today as in the past. Central to this variety, as well as to the connection itself, is the complex relationship between knowing (understanding, representing) and making (constructing, intervening) that has prevailed in the life sciences. That relationship is the focus of this article. More specifically, my aim is to explore the different assumptions about how knowing is related to making that have prevailed, implicitly or explicitly in the various activitiesnow or in the pastsubsumed under the name synthetic biology.

Knowing As Making, Making As Knowing: The Many Lives of Synthetic Biology

Biological Theory, 2009

The ways in which the various activities of synthetic biology connect to those of conventional biology display both a multiplicity and variety that reflect the multiplicity and variety of meanings for which the term synthetic biology has been invoked, today as in the past. Central to this variety, as well as to the connection itself, is the complex relationship between knowing (understanding, representing) and making (constructing, intervening) that has prevailed in the life sciences. That relationship is the focus of this article. More specifically, my aim is to explore the different assumptions about how knowing is related to making that have prevailed, implicitly or explicitly in the various activities-now or in the past-subsumed under the name synthetic biology.

Life by design: Philosophical perspectives on synthetic biology

BIO Web of Conferences, 2015

Biology is Technology", this title of a book authored by bioengineer Rob Carlson captures the essence of synthetic biology. This novel research field is in the hands of engineers, who are in charge of redesigning life or designing new forms of life for specific purposes. In the aftermath of "the century of the gene" (Evelyn Fox Keller, Cambridge Mass, Harvard University Press, 2002) he comes the century of "life by design". As the emergence of molecular biology allowed reading the code of life, it seems quite natural to rewrite it with the alphabet. "From reading to writing the genetic code", this is how Craig Venter, a genetic engineer who designed the first bacteria with a synthetic genome in 2010, explains and legitimizes his research programme. It seems to be a logical inference based on a chronological sequence. The prospect of designing organisms triggers the promise of manufacture of all sorts of organisms to meet societal demands or human desires and fantasies: From bacteria-workers to the creation of new forms of life or even.. . immortal life. Just as in nanotechnology, synthetic biology develops an "economy of promises". However synthetic biology seems to go one step further. While nanotechnology has been advertised with the slogan "shaping the world atom by atom" in the 2000 US National NanoInitiative, synthetic biology opens up the more challenging perspective of designing organisms that will remake the world for us. Re-engineered yeasts or bacteria will serve as pharmaceutical plants producing drugs. Synthetic algae will provide renewable fuel for our daily consumption of energy. Synthetic bacteria will decontaminate the soils polluted by chemicals and nuclear waste. This paper outlines a number of distinctive features of this emerging field in the constellation of bionanotechnologies. It then insists on the variety of research agendas and strategies gathered under the umbrella "synthetic biology". While redesigning life is the central goal, synthetic biologists do not develop a uniform view of living organisms.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY AND LIFE'S IMAGINED FUTURES (Dissertation Introduction)

Synthetic biology, a postgenomic discipline that aims to make biology "easy to engineer," is marked by bold claims about democratizing biotechnology and a distinctive attitude towards the natural world expressed in the figure of the biohacker. Analyzing the narrative and aesthetic frameworks that surround efforts to engineer life in both synthetic biology and science fiction, this dissertation argues that late-twentieth century science fiction introduces a new way of thinking about the relationship between life and technology -and a new affective and aesthetic framing of biotechnology -that is taken up in synthetic biology and related efforts to expand the tools of the field to nonprofessional biologists known as biohacking. It demonstrates the two-way influence between science fiction and developments in science and technology, drawing on the literary analysis of selected works of science fiction; textual analysis of scientific papers and popular science writing relating to synthetic biology; and participant-observation in a biohackerspace, attendance at synthetic biology conferences, and interviews with synthetic biologists.

(2009) Can synthetic biology shed light on the origin of life?

It is a most commonly accepted hypothesis that life originated from inanimate matter, somehow being a synthetic product of organic aggregates, and as such, a result of some sort of prebiotic synthetic biology. In the past decades, the newly formed scientific discipline of synthetic biology has set ambitious goals by pursuing the complete design and production of genetic circuits, entire genomes or even whole organisms. In this paper, I argue that synthetic biology might also shed some novel and interesting perspectives on the question of the origin of life, and that, in addition, it might challenge our most commonly accepted definitions of life, thereby changing the ways we might think about life and its origin.

Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology

European Journal for Philosophy of Science , 2021

This paper analyzes the notion of possibility in biology and demonstrates how synthetic biology can provide understanding on the modal dimension of biological systems. Among modal concepts, biological possibility has received surprisingly little explicit treatment in the philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to argue for the importance of the notion of biological possibility by showing how it provides both a philosophically and biologically fruitful category as well as introducing a new practically grounded way for its assessment. More precisely, we argue that synthetic biology can provide tools to scientifically anchor reasoning about biological possibilities. Two prominent strategies for this are identified and analyzed: the design of functionally new-to-nature systems and the redesign of naturally occurring systems and their parts. These approaches allow synthetic biologists to explore systems that are not normally evolutionarily accessible and draw modal inferences that extend in scope beyond their token realizations. Subsequently, these results in synthetic biology can also be relevant for discussions on evolutionary contingency, providing new methods and insight to the study of various sources of unactualized possibilities in biology.

Philosophy and Synthetic Biology: the BrisSynBio Experiment

NanoEthics: Studies in New and Emerging Technologies, 2020

The affinity or attraction of philosophy to "synthetic biology" starts already with the difficulty in defining synthetic biology or identifying clearly its origins (see [1] for a discussion of this from a molecular biology standpoint). While "synthetic biology" in its current incarnation is generally understood to have coalesced as an umbrella term around the beginning of the current century, usage of the term in the same sense that it is used today dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century-in 1912, Stephane Leduc published a book titled La Biologie Synthétique crediting Moritz Traube with the creation of the first artificial cell. This definitional problem, including the sub-question of what techniques and applications do or do not fall under the umbrella of synthetic biology , takes on historical, epistemological and even ontological significance. However, adding to the philosophical intrigue of synthetic biology is that historical and epistemological questions in the field are closely intertwined not only with ethical and even ontological issues but also with the perceived economic and subsequent political potentials of synthetic biology.