The moral economy of biotechnical facility

Abstract

Early programmatic statements about the future of synthetic biology primed the figure of the transformed biologist and the invention of facilities through which that transformation could be actualized. Ten years on from those manifestos, it seems worth posing the question of what facilities have actually been put into play as part of the making of the synthetic biologist, and how these subjectivational spaces – material, digital, and conceptual – are inflecting the economies of life, labor, and power within which synthetic biology continues to be imagined and elaborated.

Keywords:

• facility
• ontology
• ethics
• living foundries
• computer-aided design (CAD)

Arguably, the most conspicuous and widely problematized feature of synthetic biology's early manifestos, and the diffuse imaginaries that grew up with them, concerned the audacious ontological claim that life can be refigured (alternately) as open to “standardization”, made “interoperable”, and conceived as “programmable” (Knight 2003; Baker et al. 2006; Endy 2005; Andrianantoandro et al. 2006; Mutalik et al. 2013). These ontological figurations were audacious in that they turned on the confident assertion that biology can be made a science of the artificial: living beings, such as they are, need not actually function as say, interoperable parts; rather, such as they are, living beings need to be made to operate as interoperable parts (Simon 1996; Endy and Arkin 1999; Hacking 2002; Keller 2009; Rabinow and Bennett 2012). As a science of the artificial, synthetic biology will (we have been told) unlock the long hoped-for instrumental future of biotechnology.

If ontological claims concerning life and the artificial have been the most conspicuous feature of synthetic biology's manifestos, they have not actually been the defining feature. The defining feature has been the proposition that the near future of biotechnology depends on inventing of a new style of facility for research, design, pedagogy, and production (Baker et al. 2006; Endy 2005; Smolke 2009; Andrianantoandro et al. 2006). This proposition has been situated as a vital element of the still-more encompassing claim that the eventual success of synthetic biology depends less on growth in scientific knowledge, and more on the ability (and willingness) of biologists to comport themselves like real engineers (see also Cameron, Bashor, and Collins 2014). The imago of the real engineer has, of course, been the computer engineer, cast variously as: the MIT programmer working long nights with logic circuits and abstraction hierarchies (Knight 2003; Endy 2005); the Silicon Valley technocrat, decoupling design and construction through standardization (Weiss et al. 2003; Baker et al. 2006); and the high-tech entrepreneur, with seemingly no trade-offs between increases in technical capacity, wealth, and techno-political revolution (Specter 2009).

At the crux of these envisioned ontological and ethical transformations has been the idea of facility, taken in a double sense of (i) an organization designed to provide a service or fulfill a need and (ii) an increase in capabilities leading eventually to the ability to do something in an effortless manner. And despite talk of “Legos”, and “rational design”, the manifestos have been anchored in the expectation that biologists will not be able to comport themselves like real engineers unless and until: (a) they invent fabrication facilities, which will allow them to decouple the work of designing and building novel living systems; (b) they have standardized practices and materials that will allow them to organize spatially and temporally distributed labor; and (c) they have mature computer-aided design (CAD) tools that will allow them to shift from the use of databases and registries to suites of design tools for “programming matter across domains and scales” (Autodesk 2014).

All of this can be put differently: synthetic biology began with a provocation. The provocation was that synthetic biology is responsible innovation. It is responsible – as Ben Hurlbut carefully explains in this same journal – not because its practitioners take especially seriously the need to be accountable to the desires and problems of the communities that have invested the money and hope required to bring synthetic biology into the world (Kelty 2008; Hurlbut 2015). It is responsible because it relentlessly imagines human problems as uniquely susceptible to biotechnical intervention, and imagines itself as uniquely capable of delivering that intervention. The twist is that this ostensibly unique capability lies with the figure of the transformed biologist. And the vector of transformation is the facility (Rabinow and Bennett 2010). The provocation is thus, simultaneously, ontological, technical, and ethical. It is ontological and technical in that it moves with the proposition that living beings can be made to enter into the play of the artificial, and that the imago of the computer engineer can be looked to for guidance on which arts are needed to make them enter that play in a rationalized manner (Canguilhem 2008). It is ethical in that the aim of these arts is not only the creation of techniques and materials, but of a mode and form of life capable of producing new living forms.

A decade on from its early manifestos, it seems worth posing the question of what facilities have actually been put into play as part of the maturing of synthetic biology – or at least the maturing of the careers, projects, and imaginaries of those who (sometimes) refer to their work as synthetic biology. The goal would not be to audit the extent to which the early manifestos have provided a road-map. Nor would it be to test the extent to which synthetic biologists have been able to make good on the largely unexamined analogies to computer engineering and the high-tech industry that have served as the warrant for their programmatic rise. The goal, rather, would be to investigate, with a certain granularity, how it is that synthetic biologists have actually come to design their work spaces – material, digital, and conceptual – as part of the everyday struggle to increase biotechnical capabilities, and to make informed judgments about how the norms that struggle have been given specific forms.

At stake is the task and challenge of specifying exactly how the discourses of responsibility and innovation that initially animated synthetic biology, and helped mobilize the necessary institutional resources for work to begin, have (and have not) been turned into practices and embodied. It might then be possible to get a sense of the actual ways in which the design and creation of new facilities are inflecting the economies of life, labor, and power within which synthetic biology continues to be imagined, talked about, and reworked; how these facilities are contributing to the further unsettling of scientific governance (including and especially self-governance); and the extent to which they can be said to have increased biotechnical and ethical capacities without also simply intensifying existing power relations.

Over the past decade, there has, of course, been intensive work on creation of new venues for bioengineering, and the ontological and ethical status of those venues (Keller 2003; Rose 2006; Shapin 2010; Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013). Insofar as these conversations have turned to synthetic biology, they have primed the figure of the DIY biologist and the elaboration of so-called non-institutional laboratory spaces (Schmidt et al. 2009; Kelty 2011; Roosth 2011; Wohlsen 2012; Garrett 2013). The garage and the community lab have been taken up as exemplary sites new possibility, risk, and breakdown. This claim to exemplification has been justified on multiple grounds – not least because of the simple fact that the latent possibilities of DIYbio seem intuitive to digital natives who are living the history of personal computing and computer hacking (Diamandis and Kotler 2012; for a critical view see Boenig-Liptsin and Hurlbut 2015).

At the level of inquiry into changing institutional forms, however, the attention devoted to “the garage as exemplary” has actually proven limiting insofar as it has tended to reproduce an analytic reduction: opposing the figure of a settled and stable institutional lab (academic or industrial) to the imagined instability, innovation, and danger (and excitement) of non-institutional spaces. This reduction has had the infelicitous effect of over-determining expert talk about which new facilities count as significant today and why (PCSBI 2010). Even among the more sanguine, the seeming opposition of institutional and non-institutional is taken as warranted, insofar as it opens up an analytic spectrum by marking out a difference. But the presumption of polarity elides the extent to which many of the primary actors involved in synthetic biology move easily between and among multiple venues in their efforts to find and invent new forms of facility.

Inquiry into the norms and forms of contemporary facilities in synthetic biology begins with an analytic shift beyond the static terms of this opposition, and to the multiplication of cases of self-styled innovation. These cases can then be investigated for how they instantiate heterogeneous economies of responsibility. For my part, I have begun work on two forms of facility. The first are so-called “living foundries”: facilities for the design and construction of made-to-order microorganisms. The intriguing characteristic of these facilities is the ways in which the demands of workaday life have forced practitioners to cultivate a more agnostic relation to the question of which modes of labor and production will prove most effective for designing and building living systems. This cultivated agnosticism entails a shift away from the a priori design philosophies and metaphor-laden ontologies characteristic of early synthetic biology, and toward a style of practice in which knowledge and know-how are organized in a case-based, and insistently re-rationalized, manner. Here, value is invested in creating physical and intellectual equipment flexible and dynamic enough to be adjusted in response to both the successes and failures of their work – adjustments that are oriented more toward the regularization of work habits than toward the discovery of generalized methods. In this regard, the facility itself becomes the primary artifact of collective biotechnical practice.

The second form consists of those teams of practitioners continuing to develop CAD tools for biology. Though divergent from living foundries in design philosophies, presumptive ontologies, and ethical self-fashioning, these developers share a problem: namely, the task of inventing institutional forms adequate to the dream of regularizing (and eventually routinizing) the rational design of living systems. These developers approach living systems as though biology is characterized by a finite set of motifs – or that it can be made to operate on the basis of an imposed finite set. The wager is that the invention of design interfaces will lead to the generation of enough knowledge about the underlying materials to make bio-design successful, even in the absence of what might otherwise be judged sufficient understanding. Design will drive knowledge and not the other way round.

In both cases, the painstaking efforts to instantiate increased biotechnical capacities are generating a triple transformation: of the ontology and artificiality of the living beings which are being made; of the spaces, logics, and rhythms in which work is taking place; and of the practitioners who are learning to embody a more pragmatic relation between the design and fabrication of those living beings and those spaces [Rabinow and Bennett 2012; Balmers and Bulpin 2013; Benjamin Hurlbut (personal communication, 2014)]. To the extent that synthetic biology is imagined as responsible innovation, and to the extent that both responsibility and innovation have become defined by the double labor of imagining human problems as susceptible to biotechnical intervention, and imagining the synthetic biologist as capable as providing that intervention, then these new facilities might be productively studied as venues within which both synthetic biology and responsible innovation are being made actual – beyond the discourses of proponents and critics. This means (as others have pointed out) that thinking about synthetic biology requires the labor of fieldwork, as well as sustained reflection on how scholars in the social and human sciences can free themselves from the visions of synthetic biology long enough to discern how the ontological, technical, and ethical might otherwise be synthesized and given form today (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013).

Notes on contributor

Gaymon Bennett is a professor of religion, science, and technology at Arizona State University. He directs a Sloan Foundation-funded project on synthetic biology and religion, and was a founding developer of the Human Practices experiment in synthetic biology. He is the author of Technicians of Human Dignity (Fordham, forthcoming 2015); and co-author of Designing Human Practices (Chicago, 2011).