"
Template:Team:UC Berkeley/Notebook/MT anthropological narrative
From 2008.igem.org
Summary:
The 2008 UC Berkeley iGEM team includes a human practices component, and this is the second of the university’s teams to include it. The 2007 UC Berkeley iGEM team was the first of any to include such a component (read Kristin Fuller’s notebook here (link)). In relation to research being conducted under the banner of synthetic biology, human practices, which is the fourth thrust or branch of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), proposes to:
-PROBLEMATIZE critical domains of human life, such as energy, health, security, and environment
-RAISE THE QUESTION of the good life (eudemonia) in contemporary forms
-CALL FOR COLLABORATION: recognition of shared problems, stakes, challenges, and evolving norms
This year’s HP component differs from last year’s in its focus not on a delineated controversial topic but instead on the attempt to facilitate these three proposed goals within multiple problem spaces and venues.
My work focused on these three goals through the following modes of inquiry: (1) situating research done in the lab within a larger cultural context and distinguishing the assumptions on which proposed research was founded; (2) complicating the terms which give meaning to work in the lab; and (3) aiding in the search for an appropriate and effective forum for collaboration between the many actors and stakeholders of synthetic biology.
Narrative:
Explanation of iGEM, synthetic biology, some human practices.
Ten years ago [how long ago really?], chemical engineer Jay Keasling began courting the National Science Foundation to get funding for work he was doing and planning engineering biological systems. In 2006, the NSF actually granted the $16 million, to be spent over the span of 5 years, to Keasling and a loosely associated pool of scientists at academic institutions across the United States through its Engineering Research Center program—the result of which was the creation of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). The NSF granted the funding on the condition the newly organized ERC have an “ethical component" to its research. In 2004, in the initial stages of applying for the funding, the NSF mandated that the newly developing field of science would address pressing problems of biosafety, biosecurity, and preparedness—problems of how to regulate, through policy, possibilities for catastrophe--and that SynBERC have the capacity to be reflexive on its own practices, regulation, organization, and products. These conditions for funding spurred the creation of a new branch, or “thrust,” of the organization, coined Human Practices, which in the first proposal composed of a research director who would investigate how "science," as it existed in the labs of those performing synthetic biology, would impact "society," as it exists separate from lab practice.
This first model of human practices inquiry worked on the assumption that social, ethical, economic, and political questions are separate from the actual research being conducted, and Thrust 4 was placed downstream of scientific research--the "ethical component" of SynBERC became a bureaucratic rubber stamping of research being done after the fact. In Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett's "Human Practices: Interfacing 3 Modes of Collaboration," the authors describe this sort of inquiry as Mode 2 inquiry: "facilitating relations between science and society." This form of inquiry could not facilitate and perform the dynamic reflection on the actions of SynBERC for many reasons, all deriving from the problem that this was a form of cooperation between social scientists and natural scientists and not the collaboration between them. As such, when anthropologist Paul Rabinow became the University of California-Berkeley's Human Practices Project Investigator in 2006, his condition for joining SynBERC was to have to power to collaborate: the inquiry being done by the social scientists and ethicists on his team should be held in equal status with the research of the other PIs and the inquiry would be located upstream of scientific research. Reflection on design, ethics, and production is ineffective downstream, and therefore it would require human practices inquiry present for all actors to reflect on these aspects of synthetic biology.
The international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition predates SynBERC. First starting in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Randy Rettberg, iGEM began as the meeting of a small group of scientists from the university presenting projects to each other, all of which required the manipulation of DNA to produce. In 2004, it became an actual competition, with five teams (from the academic institutions of Boston University, Caltech, MIT, Princeton, and UT Austin) presenting projects What does it mean to be the human practices member of an iGEM team? It means being situated between two distinct methods of thinking, perceiving, and problem solving—two paradigms of “approaching thought, action, and the world.” (2) The human practices thrust is so named purely on basis of fact that doing synthetic biology (experimenting in it, designing projects related to it, situating findings within it, making decisions about what projects are important, etc.) is a human practice. These scientists and their work do not exist in a world separate from humanity and the cultural, political, economic, and ethical structures that shape it, because there is no such world. Assumptions and ideologies control lab practice, organization, and regulation just as they do political entities, religious groups, and intellectual schools of thought. With such [understanding], it is the task of the human practice [portion/side/bent] of synthetic biology to analyze and bring to light this subjective underbelly of an objectively presented science/field.
Expectations for the product of my inquiry were faintly defined at the beginning of my interim as the human practice researcher of the team. By nature of being the product of the expectations of the members of Berkeley's iGEM team, those of the Berkeley human practices lab, and my own, my work became focused on the contextualization of the research happening in the iGEM lab: how does the research being done by these students relate to other projects being pursued under the banner of synthetic biology?
-in this way, my project and acts of inquiry could be labeled "successes," as my ultimate goal was a sort of similar building of foundational form and forum of reflection and discussion around synthetic biology.
(1)Rabinow, Paul, and Gaymon Bennett, "Human Practices: Interfacing 3 Modes of Collaboration," [rest of citation] (2) How do you cite this? Anthony? Through him, what who?
