Synthetic biology is a research field that has grown rapidly and attracted considerable attention. Most prominently, it has been labelled the ‘engineering of biology’. While other attempts to label the field have been also pursued, the program of engineering can be considered the core of the field’s disciplinary program, of its identity. This article addresses the success of the ‘engineering program’ in synthetic biology and argues that its success can partly be explained by distinct practices of persuasion that aim at (...) persuading scientific, but also non-scientific audiences. The article explores two different modes of persuasion:, building tools as heuristic models and posing visionary claims. Objects such as the toggle switch or the synthetic oscillator in synthetic biology can more adequately be described as heuristic models of engineering instead of simply as prototypes of ‘tools’. Posing visionary claims can be also understood as a persuasion practice, since the claims are used to construct the societal relevance of the field. Drawing upon Michel Callon’s ‘sociology of translation’, I argue that both practices of persuasion aim at ‘enrolling’ entities into the disciplinary identity. The article is based on the textual analysis of rhetorical practices in three synthetic biology review articles which are considered seminal for the history of the field. (shrink)

This paper examines recent developments in the construction of insect cyborgs by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , a branch of the u.s. Department of Defense, as part of its Hybrid Insect Microelectromechanical Systems project. It takes a sociological approach in order to account for the processes involved in the creation of insect cyborgs, arguing that such creatures should be seen as the outcome of social, as well as technological, conditions. The paper critically reflects on the ethical implications of (...) the hi-mems project and discusses the philosophical repercussions of treating insects as if they are machines. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)

For many years, biology was largely descriptive (natural history), but with its emergence as a scientific discipline in its own right, a reductionist approach began, which has failed to be matched by adequate understanding of function of cells, organisms and species as whole entities. Every effort was made to explain biological phenomena in physico-chemical terms.It is argued that there is and always has been a clear distinction between life sciences and physical sciences, explicit in the use of the word biology. (...) If this distinction is real, it implies that biological phenomena can never be entirely satisfactorily explained in terms of extant physicochemical laws. One notable manifestation of this is that living organisms appear to -- actually do -- behave in purposeful ways, and the inanimate universe does not. While this fundamental difference continues to be suppressed, the purposiveness (or teleology) which pervades biology remains anathema to almost all scientists (including most biologists) even to the present day. We argue here that it can, however, become a perfectly tenable position when the Theory of Natural Selection is accepted as the main foundation, the essential tenet, of biology that distinguishes it from the realm of physical sciences. In accepting this position, it remains quite legitimate to expect that in many but not all circumstances, extant physical laws (and presumably others still to be discovered) are in no way breached by biological systems, which cannot be otherwise since all organisms are composed of physical material. (shrink)

Levels of organization are structures in nature, usually defined by part-whole relationships, with things at higher levels being composed of things at the next lower level. Typical levels of organization that one finds in the literature include the atomic, molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, organismal, group, population, community, ecosystem, landscape, and biosphere levels. References to levels of organization and related hierarchical depictions of nature are prominent in the life sciences and their philosophical study, and appear not only in introductory textbooks and (...) lectures, but also in cutting-edge research articles and reviews. In philosophy, perennial debates such as reduction, emergence, mechanistic explanation, interdisciplinary relations, natural selection, and many other topics, also rely substantially on the notion. -/- Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the notion, levels of organization have received little explicit attention in biology or its philosophy. Usually they appear in the background as an implicit conceptual framework that is associated with vague intuitions. Attempts at providing general and broadly applicable definitions of levels of organization have not met wide acceptance. In recent years, several authors have put forward localized and minimalistic accounts of levels, and others have raised doubts about the usefulness of the notion as a whole. -/- There are many kinds of ‘levels’ that one may find in philosophy, science, and everyday life—the term is notoriously ambiguous. Besides levels of organization, there are levels of abstraction, realization, being, analysis, processing, theory, science, complexity, and many others. In this article, the focus will be on levels of organization and debates associated with them, and other kinds of levels will only be discussed when they are relevant to this main topic. (shrink)

. The present study applies results and methods of psychobiology to intellectual history. Pascal's syndrome is a depressive neurosis associated with morbid effects of scientific certainty. The syndrome is characterized by self‐mortification and conversion experience that represses distressing certainties. The dynamics of the syndrome are assessed from Blake Pascal's psychosis. The ideation of the syndrome is evaluated by reference to the neurology of altered states of consciousness and the biogenic amine hypothesis of depression and mania. The evaluation yields a description (...) of the relation between psychogenic and biogenic factors in the syndrome's etiology. (shrink)

In biology, the ‘ecological orientation' rests on a commitment to examining systems, and the conceptual challenge of defining that system now employs techniques and concepts adapted from diverse disciplines (i.e., systems philosophy, cybernetics, information theory, computer science) that are applied to biological simulations and model building. Immunology has joined these efforts, and the question posed here is whether the discipline will remain committed to its theoretical concerns framed by the notions of protecting an insular self, an entity demarcated from its (...) environment, or will shift its focus of interest to a wider context. An ecological perspective emphasizes the interchange between the organism and its environment, the processing of information, and the regulation arising from responses to this larger context. Moving from the first attempts at modeling the immune system as a closed network, immunologists have joined the general interest in systems analysis, and that move might portend a significant shift to an open, more holistic consideration of immune regulation. *Received December 2006; revised August 2007. †To contact the author, please write to: Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Oogenesis being performed in the ovary shows two different kinds of nuclei in the nursing cells. The above mentioned nuclei are transferred and incorporated into the nuclei of developing eggs, which become sexually differentiated and showWolanski's methyl-green reaction. The sex determination is, therefore, cytologically progamic and genotypical. The spawned eggs in the jelly strings appear first of identical shape and are all coated from the very beginning with grainy bonellian pigment, but afterwards, being reared in free water cultures in the (...) absence of females, they differentiate into distinctly different male and female larvae. The numerical ratio of the sexually differentiated larvae is discussed. The true chromosomes in gamogenesis as well as in somatic cells have not been found. L'oogénèse qui a lieu dans l'ovaire montre deux sortes de noyaux dans les cellules nourricières. Les noyaux mentionnés ci-dessus sont transportés dans les noyaux des ovules en voie de développement qui se différencient sexuellement et montrent la réaction deWolanski au vert de méthyle. Le déterminisme du sexe est, par conséquent progamique et génotypique, du point de vue cytologique. Les ovules déposés en gelée sont d'abord de forme identique et sont tous recouverts, dès le début, du pigment granulé de boneliéne, mais, élevés par la suite, dans des cultures en eau courante, en l'absence des femelles, ils se différencient distinctement en larves mâles et femelles. La proportion numérique des larves différenciées sexuellement est discutée. Dans la gamétogénèse, comme dans les cellules somatiques, les vrais chromosomes restent introuvables. Während der Oogenese, die sich im Eierstock abspielt, zeigen sich zwei differente Kerntypen in den Nährzellen. Diese Kerne werden allmählich in die Kerne des sich entwickelnden Eies übertragen und dort inkorporiert. Das Ei wird dadurch geschlechtlich differenziert und zeigt dann dieWolanski's Methyl-grün Reaktion. Die sexuelle Determination ist somit progam und genotypic. Die in schnurartigen Gallerten abgelegten Eier sind am Beginn von gleicher Form und Grösse, so wie von Anfang an mit Körnchen des Pigmentes Bonellein bekleidet. In freien Wasserkulturen,ohne Weibchen, entwickeln sie sich in deutlich differenzierte männliche und weibliche Larven. Das numerische Verhältniss der geschlechtlich differenten Larven wird diskutiert. Echte Chromosomen sind weder bei der Gamogenese noch in somatischen Zellen gefunden worden. (shrink)

Bionomics was a research approach invented by British biological scientists in the late nineteenth century and adopted by the American entomologist and evolutionist Vernon Lyman Kellogg in the early twentieth century. Kellogg hoped to use bionomics, which was the controlled observation and experimentation of organisms within settings that approximated their natural environments, to overcome the percieved weaknesses in the Darwinian natural selection theory. To this end, he established a bionomics laboratory at Stanford University, widely published results from his bionomic investigations, (...) and encouraged other biological researchers to adopt bionomics. (shrink)

Morphological engineering is an emerging research area in synthetic biology. In 2008 “synthetic morphology” was proposed as a prospective approach to engineering self-constructing anatomies by Jamie A. Davies of the University of Edinburgh. Synthetic morphology can establish a new paradigm, according to Davies, insofar as “cells can be programmed to organize themselves into specific, designed arrangements, structures and tissues.” It is obvious that this new approach will extrapolate morphology into a new realm beyond the traditional logic of morphological research. However, (...) synthetic morphology is a highly idealized vision of morphology which derives its visionary ideas from morphological engineering and mathematical idealizations in order to understand the principles of molecular morphology. Thus, the question is, if this approach will help to understand morphogenesis better or if it will just enable biologists to engineer morphogenesis. The paper investigates the development of synthetic morphology and its relation to synthetic biology as well as its epistemic gains. (shrink)

This articles suggests that the root of the current crisis in modern scientific innovation is mainly due to the method that science applies towards the real world. The scientific method reduces its possibilities by not considering the comprehensiveness of the human person, i.e. science is impersonal. Philosophers of science in the 20th century have identified this anthropological reductionism and further detected the limits of the scientific method. The lack of alternative solutions leads science into a cul-de-sac. The notion of crisis, (...) recently pointed out by Leonardo Polo’s Transcendental Anthropology, allows us to detect the limit, to abandon that limit and to open knowledge to further dimensions of unrestricted novelty such as freedom or love. Here we highlight the following distinctions: firstly, the state of crisis and the critical conscience, secondly, the ‘desperate vs. puzzle-solver’ critical conscience, thirdly, the limit of science and its abandonment. (shrink)

Dissatisfied with the descriptive and speculative methods of evolutionary biology of his time, the physiologist Jacques Loeb , best known for his “engineering” approach to biology, reflected on the possibilities of artificially creating life in the laboratory. With the objective of experimentally tackling one of the crucial questions of organic evolution, i.e., the origin of life from inanimate matter, he rejected claims made by contemporary scientists of having produced artificial life through osmotic growth processes in inorganic salt solutions. According to (...) Loeb, the answer to the question of whether or not life could be created artificially had to come from macro-molecular chemistry, in particular from the research on the recently discovered DNA. He was convinced that a prerequisite for making living matter from inanimate substances was the chemical synthesis of nuclear material capable of self-replication. Moreover, Loeb, experimentally refuting some vitalistic explanations as well as colloidal chemists’ far-reaching claims that biologically relevant macromolecules follow colloidal rather than chemical laws, pioneered research on the physical and chemical explanations of biological phenomena. (shrink)

Different accounts of Skinner's work are often in conflict. Some interpretations, for example, regard Skinner as a mechanist. Other interpretations regard Skinner as a selectionist. An alternative interpretation is to see Skinner as employing both views with changes in these views and their proportionate relations over time. To clarify these distinctions, it is helpful to see Skinner's work against the background of similar changes that have been taking place in Western Culture. An extended and overlapping shift in cultural values has (...) occurred from modernism to postmodernism. Some key distinctions in this shift are that modernism emphasizes abstract simplicity, permanent necessity, and absolutely certain sources of truth. Postmodernism emphasizes complex and concrete contexts, probability, and explanations of change in terms of consequences. Skinner shows a similarly extended and overlapping shift over time that results in separate sets of responses which may be regarded as two sides or two selves of Skinner: one an organized collection of responses aligned with modernism, another an organized collection of responses aligned with postmodernism. (shrink)

Inspired by the success of synthesising organic substances by Friedrich Wöhler in 1828, the vision of creating life in the laboratory synthetically has become increasingly accessible for today’s synthetic biology and synthetic genomics, respectively. The engineering of biology – a contemporary version of the liaison of technology and organic form – creates cellular machines, biobricks, biomolecular ‘borgs’, and entire synthetic genomes of artificial organisms. Besides major ethical concerns, the shift in scientific epistemology is of interest. Unlike classical analytical science, synthetic (...) science understands by a process of generation, through which myriads of new things are created, dramatically changing the living environment. (shrink)