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OUTSTANDING PAPER AWARD, Division of the History of Chemistry, American Chemical Society.

The first U.S. nominee for the Nobel Prize, Jacques Loeb was trained in experimental physiology in Germany, joined the biology faculty of the new University of Chicago in 1892, later taught at the University of California at Berkeley and then moved to the Rockefeller Institute. Loeb's career provides the vehicle, in this book, for an examination of the foundations of biotechnology.

In this accessible and fascinating book, Michel Morange draws on recent advances in molecular genetics, evolutionary biology, astrobiology, and other disciplines to find today’s answers to the question of life.

Synthetic biology emerged around 2000 as a new biological discipline. It shares with systems biology the same modular vision of organisms, but is more concerned with applications than with a better understanding of the functioning of organisms. A herald of this new discipline is Craig Venter who aims to create an artificial microorganism with the minimal genome compatible with life and to implement into it different 'functional modules' to generate new micro-organisms adapted to specific tasks. Synthetic biology is based on (...) the possibilities raised by genetic engineering, but it aims to engineer organisms, and not simply to modify them, mimicking the practice of computer engineers. Three points will be discussed: In what regard does synthetic biology represent a new epistemology of the life sciences? What are the relations between synthetic biology and evolutionary biology? What is the raison d'être of synthetic biology as a discipline independent of nanotechnologies? (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Brief History of Developmental Explanations of Phenotypic Evolution Research Questions of Evo‐Devo Unifying Themes of the Conceptual Basis of Evo‐Devo Conclusion: A Mechanistic Theory of Evo‐Devo Challenges the Modern Synthesis Postscript: Counterpoint References.

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, "Making Sense of Life" draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

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 and making 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. (shrink)