Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology by Paul Rabinow

by Paul Rabinow

In 2006 anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett set out to rethink the role that human sciences play in biological research, creating the Human Practices division of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center—a facility established to create design standards for the engineering of new enzymes, genetic circuits, cells, and other biological entities—to formulate a new approach to the ethical, security, and philosophical considerations of controversial biological work. They sought not simply to act as watchdogs but to integrate the biosciences with their own discipline in a more fundamentally interdependent way, inventing a new, dynamic, and experimental anthropology that they could bring to bear on the center’s biological research. Designing Human Practices is a detailed account of this anthropological experiment and, ultimately, its rejection. It provides new insights into the possibilities and limitations of collaboration, and diagnoses the micro-politics which effectively constrained the potential for mutual scientific flourishing. Synthesizing multiple disciplines, including biology, genetics, anthropology, and philosophy, alongside a thorough examination of funding entities such as the National Science Foundation, Designing Human Practices pushes the social study of science into new and provocative territory, utilizing a real-world experience as a springboard for timely reflections on how the human and life sciences can and should transform each other.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sordid but fascinating tale of the effort of several Berkeley anthropologists to participate as equals in the laboratory research of the burgeoning field of synthetic biologists. At first they were indulged as a curiosity with possibly interesting insights about ethics, danger, and social engagement around the new biosciences, but as it became clear that the anthropologists were not only explicitly designing their participation in counter-instrumentalist terms (that is, unlike the bio scientists, they were not interested in forms of inquiry that were likely to produce commercially useful outputs), but also were actively seeking to impose changes on the practices of the synthetic biologists, the human scientists were eventually pushed out of the research enterprise. This account of these events by the participant human scientists themselves provides a car-crash-fascinating account of the relative power hierarchies of different forms of scientific inquiry, and also a case study in paradigm maintenance via hermeneutic boundary-defense.