Synthetic: How Life Got Made

by Sophia Roosth

In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools.
 
In  How Life Got Made , cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers’ garages across the United States—even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists’ own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing.

Genres: Science, Technology, Nonfiction, History Of Science, History

256 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2017

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Sophia Roosth’s new book Synthesis, an anthropological account of contemporary synthetic biology (featuring a bunch of people I’ve known for almost a decade), made me realize a curious mirror image that exists between the ontology of synthetic biology and that of artificial intelligence.

On the one hand, the central conceit of synthetic biology is that biological matter is, in its functional essence, no different from inorganic matter. In this world, the Cambridge crowd of synthetic biologists and biohackers (including Tom Knight, Reshma Shetty George Church, Drew Endy, and a bunch of DIYbiohackers) tend to work from metaphors of mechanical and computer engineering, whereas the Bay Area synthetic biologists (like Zach Serber, Jack Newman, or Jay Keasling, whom I’ve gotten to know more recently) more from metaphors of chemical engineering, but both at bottom believe living substance to be mechanistic and partible – in other words, both engage in a radical rejection of the old vitalist contention that there is something “special” about life. On the other hand, the central conceit of artificial intelligence researchers (at least the American ones we’ve so far been meeting with – again, especially the Cambridge-based ones like Tegmark and Bostrom) is the inverse, namely, that the machines they are building will in the end become indistinguishable from living entities, and indeed may go beyond existing life forms to become super-capable entities.

In other words, both of these cutting-edge scientific movements are engaged in a process of breaking down the longstanding structuring distinction between (a) the subtility and dynamism of life and (b) the brutality and controllability of the mechanical. But they do so in obverse ways: whereas the biologists are busy building biological processes can be reduced to controllable mechanical functions, the computer wonks insist that the mechanical functions of their artificially intelligence machines will eventually take on “a life of their own.” In each case, furthermore, these technological advances are represented by their practitioners as Promethean: at once representing a great promise for economic and human transformation, while at the same possibly presenting unprecedented (and perhaps grave) risks to actually-existing life forms like us humans, not least because for both the artificial intelligence researchers and the synthetic biologists, they are building things whose inner workings they forthrightly admit they do not fully understanding.

[Kenza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm bad at book reviews.
But I'm a synthetic biologist.
And it was a joy to read this book. I've learned so much and used this book in many talks as a great reference for us synthetic biologists, to learn from. It's been on my desk for a year now with multiple post its and notes in. It is an important read for anyone in the field that will teach you about language, policy and how not to call things.

[James Zwierzynski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cool book that presents an ethnography of modern synthetic biology -- I found the former half of the book concerned with the "synthetic" and treating synthetic biology as something special, when really what Roosth was really talking about (perhaps without knowing it) was just modern molecular biology, more broadly. Definitely fun getting to see features of Stanford and the Bay Area's synthetic bio focus play out in this historio-ethnographic project! I was hoping for a rigorous treatment along the lines of Latour's Laboratory Life, but found this a tad different. In fact, I found that Roosth's argument is largely concerned with defining the epistemic object that is formulated by synthetic biology (this is only successfully done in the latter half of the book IMO); however, much of the evidence in the book, particularly the ethnographic detail concerns how synthetic biologists conceptualize synthetic biology as an ontological practice. Not too sure what to make of this tension, while it was certainly noticeable, I still enjoyed the book thoroughly -- a brief, modern take on updating Latour's Laboratory Life, perhaps.

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really enjoyable read compared to most history and philosophy of science books I have read. Her overview of synthetic biology is quite elegantly written and resonates with many questions not only raised in biology, but also within all fields of scholarship, such as questions about what differentiates the natural from artificial, the animate from the inanimate, and identity in general. Any reader left wondering how to resolve this entanglement might find themselves soothed (and perhaps greater anxiety) in the work of scholars like Vicki Kirby (Quantum Anthropology) that explode the notion of “identity” rather than merely point out its instability. What becomes of the sciences and all fields is something that is uncertain, or rather perhaps more accurately (following Karen Barad and Niels Bohr), indeterminate.

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

Standing in the doorway of his MIT office, I described to him [Endy] in broad strokes what anthropological fieldwork is. I had grossly underestimated him. Pulling a paperback copy of Paul Rabinow's Making PCR from his bookshelf, he told me that if this was the sort of book I wanted to write, then I had full access to his laboratory.

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

eye opening