Bio-Fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences
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Bio -fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences By Gaymon Lamont Bennett Jr. A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair Professor Stefania Pandolfo Professor Ignacio Chapela Spring 2011 Abstract Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences by Gaymon Lamont Bennett Jr. Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences provides an account of an experiment I undertook in ethics and anthropology as part of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology, the BIOFAB. It offers an analysis of the facility‘s programmatic attempt to actualize a core claim of the new field of synthetic biology: that living beings can be conceived as collections of interoperable genetic components, constructed through rational design, standardized, and fabricated at scale. It provides a diagnosis of the scientific, vocational, and ethical limits of this endeavor. And demonstrates why, in the end, loyalty to truth and seriousness required an exit from the both the mode and stakes of my undertaking. My experiment with the BIOFAB constituted a distinctive and final phase of a five-year project to design Human Practices, which began as part of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). Extending ontological and ethical lines of inquiry characteristic of an anthropology of the contemporary, I asked: how are researchers in the BIOFAB bringing things into the world? How are they naming these things, distributing, and modifying them? Equally important, what habits, dispositions, and capacities are being cultivated and managed in order to make such ontological work possible? And, most crucially, what is the price to be paid? Following intensive participation-observation of the biologists whose task was to put into operation the BIOFAB‘s strategic vision, the dissertation examines a double-bind at the heart synthetic biology: those who are most capable of taking on the technical challenge of standardizing biological parts are also those least ready to fully commit themselves to such a vision for the future of bioengineering. The ethical and scientific challenge for these biologists was thus how to take a stance toward their work that would simultaneously allow them proceed with a technically difficult experiment, while distancing themselves from the lack of scientific seriousness often attributed to the BIOFAB‘s undertaking. As the thesis demonstrates, a similar challenge proved equally troublesome for me. The dissertation concludes that the attempt to incorporate ethics and anthropology as defining elements of synthetic biology reactivates a typically modern problem. Despite efforts to remediate the relations of ethics and science, actual asymmetry in power between biologists and non-biologists encumbers such work. Crucially, the thesis shows that this problem is as characteristic of governance at the highest levels as it is the micro-practices of life in the BIOFAB. In the case of my experiment, such difficulties initially required raising a second-order question: how are asymmetries in power being formed and how might they be unsettled? Ultimately, however, they required an ethics of exit: how can persistent disconnections between power, truth, and ethics be productively refused and, where necessary, left behind? 1 Parrēsia is a human practice and a human risk. —Michel Foucault i To Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis ii Table of Contents A PROLOGUE TO THE RE C E N T P A S T The Motion of Inquiry: Prior Determinations iv I. D ISCORDANCIES C H A P T E R 1 BIOFAB: A Program 2 C H A P T E R 2 From Program to Deportment: Affective Ramifications 2 2 C H A P T E R 3 Ontological Proliferations: Subjectivational Ramifications 45 II. I NDETERMINACIES C H A P T E R 4 Governance and Veridiction: The Specter of Valuation 6 6 C H A P T E R 5 Pilot Project: The Time for Serious Design 8 7 C H A P T E R 6 Human Practices Inquiry: Deploying Monster-Machine-Mechanism 119 III. T O W A R D R ECONSTRUCTION C H A P T E R 7 Articulating Scales: The Apparatus at Work 1 5 0 C H A P T E R 8 Problematizing Modern Problems: Ethics and Science 172 A PROLOGUE TO THE NE A R F U T U R E Existential Tests: An Exit Toward Reconstruction 197 iii A PROLOGUE TO THE RE C E N T P A S T The Motion of Inquiry: Prior Determinations I think we have here an injunction that is absolutely important and which corresponds somewhat…to what is found in the first texts, the first Platonic dialogues, concerning philosophy having to be not merely an activity of learning but also disciplined practice. —Michel Foucault1 From January 2010 to March 2011 I conducted an intensive experiment as the director of Human Practices for a new research endeavor and venue in synthetic biology: the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology, or the BIOFAB as it is almost always called.2 What follows in this thesis is a report on the first six months of that experiment, which were also the first six months of the BIOFAB‘s operations. During this period of time the researchers at the BIOFAB addressed a core concern in a sustained fashion. That concern is whether, and to what extent, living systems can be conceived and constructed as collections of interoperable genetic components and whether, and to what extent, those components might be susceptible to scalable fabrication. To put it in terms used by the BIOFAB directors, the problem is the extent to which biological systems are susceptible, or can be made to be susceptible, to rational design. To put it in more philosophic terms, terms borrowed from George Canguilhem, the BIOFAB can be cast as addressing the long-standing problem of the relation of the living being and its milieu.3 This problem, however, is now being taken up as a matter of design, refinement, and manufacture. The BIOFAB‘s undertaking, it bears noting, is not the familiar fare of ontological reductionism, and its question is not whether biology ―is really just‖ an ensemble of parts, as some critics have suggested. The experiment, rather, turns on the question: can living systems be constituted as a design challenge in which instrumentality is the aim, contingency the norm, and imagination the limit? These are my terms, of course, and not theirs. With regard to my part in the undertaking, during the first six months of the experiment it was agreed that I would be responsible for constituting the elements of an organizational capacity for ethical self-reflection and strategic orientation. As with the biotechnical aspects of the BIOFAB‘s undertaking, the directors expected that my part of the experiment should be made routine, which is to say, programmatic. What such a programmatic capacity might look like was discussed at length in a series of meetings leading up to the launch of the BIOFAB‘s work, meetings I will detail in the first chapter. Here it suffices to say that the directors did not really have a clear sense of what such an ethics component would look like, except to stress that it would have a ―practical‖ relation to the BIOFAB‘s strategic goals. The core concern of my work, the problem to which I addressed my efforts, and the problem which I will discuss at length in this prologue, thus turned on the question of ethical iv capacities. This core concern was inconsistently shared by the BIOFAB‘s directors and the terms the two co-directors used to describe my possible contribution were never really settled. Early in the programmatic stage of the BIOFAB‘s operations one director publically described my contribution as ―keeping the bioengineers from slipping into nerd rapture.‖ At about the same time, but in a much less public setting, the other director obliquely stated that he only wanted to have me around because ―it was useful.‖ To draw once again from a more philosophic vocabulary, this time borrowing from a much older tradition, the problem as I understood it was how to design and fashion ethical equipment—aids for inquiry and practice—that might prove appropriate to the stakes of the BIOFAB‘s undertaking. How such equipment should be fashioned and how its appropriateness determined actually remain open questions, though I have made a number of initial determinations. Such determinations constitute one of the crucial successes of my experiment. CONTEMPORARY EQUIPMENT: HUMAN PRACTICES FROM SYNBERC TO THE BIOFAB The technical work of the BIOFAB is predicated, in part, on a series of prior experimental determinations carried out (principally, though not exclusively) by researchers at UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, UCSF, and Harvard—researchers associated with a major National Science Foundation funded engineering research center for synthetic biology, SynBERC.4 Details of these prior technical and organizational determinations are the subject of the first chapter of this thesis, and will be dealt with there. Here, I provide an account of a different, if related, series of prior experimental determinations. These ethical and scientific determinations provided the point of departure and conceptual repertoire for the Human Practices undertaking at the BIOFAB. The term Human Practices was coined and proposed by Paul Rabinow to specify and differentiate an experiment with synthetic biology he and I have undertaken since 2006.5 This experiment was designed and elaborated as one of SynBERC‘s four ―foundational research thrusts,‖ with Rabinow as the thrust leader. The term helps specify the ways synthetic biology, as it is currently being practiced, connects problems among and between ethics, security, policy, and organizational development.