Biology in the Grid

Biology in the Grid CARY WOLFE, SERIES EDITOR 46 Biology in the Grid: Graphic Design and the Envisioning of Life Phillip Thurtle 45 Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude Michael Haworth 44 Life: A Modern Invention Davide Tarizzo 43 Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts Carsten Strathausen 42 Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human Dominic Pettman 41 Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 40 Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression Julian Yates 39 Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary Karen Pinkus 38 What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Vinciane Despret 37 Manifestly Haraway Donna J. Haraway 36 Neofinalism Raymond Ruyer 35 Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life David Wills 34 All Thoughts reA Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy John Ó Maoilearca 33 Necromedia Marcel O’Gorman 32 The Intellective Space: Thinking beyond Cognition Laurent Dubreuil 31 Laruelle: Against the Digital Alexander R. Galloway 30 The Universe fo Things: On Speculative Realism Steven Shaviro 29 Neocybernetics and Narrative Bruce Clarke 28 Cinders Jacques Derrida 27 Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World Timothy Morton 26 Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism David Cecchetto 25 Artist Animal Steve Baker 24 Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights Élisabeth de Fontenay (continued on page 263) Biology in the Grid Graphic Design and the Envisioning of Life posthumanities 42 posthumanities 43 posthumanities 44 posthumanPhillip Thurtleities 45 posthumanities 46 posthumanities 47 posthumanities 48 posthumanities 49 posthumanities 50 University of Minnesota Press posthumanMinneapolisities 51 London posthumanities 52 posthumanities 53 posthumanities 54 posthumanities 55 posthumanities 56 posthumanities 57 posthumanities 58 posthumanities 59 posthumanities 60 posthumanities 61 A multimedia website accompanies the theoretical and historical analysis presented in Biol- ogy in the Grid: Graphic Design and the Envisioning of Life. At immaterialwings.org you will find vignettes from the history of biology, movie clips, images, and excerpts from speculative fiction. These resources can be interwoven to help you envision scientifically robust, imaginatively engaged, and visually rich stories about the role of bodies in the grid. Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys- tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thurtle, Phillip, author. Title: Biology in the grid : graphic design and the envisioning of life / Phillip Thurtle. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Series: Posthumanities ; 46 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018008943 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0276-6 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0277-3 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Biology—History—19th century. | Biology—History—20th century. | Biology— Graphic methods—History. | Art and biology—History. Classification: LCC QH305 .T627 2018 (print) | DDC 570—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008943 For the warped, weird, and wandering This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction: The Varieties of Gridded Experience 1 1. Life on the Line: Organic Form 25 2. Envisioning Grids 55 3. Warped Grids: Pests and the Problem of Order 91 4. Modulations: Envisioning Variations 129 5. Drawing Together: Composite Lives and Liquid Regulations 167 Epilogue: Toward the Nonsynthetic Care of the Molecular Self 211 Acknowledgments 215 Notes 219 Index 249 This page intentionally left blank Introduction The Varieties of Gridded Experience When I trained as a molecular biologist in the 1980s, I spent most of my time characterizing biomolecules. I cloned genes to understand how that gene product functioned in cells; I isolated RNA to see how and when it was expressed; and I assayed under what conditions a specific protein might be expressed. One evening, while learning a new protocol for iso- lating proteins, I asked a postdoctoral fellow in the lab next to mine if he ever thought that the molecular biological sciences would move toward a science of “building things back up” after all this characterization. I was interested in seeing how all the bits of knowledge we gathered fit together to form a picture of how a cell, or an organism, might operate. Not in the piecemeal fashion we were currently glimpsing, a cellular function dis- covered in one part of the cell, a molecular signal glimpsed in another. I wanted to see how all these insights might be orchestrated together. If the protein expression problem I was working on could be compared to a single musical instrument, I wanted to hear the grandeur and complexity of the whole cellular symphony. The postdoctoral fellow replied that he didn’t think the type of science I was interested in would happen for a long time. As he saw it, there was still too much characterizing that had to be done. In his view, the molecular biological sciences of the twentieth century would remain as mostly detailed depictions of molecules, cells, and organisms. We just didn’t have enough information to develop a comprehensively synthetic (as opposed to an overtly analytic) molecular biology. Only after we had characterized the world sufficiently, would we be able to see how the parts fit together. To be a successful scientist, he suggested, I needed to dedicate myself to the intellectual world of a single amino acid on a single molecule. 1 2 · INTRODUCTION Well, the era of “building things back up” has most certainly arrived. Many molecular biologists today embrace the use of computation, art, ani- mation, engineering, systems thinking, and design to promote making as a new form of understanding. Disciplines as varied as synthetic biology, evolutionary and developmental biology, systems biology, bioengineering, bioinformatics, and even biodesign flourish because of a deeply held com- mitment that understanding how biomolecules interact to form organelles and cells is important for understanding how living things operate. If we frame this insight into terms of literary theory, one could claim that within the last few decades, biomolecular scientists increasingly adopted world building as a strategy for exploring the complex interactions that form living things.1 I’m not the first to notice this shift in biology. Just ask the scientists. Synthetic biologists have written on how “biology is technology” as cells can be used as “platforms” to fabricate economically important biomolecules, such as pharmaceutical drugs.2 Disciplines such as evolutionary and developmental biology temper the study of the selective pressure of envi- ronments with a renewed sense of the importance of the internal molecular and physiological constraints of developing organisms,3 and scientists have “pioneered” institutes dedicated to embracing “biological complexity” to fearlessly decipher “vast amounts of data” “to gain valuable insights and achieve breakthroughs across scientific disciplines.”4 Clearly something is afoot and people have noticed. What I find especially surprising is the speed with which this change appeared. For many commentators, the cause for the rapidity of this change is clear: the use of computers in biology.5 Specifically, these commentators point to the heavy use of computers in biological practices, with their ability to store and correlate large amounts of data, and the use of cyber netic and biological metaphors for thinking about biological systems, giving researchers new conceptual tools to think about complex processes. Although I don’t think these histories of biology are wrong, and I will address these claims in more detail below, I think they are much too limited. An overemphasis on computation as a historical agent obscures two main points. The first is the problem of standardization. It is difficult to turn something as complex as a fruit fly’s body into the data and oper- able commands that a computer will recognize. There are a large number of historical studies that have labored to demonstrate the conceptual and technological innovations that needed to go into making a body calculable INTRODUCTION · 3 in the first place.6 This history should not just be swept under the carpet. The second problem is the role of envisioning. I will offer a more concrete definition of “envisioning” below. For now, however, we can think about envisioning as a composite act that mixes imagination, visualization, and desire. To envision something in the biological sciences means having a vision for how something could occur under specific circumstances. Often envisioning requires tangible images, movies, animations, or diagrams to depict phenomena as well as the relations that birth them. Pointing to the adoption of computers as the prime historical agent diminishes the values, desires, and imaginative potentials that make science such an interesting field of study. My goal as a scholar of the cultural and conceptual basis of biology is to create stories that are historically informed, scientifically robust, and imaginatively captivating. Pointing to the increased rise of com- puting, while it is a superficially correct claim, too often tempts authors to condense these complex interactions into a single opaque technological box of agency. I have spent my career trying to understand these two moments in the history of biology, the standardization of human, animal, and plant bodies and the envisioning of how they work. My first book, The Emergence in Genetic Rationality, was a study of the role of standardization in defining biological relationships.

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