Recoding Life; Information and the Biopolitical
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Recoding Life This book addresses the unprecedented convergence between the digital and the corporeal in the life sciences and turns to Foucault’s biopolitics in order to understand how life is being turned into a technological object. It examines a wide range of bioscientific knowledge practices that allow life to be known through codes that can be shared (copied), owned (claimed, and managed) and optimised (remade through codes based on standard language and biotech engineering visions). The book’s approach is captured in the title, which refers to ‘the biopolitical’. The authors argue that through discussions of political theories of sovereignty and related geopolitical conceptions of nature and society, we can understand how crucially important it is that life is constantly unsettling and disrupting the established and familiar ordering of the material world and the related ways of thinking and acting politically. The biopolitical dynamics involved are conceptualised as the ‘metacode of life’, which refers to the shifting configurations of living materiality and the merging of conventional boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living. The result is a globalising world in which the need for an alternative has become a core part of its political and legal instability, and the authors identify a number of possible alternative platforms to understand life and the living as framed by the ‘metacodes’ of life. This book will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, as well as scholars of the sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of science, who are seeking to understand social and technical heterogeneity as a characteristic of the life sciences. Sakari Tamminen is an Adjunct Professor of Science and Technology Studies (Anthropology of Science and Technology) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and co-editor of Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century . Eric Deibel lectures STS to engineering students at Bilkent University. Recoding Life Information and the Biopolitical Sakari Tamminen and Eric Deibel First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Sakari Tamminen and Eric Deibel The right of Sakari Tamminen and Eric Deibel to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license . Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-22557-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-39922-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of tables vi List of figures vii Acknowledgements viii 1 Recoding life: information and the biopolitical 1 2 Rethinking the biopolitical 17 3 Read, write, standardise 34 4 Crossing boundaries: the global politics of access and plant as species of life™ 48 5 Animal genetic resources as a global matter of concern 76 6 Recoding synthetic life : from openness to (free as in) freedom 93 7 Re-thinking the age of biology: biomass, biohacking, and open-source seeds 116 8 The re-articulation of biopolitical theory in an era of informatics 150 Index 157 Tables 5.1 The historical changes in AnGR conceptualisation 89 7.1 Virtual life/living matter 145 8.1 The metacodes of life and their epistemic platforms 155 Figures 2.1 Las Meninas or ‘The Maids of Honour’, painted between 1656 and 1657 by Diego Velázquez 21 3.1 BBMRI wiki for global biomedical research 42 3.2 MIABIS 2.0 core 44 7.1 From the fossil age to the bio-age (DSM) 120 Acknowledgements This book would not have existed without the preparatory work done in the COST Action ‘Bio-objects and Their Boundaries’, spearheaded by the BioStep Group. The series of meetings over several years was a rare chance to cement relations with a varied group of scholars, who brought perspectives from different nation- alities and fields of specialisation. We wish to acknowledge the significance of such a setup – this book is what it is precisely because of the opportunity to focus on working with people rather than thinking primarily in terms of outputs. Sakari Tamminen Families are more than just families. To my biological family, my wife, and my daughters Mai and Ines: apologies for the late nights at the computer and thank you for your patience. Love you. To my other family, the family of intellectuals in and outside of academia: thinking is a collaborative effort, and so is this book too. You know who you are, and I want to thank you for your support along the way in life, in dialogue, in thought. I also want to extend my gratitude to the Gemic fellows J.Suikkanen and O.Utti, all intellectuals working with us, and to all the members of the HK Club. What a great joy in life to have you around. I also want to thank all the experts, scientists, people who generously found time for interviews and kindly shared their thoughts about biology, informatics, and future. Finally, I wish to thank Academy of Finland for the grant ‘Vital Digi- tal’ that allowed me to do the research and enable me to write this book with Eric. Eric Deibel To the colleagues, friends, and family who have continued to support me over the years: I hope you know of my gratitude already. Here I wish to focus on one person in particular: my late father. I am very much aware that my intellectual views of the world, including those expressed in this book, are inspired by his life and the example he set. Firstly, my interest in alternatives follows his example: he could have easily passed for a DIY biologist avant-la-lettre , if we count his huge aquarium, full of life and technology, which was the soul of our house. It was designed with the vision of an engineer, constantly searching for spare parts and new breeds through constant interaction with his fellow hobbyists. Secondly, Acknowledgements ix I have come to realise that it was because of him that the second-hand copy of Foucault’s History of Madness made such an impression on me as a teenager. I grew up with the understanding that his life was a miracle, while his condition was caused by medical malpractice. The example he set was his self-sufficiency while surrounded by the many small indignities he had to suffer. My views of how science and other facets of society blend are heavily influenced by his condition – or, rather, by how the human condition should be the centre of our concerns as scholars. Yet this quickly becomes overtly extravagant when coming into contact with the force field of constant conditioning that is needed to reproduce academic hierarchies. The period wherein this book was conceived and written brought me closer to his memory: how getting better cannot happen without dignity, our own as well as by working hard to lift the constant state of insufficiency and minor violations we all relentlessly impose on others if we are too selfish – on those that are ill and are trying to survive as well as those that can live their lives to try and make something of themselves. 1 Recoding life Information and the biopolitical The new Invitrogen™ GeneArt™ CRISPR Search and Design Tool allows you to quickly search our database of >600,000 predesigned CRISPR guide RNAs (gRNAs) targeting human and mouse genes or analyze your sequence of inter- est for de novo g RNA designs using our proprietary algorithms. Up to 25 gRNA sequences per gene are provided with recommendations based on potential off- target effects for each CRISPR sequence. Once you’ve selected the optimal gRNA designs, you may purchase your gRNAs and other recommended products for genome editing directly from the Web tool. – www.thermofisher.com/ But as we go into some combination of outer and inner space, ourselves a com- bination of carbon- and silicon-based life, we still have questions pertaining to the manner in which we will pursue our explorations. Will we be a well-stirred homogenous ‘optimal’ monoculture, or will we be a cacophonous anarchy of self- experiments – or something in between? – George Church, in Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves Introduction Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, has been a contested object of exploration, espe- cially since the conclusion in 1953 that it exists in the form of a double helix. It once was seen as the molecule that unlocks secrets of life that have vexed human- kind since the dawn of time ( Fox Keller 2000 ). By the same token, however, the discovery of DNA quickly dislocated the idea of ‘life’ from its historically situ- ated seat within the realm of the transcendental or divine, relocating it with the immanence of corporeal matter embodying informatic patterns and codes (Doyle 2003 ). While this development has been seen by many as a ‘reductionist’ one, we claim that the opposite is true: it is only today that the potentiality of life has proliferated and been released from the traditional forms and functions reserved to it within natural history and the life sciences.