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Flourishing and Discordance: on Two Modes of Human Science Engagement with Synthetic Biology

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Flourishing and Discordance: on Two Modes of Human Science Engagement with Synthetic Biology Flourishing and Discordance: On Two Modes of Human Science Engagement with Synthetic Biology by Anthony Stavrianakis 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 Xin Liu Professor Charis Thompson Fall 2012 Abstract Flourishing and Discordance: On Two Modes of Human Science Engagement with Synthetic Biology by Anthony Stavrianakis Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair This dissertation takes up the theme of collaboration between the human sciences and natural sciences and asks how technical, veridictional and ethical vectors in such co-labor can be inquired into today. I specify the problem of collaboration, between forms of knowledge, as a contemporary one. This contemporary problem links the recent past of the institutional relations between the human and natural sciences to a present experience of anthropological engagement with a novel field of bioengineering practice, called synthetic biology. I compare two modes of engagement, in which I participated during 2006–2011. One project, called Human Practices, based within the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), instantiated an anthropological mode of inquiry, explicitly oriented to naming ethical problems for collaboration. This project, conducted in collaboration with Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, took as a challenge the invention of an appropriate practice to indeterminate ethical problems. Flourishing, a translation of the ancient Greek term eudaemonia, was a central term in orienting the Human Practices project. This term was used to posit ethical questions outside of the instrumental rationality of the sciences, and on which the Human Practices project would seek to work. A second project, the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) project, based at the Arizona State University’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society (ASU- CNS), was an explicitly ‘method driven’ project, whose rationale was for human scientists, through the use of a method, to act as mediums for the reflexivity, and self-observation, of research scientists relative to their on-going projects. The aim was for such interaction and self-observation to produce modulations of thought and practice within research settings. I used the method, from May-December 2009, within a bioengineering laboratory of a newly established Department of 1 Biosystems science and engineering (D-BSSE) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). The comparison on which I reflect is between one mode of engagement characterized by its encompassing ethical orientation, and a mode characterized by it methodology and orientation to the latent social aspects of research decisions, made within on-going work. With respect to their relation, I diagnose the problematic effects of parameterizing the goods of biology and the stakes of collaboration solely within the dominant ameliorative and industrial norms and values of the scientific field. The general demand in the present, to modify the practice of science with respect to ethical questions, was in this case unable to be actualized. I argue that the projects in which I participated were structured in a double bind situation in which the transformation of the ethical field in which bioscience operates, was simultaneously demanded (by a range of funding agencies, political activists, bio scientists and human scientists) and undermined. I argue that the discord comes from incommensurable conceptions and embodied stances to the ethical ends and practices of knowing. This blockage is set within a broader historical problematization of the relation between forms and practices of science, within research venues from the mid-19th Century to the present. The intellectual and ethical breakdowns arising from within the practice of collaboration in the present, between a specific set of bioscientific and engineering practices and two social science modes of engagement, are thus situated within a historical problematization of the relation of science and ethics. 2 “Whenever we undertake to pass judgment on an educational enterprise, the import of these two phrases serves as our criterion: we ask that education supply the means for a criticism of life and teach the student to try to see the object as in itself it really is.” –Lionel Trilling i TABLE OF CONTENTS ORIENTATION INTRODUCTION: TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROBLEM 1 CHAPTER ONE: A PROBLEM 30 CHAPTER TWO: MODERN SCENE 50 INQUIRY CHAPTER THREE: VENUES: SynBERC and STIR 69 CHAPTER FOUR: FUNCTION & SIGNIFICANCE 99 CHAPTER FIVE: MEDITATION: PREPAREDNESS 125 CHAPTER SIX: METHOD: STIR 146 DIAGNOSIS CHAPTER SEVEN: COMPARATIVE METRICS 165 CONCLUSION: DETERMINATIONS & DOUBLE-BINDS 186 BIBLIOGRAPHY 216 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With respect to the external conditions of research, I thank the National Science Foundation, for the support I received in their capacity as funders for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) Project and the Bios Technika Project. I thank participants in SynBERC, STIR and the laboratory of Professor Sven Panke at the Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (ETH-Z), particularly: J. Chris Anderson, Sonja Billerbeck, Andreas Bosshart, Antonio Calleja-Lopez, Sven Dietz, John Dueber, Christoph Hold and Joshua Kittelson. Whilst the core of this dissertation comprises reflections on discordances in efforts at collaboration, within the human sciences and between the human sciences and biotechnical sciences, it is equally about the sustained effort at practicing anthropology, a science of human being, oriented to human goods and including such a science in the fulfillment of such goods. I wish to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Erik Fisher, designer and convener of the STIR project, not only for including me in the project, but also for his willingness to engage me on questions of discordance and flourishing in collaboration. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to my advisor, Paul Rabinow, not only for the opportunity to collaborate in this endeavor and for his intellectual guidance, but also for the formative effects of such participation and guidance. I heartily thank Gaymon Bennett and James Faubion for their support and collaboration, as well as my dissertation supervising committee, Professor Liu Xin and Professor Charis Thompson. In gratitude for friendship and sustenance, I thank my family and friends. iii Introduction Orientation to an Anthropology of the Contemporary “We have almost ceased to notice, to cite one striking example, the differences and oppositions between the diagnosis of the problems of our times which traces the persistent crises of a scientific and technological age to the fact that our moral and spiritual development has not kept pace with our scientific and technological advance and the diagnosis of our troubles as due to the fact that the social sciences have lagged behind the natural sciences and that our power to control nature exceeds our power to control man.” –Richard McKeon. 1 This dissertation takes up the theme of collaboration between the human sciences and natural sciences. 2 3 With respect to the epigram, what are the differences and oppositions between a diagnosis of spiritual paucity in the face of technological developments, and a diagnosis of a failure to bring the sciences, both human and natural, into an appropriate relation, given technical capacities to transform nature? The first diagnosis might be read as epochal and tragic; the moral crisis of technology characterized as persistent and the possibility of redemption deferred to faith. The second diagnosis poses the problems of a 1 Richard McKeon, Thought, Action, and Passion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1954, 3. 2 Wilhem Dilthey’s use of the term Geisteswissenschaften encompassed what we now distinguish as the social sciences and humanities. Wilhem Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences (Michigan: Wayne state University Press, [1883]1988). As Rudolf Makreel notes, it is possible and curious that Dilthey’s use of the term was a German translation of J.S. Mill’s use of the term “moral sciences,” Rudolf A. Makreel, “Wilhem Dilthey and the Neo- Kantians: On the Conceptual Distinction between Gesiteswissenschaften and Kulturwissenschaften,” in Neo- Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, eds. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Sebastian Luft (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010), 254. 3 On the use of themes, see Richard McKeon, Thought, Action, and Passion, 8. “A theme or a concept is an instrument in the development, defense, and refutation of doctrines and theories. The history of themes is longer in extent and broader in scope than the history of the doctrines that specify the theme in any field or in any form of action, since the development of themes includes the significances and implications which relate disparate doctrines , connect the histories of separated theories and sciences, and explain heterogeneous applications of developed doctrines in other fields than those in which they originally appeared. Some themes which were first elaborated by the Greeks have influenced later developments of doctrine by the pattern of interrelations they suggested or laid bare.” Rabinow and Bennett have re-worked McKeon concept of a
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