Technological biology

Technological revival
Social scientific and humanistic research on synthetic biology has focused quite narrowly on questions of epistemology and ELSI. I suggest that to understand this discipline in its full scope, researchers must turn to the objects of the field—synthetic biological artifacts—and study them as the objects in the making of a science yet to be made. I consider one fundamentally important question: how should we understand the material products of synthetic biology? Practitioners in the field, employing a consistent technological optic in the study and construction of biological systems, routinely employ the mantra ‘biology is technology’. I explore this categorization. [...]
synthetic biology styles itself as an engineering discipline: it frames its products as technological artifacts. Biological systems are abstracted and schematized as electronic systems; organisms are epistemically represented as mechanistic entities; synthetic biological artifacts are to be produced following methods and aims standard in traditional engineering disciplines. It is of value to evaluate such claims. Second, synthetic biological artifacts are physical tokens of the field’s practices, its practitioners’ aims and epistemic-ontological commitments, and its relation to broader social institutions of law, regulation, and ethics—all key interests to analysts of synthetic biology.'''
Pablo Schyfter Biology & Philosophy volume 27, pages29–48(2012). 442 Accesses 10 Citations 2 Altmetric
Technology; Biology