Nature Natured and Nature Denatured by Gaymon Bennett
I
n 1976, the French historian of biology Georges Canguilhem published an essay titled ‘‘Nature naturante et nature dénatureé’’ (‘‘Naturing Nature and Denatured Nature’’).1 Canguilhem posed the question of a different philosophical posture toward nature: how to think about the moral significance of nature—and of biological life in particular—while rejecting a naturevalorizing stance (“naturalism,” in Canguilhem’s writing) that has dominated critiques of science for the last two hundred years. Such a posture is difficult to inhabit. The mechanistic explanations of life characteristic of biomedical and biotechnical science are dominant, but they nonetheless accept (if tacitly) the vitality of the living being.2 Naturalism can be equally problematic: it tends to overestimate the ability of nature to thrive according to its own intrinsic norms if only we would leave it alone. That said, naturalism valorizes a point that one must take seriously: living beings are defined by the intrinsic capacity to generate and regenerate themselves in face of the demands of a milieu. Canguilhem invokes Spinoza’s concept of “natura naturans” to remind us that nature produces nature—“naturing nature.”3 But nature also “denatures.” In relation to a milieu, the living being adjusts its internal and external norms, even to the point that it can “lose the elements that have come to define it as such.”4 Evolutionary life is defined by the assemblage and reassemblage of motifs across a field of possibilities—the play of “nature-naturing and nature-denatured.” In this play, the artifactual character of living beings shows itself. Entering into this play, biologists try out combinations that nature has overlooked, potentials it hasn’t yet actualized.5 Across the history of experimental biology, one finds homologies between the forms of life studied by biologists and the forms of life lived by biologists.6 Gaymon Bennett, “Nature Natured and Nature Denatured,” Synthetic Future: Can We Create What We Want Out of Syntheitc Biology?, special report, Hastings Center Report 44, no. 6 (2014): S38-S39. DOI: 10.1002/ hast.398
S38
Synthetic biology began (on one account) as a bicoastal aspiration. Around 1999, researchers at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley and the artificial intelligence laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began to ask whether existing biotechnical capacities might be increased if molecular biologists comported themselves like real engineers—by which they meant like computer scientists. What the results of this change might look like, biologically, remained vague and shifting. But a provocation had been set in motion: could an adjusted style of biological practice—adjusted concepts, adjusted design strategies, and a different feel for problems, venues, and equipment—open up a new relation to living beings?7 The test, as one proponent put it, would be measured by a coordinated increase of capacity and incapacity: success meant using computer-aided design and standard biological parts to invent a living being without needing to understand how life works. The question of comportment and the test of capacities and incapacities constituted an experiment in ethics and ontology: the reworking of character as a means of bringing new things into the world.8 By 2004, the experiment had been elaborated as a set of manifestos.9 By 2006, these manifestos had been turned into programmatic designs. By 2010, the designs had flipped a playful game into a worldly game of building institutions and careers. A common maxim emerged: approach living systems like digital systems. The natural taken up as the artificial. Synthetic biologists have imagined a future in which nature can be simultaneously natured and denatured— natured in that its capacities can be reproduced, imitated, and aggregated; denatured in that its capacities can be disaggregated, recontextualized, and intensified. Take the Venter Institute’s vaunted “synthetic life,” a bacterial genome stripped of multiple elements, digitally annotated, synthesized, and “booted up” in a bacterium of another species. Every molecule in the borrowed cell was soon replaced on the “instructions” of the annotated genome— confirming nature’s ability to generate itself.10 November-December 2014/ H A S T I N G S CE NTE R RE P O RT
To observe and make judgments about synthetic biology, we need to figure out where and how to stand in the world. Almost fifteen years on, two features of the synthetic biology movement seem worth considering. First, although programmatic elements of early manifestos have been abandoned, figurative language drawn from the digital world remains a basic part of the movement’s self-conception. “Genomes,” Venter insists, “are software that produces its own hardware.” Such metaphors give one the feel of understanding biology without actually learning anything new. Second, although talk about synthetic biology’s novelty continues, many of the early proponents have gotten on with their work. For example, the first generation of synthetic biology graduate students from MIT—architects of the celebrated iGEM competition—started a company, Gingko Bioworks, that builds microorganisms to specification. Their previous a priori design philosophy, turning on the use of interchangeable parts, has given way to a certain design agnosticism. The goal is no longer to produce strictly standardized methods, but to capture enough know-how from each failure and success to tune their operations for the next go round, a sort of casuistry for biology. Because of these two features, those who want to observe, analyze, and make judgments about synthetic biology will need to think about where and how to stand in the world to get an informed sense of which new capacities and incapacities are actual and which matter.11 They will need something like “upstream ethics”—but not because they have to “get ahead” of the imagined onslaught of the “enabling technology.”12 After all, the imagined capacities may remain entirely overstated. They will need upstream ethics because the question of which new capacities and incapacities are being brought into the world is unlikely to be found at the level of what bioengineers say about the work that they are doing. It is more likely to be found in the everyday spaces of practice in which engineers face the painstaking labor of making living beings that work. Those who want upstream ethics will also need to observe the relation between talk of synthetic biology and the extratechnological effects such talk sets into motion—from the mobilization of capital to the activation of new power relations, anxieties, and displacements. It’s in this motion that the biotechnical dreams generated by synthetic biology do their primary work. Any democratic deliberation about synthetic biology will need to operate as much on the ethical and political artifacts of these dreams as on the novel organisms synthetic biologists hope to build. And so Canguilhem: the challenge of mapping the moral topography of capacities and incapacities requires attending to the relation between new forms of biological life
and new forms of the life of biology. It requires attending to how the talk and practice of science activate a naturing and denaturing of living beings—including ourselves. Canguilhem’s meditations reconfigure possible questions about the “intrinsic” worth of nature. Intrinsic worth, in this case, is keyed to the intrinsic artificiality of living beings—their ability to rework the norms of life in response to often hostile milieus. For Canguilhem (himself a physician), this meditation on nature opens up “the space for a judgment on the doctor-patient and doctor-nature relations” and on the extent to which active intervention in nature is actually integral to health.13 The question of nature might similarly open up space for a judgment on synthetic biology. After all, synthetic biology from its outset has traded on a particular imagination of the natural and the artificial in the name of a salvational human future, one in which biologists promise to make living things better and make better living things. 1. G. Canguilhem, ‘‘Nature naturante et nature dénatureé,’’ in Savoir, faire, espérer: Les limites de la raison, vol.1 (Brussels: Publications des Faculte´s Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1976). 2. G. Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 75-97. 3. G. Canguilhem, “The Living Being and Its Milieu,” in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 4. S. Geroulanos and T. Meyers, “George Canguilhem’s Critique of Medical Reason,” introduction to G. Canguilhem, Writings on Medicine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 14. 5. See F. Jacob, “Evolution and Tinkering,” Science 196 (1977): 1161-66. 6. Canguilhem, Writings on Medicine. 7. P. Rabinow and G. Bennett, Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 8. Ibid. 9. See D. Baker et al, “Engineering Life: Building a Fab for Biology,” Scientific American 294, no. 6 (2006): 44-51; and D. Endy, “Foundations for Engineering Biology,” Nature 438 (2005): 438-53. 10. D. G. Gibson et al., “Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome,” Science 329 (2010): 52-56. 11. P. Rabinow and A. Stavrianakis, Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). 12. G. E. Kaebnick, M. K. Gusmano, and T. H. Murray, “How Can We Best Think about an Emerging Technology?,” Synthetic Future: Can We Create What We Want Out of Syntheitc Biology?, special report, Hastings Center Report 44, no. 6 (2014): S2-S3, at S2. 13. Geroulanos and Meyers, “George Canguilhem’s Critique of Medical Reason,” 15.
SPECIAL REP ORT: S ynt h et ic Fu t u r e: C a n We C re a te W h a t We Wa n t O u t of S y n th e ti c B i ol og y ?
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Copyright of Hastings Center Report is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
I
n 1976, the French historian of biology Georges Canguilhem published an essay titled ‘‘Nature naturante et nature dénatureé’’ (‘‘Naturing Nature and Denatured Nature’’).1 Canguilhem posed the question of a different philosophical posture toward nature: how to think about the moral significance of nature—and of biological life in particular—while rejecting a naturevalorizing stance (“naturalism,” in Canguilhem’s writing) that has dominated critiques of science for the last two hundred years. Such a posture is difficult to inhabit. The mechanistic explanations of life characteristic of biomedical and biotechnical science are dominant, but they nonetheless accept (if tacitly) the vitality of the living being.2 Naturalism can be equally problematic: it tends to overestimate the ability of nature to thrive according to its own intrinsic norms if only we would leave it alone. That said, naturalism valorizes a point that one must take seriously: living beings are defined by the intrinsic capacity to generate and regenerate themselves in face of the demands of a milieu. Canguilhem invokes Spinoza’s concept of “natura naturans” to remind us that nature produces nature—“naturing nature.”3 But nature also “denatures.” In relation to a milieu, the living being adjusts its internal and external norms, even to the point that it can “lose the elements that have come to define it as such.”4 Evolutionary life is defined by the assemblage and reassemblage of motifs across a field of possibilities—the play of “nature-naturing and nature-denatured.” In this play, the artifactual character of living beings shows itself. Entering into this play, biologists try out combinations that nature has overlooked, potentials it hasn’t yet actualized.5 Across the history of experimental biology, one finds homologies between the forms of life studied by biologists and the forms of life lived by biologists.6 Gaymon Bennett, “Nature Natured and Nature Denatured,” Synthetic Future: Can We Create What We Want Out of Syntheitc Biology?, special report, Hastings Center Report 44, no. 6 (2014): S38-S39. DOI: 10.1002/ hast.398
S38
Synthetic biology began (on one account) as a bicoastal aspiration. Around 1999, researchers at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley and the artificial intelligence laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began to ask whether existing biotechnical capacities might be increased if molecular biologists comported themselves like real engineers—by which they meant like computer scientists. What the results of this change might look like, biologically, remained vague and shifting. But a provocation had been set in motion: could an adjusted style of biological practice—adjusted concepts, adjusted design strategies, and a different feel for problems, venues, and equipment—open up a new relation to living beings?7 The test, as one proponent put it, would be measured by a coordinated increase of capacity and incapacity: success meant using computer-aided design and standard biological parts to invent a living being without needing to understand how life works. The question of comportment and the test of capacities and incapacities constituted an experiment in ethics and ontology: the reworking of character as a means of bringing new things into the world.8 By 2004, the experiment had been elaborated as a set of manifestos.9 By 2006, these manifestos had been turned into programmatic designs. By 2010, the designs had flipped a playful game into a worldly game of building institutions and careers. A common maxim emerged: approach living systems like digital systems. The natural taken up as the artificial. Synthetic biologists have imagined a future in which nature can be simultaneously natured and denatured— natured in that its capacities can be reproduced, imitated, and aggregated; denatured in that its capacities can be disaggregated, recontextualized, and intensified. Take the Venter Institute’s vaunted “synthetic life,” a bacterial genome stripped of multiple elements, digitally annotated, synthesized, and “booted up” in a bacterium of another species. Every molecule in the borrowed cell was soon replaced on the “instructions” of the annotated genome— confirming nature’s ability to generate itself.10 November-December 2014/ H A S T I N G S CE NTE R RE P O RT
To observe and make judgments about synthetic biology, we need to figure out where and how to stand in the world. Almost fifteen years on, two features of the synthetic biology movement seem worth considering. First, although programmatic elements of early manifestos have been abandoned, figurative language drawn from the digital world remains a basic part of the movement’s self-conception. “Genomes,” Venter insists, “are software that produces its own hardware.” Such metaphors give one the feel of understanding biology without actually learning anything new. Second, although talk about synthetic biology’s novelty continues, many of the early proponents have gotten on with their work. For example, the first generation of synthetic biology graduate students from MIT—architects of the celebrated iGEM competition—started a company, Gingko Bioworks, that builds microorganisms to specification. Their previous a priori design philosophy, turning on the use of interchangeable parts, has given way to a certain design agnosticism. The goal is no longer to produce strictly standardized methods, but to capture enough know-how from each failure and success to tune their operations for the next go round, a sort of casuistry for biology. Because of these two features, those who want to observe, analyze, and make judgments about synthetic biology will need to think about where and how to stand in the world to get an informed sense of which new capacities and incapacities are actual and which matter.11 They will need something like “upstream ethics”—but not because they have to “get ahead” of the imagined onslaught of the “enabling technology.”12 After all, the imagined capacities may remain entirely overstated. They will need upstream ethics because the question of which new capacities and incapacities are being brought into the world is unlikely to be found at the level of what bioengineers say about the work that they are doing. It is more likely to be found in the everyday spaces of practice in which engineers face the painstaking labor of making living beings that work. Those who want upstream ethics will also need to observe the relation between talk of synthetic biology and the extratechnological effects such talk sets into motion—from the mobilization of capital to the activation of new power relations, anxieties, and displacements. It’s in this motion that the biotechnical dreams generated by synthetic biology do their primary work. Any democratic deliberation about synthetic biology will need to operate as much on the ethical and political artifacts of these dreams as on the novel organisms synthetic biologists hope to build. And so Canguilhem: the challenge of mapping the moral topography of capacities and incapacities requires attending to the relation between new forms of biological life
and new forms of the life of biology. It requires attending to how the talk and practice of science activate a naturing and denaturing of living beings—including ourselves. Canguilhem’s meditations reconfigure possible questions about the “intrinsic” worth of nature. Intrinsic worth, in this case, is keyed to the intrinsic artificiality of living beings—their ability to rework the norms of life in response to often hostile milieus. For Canguilhem (himself a physician), this meditation on nature opens up “the space for a judgment on the doctor-patient and doctor-nature relations” and on the extent to which active intervention in nature is actually integral to health.13 The question of nature might similarly open up space for a judgment on synthetic biology. After all, synthetic biology from its outset has traded on a particular imagination of the natural and the artificial in the name of a salvational human future, one in which biologists promise to make living things better and make better living things. 1. G. Canguilhem, ‘‘Nature naturante et nature dénatureé,’’ in Savoir, faire, espérer: Les limites de la raison, vol.1 (Brussels: Publications des Faculte´s Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1976). 2. G. Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 75-97. 3. G. Canguilhem, “The Living Being and Its Milieu,” in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 4. S. Geroulanos and T. Meyers, “George Canguilhem’s Critique of Medical Reason,” introduction to G. Canguilhem, Writings on Medicine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 14. 5. See F. Jacob, “Evolution and Tinkering,” Science 196 (1977): 1161-66. 6. Canguilhem, Writings on Medicine. 7. P. Rabinow and G. Bennett, Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 8. Ibid. 9. See D. Baker et al, “Engineering Life: Building a Fab for Biology,” Scientific American 294, no. 6 (2006): 44-51; and D. Endy, “Foundations for Engineering Biology,” Nature 438 (2005): 438-53. 10. D. G. Gibson et al., “Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome,” Science 329 (2010): 52-56. 11. P. Rabinow and A. Stavrianakis, Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). 12. G. E. Kaebnick, M. K. Gusmano, and T. H. Murray, “How Can We Best Think about an Emerging Technology?,” Synthetic Future: Can We Create What We Want Out of Syntheitc Biology?, special report, Hastings Center Report 44, no. 6 (2014): S2-S3, at S2. 13. Geroulanos and Meyers, “George Canguilhem’s Critique of Medical Reason,” 15.
SPECIAL REP ORT: S ynt h et ic Fu t u r e: C a n We C re a te W h a t We Wa n t O u t of S y n th e ti c B i ol og y ?
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Copyright of Hastings Center Report is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
