The BEC Seminars 2020
These seminars took place between September and December 2020, featuring members of the Biological Engineering Collaboratory. This page is maintained as a record.
4th September 10am EDT
Julia Bursten and Catherine Kendig - 'Growing Knowledge: Epistemic Objects in Agricultural Extension Work' ABSTRACT
We outline a specialized form of knowledge arising from established communication practices between farmers, university researchers, and regulators. The grower standard is a benchmark concept in agricultural experiments that differs from familiar epistemic objects in philosophy of experiment such as controls or background conditions. It is a unique, institutionally-structured way in which agricultural experiments are value-laden. Grower standard is not a one-size-fits-all standard. It is the product of active interactions between diverse agricultural communities of stakeholders within agricultural extension communication practices. Exploring this form of knowledge coproduction, we explore the role extension work plays in shaping agricultural science more broadly. |
15th September 9am PST
Alok Srivastava - No Colligation Without Commensuration - How Torricelli & Chargaff successfully bound phenomena through measurement and thus bound facts through concept ABSTRACT
The Sociologist Herbert Blumer in his 1930 paper ‘Science Without Concepts’, a study of the formation of concepts in scientific communities, made the case: No practical science without concepts. Blumer revived the terrain Francis Bacon organized in his Novum Organon to work through how the marks of nature available to our senses which are readily engaged by the discourse and practices of common persons are converted into signs and ideas of science practice. In my paper, I will revive the terrain of William Whewell’s Novum Organon Renovatum and Charles Peirce’s critique of J.S. Mill’s controversy with Whewell’s work on “colligation”. I will discuss the cases of Evangelista Torricelli’s invention of pressure and Erwin Chargaff’s discovery of the rules of compositional consistency of the genetic material, DNA. I will show that binding phenomena through successful measurement requires the work of commensuration which then enables colligation of facts with concepts. |
2nd October 14:00 BST
Mieke Boon - Analyzing Epistemic Strategies in Re-Using Data – A Case-Study of Traditional Scientific Research in Bioprocess-Engineering ABSTRACT
Big data attracts a lot of interest in current philosophy of science, because it raises new epistemological issues (e.g., Boon 2020). In science, one of the aims is to re-use data for new goals. Boumans and Leonelli (2020) investigate the ways in which data are prepared for use as evidence for claims about phenomena. They show that Big data cannot be interpreted without extensive and laborious preparation, including various stages of processing and ordering to make it possible for data to be disseminated. Against this background, I will investigate what can be learned from the re-use of data in traditional scientific research that transfers data through scientific articles. My approach is to analyze the epistemic strategies in a scientific research-project in bioprocess-engineering, where the re-use of data played a central role in testing two competing hypotheses about the mechanism responsible for a microbiological phenomenon (Boon 1996). |
15th October 11:00 CST
Janella Baxter - When is it Safe to Edit the Human Germline? Conceptual and Practical Issues ABSTRACT
Shortly after the development of the new technology, CRISPR-Cas9, erupted calls for collective discussion and decision-making concerning the ethical use of this groundbreaking tool from prominent members of the scientific community, philosophers, historians, and social scientists (Baltimore et al. 2015; Doudna et al. 2015; Baylis 2016; Comfort 2015; Frow 2015). Of particular concern to many is the unprecedented power CRISPR-Cas9 provides users to edit the genome of early stage embryos. Human germline gene editing raises a host of ethical and political problems, not the least of which have to do with the potential harm this technique may cause to future individuals. Safety concerns have prompted many authors to advocate for further research before human germline gene editing is permitted as a medical intervention (Baltimore et al. 2015; Ormond et al. 2017; Gyngell et al. 2017). Following Stephan Guttinger (2019), I show how the reactive genome challenges a strict separation between research and clinical contexts that this policy presupposes. Elaborating on Guttinger’s argument, I show how the risk of unintended consequences threatens to compromise the autonomy of recipients of this medical intervention. I defend two necessary epistemic conditions that medical researchers must meet to be morally and epistemically justified in using human germline gene editing to prevent disease. In doing so, I argue that Guttinger’s (2019) and Gyngell et al.’s (2017) strategy of basing policy on whether a disease is monogenetic or complex is irrelevant. Instead, what matters is whether a disease: (1) is a genuine genetic disease and (2) has genetic variants that are known by the scientific community to substantially increase the chances that a patient will be better off than they would have been otherwise. I propose that decision-making bodies formulate policy on a disease-by-disease basis. An important consequence of my view is that decision-making bodies must also determine epistemic standards for when the scientific community has sufficient knowledge of a disease. |
ABSTRACT
In my contribution I wish to ask: How does the use of standardized organisms in synthetic biology, cellular engineering and biotechnology differ from the use of model organisms in molecular biology (cell biology, developmental biology, systems biology) and disease modelling? Researchers in the former fields speak of “host organisms”, “chassis” and “platforms”. A first sight these terms suggest a strong separation of the engineered structure and the material context in which the engineering can be performed. Comparison with emerging cell free systems in synbio might serve to show that an organism is never a mere container. Nonetheless, a comparison with model organisms, for which it has often been emphasized that they allow to study processes in their physiological context, can highlight the ways in which the independence from such contexts is at least an ideal in synbio. Additionally, contrasting hosts with model organisms generates questions regarding representational qualities of systems in synbio. Finally, the role and organization of social ad material infrastructures can be fruitfully compared in both cases. |
11th November 15:00 GMT
Tiago Moreira and Margarita Staykova - Re-imagining Living material ABSTRACT
Defined as any “composite material that has a biologically derived component and a synthetic component” (Nguyen et al, 2018), living materials are seen as a ‘new generation’ of technologies that respond to environmental cues, are able to remodel, self-organise and self-heal. A combination of synthetic biology and materials science, the field has arguably reinforced the engineering mode of practice of synthetic biology by linking it with specific sociotechnical expectations of domestic, environmental, industrial and military application. In this paper, we report on an on-going interdisciplinary project - Material Imagination – that aims to open up and explore alternative futures for living materials, where local, evolving ‘synthetic ecologies’ are developed through extended collaboration between researchers, citizens and the materials themselves. Using concepts and techniques from participatory design and speculative design, we outline a methodology for using experiential knowledge of living with micro-organisms to imagine making, living with and caring for living materials in the future. |
ABSTRACT
We know humanoid robotics and what one might call humanoid AI. It is the attempt to replicate human behavior and intelligence in a machine, thereby to better understand ourselves and to advance technology beyond human limitations. Upon closer scrutiny, however, this path to self-understanding does not move through a replica or faithful model or technical counterpart but through a parody or joke. We don't perceive ourselves in the robots or intelligent agents but are confronted with a peculiarly one-sided distortion or a version of what we might be considered to be. This is true also for biomimetic technology and science - does the famous velcro fastener "mimic" or much rather parody an evolved biological function? Similary regarding the circadian switch when it becomes a technical function that is divorced from its evolutionary history - reflecting on the productive distortion that results when technical functions are taken to mirror biological function and vice versa. This suggestion or suspicion will be used to shed light upon or elaborate the second half of Dobzhansky's famous statement that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution: "If the living world has not arisen from common ancestors by means of an evolutionary process, then the fundamental unity of living things is a hoax and their diversity is a joke." I want to suggest that this holds especially when a a living world is conceived by way of human invention. |
ABSTRACT
The historiography of biological engineering remains under-developed. In part, this situation persists because the variety of ways in which biology and engineering have been (and can be) implicated in one another has not been recognised as a whole, and therefore has not been addressed systematically. As part of my work I have therefore developed at least 7 ways in which biology and engineering/technology have been (and can be) implicated in one another, and so seen together. This strategy was inspired by Agar’s list of ways in which technology and the environment can be implicated in one another (Agar and Ward, 2018). In my discussion session I wish to flesh out the seven types of biological engineering which I have identified, and explain their relationships to existing historiography, philosophy, and social science. |