Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T12:57:44.940Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What Does Synthetic Biology Have to Do with Biology?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Evelyn Fox Keller
Affiliation:
Program in Science, Technology and Society, Building E51 Room 171, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA E-mail: efkeller@mit.edu
Get access

Abstract

This article examines the historical roots of synthetic biology, highlighting the multiple meanings and understandings of the term. Synthetic biology as it is used today refers to an especially wide range of endeavors, embodying an equally wide range of aims, and having correspondingly various relations to the activities generally included in the discipline of biology. To address the question of what synthetic biology has to do with biology, this article illustrates some of the ways in which the entanglement of synthetic biology as the epitome of technoscience and synthetic biology as an alternative, artificial biology plays out in three different examples of synthetic biology—one current and two historical.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Collingwood, R.G. (1940). An essay on metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford UP.Google Scholar
Edge (online magazine) (2008) Engineering biology: A talk with Drew Endy. URL (consulted July 2009): http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/endy08/endy08_index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Forman, P. (2007). The primacy of science in modernity, of technology in postmodernity and of ideology in the history of technology. History and Technology, 23, 1152.Google Scholar
Forster, A.C., & Church, G.M. (2007). Synthetic biology projects in vitro. Genome Research, 17, 1 April, 16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fox Keller, E. (2002) Making sense of life: Explaining biological development with models, metaphors and machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leduc, S. (1910). Théorie physico-chimique de la vie et générations spontanées. Paris: A. Poinat.Google Scholar
Leduc, S. (1911). The mechanism of life, trans. W.D. Butcher. New York: Rebman Co., and London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Pauly, P.J. (1987a). Controlling life: Jacques Loeb and the engineering ideal in biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pauly, P.J. (1987b). The invention of artificial parthenogenesis. In Controlling life: Jacques Loeb and the engineering ideal in biology, ch. 5. Available online, URL (consulted July 2009): http://8e.devbio.com/article.php?id=72Google Scholar
Turing, A.M. (1952). The chemical basis of morphogenesis, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London, B237, 3772.Google Scholar
Vincent, B.B. (2008). Technoscience and convergence: A transmutation of values?, Paper presented at Summer School on ‘Ethics of Converging Technologies’, 21–26 September, Alsfeld, Germany, URL (accessed July 2009): http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/35/08/04/PDF/06BBV.pdfGoogle Scholar