Choosing an iGEM Project

iGEM is promoted to undergraduate students as an exciting and playful competition in which you get to create a cool new organism. The jamboree, for example, is organised as a way of performing this enthusiasm, through the way in which trophies and medals are awarded, but also through the parties, and workshops and all the photo opportunities.

Lots of the concepts embedded in the idea of iGEM are borrowed from the world of software engineering and computer gadgetry. Take ‘biohacking’, for example. This set of concepts, ways of thinking, images and so on also relate to certain values of judgement and decision making. Trying to make something ‘cool’ or ‘exciting’ pushes thinking and design in some directions and not others. It influences the choices we make and how we evaluate our work.

Which is cooler? Designing an organism that uses bioluminescence to signal air quality, whilst also removing pollutants from the atmosphere; or making an organism that produces an enzyme involved in the industrial production of paint for ship hulls. They both sound reasonably helpful and there might be a commercial market for each one, but I think most people would say bioluminescence is a bit cooler than ship hulls. But why should science be designing things on the basis of them being cool, or fun, or exciting?

The way the iGEM competition tends to work is to prioritise and celebrate projects not only for their scientific success but for their fun spirit. I am not trying to make a case for or against the notion of fun and excitement as a relevant factor in the judging process or indeed in science more generally. It is just to begin to point out that there are dimensions to the choices that iGEM teams make and the decisions that judges make that are not simply objective. Instead, making choices of this kind involves a range of values and emotions that we tend not to see, and that we often erase from our descriptions of why we chose certain projects over others.

In this regard, I want to remind iGEM teams that the ways in which they choose their projects are laden with values and social features of everyday life that aren’t captured by the usual assumptions about how science and innovation progress.

Indeed, iGEM isn’t all about fun and playfulness. In fact, the fun and playfulness are part of a larger issue: iGEM is often more about demonstrating that synthetic biology as a field is useful itself.

Being useful, being industrially-relevant, solving a problem and so on: these are some of the values that engineers often prize in their work and they have become central to synthetic biology. And perhaps these seem obvious and uncontested.

But in order for synthetic biology to be funded and to distinguish itself from previous forms of genetic engineering, it has had to organise itself directly in relation to making stuff that’s useful to industrial partners.

And hopefully here we can see that there are certain ethical implications. If we just focus on the ideas of being useful and industrially-relevant there are a number of questions we can pose. To whom will the work be useful? To what uses will they put it? Will it be used solely in the ways intended? Why should we make something that is industry relevant in the first place? And which industries do we prioritise? What are the values of those industries? What do they do in the world and with what implications? How do the values of these industries and companies align with your own values?

In this regard it becomes important to think about the specifics of the project you’re considering working on and whether the context of the industry in which you plan to work makes a difference to how the object you produce will be used. Is making something useful for the pharmaceutical industry just the same as making something useful for the agricultural industry, or for the weapons industry, or the space industry?

The common assumption that iGEM teams should make something that is useful is generally attached to making something industrially-relevant. But this embeds a certain relationship between science and industry into the process of choosing a project. Generally, it puts science in the service of industry.

That relationship is not necessary and doesn’t have to be part of how science and engineering work. However, it has become a background assumption in iGEM. It has been embedded into iGEM’s emphasis on demonstrating the relevance and usefulness of synthetic biology. And this plays out in team’s choices.

UCSF’s Sponsors in 2009.

So when you’re thinking about what to focus on for your project, consider why you want to make something for industrial use. What kinds of industry do you want to create things for? Think about how they might use it. Who will gain from this technology and who will lose?

It can be easy to get lost in making your iGEM choices, particularly if there are lots of options and you’re excited about a lot of different ideas. It is of course part of iGEM that you should have fun, but choosing your iGEM project has to be an ethical choice and it is one that you should make explicitly, that you should think about carefully, and that you should talk about with a range of different people before settling on an idea.

Public Perceptions, Knowledge Deficit and Expertise.

This is the third in a series of posts I’m writing about human practices. They are specifically targeted at undergraduate iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition) teams currently working on summer projects to create novel microorganisms.

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During past scientific controversies, natural scientists have often sought to convince people from ‘the public’ to trust that they know what they’re doing with science because they’re the experts. They also often seemed to feel that ‘the public’ and the government should just let scientists make decisions on their own because they are the most qualified to judge the science on its own terms. This was a common response, for example, to questions that were asked of scientists about the emergence and use of genetically modified foods, which forms an important background to the contemporary development of synthetic biology. Researchers largely seemed to think that people were frightened of GM foods because they didn’t understand the science. A related idea was that this ‘public ignorance’ of the science could be somehow cured if we educated people about GM technologies. In this regard, scientists assumed the main problem was a ‘knowledge deficit’ in public understanding of science, which meant that public perceptions of science were skewed and inappropriate but could be changed by better education and ‘outreach’.  So scientists set about telling people about the GM work they were doing, hoping to calm ‘the public’ fears by providing knowledge.

In iGEM much of the work that teams do in human practices still follows this model. Most teams go out into public spaces like schools, community centres and so forth, to tell people about the work they’re doing. Mostly it is a one way thing, where teams tell people the science and hope that this interests them or at least that it allays some of their fears. One reason for this is that there is a major constraint on human practices work in iGEM. You have very little time to read or explore HP scholarship, and – for the most part – having only studied a single subject at university, most of you will be unfamiliar with the methods and conceptual apparatus used in humanities and social sciences. So it is much easier to adopt these kinds of one-off outreach activities, talk to the public and then get back to the lab, to updating your wiki pages and preparing for the jamboree. After all, there’s no hope of a medal or an award if you haven’t actually got an engineered microbe to present no matter how many people you’ve talked to about your project or how much you’ve learned about social science. So the priorities of iGEM teams are set-up in part by the medal criteria.

So what’s the point of engaging with ‘the public’ in iGEM human practices or in synthetic biology more generally? Before I approach that question I first want to dwell on this phrase for a paragraph or two. ‘The public’ is usually invoked by scientists and iGEM team members alike to indicate the mass of people who are not familiar with the scientific knowledge that they themselves have developed. It implies a uniform group, made of non-scientists. But of course, ‘the public’ isn’t a unitary group. There are all kinds of differences in people’s lives, like gender, race, religion, class, age, education, profession, and so on, that change their experience of the world in ways that have nothing at all to do with whether they have studied genetic engineering or not. This is why social science researchers tend to talk about ‘publics’, in order to imply all those differences and complexities that make up the worlds of human life.

Moreover, scientists themselves are part of publics, since they also have lives that extend beyond the lab, they have concerns outside of academia, and most will have relationships and intimacies that are not part of their professional work. In this regard, scientific developments, innovations, knowledge-making practices and so on are just as important to different individual scientists as they might be to non-scientists. One chemical engineer who has a child with a genetic disease might think quite differently about how we begin to use epigenetics in our organisation of society than might another chemical engineer who doesn’t have children.

Importantly, scientists also comprise a number of different publics because they also have values and perspectives as part of their work. Scientific values and perspectives are part of the practices of different kinds of scientific education and research. So – as I’ve tried to describe in previous posts – these values and ways of thinking are going to be difficult to disentangle or even to see or describe by the scientists who are competent in those practices. Some of these values, for example, consist in a commitment to certain forms of evidence and argument, to certain ways of doing knowledge-making, to ethical principles about life, its meanings and what human beings are about and how we should relate to each other. Scientists also often have beliefs about the roles of science in governance of social life and how expertise should be used. And, much like riding a bike, these assumptions, values and perspectives are just part of how you do it – they’re embodied in how you do the work and how the practices are organised.

In this way, we can begin to see that scientists are also just humans doing a specific kind of practice, namely, synthetic biology in the case of iGEM.

Why talk to publics then? Well, because it will help to explore what it is that you have assumed about your work, its purposes and how the technologies you’re making might be used. Importantly, though, this involves more than just asking people what they think. It means trying to see the significance of practices that you’ve invoked in your iGEM project work and to think critically about how you are intending to change those practices. It also means accepting that there are other forms of expertise that are relevant to changing practices with scientific innovations. The contexts in which innovations are imagined to be used in the future – like how we currently envisage the use of synthetic artemisinin – will involve a number of different people from different publics who will be competent experts in the practices involved in those contexts.

So, for example, imagine you’re designing an organism that will make a kind of sustainable cooking oil. Brilliant – there are lots of ways in which a sustainable cooking oil could be good for the world. But you should also use your human practices to explore how cooking oil is currently used. In what practices does it play a role? Of course, there’s home cooking, there is also restaurant and take-away cooking, there’s military and hospital and other public service cooking. Then there are various practices involved in the manufacture, distribution, marketing and selling of cooking oils that differ according to the practices in which the cooking oil is intended for use. All of these practices may differ across different regions of the world. In home cooking in the UK, for example, the use of oil is loaded with a range of different values and meanings by virtue of how cooking is connected to other practices, including eating, caring for one’s family, being healthy, getting sick, growing older, being in a rush, going to work, and so on and so forth. Your iGEM project might produce a cooking oil that disrupts some of the values and meanings that are embedded in these practices or that implies the adoption of new values and meanings that weren’t a part of these practices previously.

Imagine something as small and seemingly inconsequential as the cooking oil being a slightly different colour. The meanings of the colour might be quite important as part of these practices of cooking, eating and so on. For example in how the colour yellow of most oils has been connected to sunshine, blooming fields and farms, good and bad health, and so forth in their marketing or contestation.

Or imagine if it tastes a bit different. Practices of cooking and eating embed practices of taste. What tastes good and why is complex and not simply a biological phenomenon. In the UK at least there is also the phenomenon of ‘good’ and ‘bad taste’, having to do not only with the flavour of the food but also with what kinds of flavours that different groups of society associate with their lifestyles. So to have good taste is part of being seen as a competent member of the social group and forms a part of one’s expertise as a member of that group. Good taste is very much affected by class, ethnicity, and age. What counts as good taste in a working class, white household in urban London might be quite different to a middle class, Afro-Caribbean household in rural Kent. So what might be acceptable as a change in the colour or taste of cooking oil for these families might be quite different because the kinds of flavours and ways of cooking that the oil is involved in might differ. Moreover, cooking for one’s family is rife with important values that are embedded in how we live and organise our relationships with each other. How we use food might be different in the context of being a new father tasked with taking care of a child’s health, or in working at a hospital canteen trying to keep people happy and letting them still have their own choices, or in a mother appeasing a bossy teenager going through adolescence. People might have a problem with a GM cooking oil for reasons that have nothing to do with not ‘understanding the science’ and everything to do with their very detailed, situated and embodied understandings of health, taste, family, care and so on. Publics are multifarious and complex because practices are multifarious and complex. How we make sense of people’s reactions to scientific developments has to take into consideration the expertise that these people use in their practices and how this shapes the values and meanings placed on scientific change.

Much of the time, scientists of most varieties spend their time developing more and more specialised knowledge about a number of topics and so becoming far more expert in a smaller number of practices. Just like most professionals. Good lawyers, chefs, teachers, pilots, mothers, fathers, hairdressers, doctors, painters and decorators all become experts in sets of practices that affect the way that they think about the world. Our values and perspectives are tied to the practices in which we live and in which we have become expert. And when scientists seek to change something about our practices, like introducing a new product into the practice, there are many features to how we make sense of this proposed change that have very little to do with a knowledge deficit in molecular biology and more to do with our differences in expertise.

Talking to publics, then, has to be about understanding the human practices that are involved with the kinds of products that you’re envisioning in your iGEM work. Although you’re experts in science and in iGEM you might well be novices in growing crops, selling farm produce, distribution, marketing, managing a retail chain, cooking, being a parent, feeding a family, being a Buddhist, and so on and so forth. You’ll need lots of methods and concepts that don’t exist in synthetic biology in order to be able to understand these forms of expertise and relate them to your work. Human practices is about exploring these worlds and practices and trying to make sense of how your products and envisaged changes to the world will be made sense of. Investigating the human practices bound up with your proposed innovations should help you to critically think about and so possibly change how you design and construct those innovations. In this regard, human practices should be about your knowledge deficit, and not that of ‘the public’.

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In a future post I’ll begin to discuss some of the methods that you might use to do human practices in a way that is more conducive to this kind of analysis and that goes beyond outreach and public understanding.

Why ‘Practices’?

This is the second in a series of posts I’m writing about human practices. They are specifically targeted at undergraduate iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition) teams currently working on summer projects to create novel microorganisms.

Much work across academic disciplines has sought to describe and explain human life at two levels, emphasising either: natural laws, group life and social structures; or individual behaviour and personal life. When natural laws and social structure is emphasised we tend to see individual actions and meanings as being primarily determined by forces outside of individual control. On the other hand, when individual behaviour is emphasised, we tend to focus on how people make up their lives through their own free will, creatively negotiating interactions with each other in everyday spaces to maintain social organisation and order.

There are also those theories that try to make sense of both sides of the coin, individual creative freedom and social determination. Such theories try to understand how forces outside of individual control shape the patterns of social life whilst also maintaining the importance of individual differences and spontaneity. How such theories try to do this varies considerably. Indeed, within some of the social science disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, there are a wealth of approaches that can be used to think about the links between individual and group behaviour.

‘Practice theory’ is one such approach. Since around 1970 a number of scholars in sociology, anthropology and related disciplines have tried to develop accounts of how social structures shape individual behaviours whilst also attending to how those individual behaviours help to create the very structures that shape them. In this regard these thinkers have tried to explain how both levels reciprocally construct each other: how individual action and group patterns are made of the same kind of stuff. In short, it is ‘practices’ that make up the world for this approach. We can roughly understand practices to be things that individuals and groups routinely do in the world. Practices are patterns of actions that for most participants are just second nature.
Like driving a car. Indeed, although what counts as a practice is quite varied, examples often emphasise things we clearly do with our bodies, like riding a bicycle, but also extends to less clearly bodily-oriented actions, like talking to a doctor, reprimanding an infant, singing a hymn in church, buying groceries, taking a shower and so on and so forth.

Given some initial training, whether formally (through parents or teachers, for example) or informally through every day participation in group life, practices become part of how we do our lives day-to-day. So part of learning a new practice involves learning the rules so that it becomes second nature to do things in one way and not another. We rarely question the rules of how we do everyday life. Imagine if you were constantly challenging how to greet each other, eat, work or sleep. You would be hungry, unemployed and exhausted, and people would quickly get annoyed with you.  Many practices come with quite clearly legitimate and illegitimate ways of doing the practice. Like the rules of the iGEM competition that enforce how you should use the standard biological parts and how to submit your parts to the library. These rules help to shape how people do the practice and most iGEM teams don’t think to question them because they’re just essential to how iGEM is currently done.

http://2011.igem.org/Team:Potsdam_Bioware/Safety_Ethics

Theories of practices often place an emphasis on how skilful people are in their everyday encounters with each other and with the world. We seem to get by without much problem once we have learnt how to do something, even when practices are very complex, like flying an aeroplane. So theories of practice emphasise skilful routine and habit. As an iGEM team member you will become or will have already become very skilful at a whole bunch of different practices that are relatively new to you. Think about what it was like early on in your lab experiences to pipette very small amounts of fluids, at speed, from one tube to another, mixing them in appropriate quantities, in order to follow a protocol. By the end of iGEM many of you will have become so skilled at doing this that you will not need the protocols anymore, and may not even have to think about how much of the different substances you need to mix, in what order, for how long, and so on. You’ll also be far more dextrous with your pipetting.

The knowledge and skill you are acquiring is ‘embodied’ – it is knowledge that is habituated in your body through situated training. A mini-prep has likely become part of your routine and habitual behaviour. Because the knowledge involved in practices is tied up with embodied abilities, these routines and habits become part of our background or ‘tacit’ knowledge, and it is very difficult to explain exactly where that knowledge is or what it is that you know in order to be able to do it. A classic example involves trying to communicate how it is that you ride a bicycle so that someone who hasn’t ridden a bicycle can then get on one and ride around based on what you’ve told them. It is extremely difficult – and some argue impossible – to tell someone how to ride a bike without actually getting them on a bike and showing them, and indeed guiding them as they learn practically how to do it. When we are riding a bicycle there a lots of techniques that we are unconsciously using through embodied skills that can be described mathematically, having to do with how we balance and so on. But most of us would be completely incapable of producing those equations, and yet many of us can still ride a bicycle.  So the emphasis in practices is on how everyday, taken for granted skilled actions, knowledge and meanings are practical – they only make sense and can be communicated within the doing of the practice.

Putting these two last points together, we can say that some of the rules of a practice are tacit too, so we cannot always easily identify why things are done in the way that they there are, and why they have the meanings that they do, even when we are proficient in the practices in question. Mostly we don’t learn the rules of a practice by sitting down and memorising them, instead we learn by doing it ourselves and watching others do it. Just like we learn language from being within practices of using language from birth.

Moreover, there are lots of rules that shape our basic movement through the world and how we relate to each other and organise social space. Think about the rules involved in choosing a seat on the bus. It can tell us quite a lot about some of those more invisible, tacit rules of everyday living in the world. Why do you go for one seat and not another? There are variety of rules that people seem to use to make a decision that only really become visible when they’re broken. The rule that roughly goes “don’t sit immediately next to someone if there is no one else on the bus” is an important one. Imagine how the person would react! We just seem to know these rules from having been brought up within the culture that we live within. They’re just part of the accepted practices for doing life in our culture. But some of these basic rules change from culture to culture and can help explain why we do life differently in different countries. Americans, for example, are often bemoaned by British people, because although we share much of the same rules about social space, many Americans are more comfortable with physical intimacy and cheeriness in their greetings than are British people. This is clearly an embodied norm of social interaction and when these two different forms of greeting conflict it feels palpable to the participants. British people experience discomfort and Americans presumably experience rejection or offence when a warm proffered American hug is met with a frosty British handshake. But this practice is currently changing and hugging seems to be more acceptable and frequent here in the UK than it used to be. At the same time, gender norms around doing masculinity and femininity seem to be changing. There may well be connections between these shifting practices, so how men hug each other might be changing in response to or alongside changes in what it means to be a man and how doing manliness is understood. So we can begin to see how practices are connected and how changes in some practices might result in changes elsewhere. It is also true that some practices are difficult to change because of their connections to other practices.

In the context of iGEM there are a whole bunch of practices, from the lab to the wiki to the jamboree and the competition itself. In the lab, practices include doing a PCR or running a gel, designing a BioBrick or cleaning a work surface. On the wiki they involve presenting the team, describing the research in a particular way, and so on. The jamboree involves lots of practices around celebration and cheerleading. Of course the competition has all of its practices, involving presentations, judging, awarding prizes, congratulating and so forth. And these are changing slowly, so what was expected of a team to be able to earn a gold, silver or bronze medal shifted over the years that the competition has been running. The judging practices are in flux and this shapes some of the lab practices that teams engage in across the world.

In my last post I described how the meanings of human life are myriad and complex and why human behaviour is so difficult to explain. In this post I hope it is clear that these meanings are helpfully understood from within a practice theory perspective. It helps us orient our thinking to what people are trying to do, skilfully, within a given situation. So ‘human practices’ in iGEM should be about understanding the meaningfulness of human life from within the practices in which we are all engaged. Remembering, of course, that iGEM and synthetic biology are themselves human practices, too. They are made up of smaller practices, and themselves contribute to broader human practices of doing science and making knowledge and training people and so on and so on. So human practices work in iGEM can be about how iGEM practices are taught, stabilised, change or are challenged. In my next two posts I’ll begin to identify how a human practices approach to iGEM work in synthetic biology can be a powerful way to think beyond the often used notions of ‘public understanding’ and ‘social and ethical implications’. Using a human practices approach we’ll be able to ask different kinds of questions and so provide different kinds of answers to the common concerns that scientists have about how their work is understood and judged.

 

What’s “Human” about Human Practices?

This is the first in a series of posts I’m writing over the next couple of months about human practices. They are specifically targeted at undergraduate iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) teams currently working on summer projects to create novel microorganisms.

Human beings live within cultures, and have social relationships with family, friends, acquaintances, and indeed with strangers. How we each live with these relationships and how they change over our lifetimes is an inescapable dimension of social life, so that how we view ourselves and others similarly shifts as these connections change and develop. Imagine how strange it would be to think of your friends in the same way now as you did as a toddler. In this regard, we are ‘socialised’ into the cultures in which we grow up, so that how we learn to relate to each other (through more or less formal social norms, rules, laws and so on) is culturally specific by virtue of how we are taught to do this. Whilst the family unit and friendship group might seem natural for many readers of English, how we conceptualise family and friendship changes from culture to culture, and over time. These elements of our lives thus only seem ‘natural’ to us because that is how we were taught to think and relate to each other. And indeed, what constitutes a family in America, Europe and elsewhere is currently contested.

We are also embedded in networks or webs of materials, including such things as trees, atoms of oxygen, food, trains, genes, pharmaceuticals, bodies, oceans, and an ever expanding number of consumer goods. The list of things involved in human life is already incomprehensibly long and we’ve only just got going. Just think about how many things you can now buy in a large supermarket store and how all of those things have to be constructed from other materials, which have to be mined or manufactured themselves. The chains of connection between various materials in our lives help to organise how we do everyday life so much so that they can often become essential to how we view the world and each other: what would life be like now without computers? But materials and technologies are also shaped by existing structures and practices of everyday life. We can see this, for example, in how designers of mobile phones have sought to better mimic co-presence between speakers – as would normally occur in everyday life conversations – by improving sound quality, introducing the use of emoticons and pictures in text, and by the addition of video cameras.

Moreover, because we ourselves are material bodies we’ve got feelings and emotions, psychological and physical states, as well as habits, routines, reflexes and so on, all of which are essential to our experience. These too are socialised so that how people experience love and anger, how they taste and eat food, how they sleep and so forth all differ according to their positions within culture and across cultures. For example, how women are taught to experience love and anger may be quite different from how men are taught to experience these dimensions of life. Moreover, some of these differences may now be partly because of differences in the kinds of materials that we surround ourselves with and make sense of ourselves through. So the equipment we use to cook and eat food, the kinds of clothing we wear, and the arrangement of rooms in houses differs from culture to culture.

In the mix of these cultural relations and material chains there are thoughts, ideas, concepts, stories, books, advertisements, news reports, TV shows, films and a plethora of other textual and visual features to everyday life. These texts help us to describe and organise our everyday lives but they also serve to shape them. When President Barack Obama campaigned with the slogan “Yes we can!” he wasn’t only trying to describe a state of affairs but actually trying to bring about the situation through which the imagined social change might become possible. In the same way, promises made by synthetic biologists about how the future will be driven by a biological industrial revolution are not just descriptions they are part of how we try to bring about those situations that we imagine.

Then there are a whole bunch of different structures of social life that bring together these cultural and material relationships into stable patterns. This is one of the ways in which the ‘practices’ element of human practices becomes important. One example of a complex set of human practices that show some stability would be the assemblage of trained professionals, friendships, rivalries, family traditions, rules and tactics, bodies and exercise, habits and creativity, food production and consumption, entertainment reporting, and advertisements that all have to be orchestrated together to make up the individual games of football[1] in a local, national or international tournament. At the same time as these orchestrated assemblages of relationships, texts and materials are shaped into a game of football, so too does the game of football shape the meanings of individual actions within the game and its appreciation.

When a player makes a ‘dive’ to claim an undeserved penalty, the meanings of that dive to the player, her team mates and opponents, the supporters, the referee and managers and so on is informed by their role or position within the whole orchestration. And so how they subsequently feel about and act in relation to the dive will differ. In this regard, single actions only make sense as part of larger projects of social practices and will have different meanings for participants given their position within the network of relationships assembled into the ongoing project. For the referee the dive is just one more instance of a game gone sour, for the player it’s a calculated risk, whilst for the fans of the opposing team it is a travesty of quite epic proportions. So the referee sighs and holds up a yellow card, whilst the player feels a swell of satisfaction and relief, as the opposing fans growl, shout and chant in disgust.

We humans are thus powerfully complex. The meanings of our whole lives and everyday individual actions are interwoven with relationships, materials, bodies, texts and social practices. So much so that they are impossible to disentangle. Add to this the dimension of social change, so that the meaning of a given action, material or text might change over time, and we have a picture of human life that truly boggles the mind.

All this means that when we talk of human practices we have to remember that there is all of this going on for the human beings we’re referring to, whether they’re scientists, politicians, football players, members of ‘the public’[2] or whatever. So in order to appreciate how synthetic biology might figure amongst all of this we have to take synthetic biology to be just one amongst many ongoing projects in the lives of all of the humans involved. What it means to envisage, create, produce, use or contest the development of an engineered microorganism will be shaped by the complex of other ongoing human practices involved for the many different people brought together to make these practices of imagination, creation, production, use and contestation possible.

Imagine how much meaning and complexity there is going to be at the 2014 jamboree when people from all around the world, from many different cultures, speaking many different languages, and familiar with many different practices, come together with their individual life histories and recent team experiences in order to compete for a range of trophies in the assemblage of people, relationships, materials, bodies, texts and social structures that make up the iGEM competition!

And, finally, let’s think about how complicated things would get if even just a few of the projects that teams bring to the competition are taken forward in some way and developed into novel technological and social changes. How might those future projects be made up of relations, materials, texts, structures and so forth? How will these technical developments borrow from or change existing patterns of social life? How will we all, scientists, politicians, football players and members of the public alike, make sense of all of this change and with what consequences for how we do things in our everyday lives?

If iGEM teams are going to start making human practices into something that can be more about the human of human practices then we need to take seriously all of these dimensions of what being a human is about when we are considering our synthetic biology innovations. We need to be adventurous in how we use social research methods, how teams collaborate, how we imagine what synthetic biology can be, who it can work for, and how we might try to change social relations for the better through it and with it.

In a series of posts, of which this is the first, I’ll be writing accessibly about some of the dimensions of human practices work in the context of iGEM and synthetic biology. My hope is to be able to help some iGEM teams to think a bit more broadly about what human practices could be about and what they might do as part of their own human practices work. Some of the information might help to inspire teams to think creatively about how their proposed technical innovations might be shaped by existing social forces, and also in what ways they might think about the possible futures in which their proposed innovations might play a role.

Suggestions of topics that you’d like to see me cover are very welcome – though no promises.

[1] Or soccer, for our American friends.

[2] I’ll come to this term in a later post I’m hopefully going to write: What’s “public” about ‘public understanding’?

Pennines STS First Meeting

Yesterday, for one day only Copenhagen came to Sheffield. Well, not quite. I got together with colleagues from Manchester and across the Pennines for the first meeting of what we’re calling ‘Pennines STS’. It’s a chance for those of us on each side of the hills to discuss work in progress and develop ideas collaboratively. For the first meeting we did an ‘EASST/4S Revisited’, in which we all gave the talks we’d given in Copenhagen last month. It was great to see presentations on a range of subjects from interdisciplinary collaboration, through organic wine, boundary work, and photovoltaics to agency, networks and the Manchester riots 2011.

People and titles of talks

Paul Martin – political economy context of science and social science collaborations
Kate Bulpin – interdisciplinary collaborations in synthetic biology/iGEM
Andrew Balmer – playfulness and collaborations between science and social science
Kate Wiener – temporalities and practices of use and non-use in context of statins
Bridgett Wessels – agency, networks and reflections on ‘third modernity’
Matt Watson – photovoltaics, engagement and interdisciplinarity
Elisa Pieri – securitisation, city branding and police practices following the Manchester Riots 2011
Yin-Ling Lin – science and soc-sci/humanities students’ boundary working
Anna Krzywoszynska – organic wine, consumption, taste and branding

[Valuable contributions to discussion also came from Susan Molyneux-Hodgson, Celso Gomez and Rob Meckin]

In a way, much of the discussion turned on the perennial issue of what is we’re trying to do in Science and Technology Studies at the moment and the cognate and similarly recurrent interest in ‘working with’ scientists. Though the differences were sometimes subtle, there were alternative positions being put forward as to how STS might relate to scientific work, sometimes overtly and other times more implicitly. Kate Weiner’s work (conducted with Catherine Will) looked in two directions, both towards STS concepts of ‘users’ and to pharmaceutical science and its concern with patient resistance to drugs. In this regard, Weiner’s work took a traditional method of social research (interviews) in order to nuance concepts in both realms. From my perspective, Kate’s work followed the traditional academic pattern of social science, in that it sought to apply STS to science, rather than to collaboratively work on concepts and research with pharmacologists developing statin drugs or GPs prescribing them. This is the way that much STS work is done, which is not to critique it, but to point towards the established division between production of science and commentary on it, and the way in which the scientists generally seem to speak for the science and we speak for the users, or non-users as the case may be.

But there was an interest in trying to understand how we might work in different modes. Paul Martin’s disposition, for instance, seemed to be concerned with attending to governance and how it structures the relations between scientists and social scientists as regards responsible innovation.  Matt Watson and Anna Krzywoszynska’s current project was concerned with findings ways to produce ‘socio-technical efficiency’ using collaborations between social and natural scientists, and thus was a more locally-defined, context-specific undertaking. My own research has been oriented to (or is trying to move towards) ‘strategic power’, as Foucault would term it, rather than ‘structural power’, meaning that I’ve been trying to produce local moments of creative, collaborative play – though, so far, largely failing, I must admit. Which brings me to Yin-Ling and Kate Bulpin’s talks, in that they both drew attention to the ways in which the boundaries between disciplines are organised. Yin-Ling showed that it isn’t only science students who, whilst often eschewing claims to expertise, nonetheless police the boundaries of science but also humanities and social science students who engage in such work. Kate showed how a range of material, temporal and social factors were at work in producing a split between the engineers/modellers and the laboratory biologists during an iGEM project. In conversation with Kate and Susan Molyneux-Hodgson I discussed their interest in bringing interest back to disciplines by attending to the ‘disciplining’ process of education. We thus, collaboratively, pointed towards the ways in which identification of disciplinary expertise is accomplished through talk and practice and how these processes are importantly tied to contexts, norms and power.

I can’t say, in the end, whether we left hopeful or not as regards STS work and the potential for collaborations, but we certainly left with hope for the future of Pennines STS and these productive and exciting conversations.

We’re planning on future meetings so if anyone has an interest in attending then please contact me.