Gaymon Bennett

Reply to the Respondents

Law & Literature, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 1–. issn 1535-685x, electronic issn 151-2601.

Building Capacity for a Global Genome Editing Observatory: Conceptual Challenges

A new infrastructure is urgently needed at the global level to facilitate exchange on key issues concerning genome editing. We advocate the establishment of a global observatory to serve as a center for international, interdisciplinary, and cosmopolitan reflection. This article is the first of a two-part series.

Building Capacity for a Global Genome Editing Observatory: Institutional Design

A new infrastructure is urgently needed at the global level to facilitate exchange on key issues concerning genome editing. We advocate the establishment of a global observatory to serve as a center for international, interdisciplinary, and cosmopolitan reflection. This article is the second of a two-part series.

From theory to inquiry

This book recollects an experiment in collaboration.The guiding question was: ‘How should complexassemblages bringing together a broad range of diverseactors be ordered so as to make it more rather thanless likely that flourishing will be enhanced?’ (p. 41).Synthetic biology presented itself as a promising venuefor this reconstructive anthropological and ethicalanalysis because, by creating new beings and elicitingnew competences from life, it contributed to ‘aproblematization of things (ontology) that must betaken up, thought about, and engaged (ethics andanthropology)’ (p. 34). For the enterprise to be trulycollaborative, synthetic biologists would have had toacknowledge their implication in a heterogeneous,complex, and unstable assemblage of practices, and towork with the idea that analytical and ethicalequipment is not given in advance but formed up as a‘problem-space’ unfolds and ramifies, and, crucially, asthe human and the life sciences exchangecompetences. Apparently, these elite biologists werenot engaged by the challenges of contingentencounters; they were retrenched in an instrumentalapproach to the remaking of life, and in anunderstanding of ethical reflection as somethingexternal to science itself. The authors’ invitations tocollaboration were met with indifference,incomprehension, and hostility; their diagnosis is thatthey had experienced an exercise of ‘sovereign power’.Yet, in the mode of what Foucault called ‘

H5N1 and the Politics of Truth

The social fact of disease means the ethical dimensions of H5N1 research are not only fraught but empirical. Any account of the reality of research that leaves out its ethical dimensions leaves out reality. For this reason alone—and quite apart from his carefully reasoned analysis—David Resnik deserves our thanks: his attention in this issue to the ethics of knowledge focuses our attention on the fact that the possible harms and benefits of H5N1 turn as much on the “politics of truth”—how work is conducted and talked about—as the biology itself. Sufficient discussion of this ethical dimension, as Resnik points out, requires attending to all stages of research, its premises and its ramifications. Resnik focuses on questions of publication and risk, offering philosophical, legal, and political insight. For my part, I would like to bolster (if complicate) Resniks assessment by offering a few anthropological notes.

The moral economy of biotechnical facility

Early programmatic statements about the future of synthetic biology primed the figure of the transformed biologist and the invention of facilities through which that transformation could be actualized. Ten years on from those manifestos, it seems worth posing the question of what facilities have actually been put into play as part of the making of the synthetic biologist, and how these subjectivational spaces – material, digital, and conceptual – are inflecting the economies of life, labor, and power within which synthetic biology continues to be imagined and elaborated.

Nature natured and nature denatured

Those who want to observe, analyze, and make judgments about synthetic biology need to think about where to stand in the world so as to get an informed sense of which new capacities and incapacities are actual and which matter. They will need something like “upstream ethics”—but not because they want to “get ahead” of the imagined onslaught of the technology. 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 extra-technological effects such talk sets into motion—from the mobilization of capital to the activation of new power relations, anxieties, and displacements. Its 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 any novel organisms synthetic biologists hope to build.

Sacred cells? response to the respondents

Space does not allow a full response to each of the insights and critical questions offered by the reviewers of Sacred Cells? Moreover, in collaborative authorship, each of us would probably respond with differing nuances—these questions go to the heart of matters of faith, after all, and we each come from different traditions. We nonetheless welcome the opportunity to provide clarification and elaboration. The reviewers’ questions can be clustered into several topical groupings. We focus on two of these, which are connected. A first concerns the question of potential; a second the question of the soul. With regard to the first, Robert Lebel asks whether the development of an artificial placenta would undermine our emphasis on the ethical salience of implantation and the future potential of an embryo. Richard Gula asks whether our approach to embryo ‘‘status’’ is too anthropocentric—too oriented to human relationships rather than relationship with God. Cole-Turner cites the ‘‘intrinsic potential’’ of the blastocyst. And Lisa Fullam reminds us that the resolution of questions of potential will always be troubled by the challenge of connecting claims about persons and biological materials. Taking these together we might ask: how is the ‘‘potential’’ of a blastocyst to be defined and considered, have we given too much weight to external rather than internal factors, and what has our framing omitted? The much-discussed question of potential is obviously a thorny one. We argue that there is a morally relevant difference between the circumstances of the blastocyst in a womb and the blastocyst outside the womb. A womb—whether the potential artificial womb that Lebel asks about or not—is clearly needed for human biological and therefore personal development. An embryo outside the womb, which will not be implanted, currently has no potential to develop into a child. The blastocysts currently used for stem cell research are outside the womb and will not become children unless they are implanted. One may quibble as to whether this difference is technically a question of potential or of the circumstances needed for the actualization of potential. But surely most readers will recognize that circumstances matter to the future of a blastocyst and that circumstances are, therefore, morally relevant. Gula notes that ‘‘science cannot decide the question of personhood, and theology cannot decide it without science.’’ In science—that is, in contemporary Theology and Science, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2011