Morgan Meyer

Tales of Emergence—Synthetic Biology as a Scientific Community in the Making

This article locates the beginnings of a synthetic biology network and thereby probes the formation of a potential disciplinary community. We consider the ways that ideas of community are mobilized, both by scientists and policy-makers in building an agenda for new forms of knowledge work, and by social scientists as an analytical device to understand new formations for knowledge production. As participants in, and analysts of, a network in synthetic biology, we describe our current understanding of synthetic biology by telling four tales of community making. The first tale tells of the mobilization of synthetic biology within a European context. The second tale describes the approach to synthetic biology community formation in the UK. The third narrates the creation of an institutionally based, funded ‘network in synthetic biology’. The final tale de-localizes community-making efforts by focussing on ‘devices’ that make communities. In tying together these tales, our analysis suggests that the potential community can be understood in terms of ‘movements’—the (re)orientation and enrolment of people, stories, disciplines and policies; and of ‘stickiness’—the objects and glues that begin to bind together the various constitutive elements of community.

Do-it-yourself biology: challenges and promises for an open science and technology movement

The do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) community is emerging as a movement that fosters open access to resources permitting modern molecular biology, and synthetic biology among others. It promises in particular to be a source of cheaper and simpler solutions for environmental monitoring, personal diagnostic and the use of biomaterials. The successful growth of a global community of DIYbio practitioners will depend largely on enabling safe access to state-of-the-art molecular biology tools and resources. In this paper we analyze the rise of DIYbio, its community, its material resources and its applications. We look at the current projects developed for the international genetically engineered machine competition in order to get a sense of what amateur biologists can potentially create in their community laboratories over the coming years. We also show why and how the DIYbio community, in the context of a global governance development, is putting in place a safety/ethical framework for guarantying the pursuit of its activity. And finally we argue that the global spread of DIY biology potentially reconfigures and opens up access to biological information and laboratory equipment and that, therefore, it can foster new practices and transversal collaborations between professional scientists and amateurs.

Placing and tracing absence: A material culture of the immaterial:

This essay engages with recent work on an unusual, yet fascinating theme: absence. Two edited collections have recently been published that deal with the topic: An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss (Bille et al., 2010) and The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality (Hockey et al., 2010). These books explore an almost counterintuitive aspect of absence: its material culture. Indeed, absence has a materiality and exists in – and has effects on – the spaces people inhabit and their daily practices and experiences. Drawing on the discussions in these two books and on other recent developments in the study of absence, this essay considers the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to trace absence. This entails following and describing the processes through which absence becomes matter and absence comes to matter. It means to map out, locate and follow the traces of absence and understand absences as traces, that is, as residual, incomplete, elusive, ambiguous, yet material entities.

Domesticating and democratizing science: A geography of do-it-yourself biology

By turning private homes and community spaces into sites where biological experimentation can be carried out, do-it-yourself biology promises a democratization of science. This democratization is based upon material processes: efforts to increase the affordability, accessibility and mutability of scientific equipment can be observed. In particular, do-it-yourself biology relies on ‘creative workarounds’ around objects (to transform and combine them in novel ways) and institutions (to circumvent established university–industry business linkages). By tinkering with objects and sharing knowledge via various communicative devices – websites, blogs, wikis, forums, videos – do-it-yourself biologists aim to create a new, collective and open economy of scientific equipment and render biology more accessible to citizens. A distinct form of individuality is constituted by providing people with access, transforming them into active makers of science, making their bodies/ailments more knowable and demonstrating that one can do it oneself. Do-it-yourself biology thus offers a site for exploring the ethics, boundaries and new forms of sociability for biology.

Caring for Weak Ties - the Natural History Museum as a Place of Encounter Between Amateur and Professional Science

This article is concerned with a community of practitioners that does not hold together well: amateur scientists. It examines the interrelationships between amateurs and professionals in a museum of natural history and focuses, in particular, upon two ‘community-making devices’ through which they meet: an annual conference and a journal. I consider these devices as a place of encounter, or ‘boundary encounter’, between amateurs and professionals. These encounters provide for a combination of several practices – practices of naming, assuring linguistic heterogeneity and thematic flexibility, exchanging knowledge and symbolic gifts – that enables the museum to keep the heterogeneous group of the amateurs somehow together. Since the connections between amateurs and professionals are not permanent, nor strong, but rather partial and fragile, they have therefore to be nurtured and cultivated with care. In fact, the museum and its professionals cannot continue to control – to use technical and ‘cold’ devices to discipline subjects – but have to care by fostering a ‘warm’ world of people. As I will show then, beyond their role as a place that brings together an epistemic collective, the encounters described in this paper also function as devices that nurture weak ties.

Researchers on display: moving the laboratory into the museum

Abstract An intriguing development is taking place in several European science museums: the move of university research laboratories into the space accessible to visitors. Seen as a means to encourage the public understanding of research and to render research practice more accessible to visitors, such laboratories-in-the-museum have been set up in museums in Munich, Berlin, Milan and Gothenburg. This paper is concerned with the changes that the laboratory undergoes through this relocation – namely a transformation of its social and material architecture; an extension of its object-world; and a change in, and multiplication of, the roles of researchers. The laboratory-in-the-museum not only represents, displays and explains a particular kind of space – the laboratory – but it is also designed to create space for dialogue and discussion between researchers and visitors.