Susan Molyneux-Hodgson

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.

Five rules of thumb for post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaborations

In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of unshared goals and neighbourliness.

Synthetic Biology : A Sociology of Changing Practices

This book explores the emergence of a new scientific field, synthetic biology, and the many bold promises its proponents have made to change the future of science, industry and humanity. It explores how people tried to change their practices to bring engineering and biology together and to realise such promises from within their everyday lives

Bacterial cultures: ontologies of bacteria and engineering expertise at the nexus of synthetic biology and water services

In this paper we report on ethnographic work developed over two years, working as social scientists within a project on synthetic biology (SB), which aimed to use engineered bacteria as solutions to water industry problems. We were asked to help solve the ‘barrier to innovation’ by our engineering colleagues who believed that industrial and public ignorance would block their innovations. Instead of orienting around ‘ignorance’ we chose to explore the different ontologies of bacteria that were adopted in the various practices of the many sites involved in the project. We describe our observations in microbiological laboratories and compare them to a waste water treatment facility. Engineers in the lab understand bacteria as controllable but also vulnerable, thus their ability to manipulate and protect bacteria becomes important in their claims to expertise. In contrast, engineers in the water facility understand bacteria as dangerous, but they become skilled in protecting their bodies, make sense of their relation to bacteria through immunological narratives and claim expertise through an olfactory epistemology. Overall, we conclude that the ontologies of ‘engineer’ and ‘bacteria’ are interrelated through context-specific practices. Finally, we argue that this account is instructive for current policy and engagement discussions around SB.

“Measuring” sustainable living agendas

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce an approach for dynamically assessing the transition from partition to integration within a multi‐disciplinary research/urban regeneration project and its effect on the relative sustainability of interventions proposed.Design/methodology/approach – Stated sustainability aims of the research project are deconstructed in discussion with the multi‐disciplinary teams and stakeholders involved to give transparency to values held. Indicators are defined separately by the teams and then collectively. A framework for assessment is developed from a combination of ideas in research and practice and from a social science perspective. The thesis of the project that there are “significant social, economic and environmental gains to be made by integrated and innovative interventions in urban river corridors” is iteratively tested against the framework in open discussions enabling the frameworks continual refinement.Findings – The dynamics of sustainability assessment...

Placing a New Science: Exploring Spatial and Temporal Configurations of Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is a field that can be and often is described as “emerging”. The field-in-emergence is creating futures, problems and new objects that remain elusive. By turning an ethnographic gaze on the nascent stages of a new research field, we can pose interesting questions about the formation of local configurations and their relations to wider policies and actions in ways that the analysis of established fields would struggle to illuminate. In this paper we explore how a new field such as synthetic biology is actively ‘placed’, tracing the development of the field in the UK and in France. The concept of ‘placing’ allows us to interrogate the local configurations of an emerging field and tie these into non-local manoeuvres. The concept permits us to comprehend and link entities that are commonly differentiated as “local” (universities, research teams), “national” (funding, policy-streams, public debates, platforms), and “non-local” (international competitions, international conferences and publications). Placing a science means that the practices and discourses of the science co-emerge with its modes of organisation and geographies and with its histories and futures.

Enacting Ontologies, Failure and Time

In Chapter 1 we made a case for understanding synthetic biology, as we put it, ‘in situ’. By this we meant that what the field is, how people try to do synthetic biology and with what consequences are importantly shaped by the situation in which it is enacted. We highlighted some sensitising themes on every day practices, promises and ontology, arguing that by understanding synthetic biology at the level of everyday practices we might be better equipped to moderate the bold promises made by the field’s core proponents, and to see more clearly how ontologies are reconfigured practically as people try to bring about change.

Synthetic Biology in Situ

1. Quotation from an interview with a project participant. Andy Balmer: You say you’re working on a synthetic biology project. Why do you call it that? Academic Molecular Biologist 1: Why do I call it that? Partly because that is where the idea [for my work] came from. The network I got involved with was badged as a synthetic biology network and the idea came out of that. But it may have equally come out of a network that wasn’t badged as synthetic biology. It would have just been called biotechnology or something in the past. Would we have called it synthetic biology five years ago? Probably not. We would have just said it was a kind of microbial biotechnology approach or something.

The disciplining of scientific communities

Abstract Amidst ongoing concern with training students in the skills and knowledge necessary to contribute towards a knowledge-intensive economy, we explore how particular ‘epistemic subjects’ are produced within specific epistemic communities. We examine how social studies of science have probed the ‘disciplining’ practices that constitute scientific knowledge production, but have tended to overlook how students participate in, and become members of, epistemic communities. We propose that training contexts provide a window onto the disciplining processes through which scientific fields and their practitioners are co-produced. We offer an empirical example of an emerging scientific field that is working to establish community boundaries through the recruitment and training of university students. We explore how newcomers’ practices, values and identities are disciplined through participation in this nascent community whilst remaining open to negotiation and resistance. The conclusion calls for more scholarly attention to educational trajectories as processes through which disciplines and their disciples are produced.