An object is not a thing. I am still stuck on this. Through the Human Practices work on synthetic biology I have been exposed to the work of the Voigt lab who have the ambition to develop a tumor destroying bacterium (see especially task 3)

Is the yet-to-be bacterium - a la Haraway - a material-semiotic object, much more semiotic than material at this stage? Is it in fact a thing, or rather not even a thing?

Let me backup a stage, is an object the constituted site of action where something has become a problem? In this case is the bacterium actually an object, the site at which life as a problem can be remediated?

One interesting term which has become apparent in this syn bio enterprise ‘modularity’. (First time I heard it was from Adam Arkin in a lecture)

I am wary of collapsing the term into metaphor applied to ‘the social stuff’. The term has been used over two centuries, from Eli Whitney’s rifle modularity through computer science. The main characteristic of something that is modular is that parts are isolatable and can be re-configured. However, in the biological milieu, As Weiss et al point out isolatable parts are entirely context dependent. Weiss et al write,

“The notions of standardization, decoupling, and abstraction must be recast to better reflect the complexity of the cellular context …

A biological device has no meaning isolated from a module; a module has no meaning isolated from a cell; a cell has no meaning isolated from a population of cells. This contextual dependence is an essential feature of living systems and is not an impasse, but rather a bridge to the successful engineering of living systems” (Molecular Systems Biology (2006) doi:10.1038/msb4100073)

Perhaps meaning is not the issue but rather ‘significance’, at any rate, a shift in the term modularity has occurred whereby the functioning of parts are both isolatable and entirely context dependent, unlike say a rifle or lego.

Why the title? Weiss et al suggest that moving from the single cell to the multicellular opens ‘vistas for exploration’, a vista (among other definitions) is ‘a mental picture covering a wide range of objects or a long succession of events in the past or future’. parts, objects, modules, contexts. More work to be done on what these terms mean.