Biopower and the Contemporary

June 29, 2007

Life, vitalism, misusing the name of the Lord and so on…

There’s an editorial in Nature (subscription required) this week that demands some attention– it could have been written by Dr. Rabinow, for all I know, and it’s a fascinating read.

Called “Meanings of ‘life’” it essentially argues, now in the wake of synthetic biology, now in the wake of J. Craig Venter’s bad science fiction science, that the term life is essentially meaningless: “chronic vitalism” it says, invoking that 19th century debate about the origins of a life force, has been rendered moot by synthetic biology. Just as an aside, the resurrection of vitalism as a concept in philosophy, in particular by Scott Lash, would it seems, echo this editorialist’s concerns, insofar as Lash seems content with a basic opposition between mechanism and vitalism, both would probably identify the editorial as a “mechanistic” rather than a vitalist approach, but this is where it get’s interesting… read on…

The first part of the editorial concerns itself with accusations of “playing god” in synthetic biology (I have a nanotechnology colleague at Rice, one James Tour, who essential sees himself as “building from the bottom up, the way God does”):

Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to God, but perhaps none invites the accusation as directly as synthetic biology. Only a deity predisposed to cut-and-paste would suffer any serious challenge from genetic engineering as it has been practised in the past. But the efforts to design living organisms from scratch — either with a wholly artificial genome made by DNA synthesis technology or, more ambitiously, by using non-natural, bespoke molecular machinery — really might seem to justify the suggestion, made recently by the ETC Group, an environmental pressure group based in Ottawa, Canada, that “for the first time, God has competition”.

The editorial then goes on to invoke predictable precursors:

deep roots running from the medieval homunculus portrayed by Paracelsus and the golem of Jewish legend to the modern faustian myth of Frankenstein.

And then, in good scientific rhetorical form, laments that these well established scientific principles–like evolution–cause such trouble

There is a popular notion that life is something that appears when a clear threshold is crossed. One might have hoped that such perceptions of a need for a qualitative difference between inert and living matter — such vitalism — would have been interred alongside the pre-darwinian belief that organisms are generated spontaneously from decaying matter. Scientists who regard themselves as well beyond such beliefs nevertheless bolster them when they attempt to draw up criteria for what constitutes ‘life’.

and then, here’s the punchline:

It would be a service to more than synthetic biology if we might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept.

The editorial takes an interesting turn though, as Dr. Landecker pointed out to me, when it gets into the details of what it means for Venter to “make an organism”:

a patent filed by the Venter Institute in October 2006 on a “minimal bacterial genome” — a subset of genes, identified in Mycoplasma genitalium, required for the organism to be viable “in a rich bacterial culture medium”. That last sounds like a detail, but is in fact essential. The minimal requirements depend on the environment — on what the organism does and doesn’t have to synthesize, for example, and what stresses it experiences. Too much minimization and you end up with cells on life support.

The idea that life is something transcendental, that core claim of vitalism, is in fact being refuted here (in the spirit of philosophical vitalism? Not sure…) in favor of a claim that life is about living in context– try to reach for the minimum constitutents of life and you end up with cellular Terry Schiavos– and all the sound and fury that generates. But as the editorial points out:

cells do not live alone, but in colonies and, in general, in ecosystems. Life is not a solitary pursuit, nor can evolution happen without the opportunity for competition.

Life is social. Whoa. What a neat idea, I wonder where one might find people who have thought about this? Hmmm… maybe amongs (neo)-vitalists?

In the end, the editorial suggests that the radical biology of synthetic biology is another way to counter a Christian right claim to a divine spark of life… and to replace it with one that recognizes that

the formation of a new being is gradual, contingent and precarious — then the role of the term ‘life’ in that debate might acquire the ambiguity that it has always warranted.

I’m of two minds about this: on the one hand it is an obvious joy to see an editorial in Nature that treats a question like this in such a familiar way… but at the same time, it draws the same old battle lines between science and religion in ways that are also unhelpful, as if the success of science necessarily implies the complementary defeat of religious thinking.

Dare I invoke Latour here again, but when we met with said nanotechnologist, James Tour (we had dinner at his house, which was a night to remember), Tour invoked God twice: he said grace before the meal, and he explained nanotechnology by saying that it builds things the way God builds them. Latour’s response was to accuse Tour of breaking the 5th commandment (”You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name”) because, though it was acceptable to say Grace before a mean, it was unacceptable to insert God into an explanation of molecular electronics– it was a wrongful use of the name of the Lord. Latour’s point, if I understood him, was that if we want to have both science and religion (rather than one or the other) then we need to allow both domains to body forth their own truth, and truth conditions, and be able to distinguish between those experiences and problems that demand recourse to religious thought, and those that do not: molecular electronics has no need of God as an explanans, it is rather something for which we have sharp, well defined, standardized and highly technical means of understanding it; by contrast, that we remain healthy and are blessed with a wonderful meal in the presence of curious and friendly people is not something we need science to explain.

I wonder then, whether the “anti-vitalism” of this editorial and the “pro-vitalism” of the kind I read in Scott Lash and elsewhere, actually have common ground here… especially with respect to the status of religious or theological thought and reasoning. Or even closer to home, whether Jim Faubion’s reflections on problematics of emergence vs. problematics of reproduction might cut through some of this in a way that is more clarifying. It seems to me that this is a good place for some concept work.

June 20, 2007

France Warns Officials on BlackBerry Use