This book examines how synthetic biologists make, tinker with, and reason through experimental systems, and shows how these various activities articulate with the demands of academic life. Dan-Cohen's book offers a set of timely interventions into cross-disciplinary discussions of the nature of knowledge, the relationship between knowledge and control, and the role of the university in giving form to modern 'technoscience.' It frames synthetic biology as the latest permutation in a history of mutual incursions between nature and culture, and as an heir to a long tradition of populating biology with new kinds of objects, relationships, practices, and forms of expertise. It follows synthetic biologists as they attempt to make and know new biological things while also stabilizing this novel field and their place within it. Synthetic biology has been the subject of much hype, the substance of which revolves around a future of biological design and fabrication, of end users, standardized parts made from scratch, and lively markets. As Dan-Cohen shows, attending to these aspirations obscures two basic features of synthetic biology in its present-day incarnation, features that ethnography brings bluntly into view.


Author Information:
Talia Dan-Cohen (Ph.D., Anthropology, Princeton University, 2011), Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include the anthropology of knowledge, science and technology studies, social theory, and economic anthropology. In 2013, Princeton published "A Machine to the Future: Biotech Chronicles" (co-authored with Paul Rabinow). This is her first single-authored book.