Synthetic Biology: Constructing Nature?

Synthetic biology is a new scientifi c fi eld which literally aspires to construct nature, by building living things ‘from scratch’. Because of this approach, it challenges our ideas about what we should think of as ‘natural’. An important aspect of how we understand ‘natural’ rests on what we oppose it to (see Keller, 2008a). In synthetic biology the main dichotomy is between the natural and the artifi cial. But other oppositions also become relevant: particularly those between the natural and the social, and the natural and the invented. In what follows, I start with a brief description of synthetic biology and how it distinguishes itself from previous biotechnologies. I analyse the principles of an engineering approach to biology and show how these principles lead to aspirations amongst synthetic biologists to eliminate or reduce biological complexity in their synthetic creations. While some synthetic biologists want to ‘improve’ on nature (ie to make it easier to engineer), others want to replace certain natural phenomena with ‘unnatural’ alternatives. However, sceptics and critics argue that these blatant attempts to reduce complexity will not work, and that nature’s contingency will not be successfully eliminated. I then connect my discussion of synthetic biology to theoretical work by Paul Rabinow and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on earlier biotechnologies, and discuss their analyses of the imposition of ‘society’ on ‘nature’ that we have seen in previous attempts to re-write and engineer biological systems. I go on to contextualize our understanding of synthetic biology and its construction of nature by considering model organisms and intellectual property, both of which attempt to impose uniform properties of natural entities, and which have the potential to move their objects out of the realm of the natural and into the realm of the artifi cial. In the conclusions I show how pressures for engineerability, commodifi cation and standardization are all pulling in the same direction: towards a reconstruction of nature which is instrumentalizable and utilizable for our purposes. These pressures could have profound consequences for the kinds of living things that are brought into the world by synthetic biology.