Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication
View/ Open
Author
Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889712000324Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Roosth, Sophia. 2013. Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication. Science in Context 26, no. 1: 153–171.Abstract
What does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12563736
Collections
- FAS Scholarly Articles [18256]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)