Technicians of Human Dignity

Technicians of Human Dignity traces the extraordinary rise of human dignity as a defining concern of religious, political, and bioethical institutions over the last half century and offers original insight into how human dignity has become threatened by its own success. The global expansion of dignitarian politics has left dignity without a stable set of meanings or referents, unsettling contemporary economies of life and power. Engaging anthropology, theology, and bioethics, Bennett grapples with contemporary efforts to mobilize human dignity as a counter-response to the biopolitics of the human body, and the breakdowns this has generated. To do this, he investigates how actors in pivotal institutions —the Vatican, the United Nations, U.S. Federal Bioethics—reconceived human dignity as the bearer of intrinsic worth, only to become frustrated by the Sisyphean struggle of turning its conceptions into practice

Synthetic biology: ethical ramifications 2009

During 2007 and 2008 synthetic biology moved from the manifesto stage to research programs. As of 2009, synthetic biology is ramifying; to ramify means to produce differentiated trajectories from previous determinations. From its inception, most of the players in synthetic biology agreed on the need for (a) rationalized design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems as well as (b) the re-design of natural biological systems for specified purposes, and that (c) the versatility of designed biological systems makes them suitable to address such challenges as renewable energy, the production of inexpensive drugs, and environmental remediation, as well as providing a catalyst for further growth of biotechnology. What is understood by these goals, however, is diverse. Those assorted understandings are currently contributing to different ramifications of synthetic biology. The Berkeley Human Practices Lab, led by Paul Rabinow, is currently devoting its efforts to documenting and analyzing these ramifications as they emerge

From Bio-Ethics to Human Practice: Steps Toward Contemporary Equipment

ARC Working Paper, No. 11National Science Foundatio

A Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms

ARC Working Paper, No.

Assembler le vivant

Ce texte entend contribuer aux discussions anthropologiques actuelles autour du défi que constitue le fait de considérer un assemblage comme un objet d’enquête. Autrement dit, il traite du problème de l’assemblage en tant qu’objectif anthropologique. Je commencerai par exposer l’enchevêtrement méthodologique et ontologique que représentent les assemblages pour les travaux d’inspiration ethnographique, ainsi que la raison pour laquelle cet enchevêtrement importe dès lors qu’il s’agit de penser..

Technicians of Human Dignity

Technicians of Human Dignity traces the extraordinary rise of human dignity as a defining concern of religious, political, and bioethical institutions over the last half century and offers original insight into how human dignity has become threatened by its own success. The global expansion of dignitarian politics has left dignity without a stable set of meanings or referents, unsettling contemporary economies of life and power. Engaging anthropology, theology, and bioethics, Bennett grapples with contemporary efforts to mobilize human dignity as a counter-response to the biopolitics of the human body, and the breakdowns this has generated. To do this, he investigates how actors in pivotal institutions —the Vatican, the United Nations, U.S. Federal Bioethics—reconceived human dignity as the bearer of intrinsic worth, only to become frustrated by the Sisyphean struggle of turning its conceptions into practice

Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences

Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences provides an account of an experiment I undertook in ethics and anthropology as part of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology, the BIOFAB. It offers an analysis of the facility's programmatic attempt to actualize a core claim of the new field of synthetic biology: that living beings can be conceived as collections of interoperable genetic components, constructed through rational design, standardized, and fabricated at scale. It provides a diagnosis of the scientific, vocational, and ethical limits of this endeavor. And demonstrates why, in the end, loyalty to truth and seriousness required an exit from the both the mode and stakes of my undertaking. My experiment with the BIOFAB constituted a distinctive and final phase of a five-year project to design Human Practices, which began as part of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). Extending ontological and ethical lines of inquiry characteristic of an anthropology of the contemporary, I asked: how are researchers in the BIOFAB bringing things into the world? How are they naming these things, distributing, and modifying them? Equally important, what habits, dispositions, and capacities are being cultivated and managed in order to make such ontological work possible? And, most crucially, what is the price to be paid?Following intensive participation-observation of the biologists whose task was to put into operation the BIOFAB's strategic vision, the dissertation examines a double-bind at the heart synthetic biology: those who are most capable of taking on the technical challenge of standardizing biological parts are also those least ready to fully commit themselves to such a vision for the future of bioengineering. The ethical and scientific challenge for these biologists was thus how to take a stance toward their work that would simultaneously allow them proceed with a technically difficult experiment, while distancing themselves from the lack of scientific seriousness often attributed to the BIOFAB's undertaking. As the thesis demonstrates, a similar challenge proved equally troublesome for me. The dissertation concludes that the attempt to incorporate ethics and anthropology as defining elements of synthetic biology reactivates a typically modern problem. Despite efforts to remediate the relations of ethics and science, actual asymmetry in power between biologists and non-biologists encumbers such work. Crucially, the thesis shows that this problem is as characteristic of governance at the highest levels as it is the micro-practices of life in the BIOFAB. In the case of my experiment, such difficulties initially required raising a second-order question: how are asymmetries in power being formed and how might they be unsettled? Ultimately, however, they required an ethics of exit: how can persistent disconnections between power, truth, and ethics be productively refused and, where necessary, left behind

Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences

Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences provides an account of an experiment I undertook in ethics and anthropology as part of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology, the BIOFAB. It offers an analysis of the facility's programmatic attempt to actualize a core claim of the new field of synthetic biology: that living beings can be conceived as collections of interoperable genetic components, constructed through rational design, standardized, and fabricated at scale. It provides a diagnosis of the scientific, vocational, and ethical limits of this endeavor. And demonstrates why, in the end, loyalty to truth and seriousness required an exit from the both the mode and stakes of my undertaking. My experiment with the BIOFAB constituted a distinctive and final phase of a five-year project to design Human Practices, which began as part of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). Extending ontological and ethical lines of inquiry characteristic of an anthropology of the contemporary, I asked: how are researchers in the BIOFAB bringing things into the world? How are they naming these things, distributing, and modifying them? Equally important, what habits, dispositions, and capacities are being cultivated and managed in order to make such ontological work possible? And, most crucially, what is the price to be paid?Following intensive participation-observation of the biologists whose task was to put into operation the BIOFAB's strategic vision, the dissertation examines a double-bind at the heart synthetic biology: those who are most capable of taking on the technical challenge of standardizing biological parts are also those least ready to fully commit themselves to such a vision for the future of bioengineering. The ethical and scientific challenge for these biologists was thus how to take a stance toward their work that would simultaneously allow them proceed with a technically difficult experiment, while distancing themselves from the lack of scientific seriousness often attributed to the BIOFAB's undertaking. As the thesis demonstrates, a similar challenge proved equally troublesome for me. The dissertation concludes that the attempt to incorporate ethics and anthropology as defining elements of synthetic biology reactivates a typically modern problem. Despite efforts to remediate the relations of ethics and science, actual asymmetry in power between biologists and non-biologists encumbers such work. Crucially, the thesis shows that this problem is as characteristic of governance at the highest levels as it is the micro-practices of life in the BIOFAB. In the case of my experiment, such difficulties initially required raising a second-order question: how are asymmetries in power being formed and how might they be unsettled? Ultimately, however, they required an ethics of exit: how can persistent disconnections between power, truth, and ethics be productively refused and, where necessary, left behind

Book review: from theory to inquiry?

Rabinow, Paul & Gaymon Bennett. Designing human practices: an experiment with synthetic biology. 200 pp., tables. Chicago: University Press, 2012. $80.00 (cloth),$29.00 (paper