Engineers of Life? A Critical Examination of the Concept of Life in the Debate on Synthetic Biology

The concept of life plays a crucial role in the debate on synthetic biology. The first part of this chapter outlines the controversial debate on the status of the concept of life in current science and philosophy. Against this background, synthetic biology and the discourse on its scientific and societal consequences is revealed as an exception. Here, the concept of life is not only used as buzzword but also discussed theoretically and links the ethical aspects with the epistemological prerequisites and the ontological consequences of synthetic biology. The second part examines this point of intersection and analyses some of the issues which are discussed in terms of the concept of life. The third part turns to the history of the concept of life. It offers an examination of scientific and philosophical discourses on life at the turn of the 20th century and suggests a surprising result: In the light of this history, synthetic biology leads to well-known debates, arguments, notions and questions. But it is concluded that the concept of life is too ambiguous and controversial to be useful for capturing the actual practice of synthetic biology. In the fourth part I argue that with regard to the ethical evaluation of synthetic biology, the ambiguity of the concept of life is not as problematic as sometimes held because other challenges are more important. The question whether the activity of synthetic biological systems should be conceived as life or not is primarily theoretical

Reduction in primary production followed by rapid recovery of plant biomass in response to repeated mid-season droughts in a semiarid shrubland

The frequency and severity of extreme weather events, including droughts, are expected to increase due to the climate change. Climate manipulation field experiments are widely used tools to study the response of key parameters like primary production to the treatments. Our study aimed to detect the effect of drought on the aboveground biomass and primary production both during the treatments as well as during the whole growing seasons in semiarid vegetation. We estimated aboveground green biomass of vascular plants in a Pannonian sand forest-steppe ecosystem in Hungary. We applied non-destructive field remote sensing method in control and drought treatments. Drought treatment was carried out by precipitation exclusion in May and June, and was repeated in each year from 2002. We measured NDVI before the drought treatment, right after the treatment, and at the end of the summer in 2011 and 2013. We found that the yearly biomass peaks, measured in control plots after the treatment periods, were decreased or absent in drought treatment plots, and consequently, the aboveground net primary production was smaller than in the control plots. At the same time, we did not find general drought effects on all biomass data. The studied ecosystem proved resilient, as the biomass in the drought-treated plots recovered by the next drought treatment. We conclude that the effect of drought treatment can be overestimated with only one measurement at the time of the peak biomass, while multiple within-year measurements better describe the response of biomass

Neuronale Determiniertheit und Freiheit

Beckermann A. Neuronale Determiniertheit und Freiheit. In: Köchy K, Stederoth D, eds. Willensfreiheit als interdisziplinäres Problem. Lebenswissenschaften im Dialog. Vol 1. Freiburg: Alber; 2006: 289-304