Although the emerging field of synthetic biology looks back on barely a decade of development, the stakes are high. It is a multidisciplinary research field that aims at integrating the life sciences with engineering and the physical/chemical sciences. The common goal is to design and construct novel biological components, functions and systems in order to implement, in a controlled way, biological devices and production systems not necessarily found in nature. Among the many potential applications are novel drugs and pesticides, cancer (...) treatments, biofuels, and new materials. According to the most optimistic visions, synthetic biology may thus lead to a biotechnological revolution by transforming microorganisms into ‘factories’ of sorts, which could eventually displace conventional industrial methods. (shrink)

We explore three questions about Earth system modeling that are of both scientific and philosophical interest: What kind of understanding can be gained via complex Earth system models? How can the limits of understanding be bypassed or managed? How should the task of evaluating Earth system models be conceptualized?

Morphological engineering is an emerging research area in synthetic biology. In 2008 “synthetic morphology” was proposed as a prospective approach to engineering self-constructing anatomies by Jamie A. Davies of the University of Edinburgh. Synthetic morphology can establish a new paradigm, according to Davies, insofar as “cells can be programmed to organize themselves into specific, designed arrangements, structures and tissues.” It is obvious that this new approach will extrapolate morphology into a new realm beyond the traditional logic of morphological research. However, (...) synthetic morphology is a highly idealized vision of morphology which derives its visionary ideas from morphological engineering and mathematical idealizations in order to understand the principles of molecular morphology. Thus, the question is, if this approach will help to understand morphogenesis better or if it will just enable biologists to engineer morphogenesis. The paper investigates the development of synthetic morphology and its relation to synthetic biology as well as its epistemic gains. (shrink)

Re-Design des Lebens: Wissenschaft und Technik rekurrieren zunehmend auf das Prinzip des Synthetischen. Die Synthetische Chemie und seit Neuestem die Synthetische Biologie zielen auf ein Zusammensetzen von Bausteinen, um neue Entitäten zu designen - von Molekülen bis hin zu Stoffwechselnetzwerken in Organismen. Dieser Band unternimmt wissenschaftsphilosophische und -historische Annäherungen an das Prinzip der Syn-Thesis. Die Beiträge fragen: Welche Konstruktionsbedingungen realisieren die synthetischen Wissenschaften? Wie ist das Verhältnis zu analytischen Methoden? Und wo liegen die Grenzen technischer Synthesis?

Continuous culture techniques were developed in the early twentieth century to replace cumbersome studies of cell growth in batch cultures. In contrast to batch cultures, they constituted an open concept, as cells are forced to proliferate by adding new medium while cell suspension is constantly removed. During the 1940s and 1950s new devices have been designed—called “automatic syringe mechanism,” “turbidostat,” “chemostat,” “bactogen,” and “microbial auxanometer”—which allowed increasingly accurate quantitative measurements of bacterial growth. With these devices cell growth came under the (...) external control of the experimenters and thus accessible for developing a mathematical theory of growth kinetics—developed mainly by Jacques Monod, Aron Novick and Leo Szilard in the early 1950s and still in use today. The paper explores the development of continuous culture devices and claims that these devices are simulators for standard cells following specific requirements, in particular involving mathematical constraints in the design and setting of the devices as well as experiments. These requirements have led to contemporary designs of continuous culture techniques realizing a specific event-based flow algorithm able to simulate directed evolution and produce artificial cells and microorganisms. This current development is seen as an alternative approach to today’s synthetic biology. (shrink)

The modern program of operationalizing the mind, from Descartes to Kant, in the form of the externalization of human mind functions in logic and calculations, and its continuation in the program of formalization from the middle of the 19th century with Boole, Peirce and Turing, have led to the form of rationality that has become machine rationality: the digital computer as a logical-mathematical machine and algorithms as machine-rational interpretations of human thinking in the form of problem solving and decision making. (...) The modern program of the operationalization of the mind can be understood as the first program of an "artificial intelligence" on paper. With the advent of digital computers, it was transformed into the programs of "strong" and "weak" AI. As early as 2015, machine learning methods surpassed human competencies in image recognition and other fields, such turning AI increasingly into "superhuman AI." Thus, the philosophical question is, how to deal with this development as humans? (shrink)

The increasing digitalization of science particularly forgrounds the status of its visual objects. While more and more disciplines depend on methods of computer visualization, the respective transformation processes of knowledge on which the visualizations are based often remain unthematized. The article argues that an ontographic aisle between the abstraction and representation of knowledge lies in the visualization processes. This aisle is central to digitized scientific cultures. Therefore, two case studies from the history of computer graphics will be discussed.

"Viel ist über Medien geschrieben worden, und doch ist dem Medium aller Medien bislang keinerlei Abhandlung gewidmet. Die Rede ist vom Schleim. Nicht irgendein Schleim, sondern der Urschleim jeglichen Lebens, dem Rätsel der Wissenschaft, das bis heute als ungelöst gilt. Und noch ein Rätsel gilt es zu lösen, nämlich von der eigenartigen Koalition von Schleim und technischen Medien. Schleim, so die Wissenschaft, ist nicht nur Beginn der Menschwerdung sondern auch die Zukunft der Technologie. Much has been written about media, but (...) the medium of all media has not been studied so far: I am referring to slime. Not just any slime, but the protoplasm of all life, the scientific mystery, which is still regarded as unsolved. And another mystery remains be solved, namely the peculiar coalition of slime and technical media. According to science, slime is not only the origin of the human species, but also the future of technology. ". (shrink)

ZusammenfassungGenomdaten, Kernstück der 2008 ausgerufenen Big Data-Revolution der Biologie, werden voll automatisiert sequenziert und analysiert. Der Wechsel von der manuellen Laborpraktik der Elektrophorese-Sequenzierung zu DNA-Sequenziermaschinen und softwarebasierten Analyseprogrammen vollzog sich zwischen 1982 und 1992. Erst dieser Wechsel ermöglichte die Flut an Daten, die mit der zweiten und dritten Generation der DNA-Sequenzierer erheblich zunimmt. Doch mit diesem Wechsel verändern sich auch die Validierungsstrategien der Genomdaten. Der Beitrag untersucht beides – die Automatisierung und die damit verbundene Validierungskultur – um ein Bild der (...) Komplexität der Datengenerierung und deren Datenpositivismus zu geben. Leitend ist dabei die Frage, ob dieser Datenpositivismus die Grundlage der aktuell angekündigten Big Data-Revolution der Molekularbiologie ist oder deren Datenhybris. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungGenomdaten, Kernstück der 2008 ausgerufenen Big Data-Revolution der Biologie, werden voll automatisiert sequenziert und analysiert. Der Wechsel von der manuellen Laborpraktik der Elektrophorese-Sequenzierung zu DNA-Sequenziermaschinen und softwarebasierten Analyseprogrammen vollzog sich zwischen 1982 und 1992. Erst dieser Wechsel ermöglichte die Flut an Daten, die mit der zweiten und dritten Generation der DNA-Sequenzierer erheblich zunimmt. Doch mit diesem Wechsel verändern sich auch die Validierungsstrategien der Genomdaten. Der Beitrag untersucht beides – die Automatisierung und die damit verbundene Validierungskultur – um ein Bild der (...) Komplexität der Datengenerierung und deren Datenpositivismus zu geben. Leitend ist dabei die Frage, ob dieser Datenpositivismus die Grundlage der aktuell angekündigten Big Data-Revolution der Molekularbiologie ist oder deren Datenhybris. (shrink)

Inspired by the success of synthesising organic substances by Friedrich Wöhler in 1828, the vision of creating life in the laboratory synthetically has become increasingly accessible for today’s synthetic biology and synthetic genomics, respectively. The engineering of biology – a contemporary version of the liaison of technology and organic form – creates cellular machines, biobricks, biomolecular ‘borgs’, and entire synthetic genomes of artificial organisms. Besides major ethical concerns, the shift in scientific epistemology is of interest. Unlike classical analytical science, synthetic (...) science understands by a process of generation, through which myriads of new things are created, dramatically changing the living environment. (shrink)