TY - JOUR
T1 - Classifying, Constructing, and Identifying Life
T2 - Standards as Transformations of "The Biological"
AU - Mackenzie, Adrian
AU - Waterton, Claire
AU - Ellis, Rebecca
AU - Frow, Emma K.
AU - McNally, Ruth
AU - Busch, Lawrence
AU - Wynne, Brian
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the auspices of the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen). Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne acknowledge the ESRC's funding under the “Taxonomy at a Crossroads 2006-2009” responsive mode project, 2002-2012.
PY - 2013/9
Y1 - 2013/9
N2 - Recent accounts of "the biological" emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.
AB - Recent accounts of "the biological" emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.
KW - biology
KW - infrastructures
KW - proteomics
KW - publics
KW - standards
KW - synthetic biology
KW - taxonomy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84881153954&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84881153954&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0162243912474324
DO - 10.1177/0162243912474324
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84881153954
SN - 0162-2439
VL - 38
SP - 701
EP - 722
JO - Science Technology and Human Values
JF - Science Technology and Human Values
IS - 5
ER -