Schyfter Pablo
Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, The University of Edinburgh, Old Surgeons' Hall, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ, UK.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2013 Dec;44(4 Pt B):632-40. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.05.010. Epub 2013 Jun 15.
A commitment to 'making'--creating or producing things--can shape scientific and technological fields in important ways. This article demonstrates this by exploring synthetic biology, a field committed to making use of advanced techniques from molecular biology in order to make with living matter (and for some, to engineer living matter). I describe and analyse how this field's 'drive to make' shapes its organisational, methodological, epistemological, and ontological character. Synthetic biologists' ambition to make helps determine how their field demarcates itself, sets appropriate methods and practices, construes the purpose and character of knowledge, and views the things of the living world. Using empirical data from extensive ethnographic and interview-based research, I discuss the importance of seemingly simple and unimportant commitments-in this case, a focus on the making of things rather than the production of knowledge claims. I conclude by examining the ramifications of this line of research for studies of science and technology.
致力于“制造”——创造或生产事物——能够以重要方式塑造科学技术领域。本文通过探讨合成生物学来证明这一点，合成生物学是一个致力于利用分子生物学的先进技术来利用活物质（对一些人来说，是对活物质进行工程改造）的领域。我描述并分析了这个领域的“制造驱动力”如何塑造其组织、方法、认识论和本体论特征。合成生物学家的制造抱负有助于确定他们的领域如何界定自身、设定适当的方法和实践、诠释知识的目的和特征，以及看待生物世界的事物。利用来自广泛的人种志研究和基于访谈的研究的实证数据，我讨论了看似简单且不重要的承诺的重要性——在这种情况下，是关注事物的制造而非知识主张的产生。我通过审视这一研究路线对科学技术研究的影响来得出结论。
