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Princeton University Library Catalog
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Synthetic : how life got made / Sophia Roosth.
Author
Roosth, Sophia
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Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Description
vi, 251 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Availability
Copies in the Library
Location
Call Number
Status
Location Service
Notes
Lewis Library - Stacks
TA164 .R66 2017
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Subject(s)
Synthetic biology
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Bioengineering
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Summary note
"In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and manufacture: viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools. In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers' garages across the United States--even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists' own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing" -- From the publisher.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (pages [217]-241) and index.
Contents
Introduction: Analysis : synthesis
Interlude 1: Plastic fantastic
Life by design : evolution and creation tales in synthetic biology
Interlude 2: From still life to more intense life
The synthetic kingdom : transgenic kinship in the postgenomic era
Interlude 3: To make an eye, a hair, a leaf
The rebirth of the author : new life in legal and economic circuits
Interlude 4: Much more than human
Biotechnical agnosticism : fragmented life and labor among the machines
Interlude 5: What comes before
Life makes itself at home : the rise of biohacking as political action
Interlude 6: Life embryonic and prophetic
Latter-day Lazarus : biological salvage and species revival
Conclusion
Appendix A: A note on method.
Show 12 more Contents items
ISBN
9780226440323 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
022644032X ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
9780226440460 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
022644046X ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
LCCN
2016027488
OCLC
952139113
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