The cut that makes a part
Alain Pottage, Claire Marris · BioSocieties · 2012
The contributions to this special issue explore some conjunctions between synthetic biology and intellectual property (IP). For the most part, practitioners of synthetic biology frame these conjunctions instrumentally, in terms of how law might facilitate science: how might one draft a commodity constitution that fosters an ethos of openness, builds community and advances the conceptual agenda of biology, while at the same time, perhaps, allowing as much commercial appropriation of community goods as might be necessary to realize the industrial potential of the new science? These terms of engagement stake out the law as the medium or terrain of a contest over the ethos of the biological sciences. Much terrain has already been lost to the ‘neoliberal program’, whose basic objective is ‘to decouple most functions of scientific research from the educational functions to which they had been wedded during much of the twentieth century’ ( Mirowski, 2011 , p. 37). But the gamble in this case is that because legal instruments are just that – instruments – they might be turned to the task of fashioning a constitutional framework for open science. One implication of this strategy is that the artefacts of synthetic biology will have to take on shapes that are adapted to the shapes into which legal forms and instruments might themselves be engineered. The engineering of life is bound into the engineering of law, and the ambition in both cases might be radical reinvention: ‘If we’re rebuilding the living world we might have to expect rebuilding part of the legal system’ (Drew Endy, cited in Campos, this issue). Our contributors reflect on the ways in which notions such as closure and openness, part and context, or materiality and information, are mobilized in the formulation of this strategy for the mutual engineering of biology and law. On the other side of the conjunction, it may be that the synthetic biologists’ project of reengineering life can tell us something about the latent states of IP regimes.