Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds

317 Pages·2021·6.932 MB·English

by  Luis A Campos

Nature Remade
Convening SCienCe: DiSCovery at
the Marine BiologiCal laBoratory
Nature Remade
Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds
EditEd by
Luis A. CAmpos,
miChAEL R. diEtRiCh,
tiAgo sARAivA, And
ChRistiAn C. young
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in
the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more
information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th
St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 78326- 0 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 78343- 7 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 78357- 4 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208/ chicago /9780226783574 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Campos, Luis A., editor. | Dietrich, Michael R., editor. |
Saraiva, Tiago, editor. | Young, Christian C., editor. | Marine
Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, Mass.)
Title: Nature remade : engineering life, envisioning worlds / edited
by Luis A. Campos, Michael R. Dietrich, Tiago Saraiva, and
Christian C. Young.
Other titles: Convening science.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press,
2021. | Series: Convening science: discovery at the Marine
Biological Laboratory | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020058521 | ISBN 9780226783260 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226783437 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226783574
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bioengineering.
Classification: LCC TA164 .N39 2021 | DDC 660.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058521
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
And last— and this is the main thing—w hen I hear people speak of
reshaping life it makes me lose my self-c ontrol and I fall into despair.
Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood
a thing about life— they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—
however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of
raw materials that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by
their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If
you want to know, life is the principle of self-r enewal, it is constantly
renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is
infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

ContEnts
Introduction: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds 1
Luis A. CAmpos, miChAEL R. diEtRiCh,
tiAgo sARAivA, And ChRistiAn C. young
Part 1: Control
1 Knowing and Controlling: Engineering Ideals and
Gene Drive for Invasive Species Control in Aotearoa
New Zealand 13
ChRistiAn h. Ross
2 A Tale of Two Rats 31
AnitA guERRini
3 Cloning as Orientalism: Reproducing Citrus in
Mandatory Palestine 44
tiAgo sARAivA
4 Harvesting Hogzillas: Feral Pigs and the Engineering Ideal 60
AbRAhAm gibson
Part 2: Knowing as Making
5 Design and Narrative in the History of DNA Analysis
and Synthesis 73
dominiC J. bERRy
6 Behavioral Engineering and the Problems
of Animal Misbehavior 89
Edmund RAmsdEn
7 Engineering Spaces for the Biological Effects of Fission 103
JoshuA mCguffiE
8 A Matter of Taste: Making Artificial Silkworm Food in
Twentieth- Century Japan 115
LisA onAgA
9 Cybernetics without the Cyborg: Biological Modernism(s)
in Biomimetics and Biomimicry 135
RiChARd fAdok
Part 3: Envisioning
10 Strains of Andromeda: The Cosmic Potential Hazards of
Genetic Engineering 151
Luis A. CAmpos
11 Engineering Human Nature in the Genome Age: A Long View 173
nAthAniEL ComfoRt
12 Engineering Uplift: Black Eugenics as Black Liberation 186
AyAh nuRiddin
13 Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth 203
JAmEs RodgER fLEming
14 Resurrecting the Sublime 217
ALExAndRA dAisy ginsbERg
Notes 231
List of Contributors 289
Index 293
Introduction: Engineering Life,
Envisioning Worlds
Luis A. CAmpos, miChAEL R. diEtRiCh,
tiAgo sARAivA, And ChRistiAn C. young
“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even
as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direc-
tion, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects
from a resolutely historical approach— tracing cases across the decades of
the long twentieth century that span the many levels at which life has been
engineered— molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet.
When biologists have (re)made nature, either they have gained knowl-
edge of life that has entailed its engineering, or their attempts to engineer
life have posited new ideas of what can be known. Both efforts have been
intertwined with visions of a better world and efforts to remake living
systems. But, like all reconstructions of the world, the engineering of life
was never simply a technical question. Every effort at remaking nature
around us— even those most seemingly future- oriented efforts extending
to the Earth itself and beyond— inescapably occurs in a particular social
and political milieu. Tracing material practices of the engineering of biol-
ogy through concrete historical cases ranging from the development of
field sites for experimentation of new test organisms to the hybridization
of game species and wildlife conservation, or from the development of
genetic modification to the new frontiers of synthetic biology, highlights
how tinkering with life entails the (re)making of both biological and social
order.
Divided into three parts, the cases considered in Nature Remade inter-
rogate the control technologies channeling life’s expression, suppression,
and interaction; offer examples of the material practices and infrastruc-
tures involved in (re)making living forms in the laboratory and in the field;
and envision the possible futures produced as a result. The three parts of
Nature Remade focus on themes of control and reproduction, knowing as
making, and envisioning.
While there are many scholarly works on the technological dimen-
sions of biological research, none deliberately contrast different histori-
cal approaches to engineering life at different scales, in different biolog-