Questions of Address: For Meaghan Morris

In beginning to prepare this tribute to Meaghan Morris’s work I went to the bulging folder that contains the letters and postcards and draft papers she sent me over a period of about twenty years, from the early 1980s to the early 2000s (more recently we’ve communicated almost entirely by email). One of the things that strikes me, looking through these pages with their typewritten text full of crossings-out and handwritten marginalia, is the enormous care Meaghan gives to her intellectual relationships, in my case with someone she didn’t know all that well, who lived on the other side of the country, and with whom there were significant points of intellectual difference. One of the letters I’m going to quote from is ten closely typed pages long, and to write it she would first have to have read, closely and carefully, a dense and abstruse paper of mine, set in what looks like 8-point font and to me today almost unreadable. Now consider that I was just one of Meaghan’s correspondents. I don’t know how many people received letters like this from her, but I’m pretty sure she had ongoing written conversations with a number of other people in Australia and elsewhere. Meaghan was and is a teacher: she takes intellectual debate as seriously as anyone I’ve ever known, and she conducts it with care, with tact, and with passion

Editorial

Editorial by John Frow

‘Can Simple Biological Systems be Built from Standardized Interchangeable Parts?’:Negotiating Biology and Engineering in a Synthetic Biology Competition

Synthetic biology represents a recent attempt to bring engineering principles and practices to working with biology. In practice, the nature of the relationship between engineering and biology in synthetic biology is a subject of ongoing debate. The disciplines of biology and engineering are typically seen to involve differentways of knowing and doing, and to embody different assumptions and objectives. Tensions between these approaches are playing out as the field of synthetic biology is being established. Here, we study negotiations between engineering and biology through the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. This undergraduate competition has been important in launching and bootstrapping the field of synthetic biology, and serves as a test-bed for the engineering approach.We show how a number of issues that iGEM teams must grapple with – including standardization, design, intellectual property, and the imagination of the social – involve the negotiation of engineering, biology, and other disciplines (including computer science), in ways more complex than the engineering rhetoric of synthetic biology implies.We suggest that a newmoral economy for synthetic biology is being created, in which epistemic and institutional values, conventions, and practices are being negotiated and (re)defined

Editorial

Editorial by John Frow and Katrina Schlunke

Opening up the Future(s) of Synthetic Biology

Much of the discussion surrounding synthetic biology involves some degree of speculation about the future. This paper reports on two workshops we held with the aim of ‘opening up’ and exploring possible futures for synthetic biology, one at the Synthetic Biology 4.0 conference (Hong Kong, October 2008) and the other at the BioSysBio meeting (Cambridge, UK, March 2009). We developed an interactive ‘causes and consequences’ exercise for these workshops, with the aim of creating a space for members of the synthetic biology community to discuss issues about the future of the field that they might not regularly explore in their daily work. We analyse the outputs and discussions from these workshops in the light of three key themes: the connections between social and technical issues in synthetic biology, the roles and responsibilities of synthetic biologists in shaping possible futures for the field, and the suitability of this method for opening up discussions about the future

Editorial

Editorial by John Frow and Katrina Schlunke