Part 1

Thank you very much for having me. The talk will be broken into two twenty minute halves, with a break between them. The first half sets up the problem, while the second explains what I have been working on as a remedy. The first half is also different from the second in that it includes no less than three adverts! I apologise for these, but the simple fact of the matter is that for the past five years I have worked entirely in collaborations. Needing to explain these always carries the sense of an advert, but I’ll try to make them as functional as possible.

My first advert comes in the form of GOOD NEWS! That the history, philosophy, and social scientific study of biological engineering has never been healthier.

So much so that last year myself, Rob Smith, and Janella Baxter, established a new scholarly network for its interdisciplinary study. We now have more than 40 members, and are in the process of creating resources, conference panels, etc. etc. all that good stuff. The details for the Biological Engineering Collaboratory (BEC) as we call it, can be found on this slide and if you are interested we very much welcome you to get in touch. Obviously this development in itself is perhaps not very interesting for PUS, but I think it could be, if this scholarship offers means by which to rethink biological engineering and its public understanding. In this talk I focus on public understanding in the UK and the importance of history. In the first half I’ll explain how some forms of historical thinking already matter, and in the second, what I am doing to improve things.

First, it is important to point out that there’s a disparity between the motivations behind public engagement exercises in relation to biological engineering or synthetic biology, and how these engagement exercises have been designed. On the side of motivations, ambitions to avoid ‘GM all over again’ are very clearly present within expert communities for science, technology, and policy. I can evidence this with my own experience and research published by Emma Frow and Claire Marris. But on the side of engagement design, history has either been excised or very narrowly defined. For instance, the UK’s 2010 public dialogue exercise did incorporate a historical question, as we see on the slide here, though in the form of ‘lessons learned’ about ‘the’ GM controversy, whatever that might be. Moreover, this historical framing was only included at the very first stage, when a group of stakeholders were interviewed independently of the eventual workshop participants. If any ‘lessons’ were learned, we do not find out what they were, as the dialogue report does not return to them. The vast majority of public engagement exercises concerning biological engineering do not draw on history at all, if anything they seem to keep it at bay, as some of that pre-existing knowledge that might make a participant biased.

There are perhaps some understandable reasons for this disparity. For one, a great deal of public engagement work was directed toward genetic modification in the 1990s and 2000s. It might be felt that those studies now constitute exercises in history - as though people in the past were asked their views on certain topics for the benefit of people in the present - though of course they were not. Another understandable reason for the disparity, is that some public engagement professionals might feel fatigued by it, or want to start again some how. For another thing, the 2010s and 20s aren’t the 1990s or 2000s, and contemporary biology may well require dialogue all its own. There are plenty of worthwhile forms of engagement that need not draw on history at all. Nevertheless, when, as in this case, the motivation is so strongly rooted in an historical interpretation of the past, I think this disparity is a problem. Leaving out the earlier history of biology and genetic engineering relieves policy makers from having to reflect on the persistence of many issues surrounding the techniques and commercialization of biological science. They are instead able to work with a cleaner slate, and if civil society organisations or publics ‘dredge up’ history, then their doing so becomes something which can be used to undermine them. Perhaps another reason that this framing gets left out, is that public engagement professionals know full well that ‘not GM all over again’ is a pretty patronising framing when it comes to dealing with actual people, not just imagined ones. So they end up leaving the historical element out.

Rather than throw the historical baby out with the patronising bathwater, I think we need to instead first recognise that history is already implicated in how different audiences interact with and perceive biological engineering, so much so that we cannot ignore it, and should therefore use it to engage multiple different publics.

With the remainder of Part 1, I’ll demonstrate the range of ways in which history is already implicated in understandings of synthetic biology, beginning with history for audiences that are very close to the biological sciences, then moving outward to history within scientific behaviour in public, in civil society, pedagogical and engagement resources, popular science, and finally art-science collaborations.

First, synthetic biologists present themselves to one another as harbingers of the next industrial revolution. This is an identity they have chosen for themselves that is also readily picked up in political and policy circles too, and thereby projected more widely. No doubt it is in part because this identity can travel that they have chosen it. However, I want to stress that this matters for scientists talking to other scientists first. This image provides a handy recent example taken from a scientific journal, and there are many other similar ones to choose from. The strategy is an old and obvious one - take it for granted that the industrial revolution was a good thing, produced by ingenuity, inventiveness, engineering, and entrepreneurial spirit, all the while showing how your yourself possess these same qualities, and so with one stroke you have a way to internalise the historical scope and ambitions of your own industry. It is also an image that synthetic biologists do not wear lightly. So much of their day-to-day efforts in the lab can be characterised as epistemically reforming biology’s ‘rules of thumb’ to turn them into a proper ‘applied science’.

When not adopting this image of themselves as industrial revolutionaries, biological engineers will take a more traditional historical approach, inserting themselves into several possible lineages. These can range from cybernetics, to electrical engineering, to microbiology, and of course - as we see here - building on means and methods for genetic recombination. It is in this more conservative mode where scientists - still very much talking to audiences of scientists - attempt to make sense of themselves to each other. Historical strategies include being eclectic about the lineages they might belong to, thereby increasing the likelihood that any given scientist might find their identity within the field, and interpreting well-understood transitions and changes that are already familiar to scientists (such as the rise of ‘omics’ included here) as having an additional significance for the emergence of synthetic biology in particular. These are pretty good historical strategies, and it is in this mode where the scientist is most directly in competition with the historian of science. While I could say more about that, and the works of people like Luis Campos, Evelyn Fox Keller, Michele Morange and myself, who have all offered direct historical interpretations of synthetic biology, I am not giving a history of science talk! I will instead move further outward from scientific audiences to increasingly public ones.

Many synthetic biologists know that they inhabit a space which previous generations have claimed before, and so they know that past future sciences are available for them to play with. These two examples were created for audiences closely aligned to science, but were shared in very public settings, Twitter and YouTube respectively. Both play with notions of ‘when’ synthetic biology might be. The image on the left is a 2017 tweet advertising a synthetic biology lectureship, conveying at the same time a past sci-fi future. The image on the right is a still taken from a video uploaded to YouTube in 2010 by the company Ginkgo bioworks. The man is Tom Knight, the company's founder, and a computer engineer and synthetic biologist who was for a long time based at MIT. In this video, titled ‘Meet Ginkgo Bioworks’, they introduce the company by using tropes from 1950s cinema, mashing the aesthetic of Pathé News with deranged and surreal skits. In the shot immediately following this one we see DNA sequences being typed out by hand on an old typewriter. The historical imagination is up for grabs.

That history is up for grabs, and that it can be used for comic effect in understanding biological engineering, is also known to civil society groups.

I take this example from the ETC group way back in 2007, not only because this has been an influential report, but also because it takes the extent to which synthetic biology has been happy to present itself historically and playfully, and turns that back on itself, putting that same identity in a more grand context of human history, one in which it looks inappropriate, ridiculous and arrogant. The notion of extreme genetic engineering is also historically loaded, tackling the question of synthetic biology’s purported novelty head on, and concluding that it is even more of the same all over again. My main difficulty in terms of the uses of history in the hands of many civil society organisations, is that they have a preference for philosophies of history - these make history into a pattern that inevitably recurs, rather than using historical knowledge as a critical resource. Arguably the latter problem is also found equally in my next example.

This is a screenshot taken of the front page of the website ‘What is Biotechnology?’ which was first launched in 2013. The front page does not do the overall site justice, thanks to its

dark design, and paranoid heavy deficit model framing. There is much more inside the website than this front page might suggest. ‘What is Biotechnology?’ acts as a central resource for different public engagement exercises, often with a strong emphasis on history. The website itself mainly contains a number of encyclopedia entries concerning people and institutions from the history of the biosciences, mostly from beyond the Second World War, mostly in fields of biomedicine. I could only find 1 scientist who had worked with plants, and in the few places agriculture is mentioned it is purely as a venue for the application of science. There is also an ever-expanding timeline, one which is currently being updated with developments concerning the Corona pandemic, so this is very much an active resource. Ultimately however, this is a resource that is clearly made in the image of, and for the service of, industrial biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturers. The main use of history is to diminish any sharp distinctions between contemporary practices and past ones, and the emphasis within the encyclopedia entries is on accomplishment and excitement in science and the process of its commercialization, how difficult that work is, how difficult it is getting biotech innovations to market, and so on. The discourse is often very straightforwardly embedded in innovation and economic speak. In short, this website is dedicated to making a very particular kind of public for biological engineering.

By comparison, the publics to be found in popular science writing are less disciplined, though the engagement with history tends to be far more shallow. On the left, a front page from The Economist which uses tropes from C19th paintings of the garden of Eden, and on the right a still from the 2012 Horizon documentary, ‘Playing God’. Here Adam Rutherford holds polaroids of a goat and a spider, teeing up the ‘spider-goat’ which acts as the programme’s centrepiece. In a blog post discussing the programme Rutherford explains he sought to skewer the phrase ‘Playing God’, which has been hurled at scientists throughout history, a repetition which he thinks renders it now meaningless.

Finally, synthetic biologists are want to use not only human history, but also natural history. An excellent recent example comes from a sci-art collaboration, ‘Resurrecting the Sublime’, parts of which you are currently meant to be able to visit in various exhibition spaces around the world. To put the point of this project very briefly, the public are asked to think about human caused extinction of species, by smelling mixtures of fragrant chemicals, chemicals which were chosen as a result of synthesising the DNA of some extinct plant species, incorporating that DNA into the genome of a yeast, which was then fermented to see what (if any) chemicals were synthesised by the organism. As with most of the examples I have discussed so far, there is always the worry that this kind of activity is primarily serving the purposes of public relations on behalf of industry, or maneuvering publics into positions that make the techniques of synthetic biology seem more familiar and therefore benign. Nevertheless, the project’s own emphasis on extinctions brought about through human land use practices at least makes economic and environmental history as central as anything to do with science.

With all of those examples, I have tried to cover some of the most important ways in which history is already implicated in public understanding of biological engineering.

On this slide I have collected some of the main problems that we encountered, some of which were generic, others more specifically about biological engineering. At the bottom there, with discussion of entrenched publics, I am making reference to Claire Marris’ excellent 2015 paper on ‘synbiophobia-phobia’, that is, the imagined phobic publics often imagined by scientists and science policy experts. There Marris also emphasises how often public engagement activities around synthetic biology are motivated by a desire to avoid ‘GM all over again’. It is because biological engineering has a fundamentally historical component, a history that is embedded in its identity, and therefore how it might be interpreted, that I want to make historical understanding a central feature of public understanding of biological engineering.

But how? This brings me to my two final adverts and the end of Part 1.

At the top, Engineering Life, and at the bottom, Narrative Science. Both projects are still ongoing, and both are made up of large teams. The members of those teams will each explain the projects slightly differently, so please remember I am only speaking for myself.

Engineering Life is led by Jane Calvert at the University of Edinburgh, and is an STS project concerned with the practices, ideas, policies, and promises of contemporary synthetic biology. Thanks to my involvement with this project I became interested in engineering as a field and profession distinct from science, potentially possessing distinct epistemic features. In the process, I became alert to the need for more historiographical attention to biological engineering, in the vein of Robert Bud’s The Uses of Life. Such a history will need a more comprehensive view of how biology and engineering have been and can be implicated in one another.

At the bottom, Narrative Science, which is based at the LSE and led by Mary Morgan. It is dedicated to finding and demonstrating the functions that narrative achieves for scientists, engineers, and medical practitioners, during the conduct of their scientific research. It is therefore not about the public communication of science, though of course there will be some overlap or interconnection. One of the key things to know of the project is the effort to use scholarship from narratology, literary theory, philosophy of history, art history, and so on - to inform what narrative can be, and therefore how it might be functioning in the sciences.

In Part 2, I’ll use my experience in these two projects to offer a new starting point for public understanding of biological engineering.

Part 2Welcome back. Time to make history a central feature for public understanding of biological engineering.

First, what is the space of biological engineering made of?

There are 7 key ways in which biology and engineering can be and have been implicated in one another. For those familiar with Jon Agar’s edited collection on the intersection of history of technology and the environment, yes, I have absolutely modelled the arrangement of these categories on his intersections of tech and the environment. What are my categories?

First, there are those times when our actors find engineering in biology and biological things, (whether these be whole organisms, or organic structures, or naturally occurring materials that get interpreted as having engineering qualities). Second, engineering done with biology. (Here you will find your industrial processes and manufacture relying on organisms and organic inputs such as proteins). Third, engineering done to or for biology. (Prime places to look include agricultural engineering, or biomedical technologies such as replacement organs, everyday cyborgs, and the analysis of biological materials by engineers). Fourth, cases of engineering learning from biology. (Some whole fields, such as biomimetics, are dedicated to exploring these questions, and sometimes this can also be a feature inside of larger agendas, such as paleontology, cybernetics, architecture, and so on). Fifth, biology learning from engineering. (Sometimes then the biologist is helped by making analogies to engineered things, or is influenced by the research approaches and priorities of engineering, or the arrangement of people and knowledge making in engineering, or epistemic goals and values taken to be characteristic of engineering). Sixth, biology learning with engineering. (This is different from the previous, because the biologist may only be relying on engineered technologies, or might leave engineering knowledge black-boxed by seeking to collaborate with engineers rather than try to become more like one). Seventh, and last, biologists ‘making’. This area would include biologists synthesising, culturing, hybridising, breeding, purifying and so on. The additional work that this category does is to take us to the edge of where engineering knowledge may be, giving us an escape hatch should we need it.

If this is the space of biological engineering, how might we start to populate it, particularly if we intend to think historically? As there is no common shared archive for a history of biological engineering - how might we make one? And how can we make that archive of use to multiple publics, not just researchers?

For several different reasons, I’ve turned to the history of popular science writing, in particular the magazine New Scientist. I am offering up New Scientist as precisely the kind of shared archival space that is attractive to researchers and publics alike. Not all researchers, and not all publics, but at least some! One reason to look at New Scientist is that we know scientists pursue many different strategies for the development of their research agendas, not just researching and publishing results. The spaces between professional science articles and more popular writing are of considerable use to scientists, particularly when wanting to try out new ideas, or new personas. My assumption that New Scientist will potentially be of interest for publics relies on first, the magazine’s continued popularity today, and second, how alienating older reporting styles can feel in contrast to today. It is fun to keep being shocked by the old. The nature of the sources also mean that you do not need any particular historical training to nevertheless get something from them. This is a core part of how I am trying to add value to public understanding of biological engineering - not to emphasise my historical knowledge, or that of other historians, but to create an opportunity for people to seek and make their own.

Between the first issue of New Scientist in 1956 and the end of 1991 I have found more than 1300 candidate examples of biology and engineering being implicated in one another, through one or more of the 7 possible ways that I just explained. I haven’t stopped at 1991, this is just as far as I have got.

For starters then, we now have a chronological list of examples where some part of biological engineering made its way into public consciousness. Any given one could be glanced at briefly, or I could set up an ‘on this day’ twitter bot, so people with very casual interests could look at the example and then move on with their day. New Scientist is also available in almost its entirety online for free between 1956 and 1989 through Google books. So each of my 1200 articles has a specific URL, allowing people to look up these things for themselves, and so dip into and follow their own cases of biological engineering. But we can go further. This is where genre analysis comes in.

By using the analytical perspective of genre, I mean to suggest not that sciences are genres, but more simply and productively, that approaching them as genres gives us a way to manage their coming and going, morphing, ebbing and flowing over time. It builds on the familiarity that more people feel they have on a day-to-day basis with changes in film and literature over time, as opposed to changes in science.

In this slide I focus on a nice clean example. Here is one image from a well known paper by the literary theorist Franco Moretti. What he and his collaborators have done is to study the origins, uses and misuses of ‘the clue’ as a literary device in the genre of detective fiction. By this point in the paper they have already shown you a couple of different collections of texts, including popular magazines as well as novels, and they have tracked and traced their use of clues, or the absence of clues, or the incorporation of ‘clue-like’ notions, over time. Here in this figure, which I am about to explain from left to right, what they are showing you is for any given year, how many of these works either failed to include ‘a clue’ at all, or only had mention of them as a possible thing in the world, or where something clue-like was at work, such as a symptom, or when a clue was present but didn’t matter for the narrative, also when a clue was entirely necessary for the narrative but the audience were never shown it, also when the audience were shown it but there was no reasonable way to draw out its significance, and when - at last - we get a fully realised ideal clue - in the hands of Arthur Conan Doyle, that is a clue which DOES matter for the narrative AND the audience can decode it.

Key points about this for me are 1) the method, of breaking down a genre to component devices and tropes that can be tracked over time, letting a sense of the whole emerge from it, and 2) recognition that something we might demand as essential for defining the overall genre of detective fiction - the clue - can actually appear but rarely. This approach to the history of genre, gives us tools we can adopt and adapt for the purposes of making the space of biological engineering in public.

What might our equivalent devices and tropes be, what might our clues be? I went back to look for them within the New Scientist articles I had already gathered.

I found 38 candidate devices or tropes that occur again and again, giving shape to what biological engineering has been and has been discussed through. These range from an emphasis on a particular kind of technique or technical know-how, the idea of a nation’s fortunes rising and falling, the social status of the biologist or engineer, agriculture, medicine, the paying of royalties, and so on. It is the combination and recombination of these devices in different settings - within and beyond these texts - that can be used to explore the history of biological engineering more systematically and symmetrically. This is true for the historian as much as it is for publics.

This graph I admit, is not very revealing, it simply illustrates how many times each of the 38 devicea occurs in articles between 1956 and 1982, 1982 simply being how far along I have got with my analysis. You can see engineering AS ENGINEERING, right there in the middle, in red, clearly very far from being commonly invoked directly, but around which - like the clue in detective fiction - I think we can build an appreciation of the conceptual space. The most commonly invoked device is the idea of molecular building - so much so that I really need to think about breaking it down further into its types of making.

Alright, so in addition to our chronological list, we also have a set of analytical touch stones that we can offer to people. Those approaching this archive can choose to have a look at some guiding terms, which they might want to have in mind when reading a given article, or when holding two or more together in comparison, or indeed, which they could use to analyse contemporary popular science writing. Many of these remain very commonly used devices and tropes in popular science reporting concerning biological engineering.

But we can go further still, and make the archive even more user friendly.

I have given each of these devices an icon. These are intended to make it easier for people looking for key individual elements that are of interest to them, or pairs of elements, over the years. Obviously in order to find them you would then need a map of the articles. So I have also used these icons to make such a map, which allows you to see how each article is coded almost at a glance. They look like this-

In terms of each of these articles, represented by these lines of icons, any given one can be more or less interesting. The one about the paleontologist working with an engineer on the topic of how dinosaurs could fly, who also liked to walk around campus with her pet fruit bat hanging from her neck, that is one of my favourites. But regardless of how interesting any given one is, each gives you various things to follow up. Presenting them in this fashion, rather than making a database for their instant searching, is intended to encourage people to explore the space more deliberately and encounter things they never anticipated. Arranging things in this way encourages browsing and the asking of historical questions rather than absorbing ready-made answers.

This is the end. Hopefully I have not been too naive about what might make a useful publicly accessible historical resource, but I will of course take any lumps coming to me. I appreciate that some of the main people who might be interested in using this thing are researchers and university students. But, given the options that are currently available to anyone interested in thinking about biological engineering historically, I hope the creation of a historical resource like this one, that has not been captured by any particular institution or industrial actor, just might help. At the very least a wider range of people will have the opportunity to reflect on the historical assumptions that might be informing their evaluation of contemporary science. It might also help create space for a wider range of economic and social models to be imagined for its future, by seeing how different things have been in the past. Thank you.