Synthetic biology and its alternatives. Descartes, Kant and the idea of engineering biological machines Werner Kogge a , Michael Richter b a Freie Universität Berlin, Institute of Philosophy, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, 14195 Berlin, Germany b Laboratory for Biomaterials, Empa – Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Lerchenfeldstrasse 5, 9014 St Gallen, Switzerland article info Article history: Available online 25 April 2013 Keywords: Synthetic biology Engineering Design Kant Descartes Concrete machines abstract The engineering-based approach of synthetic biology is characterized by an assumption that ‘engineering by design’ enables the construction of ‘living machines’. These ‘machines’, as biological machines, are expected to display certain properties of life, such as adapting to changing environments and acting in a situated way. This paper proposes that a tension exists between the expectations placed on biological artefacts and the notion of producing such systems by means of engineering; this tension makes it seem implausible that biological systems, especially those with properties characteristic of living beings, can in fact be produced using the specific methods of engineering. We do not claim that engineering techniques have nothing to contribute to the biotechnological construction of biological artefacts. However, drawing on Descartes’s and Kant’s thinking on the relationship between the organism and the machine, we show that it is considerably more plausible to assume that distinctively biological artefacts emerge within a paradigm different from the paradigm of the Cartesian machine that underlies the engineering approach. We close by calling for increased attention to be paid to approaches within molecular biology and chem- istry that rest on conceptions different from those of synthetic biology’s engineering paradigm. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1. Introduction Just ten years ago, the sequencing of the human genome was celebrated as decoding ‘the language in which God created life’. The ‘revelation of [...] the human book of life’, as it was also called, was associated with an expectation that, thanks to control of the genome, it would now easily be possible to make targeted inter- ventions in the organism, defeat diseases and generate new capa- bilities. 1 However, attention soon turned to the question of precisely what biotechnological innovations could now be antici- pated, and at this stage very different voices came to the fore: voices stressing that decoding the genome was ‘only a first step’; that the impact of the interaction between different genes and gene products in the metabolism must first be understood; and that many more years of hard work would be needed to isolate and control functional systems within the enormous complexity of a living cell. 2 It was also at this juncture that the simple translational logic of the genetic code suddenly ceased to seem quite so simple. Although the rule of the RNA-mediated translation of DNA base triplets into polypeptide chains retained its validity, it quickly became clear that the answers to many other questions cannot be read off the genome alone—such as the dynamics of when and how often the cell ‘reads’ which DNA sequences, how it processes the RNA transcripts, which transcripts are then translated into proteins, or which proteins are finally de- ployed and how. This complexity of genetic regulations had long since sedimented into standard textbook knowledge (Alberts et al., 1369-8486/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.03.013 E-mail addresses: werner.kogge@fu-berlin.de (W. Kogge), michael.richter@empa.ch (M. Richter) 1 Quotations from the speeches by Bill Clinton and Francis Collins on the presentation of the results of the Human Genome Project. 26 June 2000. <http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/ New/html/genome-20000626.html> Accessed 17.08.11. 2 We may think here of dynamic systems such as metabolic networks, signal transduction cascades or regulatory networks. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (2013) 181–189 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc