In Defense of “Synthetic”
This is the script and slides from a talk I gave in Malmö Sweden at “The Conference” in August 2022.
When I say I’m a synthetic biologist, I usually get one of these three responses:
The first and probably my favorite is 😳what are you even talking about? This one is great, someone who’s never heard of synthetic biology! A blank slate!
For the techy types, I can explain that it’s like programming DNA to develop new kinds of products,
or for the more arty types maybe I can explain that it’s about designing biological materials,
or for the more normy types with real jobs I can just say “I work in biotech.” I work for a company called Ginkgo Bioworks that does genetic engineering as a service for other businesses.
The second type of response is the jokes, and I also love these. “Oh synthetic biology, it’s like real biology but made up!” Yes, kind of! Exactly! We ARE trying to make things with biology.
Or maybe something more like “huh, a synthetic biologist—like you’re a robot doing experiments?” Um also sort of? In my lab days I sometimes felt like a robot
and these days at Ginkgo we use tons of robots to make biology easier to engineer.
There’s a third one that looks at synthetic biology as a brand, which is something I think about a lot in my role, where I work on design, communication, ethics, policy, perception–in one word, our brand.
Brand comments actually takes two forms: On one side you have the people who think that synthetic biology is only a “good brand”—is synthetic biology anything at all other than a rebranding of genetic engineering that’s better at raising capital from VCs, or perhaps tricking people into not thinking about GMOs? On the other side you have the people who think synthetic biology is a terrible brand “don’t you know people hate things that are ‘synthetic’? You really should rebrand.”
So I’ll start with the latter—the people who think I should rebrand since synthetic is bad—because I get it, synthetic has come to mean anything made with old biology, from the fossil fuels that humans have managed to extract from the ground and refine into the myriad things that we enjoy in our everyday life. Synthetic means unnatural, it means pollution, chemicals–it comes from this world, not the world of living things. No one wants synthetic, everyone and everything wants to be natural (no matter how they are actually made).
So I’d like to offer a defense of synthetic, not because I love smoke stacks and fossil fuels and not because it’s a “good brand” for GMOs, but for ideological reasons—because at its heart synthetic is about bringing things together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
Synthetic does not need to mean the opposite of natural, and in fact the reason why we think it does is exactly why I think we need to embrace synthesis again. The concept of nature is built on a fundamental division.
It is about cleaving ourselves as humans from everything else. We define nature as that which is not us, nature is everything outside of the human world. Nature is the opposite of culture, it’s the opposite of technology.
In this formulation, nature is separate from and it is below us, something that we must dominate and control so that we may survive and flourish. Synthetic materials made by humans therefore offered us better living through chemistry because technology was meant to save us from the vicissitudes of the growing cycles and the whims of weather and pestilence.
Today, many of us in industrialized parts of the world have become free from the tyranny of nature, but we suffer from new tyrannies of pollution and climate change. We therefore seek out ways to go back to natural, but even now “natural” still depends on the same fundamental principle of separation and control, which then permeates the marketing and culture of natural products. “Natural” now is about the quest we must go on to choose the right products to purify ourselves from the sins of synthetic chemistry. Natural in this case isn’t really about connecting with that which is outside of us, but again becomes about a kind of exclusion, this time what our products are ”free from.” These new purity rituals define so much of our relationship to our everyday life and culture, from the foods we eat to the cosmetics and even medicines we choose.
Much more sinister and damaging is how nature and science have been used as tools of social control, to justify the divisions and dominations of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. From ideas about women’s “natural” roles in society, to the “natural” or biological obviousness of the gender binary and heterosexual monogamy, to “natural” differences between populations from different parts of the world, this kind of appeal to “scientific facts” about the “natural” order of things has always been used as a tool of oppression.
The division between nature and technology also means that we have inherited a very atrophied imagination of what technology can be, and a technology that continues to replicate these social structures of domination. “Technology” becomes a very specific type of work, associated with a very particular type of person. It affects what we value, what we invest in, what we pay attention to. Ursula Le Guin lamented this in a rant on technology and about how her own work was devalued as less “scientific” than other kinds of sci-fi because it deals with technology in a much more expansive sense, as, in her words, “the active human interface with the material world.”
Instead of this expansive technology, we have a much more limited view of technology and technological visions that seek to entirely escape the physical reality of this world while still enforcing scarcity in order to perpetuate systems of control.
I think it’s time for a very different vision. Not to rebrand synthetic biology, but to reconfigure the relationship between nature and technology and the synthesis of the two. We don’t want the divisive technology of the metaverse, but the synthetic technology of the meatverse.
We need to celebrate the meatverse because our technology is also pathetically small when compared to what biology can do. What is a computer compared to four billion years of evolution? Of organisms that can grow anywhere, of seeds that can grow into plants, a pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Humans can’t figure out how to make things without asphyxiating our planet and filling it with garbage. Biology makes all of us, all our bodies, all of this in a fundamentally regenerative way. We have to learn to work with biology, and bring these worlds together synthetically.
This is an urgent task. We have reached the end of what is possible to sustain with technology cleaved off from nature. Our attempts to dominate nature in order to free ourselves from the scarcity of our environments have led to a world where we have more than we need but we face a threat of extinction because of our technology’s exhaust. Murray Bookchin, a theorist and pioneer of the environmental movement wrote in his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism that “Man had to acquire the conditions of survival in order to live, now we have to acquire the conditions of life in order to survive.”
I believe that for us to survive and flourish, the future must be synthetic: a union of nature and technology, and of science and technology with politics, art, and culture. These synthetic movements must remove not only our desire to dominate nature but also to dominate each other.
So I’ll leave you with a sketch of what this synthesis could look like. A world where we can revel in our biological experience and our creative energy can grow and shape the physical world. Where we can design new materials and new experiences together with nature. Where students and scientists can exchange new biological programs the way they share make-up tips on tiktok.
Where your local pharmacy brews new strains of microbes producing the ingredients and medicines you need, grown to order in custom strains. Your local flower shop sells seeds with custom genomes, accounting for our allergies and preferences.
Where your living room is appointed with the coziest mushroom material, and our fashion is shaped by the dynamics of cell cultures and the custom colors and patterns we co-design with them.
Where, biological programmers log into the wood wide web using the latest web-tree protocols. Our conversations are written in DNA. Where industrial pollution once left behind damaged soil, we grow new forests.
I believe that the future is synthetic—because the future depends on what we can imagine and make together.
I hope you’ll join me.
