#ectogenetics

[lunestael]

I JUST FUCKING COUNTER RICKROLLED THIS MOTHERFUCKER HAHAHA

[lunestael]

ah yes dean lazily lying on the couch with cas on top of him cupping dean's face and leaning over and giving super gentle kisses and deans just gripping cas's arms and taking it all in because he doesn't wanna let his angel go again

my heart ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

[leventaildezhugeliang]

The Silence of the Genome

“The silence of the genome has given way to the cacophony of the epigenetic that emerged out of embryology”[1] 

Sarah Franklin proposes in her article a new way to cope with the changes in embryology. She qualifies what used to be (symbolized by Haraway’s description, i.e. 1965-2000 period) as “old words” (I think Bruno Latour is included), and what happens since then, since 2001 and the publication of human genome (the birth of the “new worlds”).

According to Franklin, Haraway and Latour describe scientific process as « science in action, laboratory life » or « sorting things out » : « Latour’s Science in Action (1987), Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1986), and Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out (2000) are but three of the many influential monographs documenting both the way in which science must be understood as material practice and why its conceptual legacies are never ‘just descriptive’. »

  We are now far from the first Cyborg envisaged by the 1970s’ Science Fiction, made of a foetus combined to chips, hybrid genes and databases. However, our definition of “the embryo” is still to be morally/physically defined.

What is particularly important to us in this article is first the principle of “coding”. Information is coded, be it biotic (genes) or informatic (programs) and included into systems able to modify themselves through cybernetics (/epigenesis). This implies that only information can modify itself, through reactions we can produce. But from this ‘old words’ we derive to new worlds where the old conception of cyborg and information isn’t relevant anymore. This model was useful to understand part of the information we had, but the same way Einstein’s relativity is now to some extent obsolete, we now shift to a new paradigm.

What used to be an exception is becoming the rule, the trans- which was usually an error/mutant is becoming the norm: where biology is designating what is “born and made”, transbiology becomes what is “made and born”.

            This transbiology now refers to tissue engineering, stem cell science and regenerative medicine. The real challenge is to make the created organs as good as the natural/real ones. Quality control is the new big issue. All the operations of creation and modification of the “core” living (embryos) is done within the laboratory, the clean room where “tools embody and enforce new social relations”, which is here defined by the necessity to strike a balance between quality control and managing to get a workable environment. This clean room is irradiated to ensure that the modifications we produce on the core will be the one caused by our actions, and not because of collateral footprints. But we can hardly manage to reach a perfect situation where we would be able to only modify the information we want to.

            This transbiology inaugurates a new era when the cyborgs are products of a post-molecular genetics world, in which biology also means digital, synthetical, algorithmical, virtual, mimetical combinations. Any part of the living is a future subject to re-engineering and alteration/improvement, but not as an addition, from the core. Our “post-Dolly age of biological control” make stem cells live in a different time condition, and “biological” now refers to a world that is in different space/time/”relationship to/with the living” condition. The IVF children are everyday’s cyborgs, and the “cyborg embryo, itself the offspring of a union between reproductive failure and reproductive hope, has become, like ‘natural conception’ before it, some- thing that is seen to be in need of careful management in order for it to be properly domesticated” (Franklin, 1995, 1997a; Throsby, 2004).

We still don’t know if this genetic engineering will enable us to master the ultimate coding mechanism, with a syntax we can understand and derivate. Being able to disassemble and reassemble, what could stop us from making ourselves cyborgs through a new means of reproduction, which is as good (as long as quality of the result is better) as the “traditional” one ?

[1] The Cyborg Embryo : our path to transbiology – Theory culture and society2006, vol. 23, no7-8, [Note(s): 167-187, 333-334 [23 p.]]