Bios Technika: A Web-Based Platform for Multimedia Inquiry in Anthropology, Synthetic Biology, and Ethics

Bios Technika项目的目标是制作、试验和评估一个基于网络的平台，以促进对新兴技术的伦理和社会层面的调查。Bios Technika的设计将与当代生物技术(最初是合成生物学)的发展同步进行。它寻求使后基因组科学和技术的道德图景能够进行协作研究。我们的目标是开发Bios Technika来支持和推进目前正在进行的合成生物学分支的研究。如果今天有一个广泛的共识，即科学家有必要重新思考他们对基因的理解，那么，我们以类似的方式认为，同样有必要重新思考ELSI的基石概念：社会后果。社会后果涉及伦理学和人文科学的下游定位，强加了一种武断的等级制度，在这种等级制度下，研究以某种方式在更大社区的条件和限制之外进行。当代的后基因组研究计划不能再像过去那样被建立起来：如果我们要以民主和伦理的方式创造科学知识，就必须将跨学科的生物科学和人类实践带入更有成效的邻接。在这种情况下，Bios Technika建立并希望扩展：科学社会研究的理论和经验进步，使用开放源码媒体的数据可视化的进步，以及伦理学的概念和实践发展。该项目寻求通过严格的概念框架和视觉媒体技术，赋予多地点以问题为中心的社会科学的洞察力。具体地说，它将提供一个独特的媒体平台，对一种被贴上“当代人类学”标签的方法进行务实测试。

The goal of the Bios Technika project is to produce, experiment with, and evaluate a web-based platform for the facilitation of inquiry into the ethical and social dimensions of emergent technologies. Bios Technika will be designed to operate in tandem with developments in contemporary biotechnology, initially synthetic biology. It seeks to enable collaborative research into the moral landscape of post-genomic science and technology.Our goal is to develop Bios Technika to support and advance research currently underway on the ramifications of synthetic biology. If today there is a broad consensus that there is a compelling need for scientists to rethink their understanding of the gene, then, in a parallel fashion, we argue that there is an equally compelling need to rethink the cornerstone concept of ELSI: social consequences. Social consequences entails a downstream positioning of ethics and the human sciences, imposing an arbitrary hierarchy in which research somehow takes place outside of the conditions and constraints of the larger community. Contemporary post-genomic research programs can no longer be constituted as they were in the recent past: interdisciplinary biological science and human practices must be brought into a more productive adjacency if we are to create scientific knowledge in a democratic and ethical fashion.In this light, Bios Technika builds on and hopes to extend: theoretical and empirical advances in the social studies of science, advances in data visualization using open-source media, and conceptual and practical developments in ethics. The project seeks to give form to the insights of multi-sited problem-centered social science, through rigorous conceptual frameworks and visual media technologies. Specifically, it will provide a distinctive media platform for undertaking a pragmatic testing of an approach that has been labeled the "anthropology of the contemporary."