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

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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."