ABSTRACT
The mapping and sequencing of the genome of human beings and other forms of life in the first decade of the new millennium is leading to a reassessment of genomics as systems biology, with a new emphasis on function rather than structure. The result of this development has been the formation of new kinds of knowledge about living things (sometimes described as the ‘omic’ revolution) with the establishment of new disciplinary boundaries (as, for example, in proteomics), and, significantly, with the development of new intellectual and social spaces within which these events occur. The post-genomic era requires more than just a technical understanding of gene structure and function. New technological options cannot survive without being entrenched in networks of producers, users and various services. A new research system is coming into being centred on the production, use and commodification of genetic knowledge, based on new sets of knowledge, technologies and commodities, and embodying a new set of socio-technical relations involving new groups of actors (Glasner 2002). Innovation, as Brown and Webster (2004: 162) describe it, is a ‘melange of knowledge, technology, organisation and wider sociopolitical activity’ operating in the complex networks of this new research system. The governance of genomics is being reshaped by a new culture which reflects the changing relationships between government, industry and techno-scientific development (Gottweis 2005). This volume attempts to explore the contours of the new social formations that are co-constructed in, and embodied by, this post-genomic enterprise. The new biotechnologies are fundamentally constitutive of the biological
in that they are both a tool and a part of the process of biological development, resulting in unique configurations of (to follow Latour 1993) hybrid formations. The accepted view of nature-society relations, that society is inherently plastic and pliable while nature is remote and autonomous, is turned on its head. The new biotechnologies have made nature pliable and society remote and difficult to change (Brown and Michael 2004: 15). They are neither simply opposed to nature, nor even external to it. They are clearly still tools that are objects to regulate, produce or regenerate nature. But they are also constitutive of defining nature itself,
framing it through active participation (Thacker 2005). In this sense they are part of the process that Jasanoff (2004: 2) describes as the co-production of nature and society. The ways in which the world is apprehended and represented by individuals is inseparable from the ways in which they inhabit it. Socio-technical knowledge thus both ‘embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions’. Such an approach, while not a fully fledged theory, provides a useful way of organising and interpreting complex phenomena in an area such as biotechnology which is rapidly changing, and has deep moral and ethical, as well as practical implications, for society as a whole. In their discussion of the ‘risky creatures’ created through, and govern-
ing the development of, xenotransplantation technologies, Brown and Michael (2004: 208) highlight the need for new regulatory bodies to reflect, at least in part, some of the crucial features of the new objects of regulation. They suggest that related genetic technologies such as pharmacogenomics, tissue engineering and stem cells also challenge the boundaries of existing institutional corporealities and identities. Tissues and genes are potentially fragmented from conventionally understood species boundaries by new innovations in genomic technologies (Waldby 2002). The products of the innovation process then combine human actors, natural phenomena and socio-technical production in a variety of relatively unstable (in the sense of being continually co-constructed) hybrid social formations (Brown and Webster 2004). Such co-constructions need to be stabilised (albeit only for a short time) if they are to effectively mobilise actors to create novel institutions in the process of innovation. Some of this occurs through the defining ‘intermediaries’ that pass between actors, such as texts (for example scientific papers), things (for example computer software), or skills (for example clinical knowledge). These appear in a variety of contexts, including public engagement, techno-scientific economies, socio-technical platforms and social representations. The shift from reliable to socially robust knowledge, recognised by
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001), provides examples of both new social formations and the intermediaries that contribute to their stabilisation. Recognising that scientific knowledge is always incomplete knowledge, they argue that it is also always therefore contested knowledge. Technosciences, such as the new biotechnologies, illustrate the extent to which the conceptual boundaries within which scientific disputes have conventionally been resolved are now obsolete. While objectivity, proof and verification continue to be valued, these are inextricably entwined with shifting local practices which value them differentially, and are more or less robust and reliable depending on context. Progress is no longer viewed as a linear phenomenon, but messily contingent, co-constructed and contextualised. They describe the new social formations within which science now operates as part of the agora, which facilitates the greater involvement of non-experts in decision-making as an integral part of producing socially robust science.
