Article ID: CBB362815001

Changing Infrastructural Practices: Routine and Reproducibility in Automated Interdisciplinary Bioscience (2020)

unapi

Proponents of engineering and design approaches to biology aim to make interdisciplinary bioscience research faster and more reproducible. This paper outlines and deploys a practice-based approach to analyses of infrastructure that focuses on the routine epistemic activities and charts how two such routines are unsettled and resettled in the background of epistemic culture. This paper describes attempts to bring about new research infrastructures in synthetic biology using robotics and software-enabled design. A focus on the skills of pipetting shows how established manual labor has to be reconfigured to fit with novel robotic automations. An analysis of curating frozen materials shows that automated design presents new problems for the established activities of storing and retrieving biological materials. These movements, while transient, have implications for organizing interdisciplinary collaboration, research productivity, and enabling greater reproducibility. This paper explores the idea of infrastructure as practice and shows how this has important implications for studies of research infrastructures. This article discusses the main contributions of this approach for analysts of infrastructure in terms of movements, temporalities, and ethics and offers suggestions for what the research implies for synthetic biology.

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Authors & Contributors
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette
Bueno, Otávio
Castle, David
Catalá-Gorgues, J. I.
Cobb, Matthew
Dan-Cohen, Talia
Journals
Science, Technology, and Human Values
Biological Theory
The Bridge: Journal of the National Academy of Engineering
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy
Publishers
Duke University Press
Harvard University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Springer
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Chicago Press
Concepts
Biology
Synthetic biology; bioengineering
Research
Design
Genetics
Science and technology studies (STS)
People
Loeb, Jacques
Morowitz, Harold J.
Tesla, Nikola
Venter, J. Craig
Winkler, Hans Karl Albert
Waddington, Conrad Hal
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
Modern
Places
Great Britain
Alabama (U.S.)
Austria
Southern states (U.S.)
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