Distributed Biotechnology

Essay

* Article: Distributed Biotechnology. Alessandro Delfanti. Forthcoming in Tyfield, D., Lave, R., Randalls, S., Thorpe, C. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science , New York: Routledge, 2017

URL = https://www.academia.edu/23230536/Distributed_Biotechnology

Summary

"In the last two decades, an array of do-it-yourself biology groups, biotech start-ups and community labs have emerged in Europe, America, and Asia. These groups and spaces share the vision of a “distributed biotechnology” and are part of broader transformations of the relation between technological and scientific change and society.

Distributed biotechnology includes amateurs as well as an emergent set of companies that provide laboratory equipment and digital platforms designed to foster citizen contribution to biotechnology research. It differs from traditional forms of citizen science, as it draws on elements from hacker cultures and adopts molecular biology as its main scientific framework. The term “distributed” means that actors envision a biotechnology free from centralized control. They imagine biotechnology as personal, and the aggregation of individual efforts as technically and socially meaningful. Thresholds to access are relatively low, as distributed biotechnology’s spaces are open to amateurs and its techniques sometimes rudimentary. Finally, connections between different actors are created and maintained through the circulation of people, materials, and information.Regardless of the hype that surrounds it , the output of distributed biotech tends to be relatively far from any “revolutionary” scientific breakthrough. What makes it worthy of analysis is the way it imagines and implements practices that construct biotechnology as open, personal, and oppositional towards biomedical research incumbents. Distributed biotech is characterized by a perceived, and in some cases sought-after independency from, if not opposition to, incumbent institutional actors, such as corporate and university labs. Indeed, different actors share the goal of broadening life science research beyond the limits of traditional institutional laboratories. Yet, distributed biotechnology seems to emerge out of a complex relation with incumbent institutional actors, rather than in opposition to them. Also, it intersects deeply with the broader neoliberal economy of science and its innovation and justification regimes. The definition of “distributed” aims at unpacking some of these ambivalences, as it signals a plural approach to biotechnology while avoiding the lexicon of democracy implicit in definitions such as “participatory” or “citizen” science." (https://www.academia.edu/23230536/Distributed_Biotechnology)