[p2p-research] steve tallbott on synthetic life

[Michel Bauwens]

How to Manufacture the Notion of Synthetic Life
-----------------------------------------------

I recently participated in a conference on synthetic biology (the
discipline where one attempts to synthesize, in part or in whole, new
organisms) at the Hastings Center in the lower Hudson Valley of New York.
A rather minor exchange at the very end of the conference has been working
on me ever since.

  The question of the value of artificial flowers (of the conventional
sort) had come up, and after a good deal of conversation, I remarked, "By
the way, I'd like to clarify a simple point.  There has never been an
artificial plant that was even vaguely similar to a real one".  This
produced a roomful of blank looks, puzzled expressions, and raised
eyebrows -- symptoms, I would submit, of the difficulty we have in
understanding life today.

  I went on to explain: a plant is living.  It expresses itself into the
world as *movement*.  It grows from seed to leaf to flower to fruit to
seed.  (I ought, at this point, to have mimicked the opening of a flower
with my arms.)  The plant *gestures* its existence; this gesturing, not
some frozen form or substance, is what it *is*.  No artificial plant
duplicates this reality in any meaningful way.

  As I said, the point has been working on me.  It brought to mind a talk
I heard ten or fifteen years ago by one of our then-local doctors, Philip
Incao.  He asked those of us in the audience to close our eyes and take a
minute to imagine the human circulatory system.  And, yes, we all imagined
*things* -- the heart, arteries, veins, red blood cells, and so on.  The
fact that the circulatory system is a system of movement -- that it is
most essentially a *doing* -- was hardly uppermost in our minds.  Dr.
Incao went on to cite a remark by Novalis: the body is a formed stream.

  My colleague, Craig Holdrege, once illustrated this by explaining how
the spiraling fibers of the heart muscle that help to direct the blood in
its flow are themselves a congealed image of the swirling vortex of blood
within.  This kind of mutuality holds even for the heart's basic
structural divisions:

    Before the heart has developed walls (septa) separating the four
    chambers from each other, the blood already flows in two distinct
    "currents" through the heart.  The [currents] flowing through the
    right and left sides of the heart do not mix, but stream and loop by
    each other, just as two currents in a body of water.  In the "still
    water zone" between the two currents, the septum dividing the two
    chambers forms.  Thus the movement of the blood gives the parameters
    for the inner differentiation of the heart, just as the looping heart
    redirects the flow of blood.  (*The Dynamic Heart and Circulation*,
    edited by Craig Holdrege.  Fair Oaks CA: AWSNA, 2002, p. 12)

  Our inherited mode of thought today tells us that things produce
movement.  The more fundamental reality is just the opposite: particular
things crystallize out of the right sort of movement.  The tendency to
materialize and, indeed, mechanize life in our imaginations, when
unchecked, pretty much determines our philosophical conclusions about life
before we ever get a conversation going on the subject.  This is how we
manufacture the notion of synthetic life.

  It happens that in my own talk at the Hastings Center I had quoted the
twentieth-century cell biologist, Paul Weiss, to the effect that "Life is
a dynamic *process*.  Logically, the elements of a process can be only
elementary *processes*, and not elementary *particles* or any other static
units".  In a 1963 paper, Weiss wrote:

    Stable structures that are demonstrable in the living cell, other
    than chromosomes, have mostly turned out to be secondary derivatives,
    rather than primary carriers, of cellular organization . . . [There
    is] such incessant reshuffling of the cell content that even the
    thought that at last the supramolecular units (particulates) might be
    linked into a stable framework can be safely dismissed . . . cell
    contour, intracellular fiber systems, and granules of various
    descriptions change their configurations and positions continuously,
    thus ruling out the presence, or at any rate, the relevance, of a
    consistent three-dimensional cytoskeleton . . . Yet despite the
    absence of an orderly static frame, the various activities of all
    parts remain coordinated in the maintenance of a standard pattern of
    order in any given cell.  It is an order of relations rather than of
    fixed positions.  ("The Cell as Unit", *Journal of Theoretical
    Biology* vol. 5, 1963, pp. 389-97)

  There are countless molecular processes going on in the cell and
organism as a whole, continuing through time, and Weiss points out that
these are interlocking processes, like "civic activities in a community".
Every stage of every process must be in a certain proper correspondence
with every stage of every other process.  The plant's movement, in other
words, is compounded of countless submovements, and these are harmonized
in the distinctive gesturing of the plant as a whole.

  I find it interesting to compare this line of thought with the notions
of someone like AI guru, Ray Kurzweil.  After all, artificial intelligence
researchers and synthetic biology researchers share much of the same
general naivete about life.  In *The Age of Spiritual Machines* Kurzweil
talks about "reverse engineering" the brain by analyzing it, thin slice by
thin slice, and then "implementing" its neurons and their supposed inputs
and outputs in a computer.

  Suppose we could do far better than that.  Suppose we didn't have to be
content with merely abstracting a few features from brains -- features
that a computer engineer such as Kurzweil (or anyone else) happens to
think, with rather blatant arbitrariness, are the few that really count.
(Actually, there is not a single feature of the embodied brain that is
faithfully captured in any computer model.  But that is a point for
another time.) Assume instead that we could assemble precise replicas of
those brain slices, atom by atom, successively adding each slice to the
previous ones.  Would we then have produced a living brain by artificial
means?

  The question is rather like asking whether an artificial flower is a
living flower.  It is to have forgotten almost everything about the
reality of the brain.  What has happened to the *movement*?  For example,
as we were assembling those slices, how were the individual cells being
nourished?  How were the intercellular fluids and blood circulating among
them?  How were any living processes actually occurring in the cells --
the essential chemical signaling that takes place within and between
cells, enabling them to retain a living connection to each other; the
intricately coordinated replication of DNA; the entire elaborate process
of regulation of gene expression; cell division, bringing into movement as
it does *everything* in the cell . . . ?

  It's one thing to assemble many pieces of a complex puzzle, and quite
another to establish a harmonious coordination among a complex set of
interweaving processes -- a coordination that would require the setting in
motion, at a particular instant, of every one of the countless elements of
the cell in exactly the right relation to all the other dynamic processes.
And the coordination would have to be so calculated that the thousands of
ongoing, continually interpenetrating processes would be held together as
a single, coherent whole -- held together through all the unforeseeable
disturbances and environmental encounters differentially affecting all
those interrelated processes as the synthetic organism traverses its path
through life.  I see little evidence that the "synbio" proponents have
much appreciation of the real nature of their task.

  The tendency, I think, is to assume that you need only put the right
set of puzzle pieces together, and somehow the processes will
automatically start up and proceed as they ought.  They will "emerge", as
the jargon goes, indicating a kind of mystical potential in the puzzle
pieces.  This is why a number of commentators have recognized in the
supposedly all-explaining DNA of modern biology something like an
animistic totem or materialized entelechy.

  Remove this kind of materialized magic, and what would you actually
have after assembling the last molecules of your artificial brain?  The
answer is easy: an object perfectly fitted for display in Madame Tussaud's
wax museum.

  You may think that such a thought experiment is ridiculously
simplistic.  I agree.  But thought experiments just like this one have
been common for decades in fields such as cognitive science.  You can be
sure that proponents of today's "synthetic biology" will have a penchant
for similar mental excursions.

  At the Hastings conference there were in fact various references to the
possibility of assembling a living, single-celled organism from scratch,
molecule by molecule -- an organism that was "precisely identical" to some
already living organism.  You'll note what's going on here.  The
"precisely identical" idea comes from the image of an organism already
murdered in the imagination, just like the artificial plant that is
"indistinguishable" from a real one.  The life was removed from the image
in advance, and so, of course, the artificial product becomes very
persuasive as a replica of the real one.

  It was evident that a number of the participants (the group was quite
diverse) simply took for granted the realistic prospects for such an
artificial construction.  On my part, I do not even know what could be
meant by constructing an artificial cell "precisely identical" to a real
one.  The real cell, after all, is never at two different moments
identical to *itself*, let alone to another cell.  It's as much a gesture
as a thing.

  It's not only that life is movement.  Equally important is the fact
that each kind of life displays a qualitatively distinct sort of movement.
When we bother to observe a real organism, we find that its gesturing is
recognizably different from that of other species.  An oak tree does not
at all have the same way of being as a weeping willow, nor is an amoeba's
movement (whether at the level of the whole organism or of molecular
process) choreographed in the style of a paramecium's.

  If and when I hear synthetic biologists discussing among themselves how
they will reproduce such a unique gesturing -- a gesturing they must
carefully and deliberately and knowledgeably compound out of the
innumerable molecular activities proceeding simultaneously and
interdependently in the cell -- all in order to produce from scratch a
particular sort of organism with a particular sort of recognizable
character, then I will believe they have begun to glimpse a problem that
might just conceivably define a synthetic discipline of life.  Otherwise,
we're left with little more than the crude and mostly ignorant,
trial-and-error manipulation of already living things.

  The work in synthetic biology as we have it today does in fact rely
thoroughly upon already living things.  A synthetic construct is inserted
into a living organism, and the organism then takes it up (if the
experiment is successful) and incorporates it into its own being in its
own manner.  If you want to know how this actually plays out in reality --
how the organism "does its own thing" with such foreign materials, often
in radically unexpected ways -- then check out the website, nontarget.org.
No one who fairly reviews that website can come away thinking we have a
*science* of synthetic biology, as opposed to a technologically
sophisticated discipline of tinkering.

  In sum, the imagination at work in synthetic biology is grounded (often
without acknowledgment of the fact) in the world of living organisms --
organisms that are continually taken for granted, rarely observed as the
living, gesturing creatures they are, and then casually employed as a
means to assimilate and enliven artificial constructs.  The result is
viewed as a triumph of clever artifice, which it doubtless is.  But this
is no reason to lose sight of the creative contribution of the organism
itself.  Through its living *activity* it proves wonderfully capable of
meeting the contents of its environment -- internal or external, natural
or artificially constructed -- and drawing them up into its own life.

SLT

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