Not a Hollywood ending...

Went to see The Mist over the weekend, which does NOT have a Hollywood ending. Or if that's a Hollywood ending, they're certainly changing, because I'd resigned myself at this point to lame, everything-turns-out-alright-in-the-end fare from the big studios. Everything absolutely does not turn out well in the end, which was quite realistic, and really left you wondering what things would be like if the movie continued.

I've actually had the pleasure of watching another big ticket movie over the last couple of weeks that turned out to be far more thought provoking and narratively complex than the trailers would've had me believe. But then again, Beowulf's script was co-written by Neil Gaiman, so I should've known it would be more than the big-muscle smash-em-up action film the trailers tried to make it out to be. I haven't yet decided whether I like this new Beowulf better than Beowulf and Grendel. I think it depends on what kind of mood I'm in - whether I want an extrapolated story, or one closer to the original. Both are quality films, but for different reasons.

My experience with both The Mist and Beowulf has me cautiously optimistic that Hollywood might not have ruined the ending of I am Legend. Having seen trailers for it almost a year ago, and remembering a colleague at a conference raving about how good the book was, I read it several months ago. And I immediately despaired about the movie, because the book is anything but a Hollywood ending.

So now I am very curious to see if the producers of I am Legend have made it palpable for an audience who wants everything to turn out alright in the end, or if they have remained faithful to the book's darker and more philosophical ending. I won't give anything away, except to say, if you've seen the trailer, have you ever wondered why it's called I am Legend?

Dissertating

Strange sounding word "dissertating"... it simultaneously sounds ominous and a little creepy, but its verbal proximity to "dessertating" (which isn't a word, but if it was, would be a delicious word), makes it a strange kind of word.

So you might notice over on the left column that I've removed the banner declaring me a 2006 NaNoWriMo winner. I figured since the 2007 NaNoWriMo season has started, it would soon become a dated banner... but my blog certainly misses the color it added.

Instead, there's a little dissertation meter. It's recording the number of words I've typed in the dissertation compared to the number of words I should have by the end. It's not very accurate though. For one, the number of words I have written is fairly large but the number of GOOD words I've written is much smaller. Right now I'm spilling stuff out on the page and it needs to be organized and made more concise, so it's not really an accurate idea of where I am, just how much I've spilled.

I also suspect that my dissertation will be longer than the 70,000 words I've allocated. That number is based on the ideal number of words, at least according to Patrick Lunleavy in Authoring a PhD. The book indicates that each chapter should be an average of 10,000 words, and I've got 7 chapters mapped out, hence the 70,000. But I think some of my chapters will exceed the ideal number of words just because of the things I need to accomplish in them. Without footnotes it might be 10,000, but with them, they'll be considerably longer.

But the book is very useful. I considered buying Write your Dissertation in 15 minutes a day, but I suspect that you can't really write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day, and the title is just a clever way of getting desperate people to buy the book. Maybe I'm wrong, but I was just a bit suspicious. And besides, the Dunleavy book came well recommended.

I bought the Dunleavy book because I felt so overwhelmed at the start of the dissertation that I didn't know where to actually start! Giving me some good advice for how to get started, the book has been valuable. But when I started reading one of the later chapters, I realized that I don't really need this book, at least not to write the dissertation.

The dissertation is indeed a monstrously huge beast, but when you come right down to it, it's just like any other piece of writing. You need to do all the same things that you do for any shorter piece - even blog posts - that is, you need to introduce your subject, you need to organize the content into a logical sequence, and you need to finish it off in some way.

Sure, in a dissertation, you have to do this very well. And you have to do it over many, many pages. But really, the process is just the same. And no book will help you get out of the necessity of just doing it. So the beginning of the book was useful, but I might not turn to it again until I'm finishing up to see if there's any final words of wisdom I might glean from it. All I really need right now is to get the dissertation written!

One book I have also been reading, and am continuing to read is William Germano's From Dissertation to Book. It might seem in reading this book that I'm putting the cart before the horse, but it's actually quite valuable while writing the dissertation.

First off, I do intend to turn the dissertation into a book (provided of course that I end up in a job where I'm not teaching a 4-4 or even 5-4 load and haven't the time to turn around, let alone revise!). So knowing what I would have to do to accomplish that right now, might help me craft a dissertation that can more easily be turned into a book than if I didn't know what's necessary. Or at least that's the theory. So far, from what I've learnt in reading the book, I think it will turn out to have been a good idea. I also suspect that a dissertation that is written with the principles of a book in mind will be more readable and will avoid many of the pitfalls that dissertations fall into - but that's just a suspicion, I could be wrong.

It might also be appropriate since I'm on the subject to mention a book I read several years ago, near the beginning of my doctoral degree: Gregory Semenza's Graduate Student for the 21st Century. Although I read it a long time ago, I should've read it even earlier. It would be an excellent book to read before you enter graduate study. Or at least start reading before you begin a doctoral degree.

The book is valuable for what it tells you about what you're about to get into (or have gotten into). It discusses the nature of graduate study in the humanities, then moves through all the activities of a grad student - seminar papers, conferences, dissertation - and ends with a chapter on the job market. I found it very comforting to read as I went through each of these things (well, except for the job market of course), and it didn't sugar coat anything. If you're thinking at any point of entering graduate study, it would be a very good read.

Of course I question whether I needed to read these books or not. I certainly have a better idea of what I'm involved in and what's going on around me, but I suspect I might've survived quite well without them. But sometimes survival isn't enough, and I've found my reading about graduate study in some cases just as valuable as my reading for graduate study.

Facebook vs. f2f

... so I've got a Facebook account. Most of my friends on Facebook are family members, some from far away. There are also some friend's pages that I've connected to, though people of my generation tend to use this social networking software much differently (and much less frequently) than its original targeted demographic. I've found a couple of friends from high school as well, which is a real trip down memory lane, that's for sure!

But now I've got a message in my in-box saying that one of my students has added me to his friends list. We're only in the third week of our semester, so I don't know this student well, but we've talked about assignments and such, and he seems a harmless and fairly nice person.

Now I have to decide how open I want this application to become. I never made my settings private, because I felt like doing so would defeat part of the purpose of having a page. But I also don't know that I'm comfortable with this latest request. I would have little problem adding this particular student, if it was just him. But it's the web that it will connect me to that I'm more concerned about.

At the same time, I'm also not sure I want my students to know much about my personal life. I've never felt comfortable as a teacher sharing personal details - professional ones, yes - personal, not so much. I know some teachers of adults who are comfortable doing that - I've just never found myself comfortable with sharing personal information. I'd rather keep our relationship friendly, but bound by the classroom, or at least the institution we both are affiliated with.

So now I have to decide. It doesn't really help that the institution I'm at fosters a kind of informality between instructors and students. I'm barely getting comfortable with students calling me by my first name. To share an online presence as well just feels like it crosses a boundary I'm not comfortable breaching.

For the bibliophiles in the audience

I first ran across Library Thing a few years ago during a book club discussion. I checked it out, entered my 200 free books and then left it. But this summer I went back to it and got the lifetime membership.

Then I set about the task of entering all my books into the site. The search function is really flexible and I had few troubles finding the bibliographic information for the books I have on my shelf. For Canadian versions of books, I set the search to access Canadian databases. For American versions, I could search American versions. For obscure academic books, I could set the Library of Congress or a university library as my database. Overall, there were a few tricky books to find, but they were usually small press publications, and of course any independent or desktop publications weren't listed (though I don't have many of those). You can also upload and download to an Excel file if you already have a list of books.

The other interesting thing is that it tells you how many other members have the same book you do. It's been interesting seeing which books are the most popular and which ones only a handful of other people own.

Why did I do this?

Well, first off, because I like organizing things. I'm one of those people whose CDs are alphabetized, though my spice rack isn't - I have a life after all.

But my biggest motivation came from changing our insurance coverage in preparation for owning a home. As part of that preparation, I created an inventory of the household items, and came swiftly to two conclusions: a) the value of all my stuff greatly exceeded my current coverage (which we fixed), and b) no one is ever going to believe that I have that many books. I began to envision some insurance agent telling me after a fire "Ma'am, I don't believe that you had $20,000 worth of books in that house". Yes, that's the approximate value. No, I don't think it's exaggerated. I'd like to think it's less, but looking at it honestly, that's probably the value of it.

So if at any point you're looking for a way to catalogue your books, Library Thing's a great place to start. You can post 200 books for free. If you want to post more, you can buy a yearly, or a lifetime membership, both of which are very reasonably priced. So now, if God forbid, my library should ever be damaged, I can prove that yes indeed, it really was that big, and here's the list of what was in it...

Mom and Dad approve

I received a student submission of an assignment with the note: "I read it to my mom and dad and they thought it was great."



My parents think I'm the greatest too... can I just read my dissertation to them instead of defending it?

Using other people's words

A few days ago, I wrote about authority in writing. Since it was a long blog post that you might not have suffered through, I'll reproduce a couple of paragraphs:

There's something that happens as you progress through academia that changes your sense of yourself as a writer. I know I took to heart the lesson my English teachers tried to impress upon me that what was important in academic writing was not my opinion, but a careful analysis of other people's opinions. I can distinctly remember several undergraduate papers where the professor told me to put a lid on my own opinions and just focus on the facts - or "textual evidence" as we call it in literature.

I now understand what they were trying to say - that my opinions had to be supported by the text - but at the time the concept was a bit fuzzy, which meant that I studiously avoided expressing any opinion. I invested a lot in the authority of the texts I was examining. I needed to find the right quote to support the argument that I was making, and I know that a few times, the argument emerged out of what quotes I could find, rather than working the other way round.

Today, I came across a series of essays written in a course where they were discussing open education. Since I've been talking about open source with my writing students this week, I took a closer look.

The students were asked to write essays in which they contributed as little as possible to the assignment. A particularly impressive example produced this essay. In it, the writer uses nothing but other people's words to make an argument. Impressive!

It reminds me of a comment I read one time made by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin's biographer, that Benjamin loved using other people's writing and his ideal was to use nothing but others writing. While the essay above is not as artistically crafted as Benjamin's writing, I think he would've approved.

What I'm wondering is whether this kind of exercise might be useful to my students. If I required them to do the same - perhaps not for an essay but for a journal entry or writing-lab assignment - would they get the point? Or would they (maybe willfully) mis-interpret it as me saying they don't need to generate their own arguments in their papers?

I suspect as an assignment it would backfire, but it's an intriguing possibility nonetheless.

If you can read this...

I suppose this just reinforces my statement earlier this week that I find the blog an informal venue for trying out new ideas.

At least I don't have to worry about being to erudite!

On writing and blogging

I tell my writing students that writing is not just one activity. I try to convince them that writing involves pre-writing activities as well as drafting and editing. Part of that pre-writing is thinking about what they want to write about, but part of it also involves reading. I know I don't convince some of them. Many of them still persist in only starting to think about the essay two days before it's due and writing it the night before. Some of them can produce passable work that way.

I don't blame them. If they're strong writers and can pull off a B in my course by writing essays the night before, then I can't fault them for not trying to get an A. They choose their own level of involvement.

What I do try to impress upon them, and what I do pay a good deal of attention to in their writing, is how they respond to things they have read. (We employ a loose definition of reading in which we include visual, auditory and textual elements) If they try to write those high school type essays where they just express their own opinions about things, they don't get a very good grade. If they express their opinion as a response to something they've read, that they've clearly thought about and critically analyzed, then they get a better mark.

But this post isn't about students. It's about the connection between reading and writing.

I start with students because in my writing classes, it takes considerable effort to get students to see that it's not just about writing - that in order to write well, they have to read as well. And in between, they've gotta think.

I was thinking about this the other day, after doing my "writing as conversation" lecture/discussion, and realized that once you get to where I am, the balance has tipped.

There's something that happens as you progress through academia that changes your sense of yourself as a writer. I know I took to heart the lesson my English teachers tried to impress upon me that what was important in academic writing was not my opinion, but a careful analysis of other people's opinions. I can distinctly remember several undergraduate papers where the professor told me to put a lid on my own opinions and just focus on the facts - or "textual evidence" as we call it in literature.

I now understand what they were trying to say - that my opinions had to be supported by the text - but at the time the concept was a bit fuzzy, which meant that I studiously avoided expressing any opinion. I invested a lot in the authority of the texts I was examining. I needed to find the right quote to support the argument that I was making, and I know that a few times, the argument emerged out of what quotes I could find, rather than working the other way round.

Even in my graduate career, I've seen this kind of comment - that I depend too heavily on the text instead of my own scholarship.

I don't think it's a bad thing to teach students at the beginning of their careers to put a lid on their opinions. It's a necessary step in the process of becoming a critical thinker - to shut up long enough to hear what other people are saying in the texts you read. Most of my students desperately need to learn how to listen to others because they've spent way too much time expressing themselves.

But when you reached advanced levels of scholarship - when you're expected to now become one of those people that students should shut up and listen to - there's very little guidance in making that transition. Or at least I've struggled with making the transition.

My advisor has told me I have to "find my own voice". But how I go about doing that, isn't as simple. It's a case of it being easy to give the advice, but taking it and implementing it is harder.

You may have noticed that in the last few months there have been a larger number of posts that directly relate to arguments I'm trying to make in the dissertation, or my responses to things I've read. I've tried to only blog things that I think would interest other people, but I've also been trying to create blog posts as a way of "finding my voice", as my advisor suggested.

The format of the blog post lends itself well to this project I think. While there are opportunities to "cite" through linking, its more informal nature means it feels more like a conversation with my readers than a dissertation. So I feel less of a need to "support" my arguments with citation. The informal nature of the blog encourages me to express my opinions on things without feeling the need to rely only on other authorities.

One of the hardest things for me is to see myself as having the authority to speak on a subject. It's a malady that many graduate students suffer from. It's what makes it difficult to write the dissertation. I mean literally write the dissertation. We use the term "write" to encompass all those parts of writing that I tell my students are part of the process. But in my case (and judging from what I've heard other say, most graduate students), the actual act of writing - committing words that represent thoughts on paper - is the hardest thing to do. It's terribly, terribly easy to put off writing because you convince yourself you have to read one more important source before you could possibly write, and then another, and another.

But the blog frees me from that self-induced constraint. Since the opinions or thoughts on a topic come out of my reading and thinking about these things, I'm confident that they still have validity, but in the informal venue of the blog post, I feel less need to rely on what others have said about things. This allows me to "try out" an argument to see how it works.

The feedback function of commenting has been an added bonus in this way. The comments of my readers have often pointed out to me places where I'm being simplistic, or even where I've missed something entirely. So not only am I getting a chance to "try out" some of my arguments, but I have people pointing out - sometimes obvious - places where my thinking is incomplete.

I'm happy that I've found a venue that allows me to shift from authority-slave to finding my own voice, but at the same time, I really think graduate education could do a better job of teaching people like me how to make that transition. I've found my own method, but a little more guidance would've gotten me to this point much faster. I have a colleague who is flying through the program, and I suspect that part of the reason is because the reluctance to express an opinion is NOT a problem in that case.

As an undergrad, I needed to shut up and listen to others. But as a doctoral student, I need to learn to speak up. My professors were really good about pointing out how to do the first, but on the second, I've been floundering with little guidance. I'll just have to figure it out myself, and if blogging is the way to do it, then blogging it is.

The difference between bodies and machines

There's something that's been bugging me lately in a lot of the reading I've been doing. It started bugging me a while ago - probably even a year ago - but I didn't really think it important then. But this week during my reading I came across the Psymbiote project.

isa gordon, whose body provides the scaffolding for symbiote, is a very young and attractive woman (though it might be more accurate to say her body is being incorporated into Psymbiote, at least according her conceptualization of the project). Which got me thinking.

See, I used to have one of those young, tight, and attractive bodies like hers. Used to. The older I get, the looser things get in general, and of course the older I get, the less my body can be described as young. This is not unusual. It happens to everyone. (Or at least everyone who doesn't go under a plastic surgeon's knife... and even then, there's no way to really turn back the clock.) I'm not saying this out of bitterness, please don't get me wrong there. I'm rather happy with the state of my body... and my mind and my soul come to think of it. I'm really rather satisfied with the state of things. But this satisfaction has only come as a recognition of the inevitability of that loosening that takes place as our bodies age.

But I'm starting to digress from the point.

My point is that the human body changes throughout it's lifecycle. When you think of what a newborn human looks like, their proportions are different than an adult. Any adult that had the head-body proportion of an infant would look freakish. And of course children have to learn how to control the voluntary functions of their bodies.

ASIDE: There's a whole other argument out there regarding human bodies and tools, that envisions the human body as a tool which we gradually learn to use, but that's another issue and would have to be a different post. It also is an issue that I discuss in the dissertation, but so far my thinking about it isn't complete, so if a post is ever forthcoming, it will have to wait.

But the point is that human bodies change. We all know this. Yet whenever I read, or hear discussions about how our bodies and our machines will become more closely integrated with each other, the technophiles who write these things usually ignore that changing body.

They act as if the body they inhabit is the body they always have and always will inhabit.

Now as I said, I didn't really think about it much. I was aware these theorists were ignoring the changes in the body, but didn't really think about why myself. I pretty much chalked it up to the fact that the theorists who I've encountered talking about this are men.

Now, before the word "sexism" can pop into your head, let me try to explain. I will grant that it is sexist of me to expect that men writing about bodies and technology will ignore the body to a greater extent than women might. Yes, I'm guilty of thinking that. BUT. It wasn't so much that these were men writing, but that they were adopting a maculinist point of view.

Several months ago I read N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman. In it, she talks about the history of cybernetics - I would highly recommend the book if you're looking for a general discussion of cybernetics that incorporates its history with analysis of its emergence in literature e.g. Gibson, Stephenson etc. She recognizes that much cybernetic discussion dismisses the body, and when it does discuss the body, it is a normalized body, which is imagined to be white, adult and male.

If you think about it, she's right. Most of the time, the cyborg is this. Look at Robocop. Look at Terminator. Look at Case, the console cowboy. Look at Hiro Protagonist. Look at Johnny Mnemonic. All men. All white. All adult. Which means that they inhabit bodies that can go for years and years without changing.

For women, change occurs much more easily. For adult women of the same age as these men, there's the possibility that their body will change every month for a few days. There's also the very real possibility that their body will change shape radically if, for example, they become pregnant. And of course the nursing afterwards changes the shape of the body just as its function changes.

Which is why I started tweaking about this idea when I saw Psymbiote. In one of the pictures on her webpage, it shows how she was fitted for a kind of exoskeleton that she'll wear. It looks to be made of fiberglass. Now, fiberglass, when it's unprocessed, is highly malleable. But once you've formed it, it's very solid. (I dated a guy who worked in a fiberglass factory for a while, so I probably know more about it than is really necessary for an adult to know.)

My first thought on seeing this photo?

"What happens if her arm changes shape?"

Well, what does happen?

If Psymbiote is the combination of isa and technology, then what happens when isa changes so that the technology no longer fits comfortably into/onto her body? It will happen. isa's body will change. It may not change for many years. It may not change by much. But it will change.

If the technology attached to her body is indeed symbiotic, as is the project's supposed aim, then what happens when one member of that symbiotic relationship changes? How extensive are the effects?

In nature, if one organism in a symbiotic relationship changes, it can affect the health and even life of the other. Would a symbiotic relationship with a machine be the same? If you think about what would happen if the machine changes, imagines of all those disastrous science fiction scenarios where people are damaged by damaged machines certainly come to mind. Would the reverse be the same? Would a change in the human damage the machine?

And of course, this leads to the question of how much we can really integrate the body with machines, since in order for machines to change, they require an outside agent to effect that change (at least our machines of today - perhaps we'll invent machines that can alter their own structure in the future, the same as how we alter our body structures, intentionally or not). Our bodies can change through outside agency. But they also frequently change without any external intervention.

Of course what got me thinking about this is that Psymbiote's organic component - isa gordon - is clearly female. What if not just her arm changes, but large parts of her body if she chose to be pregnant? How would that affect those static technological pieces? How would it potentially constrain the function of her pregnant body? Can technology/machine adapt to interact in such an intimate manner as Psymbiote is constructed to act if the organic components of it change?

No matter how imaginative I get about it, I keep coming to the same conclusion. The machines that exist today, that are not able to adapt their form to changing circumstances, would be ill equipped to interact intimately with a human body that is capable of changing - often in radical ways - in response to its function a.k.a. its changing physiology.

This is a fundamental difference between humans and machines: our ever changing and changeable bodies. Until machines are capable of such change, there will always exist a gap between us and them that will make intimate mergings of body and machine difficult to say the least.

Flip side

"In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines".

George B Dyson Darwin Among the Machines

How to deke out an American*

As a Canadian, you have to be extra vigilant. There are a lot of impostors out there. If you suspect that someone is falsely trying to pass themselves off as a Canadian, make the following statement - and then carefully note their reaction:

"Last night, I cashed my pogey and went to buy a mickey of C.C. at the offsale, but my skidoo got stuck in the muskeg on my way back to the duplex.I was trying to deke out a deer, you see. Damn chinook, melted everything. And then a Mountie snuck up behind me in a ghost car and gave me an impaired. I was S.O.L., sitting there dressed only in my Stanfields and a toque at the time. And the Mountie, he's all chippy and everything, calling me a "shit disturber" and what not. What could I say, except, "Sorry, EH!"

If the person you are talking to nods sympathetically, they're one of us. If, however, they stare at you with a blank incomprehension, they are not a real Canadian. Have them reported to the authorities at once.

The passage cited above contains no fewer than 19 different Canadianisms.
In order:

pogey: EI (Employment insurance). Money provided by the government for not working.
mickey: A small bottle of booze (13 oz) (A Texas mickey, on the other hand, is a ridiculously big bottle of booze, which, despite the name, is still a Canadianism through and through.)
C.C.: Canadian Club, a brand of rye. Not to be confused with "hockey stick," another kind of Canadian Club.
offsale: Beer store.
skidoo: Self-propelled decapitation unit for teenagers.
muskeg: Boggy swampland.
duplex: A single building divided in half with two sets of inhabitants, each trying to pretend the other doesn't exist while at the same time managing to drive each other crazy; metaphor for Canada's french and english.
deke: Used as a verb, it means "to fool an opponent through skillful misdirection." As a noun, it is used most often in exclamatory constructions, such as: "Whadda deke!" Meaning, "My, what an impressive display of physical dexterity employing misdirection and guile."
chinook:An unseasonably warm wind that comes over the Rockies and onto the plains, melting snow banks in Calgary but just missing Edmonton, much to the pleasure of Calgarians.
Mountie:Canadian icon, strong of jaw, red of coat, pure of heart. Always get their man! (See also Pepper spray, uses of.)
snuck: To have sneaked; to move, past tense, in a sneaky manner; non-restrictive extended semi-gerundial form of "did sneak."
(We think.)
ghost car:An unmarked police car, easily identifiable by its inconspicuousness.
impaired:A charge of drunk driving. Used both as a noun and as an adjective(the alternative adjectival from of "impaired" being "pissed to the gills").
S.O.L.: Shit outta luck; in an unfortunate predicament.
Stanfields: Men's underwear, especially Grandpa-style, white cotton ones with a big elastic waistband and a large superfluous flap in the front. And back!
toque: Canada's official National Head Apparel, with about the same suave sex appeal as a pair of Stanfields.
chippy: Behaviour that is inappropriately aggressive; constantly looking for a reason to find offense; from "chip on one's shoulder." (See Western Canada)
shit disturber: (See Quebec) a troublemaker or provocateur. According to Katherine Barber, editor in Chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, "shit disturber" is a distinctly Canadian term. (Just remember that Western Canada is chippy and Quebec is a shit disturber, and you will do fine.)
Sorry, eh.

*I can't take credit for this one, but thought you might enjoy.

Some days I just can't get to the top of the curve before hitting the bottom again

Synthetic biology

One of the hazards of the kind of dissertation I'm doing - one that engages with contemporary literature based on emerging technologies - is that there's always new technologies emerging that have an impact on the literature being produced. And that means there's always something new I'm learning about.

Take Synthetic Biology.

I actually hadn't even heard the term until a couple of weeks ago, just before the whole James-Watson-discoverer-of-DNA-is-a-racist thing blew up in his face. Frankly, I think the man made a big mistake making the comments he did - first because they smack of racism, and secondly (and more importantly), that because he's a scientist, people assume he's speaking from a scientific perspective - which he's not. But that's a whole different issue - the link above will give you a good idea of the nature of Watson's comments.

Synthetic biology is an interesting extension of transgenics, and it is moving human beings much, much closer to the science fiction scenarios in the books I'm writing about for the dissertation.

From the ETC report (PDF) on Synthetic Biology "Extreme Genetic Engineering: An Introduction to Synthetic Biology":

Transgenics, the kind of engineering you find in genetically modified tomatoes and corn, is old news. As recombinant DNA splicing-techniques turn 30 years old, a new generation of extreme biotech enthusiasts have moved to the next frontier in the manipulation of life: building it from scratch. They call it synthetic biology.

Essentially, genetic engineering is the alteration of existing organisms, while synthetic biology is the creation of new organisms from scratch. The report goes on to describe synthetic biology as "the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems that do not exist in the natural world and also the redesign of existing biological systems to perform specific tasks" and that the technologies that allow this design and construction are becoming readily and cheaply available to anyone with a laptop, some knowledge of genetic engineering and a few dollars.

Synthetic biology is interesting to me for two reasons. First, because it is a controversial topic that will require social input into policy production (and that policy will need to be more globally oriented than nationally oriented since the scientific community transcends national considerations and since globalization means that anyone anywhere can get ahold of the materials needed for synthetic biology). Proponents of synthetic biology, the most prominent of whom is J. Craig Venter (quite a character by all accounts), point to the humanitarian solutions to problems that synthetic biology brings. Producing medicines, like those needed for malaria treatment, or bio-fuels through synthetic organisms does indeed have the potential to solve some of the most pressing public health and environmental problems that the world faces today.

But producing beneficial drugs and other solutions to human-made problems is accompanied by a darker potential offered by synthetic biology, and that is the potential to create biological weapons or synthetic organisms that are harmful to human beings on this planet. Just as we have had to do for preceeding technologies (e.g. nuclear energy and weapons), humanity has to come to some sort of consensus about the appropriate use of these technologies and how to regulate them.

Not only am I interested in the development of public policy regarding synthetic biology as a human occupying a space on this planet, but it also impacts the discussion of genetic engineering and other emergent technologies (AI, alife, genomics, nanotechnology, robotics) that emerges in the novels that I'm examining in the dissertation. So it's both my life, and my life, so to speak, that are at stake.

This is in part the second reason that I'm interested in synthetic biology. Synthetic biology offers the means to produce the kinds of people/organisms/beings found in the science fiction novels I'm examining. In other words, synthetic biology, and associated technologies like nanotech, alife, and robotics could create the kinds of humans that right now only exist in science fiction. It could turn science fiction into science fact.

This transformation is the reason why science fiction theorists exist. Science fiction offers readers the opportunity to look into a potential future and decide whether it's a future they want or not. Certainly many of the scenarios imagined in past science fiction adventures have not come to pass. But in some cases I have to wonder if that's simply because history took a different turn, or because someone read a science fiction story that sounded a warning about a society we might not want to create and turned away from an avenue that would have led there.

So synthetic biology interests me as a human who will live in a world where it will become more and more prevalent, and it interests me as someone who studies literature that has already imagined what synthetic biology might produce.

And from what I've seen of the literature, even benign uses of synthetic biology have some negative and unpleasant consequences. But that also is another post.

Closely related to synthetic biology is posthumanism (or transhumanism or extropianism - they're all variations of a similar sentiment even though some within the movements very vehemently draw lines between them). Posthumanism tries to imagine what human beings could look like in the future, as we develop various technologies (robotics, alife, nanotechnology, genetic engineering etc.) that have the potential to change the nature of the human from a fully organic organism to a technologically-mediated one.

One of my first encounters with the ideas of posthumanism was with the Lifeboat Foundation, which appears at different times to be part crack-pot and part rational voice in the wilderness. I suppose that's what happens when you get enough people together that have the same goal, but different ideas about how to get there.

Posthumanists generally embrace the idea that humans will change, with the often unstated assumption that this change will be for the better. They have embraced some of the stranger manifestations of this - e.g. cyrogenics, but they have also encouraged researchers in more prosaic areas of endeavour, such as weather management and storm control.

For the most part, Lifeboat is more supportive of synthetic biology than ETC, though I think the difference has more to do with organizational structure and funding than with the relative assessment of risk associated with synthetic biology. Whether the general population embraces it or fears it, there will need to be public discussion of the technology in order to control it, and the sooner that happens, the better (both for my life and my dissertation!)