The Virtues of the Naïve View

Abstract

This chapter approaches the relationship between knowledge and intervention in synthetic biology by considering the uses of ignorance among practitioners. It introduces the notion of an “epistemic wager” in order to articulate the element of conjecture at the heart of synthetic biologists' attempts to refigure relations between making and not knowing. It also argues that practitioners adjust relations between knowledge and intervention, as both means and ends on the go. The chapter takes the destabilization of knowledge in the postgenomic era to mean that the question concerning how not knowing will shape the century of biology is as pressing as the one that takes relations between knowledge and intervention as its starting point. It mentions James Collins, a prominent synthetic biologist and originator of the ground-breaking genetic switch, who mythologizes “naïveté” among an early crop of parts-based practitioners.