Labs, Lives, Technoscience

This chapter looks at Sharon Traweek's classic study of physicists, which tracks the way the experimental particle physics community reproduces itself through the training of novices. It identifies the patterns through which education and inculcation occur, and by which particle physicists learn the criteria for a successful career. It also examines the images Traweek conveys of community, stability, and gendered reproduction that can be discerned only within a sufficiently entrenched discipline. The chapter describes synthetic biology as an unstable and ambiguously bounded field in which idiosyncratic individual paths are figured prominently, especially for members of the first generation of practitioners whose training took place within the reproductive mechanisms of established disciplines. It explores paths that are embedded with different concepts and logics within the synthetic organisms that were made in different labs.