Alessandro Delfanti Interview
▀■ TG: In 2010 you interviewed Steve Kurtz, member of Critical Art Ensemble, in this dialogue were discussed earlier notions regarding the privatization and reification of genetic material as interchangeable capital as well as corporative interests behind the biotechnology industry and the combination between scientific research with political activism.
What impression leaves you this diagnosis conversed four years ago in relation to the current situation of science politics in the life sciences?
What impression leaves you this diagnosis conversed four years ago in relation to the current situation of science politics in the life sciences?
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■▀ AD: I believe that those ideas were well timed and captured the transition of biotechnology towards today's model, embodied by synthetic biology and rooted in a culture of entrepreneurialism which values distributed innovation and production as a change towards a neoliberal biomedical sector. Kurtz was signaling that the use of DIY approaches to biotech as a form of critique of the industry was being replaced by forms of DIY biology that are integral to neoliberalism. Indeed, especially in the US several DIY communities and groups havestrong links with the world of startups and venture capital.
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■"GenTerra" (2001-03), Critical Art Ensemble and Beatriz da Costa." Performed at the Natural History Museum, London; Gallery Oldham, Manchester; St. Norbert Art & Cultural Center, Winnipeg, and Le Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble. GenTerra was a live exploration of the variety of discourses on transgenics in relation to environmental risk and human health policy. Participants manipulated transgenic bacteria in an effort to develop a more nuanced understanding of risk assessment regarding the uses of recombinant DNA." | The Arts Catalyst© 2002 |
In my view, this is a two-fold process. On the one hand, grassroots practices have been coopted by the industry and adapted to its needs. On the other, corporate and academic actors had a foundational role in the emergence of today's DIY biology. I believe this is a coevolution, and the result is that DIY and open biology are re-moralizing biotech. Synthetic biology is a project of cultural and political re-positioning of an industry that was struggling with the bad image associated with patents on life, Monsanto's monopoly etc. That image is quickly being replaced by synbio and diybio: user- and consumer-friendly, small
scale, open source, etc. This masks new forms of private appropriation and ecological disruption that are integral to biotech.
scale, open source, etc. This masks new forms of private appropriation and ecological disruption that are integral to biotech.
▀■ TG: Some of the topics found in your investigations are related with the power and influence of technologies in the flow of knowledge and information. How these technologies are applied in the production of scientific knowledge in the field of Open Science and Peer-to-Peer dynamics?
■▀ AD: The influence of technological evolution on science is broad and it would be difficult to acknowledge all the different impacts that we are witnessing. First, I would mention one cultural change, which is the influence of information technology on the epistemologies of biology. For example, the use of extreme informational metaphors taken from computers to describe and understand living matter (life as software code). Second, as a more direct effect on P2P dynamics I would mention digital technologies used to capture data and use it for scientific innovation. This is something happening at all levels in the digital sphere – think of Facebook using your data to provide a better advertising experience or turning it over to surveillance agencies. But when it comes to health, illness and bodies this phenomenon has some specificities. Just to give an example, both new web-based companies and old pharmaceutical giants are interested in organizing people on platforms in which they are compelled to share data related to their health – illnesses, drugs, family history, etc – in order to use the aggregated data as a source of knowledge for drug innovation. Public participation is redirected towards corporate goals and not towards power redistribution.
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■ BIOHACKERS: THE POLITICS OF OPEN SCIENCE
■ Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science ■
"Biohackers explores fundamental changes occuring in the circulation and ownership of scientific information. Alessandro Delfanti argues that the combination of the ethos of 20th century science, the hacker movement and the free software movement is producing an open science culture which redefines the relationship between researchers, scientific institutions and commercial companies. Biohackers looks at the emergence of the citizen biology community ‘DIYbio’, the shift to open access by the American biologist Craig Venter and the rebellion of the Italian virologist Ilaria Capua against WHO data-sharing policies. Delfanti argues that these biologists and many others are involved in a transformation of both life sciences and information systems, using open access tools and claiming independence from both academic and corporate institutions."
Publisher: Pluto Press | 2013
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■HACKING GENOMES. THE ETHICS OF OPEN AND REBEL BIOLOGY
Publisher: International Review of Information Ethics © by IRIE – all rights reserved www.i-r-i-e.net ISSN 1614-1687 |
A. Delfanti, Open science, a complex movement, Jcom 09(03) (2010) E.
Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)
A. Delfanti, Know your genes. The marketing of direct-to-consumer genetic testing,
Jcom 10(03) (2011) C01
Meredith L. Patterson, A Biopunk Manifesto,
maradydd.livejournal.com (2010)
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▀■ TG: How is it that the hacker culture, information technologies and biocapitalism coexist in something as complex as the transformation of science institutions?
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■▀ AD: I believe that hacker cultures have been contaminating scientific cultures and are now part of them. Hacking is a very broad and diverse set of subcultures, but characteristics such as openness, distributed innovation or distrust for institutions are sort of cultural and rhetorical tools that some scientists are playing in the public sphere in order to re-position themselves in the world of contemporary science and in relation to the market. As it happens in hardware and software development, hacker politics can be ambivalent and support both oppositional practices directed towards goals of collective liberation, and the disruption of old monopolies in order to open new markets. Biocapitalism is interested in hacking because it is one of the fuels of digital capitalism. A few years ago Bill Gates said that if he were a kid today, he would be hacking biology rather than software, and I believe this signals how he sees market opportunities for new forms of innovation in the life sciences.
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▀▊"Open Science is sort of an umbrella term of course, because it can include different practices, social groups and phenomena... for example i would include alternative licenses for distributing scientific information and knowledge, open source of scientific data, open access to scientific scholarly publications, new forms of cooperation enacted through the internet, and new forms of inclusion straight of citizens in the scientific enterprise" - Alessandro Delfanti |
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❝...CORPORATE AND ACADEMIC ACTORS HAD A FOUNDATIONAL ROLE IN THE EMERGENCE OF TODAY'S DIY BIOLOGY. I BELIEVE THIS IS A COEVOLUTION, AND THE RESULT IS THAT DIY AND OPEN BIOLOGY ARE RE-MORALIZING BIOTECH [...] SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY IS A PROJECT OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL RE-POSITIONING OF AN INDUSTRY THAT WAS STRUGGLING WITH THE BAD IMAGE ASSOCIATED WITH PATENTS ON LIFE, MONSANTO'S MONOPOLY ETC. ❞ |
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▀■ TG: In Is do-it-yourself Biology being co-opted by institutions?, you analyze the revolutionary value of biology according to their alliances and codependency with government and state agencies, as well as three major areas: scientific institutions, market and the state.
Is there a real project of emancipation within movements derived from DIYBio? What is the effectiveness of these intentions? Are the contributions of DIYBio a real change in the democratization of knowledge? |
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■▀ AD: Right now it is very difficult to interpret DIYbio as a project of emancipation. The birth of its current incarnation is strictly related to the emergence of the synthetic biology industry, and its practices are co-opted by institutions at several levels: the state reproduces the dream of a distributed and open laboratory in museums, diluting its emancipatory promises. The industry sponsors biohacking as an incubator of new startups that can be bought by big pharma if they produce something interesting. This is a well established model in software development and outsources all risks of innovation to startups, which as we know have a very low rate of success: most fail and get bankrupt, only a few succeed and get incorporated by big corporations. Finally, academia is interested in citizen science as long as it can control and direct it, for example through projects of distributed research in which people can participate by gathering data or solving problems but cannot decide the goals, let alone slow down or stop the process. On the other hand, hacking teaches us that opening up technologies to different kinds of expertise that are only partially internal to institutions is per se an emancipatory process: this is the reason why I believe that biohacking might in the future emerge as a source of alternatives.
▀■ TG: Are there chances that Open Science is having a proto-institutionalization process, or is a movement that is committed to the resistance to the privatization of commons?
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■▀ AD: I would tend not to collapse open science in a single entity, as several different actors and practices are involved. That said, if by 'open' we mean the problem of property and the role of open source in biology: yes, open science resists older forms of accumulation based on information privatization through intellectual property rights. Yet if we focus on licenses we miss out the emergence of new forms of appropriation which are based on computational power, service providing, organization of online platforms for data sharing and the like. These are just different forms of private profit that rely on a more dynamic but probably not less exploitative mode of accumulation.
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CREDITS |
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ALESSANDRO DELFANTI (IT):
ASSITANT PROFESSOR OF CULTURE AND NEW MEDIA, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. IN THE PAST HE HAS WORKED AND TAUGHT AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS, MCGILL UNIVERSITY AND UNIVERSITY OF MILAN (AND VISITED OR STUDIED AT SISSA, UCLA AND EDINBURGH). HE ALSO HAS A DOCTOR DEGREE ON VETERINARY MEDICINE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PARMA. HIS RESEARCH IS FOCUSED AT THE INTERSECTION OF DIGITAL CULTURES, SCIENCE COMMUNICATION AND SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES. AS A JOURNALIST HE WRITES ABOUT SCIENCE POLITICS AND DIGITAL CULTURES FOR SEVERAL ITALIAN NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES. |
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PHOTOGRAPHY + IMAGE
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VIDEO
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- GENTERRA (2001-03), CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE & BEATRIZ DA COSTA | THE ARTS CATALYST© 2002
- BIOHACKERS: THE POLITICS OF OPEN SCIENCE (EXCERPT) | SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY© 2014
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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▀■^THIS INTERVIEW WOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE CONSTANT COMMUNICATION, HELP AND WILLINGNESS OF ALESSANDRO DELFANTI,
AND THE CORRECTIONS MADE BY FABRIZZIO GUERRERO MC MANUS. 2015 |
