On Synthetic Biology
Bio: Luis Campos is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the University of New Mexico, and a Senior Fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy. His scholarship integrates archival discoveries with contemporary fieldwork at the intersection of genetics and society. He is the author of Radium and the Secret of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2015, in press), and co-edited Making Mutations: Objects, Practices, Contexts (Berlin, MPIWG, 2010) as a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is currently at work on his next book on the history of synthetic biology, tentatively titled Life By Design.
Shadowgraph: What I found most profound about your articles was the idea that science looked at from a historian’s point of view found that “science” was radically altered by culturally determined customs and that our language itself creates so much of our understanding of science.
Luis Campos: We’re often used to thinking about science as being this amazing and difficult and authoritative source of knowledge in our contemporary world. And it certainly is that, but we don’t think of it as being part of culture. We don’t think of it as something being done by a certain people living in a certain time and place. For a historian of science, that’s really a methodological principle. It is done by certain people living in certain times and certain places, and the nature of the science that they do—what they study, how they explain it, how they think they know something, these kinds of things—are going to be based on whatever intellectual tools are available to them to think. At the end of the 19th century, radium was a marvelous magical element that could do no wrong. They had visions that in the future people would be painting the rooms of their homes with radium paint and they wouldn’t even need electricity anymore. We’d have radium in our fireplaces and it would warm our rooms. In that context, these fantastic visions of this new element seemed to make sense—expose a plant to it, and a plant would therefore be affected. And rather than see the effect as bad, you see it as a potential for good. You could start to control evolution. You could do these efforts called experimental evolution. You would interpret the results as showing the life-giving properties of radium no matter what results you saw. Even things that would later come to be seen very clearly as signs of damage, were understood as reflecting the life-giving power of radium. Past that story, other people who were studying the nature of heredity were trying to get an understanding of chromosomes and genes, and people began to use radium to understand the structure of the gene. Also at that time, scientists were trying to find new ways to control evolution, and to produce better fruits and flowers, and every now and then it seemed that someone had actually successfully used radium to produce a useful new variety. That work was already going on in the 1920’s. By the 1930’s, it began to be referred to, in at least some circles, as “genetic engineering”. It was fun to stumble onto the story about the connection of radium to life and how it was applied in biology, and to discover a much earlier root for the term of “genetic engineering” than we would have thought. We usually associate “genetic engineering” with the 1970’s and the advent of recombinant DNA. So radium turned out to be at the heart not only of crazy understandings that seem so far from us today, but those early experiments were actually at the root of the genetic engineering that is so much a part of our world today.
SG: When in history did people start revising their ideas about radium?
Campos: That’s an interesting story. So from the beginning radium was known to be like fire. If you use it right, it’s a wonderful thing, and if you don’t know what you’re doing you could burn yourself. There are accounts from Marie Curie and other people at the time talking about how this element is really quite marvelous but you have to be careful around it. The popular understanding in the first decade of the 20th century was pretty much only about the wonders and marvels and very little sense that this was something dangerous. It was clear from very early on that radium could be useful in medicine. Radium was used several times a week to treat what were known as rodent cancers, a kind of skin cancer that some people had. Exposure to the radiation caused the skin tumors to fall off over the course of weeks and this was described as being a kind of magical knife. It was surgery without having to do surgery. You can see before and after photos of how this was a useful thing. The more popular craze reached a peak around 1904. People were drinking radium-spiked cocktails thinking it was liquid sunshine, as good for the inside of your body as sunshine was for the outside, and people were painting it on themselves and dancing around in darkened theaters. There was quite a period of euphoria, you might call it, in the first and even into the second decade. It seems to be in the 1920’s that the story began to shift a bit. There are a couple of moments that people point to. One of them is the dial painters, in the watch factory in Orange, New Jersey. These women were using radium-based paint to paint numbers onto watch dials. Wristwatches were basically an invention of WWI. Soldiers wouldn’t have to carry a watch, they could just look at their wrist. And it’s even more useful to know what time it is in the dark. So this factory had been hiring these young immigrant women, mostly Irish, to do this work, and they would be in the factory for hours a day painting numbers on watch dials and they would be licking the brushes with their mouth to make a fine tip so they could make those numbers. And what began to be noticed was all sorts of tooth and jaw problems these women were starting to have. These were early moments when the story of radium as life giving began to be questioned in the larger, popular realm. There were also some very famous, rich people drinking radium-spiked tonic waters that had some radioactive elements in them (not all of these products did), but as a result they died quite early and this became sensational news. By the late 1920’s, in genetics, we begin to see a lot of attention paid to how x-rays and other kinds of ionizing radiation, like the gamma rays produced by radium, can cause mutations in fruit flies, not just in plants, and that many of these mutations in animals are not good. Rather than thinking that if only you could zap things and get a new species, and the potential and promise for agriculture and horticulture, they began to think, “Well, wait a minute, we’re seeing a lot of damage. We’re seeing sterile outcomes, misshapen flies. Perhaps there might be something dangerous to think about here.” Also by the 1930’s, we see the rise of science fiction as an emerging field: the rise of Superman, kryptonite, references to radiation-induced mutants, all these sorts of popular references are drawing on this real-life history of radium. This radiation-based science intensifies in the 1950’s, after the atomic and hydrogen bombs. The term itself is being coined, so these radioactive elements from science fiction … are all going to be coming out in the 1930’s and picking up in the 1950’s after the atomic and hydrogen bombs. And that’s when we have a moment of associating radiation with danger and the potential destruction of the world. That narrative begins to be solidified by mid-century. And that’s a world away from where things were in the beginning of the century. You can tie in the whole history of the Cold War into this story of how radiation goes from being good to being bad. We use radiation all the time in medicine, right? So we have that understanding of it as a useful thing. We have used it to fertilize, to diagnose, to treat—we do all kinds of things with radiation. But it went from something being marketed as something you would buy at the five-and-dime down the street, something everyone would want to have access to for their happy future, to something that is very carefully controlled.
SG: I know you’re more of a historian or philosopher, but in terms of our current scientific culture, what aspects of our situation might be like the example of the history of radium? For example, GMO foods, which come with the promise of feeding the world, also have the potential to go awry.
Campos: As a historian, I like to look at the past. As members of the public, we want to look at things that are happening right now. The most useful way to think about it would be the tension between the promissory goal, of designing better futures for ourselves, using our knowledge and wisdom as best we can to make the world a better place, (which of course is going to use science, engineering and technology), and the awareness of looking at previous examples where things don’t always turn out the way we intend. This is especially clear to historians, who are very interested in the contingent details of history. There is a famous line from Benjamin Franklin, “For want of a nail … the kingdom was lost.” The nail had loosened on the horseshoe of the horse and the horse tripped and stumbled and the general fell off the horse and therefore couldn’t lead the charge and the war was over. No matter what your plans and policies were to win that war, something seemingly insignificant could happen, and that could be at the root of why history took a different path. So both of these things—broad causal factors and specific turns of events—are always going to be in tension at any moment in history. But for examples we know well, like the case of radium, and for something today where what the final outcome will be remains unresolved, there is no perfectly clear-cut policy answer. Regarding agriculture, of course we’re going to use our scientific and engineering knowledge to maximize food production, increase agricultural productivity, and try to remove the need for certain other kinds of interventions, like pesticides that have other complications. Yet at the same time we want to be careful in thinking about what the future implications of our decisions are going to be without being able to predict that future. How should we think about things right now? Other than to note that the situation we find ourselves in now has always been the situation we have found ourselves in? We are always trying to do the best we can with the knowledge we have, and we think having more knowledge is better. And we are always dealing with the aftermath of previous things we’ve done, where we wish, perhaps in retrospect, we would have decided differently. It seems that this also has to tie into a larger historical context of what society’s relationship to its scientists is at any given moment in time. So, for instance, the relationship between society and its science in the Progressive period of the late 19th century and early 20th century in the U.S.—this was a period in which science was to provide a rational way toward the future. In the period of the atom bomb and afterwards, you had government playing a major role in providing funding and developing science along certain lines, and that was considered the appropriate role for science and government. By the 1970’s you have counter-culture movements, anti-war movements, and criticism of science being in the pocket of the military and government. The response of the larger culture to these sorts of issues is going to be quite different than it was in say, 1900. When the universities doing federally funded research wanted to be able to produce some economic benefit from that, it became not just about research for its own sake but about how taxpayers’ money should be used to help develop the economy in some way. We now have a very different understanding of the role of science in society. The sorts of debates that will emerge in public spheres, in each of those different periods, in even just the last century, are going to look quite different. The reasons vary as to why people might be on one side or another or raise some hopes for the future or raise concerns. The nature of those arguments looks different at different moments in time. That tension is always there. For instance, to return to some of the language surrounding GMO’s today, one thing that seems to have frequently recurred in my studies of the longer history of genetic engineering has been this criticism of “playing God.” In the 1890’s, when a horticulturalist breeder by the name of Luther Burbank, (we still use his potato today,) invented the Shasta daisy and the white blackberry, and a spineless cactus, things like that, he was attacked and accused by a local minister of “playing god.” He was breeding new kinds of fruits and flowers. His plant catalogue had “new creations.” This was something that was very upsetting to the some members of the religious community in the area. Nowadays, we have both “playing God” and “Frankenstein” that gets trotted out. We have people referring to the “precautionary principle” and the unknown dangers of untested technology. The language and the ways that people articulate their hopes and their concerns might be different—but we certainly could trace a longer history of how this tension has played out—this tension between wanting to produce the next best thing to save the world, and the increasing concern that maybe the next best thing might not be so good after all. These are familiar themes from looking at the history.
SG: When I was reading your work, I started to think a lot about the “scientific method.” How it was initially this idea of observation and curiosity that seems to have become more about control and engineering. I’m curious about the history of the use of science.
Campos: So I think I would challenge the very premise of your question from the get go. If you’ll permit me to do that.
SG: Of course. Go for it.
Campos: The idea that you could have a detached, objective, contemplation of nature … and that that is what science is—that idea is something that’s historically and culturally specific and is by no means shared across cultures or across time. If we look at some of the very earliest of the sciences that ever emerged, (and you might want to question what does the term “science” even cover), you can think of irrigation in Mesopotamia, you can think of the measurements of fields in order to divide property after the father of the family has died. Inheritance is a large part of what all the cuneiform tables are about. They are legal but also scientific documents. They are calculating the area of fields. Or think of other ancient societies designing sewer systems, and doing many other things that are both scientific and practical. They might also be very religious. Astronomy is an example of this. We might think of the contemplation of the heavens as the most detached thing that one could do. What good could possibly come from it? And yet, from the movements of the heavens the ancient Egyptians were able to predict the flooding of the Nile on an annual basis. And if you believe there are messages to be interpreted from the heavens, then seeing something unusual in the heavens tells you about an event that is going to happen on earth. That kind of scientific knowledge is already embedded in a context of utility that has to be, or is often associated with, practicing science for a particular, practical purpose. The idea that there is some sort of method based on hypothesis and collecting data and testing it and these sorts of things that we learn in elementary and middle school that we call The Scientific Method—that history is actually much more complicated, of course. That particular way of doing science emerges at a certain moment. We associate it, most strongly, with Sir Francis Bacon. He is often called the Father of the Scientific Method, but his goal was to make the study of nature and learning things about the world, often for practical purposes, something that anyone could do if they followed the right instructions. So it was a way of making science something that not just a genius gentleman could do, but that could be organized in an institution where you could be a member of that institution and carry out your small part. He uses interesting metaphors about bees going out and collecting the pollen and producing this wonderful honey of knowledge gathered from places all over the world. And yet this whole project he has, this particular method that anyone can do, this is all part of his grand project to restore to humanity the power that man once had over nature but lost with the fall of Adam. So the Scientific Method was invented as a hope to return to the power that humans once had, presumably, in the Garden of Eden.
SG: Fascinating. We seem to always be very vested in controlling nature.
Campos: Absolutely. It’s a long-standing theme—we have long used our knowledge to do things that are useful and practical. What’s interesting in the stuff I’ve studied is to look at how that control played out in breeding, in genetics, in agriculture, in heredity, in these sorts of areas. That same goal of engineering things has always been there and has been at the heart of much of the knowledge that we have come to have about the nature of heredity and of living things. Because we wanted bigger or better flowers, fruits, or more of a yield on something, we had to figure out how to do that, and to start to understand what the hereditary particles were, and how they interacted, and how we could modify them in one way or another. So the very things that you think of as being most scientific in contemporary genetics and genomics are totally tied up with efforts to try to improve agriculture or to control evolution. Control has always been a part of that. So a tough question in the history of science is: what is science and what is engineering? Is science knowledge and engineering making? This is the sort of thing you could have a whole class on. But the idea that science is somehow different from engineering, and that we at one time were able to just do science and that now it’s complicated because we have all these political motives is, I think, too simple of a distinction. Even the very concept of there being a scientific method has this deeply religious context in its emergence.
SG: I found the distinction between the different uses of synthetic biology between Americans and Europeans very interesting. In Europe, they tend to use synthetic biology to think about how life evolved, whereas in America they want to use it, manipulate it, and make something.
Campos: That was a very interesting subject in this contemporary case. For the Americans, synthetic biology was about making interchangeable parts and creating a registry and a system they could produce an industry off of, treating biology like a technology, like this plug-and-play ideology coming out of computers and computer science and the software industry. Whereas when the Europeans heard about what Americans thought synthetic biology should be, they said, “Well, what’s so new and revolutionary here? These are all based on techniques we’ve been developing for decades. Many people in molecular biology have been working on this. You can’t claim this to be a new field you invented from scratch.” One of the people at a conference on this told me this is an example of typical American salesmanship. Another student told me, “Europeans are used to having history.” Rather than selling everything as the next, new thing, the European attitude was to look for continuities, to look for connections. One could do a lot of interesting things with that, thinking about this American “frontier” mentality and moving on to the next thing, versus the European, post war, we-fought-each-other-so-now-we’ll-learn-to-get-along-with-each-other outlook. I think it’s too simple to put in those terms, although those are some of the ways that people are describing the field to me. You might also think about how language plays into that. The word Science is an English word, it comes from Middle French (via Latin) scientia, but the things that are included in science in the French context are larger than the things that count as “science” in the English context. There’s also a whole area of the “human sciences,” and we don’t really use that language in English, but that’s what the translation would be of the French term. There are things that would fit in there that may not fit under our concept. Or the German, wissenschaft, is literally translated as knowledge of craft or craft knowledge, which could also be much broader than just as what we think of as science in English. When we’re stuck in our own language, or a closely related language, that can affect what we think “science” is. And the further apart we go from our own language, the more different kinds of understandings there might be as to what counts as knowledge of the world, and how to access that knowledge. One of the things you might find frustrating about talking to me is that you might want me to proclaim how the world is.
SG: No, no.
Campos: One of the methodological principles for me as a historian is to always try to think outside of however I or the culture is thinking right now. Constantly moving outside of our own sureties, I think, is the useful thing that the history of science can offer us. SG: You do seem to constantly shift perspective, in some senses. There is no one perspective but rather multiple perspectives, and they are also always shifting. Campos: It’s not just to shift them for the sake of shifting them, but for what can we get from that. How do we see something that we might not see from another angle? And yet, because we’re historians, we’re not making it up. It all has to be based on evidence of some kind or another, that someone actually believes this or that. It’s not an “anything goes” type of mentality—but a lot more goes than you might think.