The last two decades have seen unprecedented growth in biologists’ capacity to reimagine and redesign living systems using technology—the fruit of a sustained effort to integrate information technologies into nearly every facet of laboratory life.
Join the DSI's Center for Data Ethics and Justice for a talk with Gaymon Bennett, Associate Professor at Arizona State University, on February 22, 2019, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., in Brooks Hall Commons. A reception will follow in Foyer.
Bennett will discuss the shift toward a digital biology that has been more than technical. It has been a shift requiring biologists to invent and adopt the habits and dispositions needed understand living things as informational processes. And that moral labor has not only opened up new scientific and technological possibilities, it has established new cultural connections between biology and high-tech more broadly.
It is a challenge that has involved more than better ontologies, semantics, or algorithms. It has involved asking a more fundamental question: how do we move from thinking about biology as information, to rethinking information biologically?
This talk will tell the story of one group of synthetic biologists facing that task—a group that set out to transform the lessons of computer engineering into a new biotechnology, and who, along the way, discovered a different feel for both the biological and the digital.