When Extracting Is Not Subtracting

Accounting for Organism-technologies as Stakeholders in Microbial Resource Extraction through an Experiment in Discursive Biomimicry

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5409840
AutoresErika Amethyst Szymanski (0000-0002-6321-8897, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen49
Número3
Páginas555-577
Fecha de publicación2024-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01622439211035449
OpenAlexW3185802175
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas52

This paper concerns how digitizing biological resources enables disentangling information technologies from biological bodies and, thus, from response-abilities among creatures from which they are derived. Extracting (digital) information from (biological) bodies makes it possible to stabilize, freeze, circulate, and control that information independently from creaturely activities-multiplying, not subtracting from the originating material. Such extractions tend to attenuate human interdependencies with other creatures even while expanding the scope of their utility as resources, to the effect of limiting those who have a stake in their development to humans alone. Where conventional natural resource extraction does violence to places and those interdependent with them, digital resource extractions may instead do violence to human capacities to recognize and act on multispecies interdependencies. Here, I argue that choosing to realize connections among organisms and organismal resources makes it possible to envision how creatures may be stakeholders in their own development, with joined ethical and epistemic consequences. I trace that possibility through a case study of the essential laboratory yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae via the physical metaphor of snowflake yeast, an S. cerevisiae variant that maintains multicellular connections as it reproduces

Biology · Creatures · Data science · Interdependence · Metaphor · Multicellular organism · Organism · Sociology · Computer Science · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Gene Regulatory Network Analysis · Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies