What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies
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Helmreich_What was_Summer 2012.pdf
Size
2.45 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
139581dfa30ce746855f88097539d843
Author(s)
Helmreich, Stefan
Date Issued
2011
Journal
Critical Inquiry
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
Citation
Helmreich, Stefan. “What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies.” Critical Inquiry 37.4 (2011): 671–696. © 2011 by The University of Chicago
Version
Final published version
Abstract
What is life? A gathering consensus in anthropology, science studies, and philosophy of biology suggests that the theoretical object of biology, “life,” is today in transformation, if not dissolution. Proliferating reproductive technologies, along with genomic reshufflings of biomatter in such practices as cloning, have unwound the facts of life.1 Biotechnology, biodiversity, bioprospecting, biosecurity, biotransfer, and molecularized biopolitics draw novel lines of property and protection around organisms and their elements.2 From cultural theorists and historians of science we learn that life itself, consolidated as the object of biology around 1800, has morphed as material components of living things—cells and genes—that are rearranged and dispersed, and frozen, amplified, and exchanged within and across laboratories.3 Writers in philosophy, rhetoric, and cultural studies, meanwhile, claim that, as life has become the target of digital simulation and bioinformatic representation, it has become virtual, mediated, and multiple.4
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1086/660987
