Bikinis and Other Atomic Incidents: The Synthetic Life of the Nuclear Pacific

This article examines a range of mid-twentieth-century American fashions, particularly women’s intimate wear, that went by the name of “bikini.” In doing so, it identifies the bikini as an overt but unremarkable incident of racial and colonial violence. Treating the nuclear Pacific as conspicuously incidental in mainstream atomic culture enables new insights on the visual interplay between white femininity and primitive sexuality—an interplay that, the author argues, was integral to establishing domestic virtue and modern living as atomic age touchstones of “peace.” To elaborate on this argument, this article tracks the bikini’s achievement of propriety within a broader fashion revolution spurred by the use of high-tech fibers in swim, sleep, and support garments. It shows how an atomic ideal of “nature” arose from an imperial desire for security in the face of extreme risk—both the global risk of nuclear war and the domestic risk of sexual promiscuity.

Xenobiology: An expanded semantical review

The definition of “xenobiology” has gradually shifted from the study of the foreign, estranged life forms potentially existing in outer space to the study where the natural and synthetic life are involved. The natural concept of xenobiology governs the unseen, hypothetical life on the outer space, and the hidden life with completely different biochemistry on Earth. The life on the outer space might possess different way to harvest energy from the one on Earth. The hidden life on Earth, or the “Shadow Biosphere” might rose from completely different way of creation and evolution on Earth, which lead to its complete difference from the known biosphere. The newest concept of xenobiology involves synthetic life, built with unnatural base pair of the nucleic acid, with analogous or xeno nucleic acid (XNA), has a synthetic genome which capable of self-replicating or enables the synthetic cell to self-replicate, or even possesses a synthetic physiological pathway. By understanding the broad spectrum of xenobiology, in both natural and synthetic concepts, we can expand our view on how life might develop into a completely estranged system, which is different from anthropocentric view of life available around us on Earth. From these perspectives, we might understand how life evolved by evolving it synthetically.

Synthetic Life and the Value of Life

If humans eventually attain the ability to create new life forms, how will it affect the value of life? This is one of several questions that can be sources of concern when discussing synthetic life, but is the concern justified? In an attempt to answer this question, I have analyzed some possible reasons why an ability to create synthetic life would threaten the value of life in general (that is, not just of the synthetic creations), to see if they really give us reason to worry. The main conclusion is that it is unlikely that a future human ability to create life will really have a great negative impact on these characteristics of life. It therefore seems unlikely that the value of life will be negatively affected by the ability to create synthetic life, though it is possible that the properties in question will be less salient in the synthetic life and thus that the value of the synthetic life will be lower than that of existing life, which in turn can lead to a disturbing difference in value between different kinds of life.

A Simpler Life

This book approaches the developing field of synthetic biology by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of practitioners in two labs at Princeton University. It highlights the distance between hyped technoscience and the more plodding and entrenched aspects of academic research. The book follows practitioners as they wrestle with experiments, attempt to publish research findings, and navigate the ins and outs of academic careers. It foregrounds the practices and rationalities of these pursuits that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life their distinctive contemporary forms. Rather than draw attention to avowed methodology, the book investigates some of the more subtle and tectonic practices that bring knowledge, doubt, and technological intervention into new configurations. In so doing, it sheds light on the more general conditions of contemporary academic technoscience.

Parasitic Behavior in Competing Chemically Fueled Reaction Cycles

Non-equilibrium reaction cycles serve as model systems of the intricate reaction networks of life. Rich and dynamic behavior is observed when such reaction cycles regulate assembly processes, such as phase separation. However, it remains unclear how the interplay between multiple reaction cycles affects the success of such assemblies. To tackle this question, we created a library of molecules that compete for a common fuel that transiently activates products. Often, the competition for fuel implies that a competitor decreases the lifetime of these products. However, in cases where the transient competitor product can phase separate, such a competitor can increase the survival time of one product. Moreover, in the presence of oscillatory fueling, the same mechanism reduces variations in the product concentration while the concentration variations of the competitor product are enhanced. Like a parasite, the product benefits from the protection of the host against deactivation and increases its robustness against fuel variations at the expense of the robustness of the host. Such a parasitic behavior in multiple fuel-driven reaction cycles represents a lifelike trait, paving the way for the bottom-up design of synthetic life.

Parasitic Behavior in Competing Chemically Fueled Reaction Cycles

Non-equilibrium reaction cycles serve as model systems of the intricate reaction networks of life. Rich and dynamic behavior is observed when such reaction cycles regulate assembly processes, such as phase separation. However, it remains unclear how the interplay between multiple reaction cycles affects the success of such assemblies. To tackle this question, we created a library of molecules that compete for a common fuel that transiently activates products. Often, the competition for fuel implies that a competitor decreases the lifetime of these products. However, in cases where the transient competitor product can phase separate, such a competitor can increase the survival time of one product. Moreover, in the presence of oscillatory fueling, the same mechanism reduces variations in the product concentration while the concentration variations of the competitor product are enhanced. Like a parasite, the product benefits from the protection of the host against deactivation and increases its robustness against fuel variations at the expense of the robustness of the host. Such a parasitic behavior in multiple fuel-driven reaction cycles represents a lifelike trait, paving the way for the bottom-up design of synthetic life.

Scaling laws in enzyme function reveal a new kind of biochemical universality

All life on Earth is unified by its use of a shared set of component chemical compounds and reactions, providing a detailed model for universal biochemistry. However, this notion of universality is specific to currently observed biochemistry and does not allow quantitative predictions about examples not yet observed. Here we introduce a more generalizable concept of biochemical universality, more akin to the kind of universality discussed in physics. Using annotated genomic datasets including an ensemble of 11955 metagenomes and 1282 archaea, 11759 bacteria and 200 eukaryotic taxa, we show how four of the major enzyme functions - the oxidoreductases, transferases, hydrolases and ligases - form universality classes with common scaling behavior in their relative abundances observed across the datasets. We verify these universal scaling laws are not explained by the presence of compounds, reactions and enzyme functions shared across all known examples of life. We also demonstrate how a consensus model for the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is consistent with predictions from these scaling laws, with the exception of ligases and transferases. Our results establish the existence of a new kind of biochemical universality, independent of the details of the component chemistry, with implications for guiding our search for missing biochemical diversity on Earth, or other for any biochemistries that might deviate from the exact chemical make-up of life as we know it, such as at the origins of life, in alien environments, or in the design of synthetic life.

Artificial life and ‘nature’s purposes’: The question of behavioral autonomy

This paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms.