Petri Turunen (University of Helsinki)
The poster outlines a four-year empirical investigation into a synthetic biology (BIO, EBRC, Elowitz 2010, Morange 2009) consortium. The focus of the investigation was on how scientists in a highly interdisciplinary research consortium deal with interdisciplinary hurdles. In particular, we studied how the scientists communicated with each other when they were trying to explain issues related their field of expertise. What kind representational strategies were used? Which ones were successful?
Synthetic biology was chosen as the target field for this investigation for two reasons. Firstly, synthetic biology is a particularly interdisciplinary field that brings together, among others, biologists, engineers, physicist and computer scientists. Secondly, synthetic biology is still a relatively new field of study. It does not yet have a clear disciplinary identity nor well regimented methodological principles. Since synthetic biology is still largely in the process of negotiating its practices it provides a particularly good case for studying how interdisciplinary practices get negotiated in actual practice.
Our focus was on representational strategies, because our empirical case was particularly suited for observing them. We followed an interdisciplinary consortium made out of three separate groups with differing backgrounds ranging from industrial biotechnology and molecular plant biology to quantum many-body systems. We were given permission to observe consortium meetings, where the three different groups came together and shared their findings. These meetings made the representational strategies used by the scientists particularly visible, since their severe time constraints and discursive format forced the scientists to think carefully on how to present their findings.
We followed and taped these consortium meetings. In addition, we performed more targeted personal interviews. Based on these materials we made the following general observations:
1. Interdisciplinary-distance promoted more variance in the use of differing representational means. That is, the bigger the difference in disciplinary background, the less standardized the communication.
2. Demands for concreteness varied: more biologically inclined researchers wanted connections to concrete biological systems where as the more engineering-oriented researchers wanted input on what sort of general biological features would be useful to model. Both aspects related to the model-target connection but imposed different demands on what was relevant for establishing that connection.
3. Interdisciplinary distance promoted the use of more schematic and general representations.
Interdisciplinary distance was thus related to noticeable differences in the utilized representational strategies. All three observations also suggest that the scientists are not merely transmitting content but are instead trying to construct suitable representational contexts for that content to be transmissible.. That is, scientists are performing a kind of contextual engineering-work. Philosophically the interesting question then becomes: how exactly is content related to its representational context?
