Introduction to the Symposium on Synthetic Life

On behalf of the editors of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, I am pleased to introduce the editors and venue of the Symposium on Synthetic Life: Scientific, Historical, and Ethical Perspectives, which occupies much of the current issue of our journal. We are very pleased that Professors Ute Deichmann, Michel Morange, and Anthony S. Travis planned, organized, and edited the proceedings of the workshop on this topic, held on March 5-6, 2012, at the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and the NIBN at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel.

Professor Deichmann has been the founding director of the Centre since it was created in 2007. Although she trained in biology in Germany, most of her career has been devoted to the history of fundamental life science research during the last century, especially in Europe and including the dreadful periods before and during the Second World War. The Centre (as described in a bit more detail below) has become one of the few institutions in the world devoted to a systematic study of the transformations during the last century of those aspects of biology that might in their entirety be termed molecular biology.

On the most general level, these transformations occurred in the context of the transition from the vague colloid theories at the beginning of the last century to analyses of specific molecules during the last several decades. Indeed, to understand the origins of molecular biology, and thus much of the current excitement in the life sciences and even medicine, one must know the several threads of structural and genetic analyses that came together as molecular biology in the mid-1950s and that have flourished since. It is the thesis of the symposium presented in the papers in this issue of Perspectives that further philosophical syntheses are now underway, including with synthetic chemistry to create the fields of synthetic biology and even synthetic life. This is analogous to the syntheses occurring with physiology that have led to what is generally termed systems biology.

Professor Morange is Professor of Biology and Director of the Centre Cavaillès for history and philosophy of science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and was trained initially in molecular biology. In the last two decades he has published several very well received books on the history of molecular biology, especially of the concept of genes, and on the history of science more generally. Professor Travis is interested in the history of chemistry and technology and has long been associated with the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Jacques Loeb Centre, and the Leo Baeck Institute in London. Thus the three editors bring very important and complementary perspectives to these issues.

The Jacques Loeb Centre (http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/loeb/Pages/default.aspx) honors in its name the German-American physiologist who lived from 1859 to 1924 and from whom Professor Deichmann and her colleagues rightly trace the concepts that were the fundamental basis of the application of physical-chemical ideas and methods to biology during the last century. This work led to the complete replacement of the vitalistic approaches with the mechanistic tradition that we now accept with few second thoughts in fields ranging from evolution to medicine. In her writings, and in the focus of the work of the Centre, Professor Deichmann has traced the specific questions and controversies that constitute this history, including in the work of other pioneers, especially during the first half of the last century. Her paper on the contributions of Leonor Michaelis during this period is published as a special addition to this issue of Perspectives.

The workshop proceedings published here are the fifth in a yearly series at the Centre. The titles of the others will give an idea of the scope of their enterprise: Philosophies in Biology (2008); Darwinism and Functional Biology, Other Sciences, and the Humanities (2009); Evolutionary-Developmental Biology: The Evolution of the Fields and Prospects for Future Developments (2010...