Petroleum Replicas

The language of innovation often stresses disruption --eliminating inefficient industries and replacing them with more streamlined, technologically advanced versions. Nowhere is disruption more complex and important than in the energy industry, with implications for so much of the way that we live, affecting global industry, economics, and climate. A major focus of synthetic biology today is the design and production of biofuels, to disrupt the current practices of oil extraction and edge towards a more carbon-netural energy future. Biofuels have to disrupt not only the intricate complexity of cellular metabolic networks, but also the complex political, economic, and technological networks of global energy production. In the words of sociologist of science Adrian Mackenzie , "Biofuels, as it turns out, are extraordinarily messy entities to think with."In his recent paper "Synthetic biology and the technicity of biofuels" in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences , Mackenzie looks at three startup companies in the biofuels industry-- Synthetic Genomics , Amyris , and Joule Unlimited --as case studies of how synthetic biology and biofuels "come into being, change and endure", asking "how does synthetic biology translate a potential technical object into an actual technical object?" [More]