The escalating politics of ‘Big Biology’

Abstract

As the history of twentieth-century science suggests, controversies about ‘Big Science’ are vehicles for rethinking the relationship between science and society. Behind arguments about size, scale or enhanced coordination, with all their managerial undertones, lie deepseated commitments to alternative visions of the political organization of knowledge production. The experiments in large-scale biology discussed in this collection are thus best seen as ‘constitutional moments’ (Jasanoff, 2011), occasions when the challenge of creating new and extended research collectives forces an explication of the links between technical practices, organizational architectures and ethical imaginaries. As these articles make clear, however, constitutional moments in the contemporary life sciences come in many shapes and forms. A healthy degree of scepticism towards claims of scale, speed or novelty runs through this special section, and helps qualify many of the most hyperbolic arguments about the nature and consequences of large biological research projects. The very category of ‘big biology’, the editors point out, “is in question from the start”. And yet, all the contributors describe processes of escalation (if not always the ‘scaling up’ of things). They are concerned, that is, with an amplification of the political reflexivity of the scientific enterprise, brought about by the expansion, intensification or acceleration of research efforts. What can we glean from these case studies, then, about the evolving constitution of the life sciences in an era of large data infrastructures and a seemingly relentless push towards greater and faster circulation of informational and biological materials? The following are some open-ended reflections prompted by the many insights that crisscross this collection.