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Short abstract

Conferences can be important sites of governance in the life sciences. In this presentation, we draw on real and speculative ethnography of meetings to explore how the past haunts the present and future of engineering life.

Long abstract

Inspired by the incredible diversity of organisms found in the fossil bed of the Burgess Shale, Stephen J. Gould argued for the importance of historical contingency for life on Earth. Synthetic biologists today cite his work to motivate their attempts to construct novel forms of life unconstrained by historical processes. These bold ambitions inevitably give rise to discussions of governance, which in the life sciences usually lead back to the Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA. In this presentation we explore conferences as sites of governance. As well as discussing meetings we have attended, we engage in ‘speculative ethnography’ to imagine what would have happened if we had been invited to the Asilomar meeting in 1975, and to an Asilomar-inspired meeting on synthetic genomics that has not yet happened at a castle in Tuscany. In all these examples, we explore how the past haunts the present and future of engineering life. We end by asking if it is possible to create spaces that allow people to gather to discuss developments in the life sciences that do not merely replay the meetings of the past.