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Short abstract:

How have the computational and quantum turns shaped our understanding of the domain of biology, and in turn contributed to the claim that modern rule has turned molecular.

Long abstract:

Our understanding of life, including both our place in and relationship to the natural world, is profoundly shaped by contemporary bio-scientific epistemologies and technological capacities - factors that shift and evolve over time. In the past few decades new and emerging science and technologies have radically changed - allowing us to observe, measure and manipulate biological phenomena and processes in unprecedented ways and scales. In this talk, we will explore how two of these novel trajectories of this century- the computational turn in biology and quantum-enabled biotech - have emerged and are reshaping our understanding of biology and our place in the world. In doing so, we anticipate focusing on the following issues - the role of new technologies in shaping bioscience, the emergence of new interdisciplinary and disciplinary collaborations in science, and the political economic consequences of these significant shifts. We question whether the application of these new emerging technologies to the study of biology represent a radical turn or merely a shift in scale and, if so, what might be the implications of such a shift.