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Paper short abstract

Synthetic biology destabilizes the category of the non-human by producing living technical objects: organisms dependent on human sociotechnical networks. Drawing on ethnography in biotechnology labs, this paper proposes the notion of anthropogenic creatures to rethink the human/non-human divide.

Paper long abstract

The category of the non-human and its conceptual offshoots have become central to the study of science and technology. Developments in synthetic biology, however, unsettle the stability of this category by producing organisms whose existence depends on human sociotechnical arrangements. To reconsider the onto-epistemological divide between humans and non-humans, this paper introduces the notion of anthropogenic creatures: beings that retain a degree of autonomy while emerging entirely from human practices.

Based on ethnographic research on human–nonhuman entanglements in synthetic biology laboratories, as well as interviews with researchers, this paper examines how fungi, bacteria, and insects designed to serve economic goals emerge as living technical objects. Supplementing established STS concepts such as black-boxing and punctualization (Callon 1991; Law 1992) with Simondon’s analysis of individuation (1958), Badiou’s notion of count-as-one (1988), and Landecker’s attention to anthropogenic biology (2025), this paper approaches biotechnology as a platform for the production of beings that lie neither inside nor outside the conventional boundaries of humanity.

Anthropogenic creatures’ continued existence depends on chains of interdependence linking organisms, environments, technical infrastructures, and labor. Their production unfolds through shifting units of attention and care, as genes, organisms, and populations are successively stabilized as singular entities within experimental practice. The resulting account complicates the distinctions such as autonomy and dependence, naturalness and fabrication, by showing how non-humans can be human fabrications without being reducible to artifacts. The human/non-human divide appears less as a given ontological boundary than as the outcome of situated operations through which beings are counted and differentiated.