Overview

A Simpler Life approaches the developing field of synthetic biology by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of practitioners in two labs at Princeton University. It highlights the distance between hyped technoscience and the more plodding and entrenched aspects of academic research. Talia Dan-Cohen follows practitioners as they wrestle with experiments, attempt to publish research findings, and navigate the ins and outs of academic careers. Dan-Cohen foregrounds the practices and rationalities of these pursuits that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life their distinctive contemporary forms. Rather than draw attention to avowed methodology, A Simpler Life investigates some of the more subtle and tectonic practices that bring knowledge, doubt, and technological intervention into new configurations. In so doing, the book sheds light on the more general conditions of contemporary academic technoscience.

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9781501753442

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In her ethnographic study, conducted over a three-year period, Dan-Cohen followed two laboratories with widely differing technical and epistemological approaches working in a complex multidisciplinary and high-profile field. Observations and interviews included here catch the day-to-day action as principal investigators, post-docs, and students navigate successes and failures in the laboratory, face the challenges of publishing, and deal with the complexities of institutional politics. These accounts are both informative and entertaining. * Choice *

Author Information

Talia Dan-Cohen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is coauthor of A Machine to Make a Future.

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