An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Startling new developments in “gene editing” have raised profound issues regarding changing and enhancing existing life, creating new life forms, and the origin of life. At the same time, contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of synthetic biology are getting particularly “close to life” today.

These issues will be explored at the Newkirk Center for Science and Society’s Gene Editing, Artificial Life and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium being held in conjunction with the opening of the Wetware: Art/Agency/Animation exhibit at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, with the cooperation of the Center for Complex Biological Systems.

The symposium will explore issues surrounding the emerging field of synthetic biology in an era in which so-called “limit biologies,” as anthropologist Stefan Helmreich puts it, “come with the promise to reboot the life sciences.”