“The artificial cell puts two visions of what living things into tension”

2023-06-12 17:15:03

Philippe Huneman, CNRS research director at the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (CNRS/Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne University), specializes in the philosophy of biology.

What does a philosopher find interesting in the study of artificial cells?

There is an easy way to answer, because when you do philosophy, especially in the field of biology, questions like “what is the essence of…?” are natural. With “artificial cell” or even “artificial life”, the interest comes immediately because these syntagms are intriguing. By definition, life is not artificial, and vice versa!

These concepts also renew a classic question in biology, which is the study of the relationship between raw matter and life, which we find for example when we question the emergence relationships between brain and thought. There, it would rather be to see how this fabrication of the living can help to understand the phenomenon of emergence. This subject also raises many ethical and political questions.

Which ones?

Like any manipulation of living matter, for example GMOs, there are general ethical questions, concerning the precautionary principle which should prevail if one does not know how to assess the risks, or else the frightening uses of technologies in countries with low regulation, as seen in China with Crispr-Cas9 modified human babies.

But there is also this particular question: what would happen if these artificial cells were released into the wild? To simplify a bit, there are two different ways to answer, depending on whether you listen to evolutionists or molecular biologists. The latter see the living as a kind of machine, which can be repaired, improved, and whose risks can be controlled and prevented from spreading in nature. The former are sensitive to the incessant genetic variations and will say that by dint of variations the organisms always end up undoing the imposed constraints. We can also say that these debates are science fiction, because these objects do not yet exist. But thinking about it in advance would still be a good idea.

And would there also be political questions?

Yes, because some proponents of artificial cells have in mind applications that are supposed to solve the issue of global warming, for example by building cell walls that would be fantastic carbon sinks. However, as is often the case with this technological solutionism, we neutralize the more political questions: a problem that has a political cause, such as global warming, cannot be treated with technology alone.

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