A Simpler Life

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.

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

In her ethnography of two synthetic biology laboratories at Princeton University, Dan-Cohen writes that synthetic biology is "the latest permutation in a history of mutual incursions between nature and culture, and a contested, heterogeneous, and unstable one at that

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.

Chunglin Kwa, University of Amsterdam, author of Styles of Knowing:

Talia Dan-Cohen will challenge her readers to rethink the very concept of scientific knowledge. An enjoyable and engaging read, A Simpler Life is a worthwhile anthropological text that engages with several very relevant literatures.

Nicolas Langlitz, The New School for Social Research, author of Chimpanzee Culture Wars:

A Simpler Life is laboratory ethnography at its best. The reader encounters a knowledge culture that creates biological life by deliberately ignoring its complexity and an author who steadfastly approaches both the hype and the alarmism surrounding synthetic biology from an angle, never failing to notice what more enthralled observers have missed.