Conjuring Machinic Life

Abstract

“Captured” in the hands of twenty-first-century structural biologists, “life itself” is taking on new form. The current trend towards molecularization in the life sciences is revealing that “life itself” is denser than the one-dimensional logic of a genetic code: it has a multidimensional material body, and its molecular structures, forces, and movements carry out the regulated work of the cell. Researchers are no longer satisfied reducing the organism to the coding systems embedded in computer software (e.g. Harrison, 2004); the organism now has a mechanical architecture, and its molecular mechanisms have come to resemble the many kinds of machines with which we currently live and work (see also Keller 1995; Fujimura 2005). These include electronic circuitry, and the levers, switches, hinges, springs, locks, and clamps of modern day mechanical devices. These are the molecular machines that populate what is fast becoming the factory-floor of the cell...