Abstract
While self-organization has been an integral part of academic discussions about the distinctive features of living organisms, at least since Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the term ‘self-assembly’ has only been used for a few decades as it became a hot research topic with the emergence of nanotechnology. Could it be considered as an attempt at reducing vital organization to a sort of assembly line of molecules? Considering the context of research on self-assembly I argue that the shift of attention from self-organization to self-assembly does not really challenge the boundary between chemistry and biology. Self-assembly was first and foremost investigated in an engineering context as a strategy for manufacturing without human intervention and did not raise new perspectives on the emergence of vital organization itself. However self-assembly implies metaphysical assumptions that this paper tries to disentangle. It first describes the emergence of self-assembly as a research field in the context of materials science and nanotechnology. The second section outlines the metaphysical implications and will emphasize a sharp contrast between the ontology underlying two practices of self-assembly developed under the umbrella of synthetic biology. And unexpectedly, we shall see that chemists are less on the reductionist side than most synthetic biologists. Finally, the third section ventures some reflections on the kind of design involved in self-assembly practices.
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Notes
The phrase ‘soft chemistry’ (chimie douce in French) has been coined in a programmatic tone by Jacques Livage “Vers une chimie écologique” Le Monde, 26 October 1977 where he formulated the question: “will it be possible to invent a soft chemistry would be harmoniously integrated in natural processes?”
Maureen O’Malley (2009) has rightly emphasized the gap between this self-representation of a number of synthetic biologists and their actual engineering practice, which involves a lot of kludging.
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Vincent, B.B. From self-organization to self-assembly: a new materialism?. HPLS 38, 1 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0108-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0108-z