Café Synthetique

Café Synthetique is a meetup for the Cambridge synthetic and engineering biology community with informal talks, discussion and pub snacks. Speakers range from students and group leaders to industry professionals and entrepreneurs.

On Monday 6 July, we will welcome talks from Yuning Chen, Noam Prywes and short lightning talks from The Royal Society and CCA Ltd. Talks will start 6pm prompt.

"More-than-human labour and resistance in the political economy of biotechnology"

Yuning Chen, Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh

When a cell line dies unexpectedly, a culture refuses to grow, or an organism mutates off-script, we call it a failed experiment, but what if we are reading it wrong? What if we see organism failure, death and mutations as signs of unrest and resistance rather than accidents and problems to solve? This talk introduces two research projects that take that question seriously, exploring the politics of living labour in biotechnology through speculative and critical design. Microbial Revolt is a speculative design workshop in the spirit of Chindogu, the 90s anti-consumerist design of the deliberately useless object. Researchers are guided to transform their lab tools into futile devices that assist their organisms' revolt, then reflect on the epistemic cultures, power dynamics and forms of care that bind biology and design. Labour Provenance then conducts a census of more-than-human labourers embedded in everyday lab tools such as reagents, gene editing tools and culture media. Drawing on Marxist theory of value, the project analyses their structural positions and labour conditions as a distinct class within systems of biological production.

Bio: Yuning Chen is a PhD candidate working at the intersection of design, Science and Technologies Studies (STS) and engineering biology at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research looks into more-than-human ethics and politics in designing with the living, with a particular focus on the notion of labour and resistance. Through methods of research through design, laboratory ethnography and critical design, she studied the power relations between human and lab organisms consolidated in tools, spaces and regulations as well as the hidden living labour embedded in biotech supply chains. Extending labour theory into the realm of microbes, plants and the broader ecologies implicated in biodesign, she analysed the structural positions and levels of subsumption of living organisms within systems of biocapital extraction.

"Rubisco enzymology at scale"

Noam Prywes, Biochemistry, University of Cambridge

Plants, algae and cyanobacteria remove ~150 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year. One enzyme, rubisco, is solely responsible for the carboxylation chemistry that ultimately feeds nearly all of the life on our planet. Engineering efforts in the past have yielded limited results. New, high-throughput enzymology methods to map out the fitness landscape of rubisco in order to study its evolution and for engineering purposes are becoming available. I will describe some preliminary work in this area.

"Future of Food"
Jonny Hazell, The Royal Society

The Royal Society’s science policy team is undertaking a project on the Future of Food, which will explore the role of science and technology across global food systems to 2100. This talk will provide a summary of some of the emergent findings to enable attendees to comment on them and get involved in the project if they’re interested.

CCA Labs: End-to-end biological experiment automation platform
Salavat Magazov, Cell Culture Automation Ltd  

Places are limited to 35. Please sign up here with full name and affiliation.

For questions or queries please contact Vicky Reid at vr314@cam.ac.uk