Making and Knowing: On the Alleged First Principles of Bioscience and Biotechnology

Abstract

Practitioners and policymakers now speak freely of reasoning “from first principles” in bioscience and biotechnology. The phrase promises that beneath the disorderly surface of laboratory life lies a small set of foundational propositions from which the rest could be derived. This article finds that promise unfulfilled, though not therefore empty. Drawing on the historiography of the life sciences from the cell doctrine to contemporary genome engineering, I argue that what biologists call their first principles are better understood as elements of a Kuhnian disciplinary matrix: symbolic generalizations of narrow scope, shared models oscillating between heuristic and ontological status, community values, and above all exemplary achievements transmitted by apprenticeship rather than deduction. Three claims follow. First, the axiomatic ideal imported from mechanics has never fitted the life sciences, and its persistence in pedagogy conceals how biological knowledge is made. Second, biotechnology is not applied bioscience but a distinct enterprise, whose criterion of understanding is successful construction rather than representation and whose design principles are normative commitments rather than empirical discoveries. Third, the accumulating failure of those commitments constitutes an anomaly of the kind that historically precedes a reorganization of a field’s conceptual furniture, and the turn to statistical learning is best read as a symptom of it. The consequences reach the humanities and social sciences, since the governance of biotechnology has assumed a foundationalist picture of the science it regulates. Where principles are exemplars rather than axioms, the question of who belongs to the competent community is political rather than technical.