Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds
Luis A. Campos, Michael R. Dietrich, Tiago Saraiva, and Christian C. Young
Abstract
“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms, to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade ... More
“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms, to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.
Keywords:
history of biology,
engineering,
biology,
environmental history,
genetic engineering
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226783260 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Luis A. Campos, editor
University of New Mexico
Michael R. Dietrich, editor
University of Pittsburgh
Tiago Saraiva, editor
Drexel University
Christian C. Young, editor
Alverno College
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