from: http://labs.fhcrc.org/brent/people.html#Bennett

Gaymon Bennett - Senior Research Fellow   

Gaymon helped found and helps steer the Center for Biological Futures, where he is a senior research fellow. He holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Systematic Theology from the Graduate Theological Union. Gaymon’s PhD thesis in anthropology, Biofabrication: Experience and Experiments in Sciences and Ethics, provides an account of the ethical, affective, and scientific price to be paid for working within “synthetic biology.” His PhD thesis in theology, On the Care of Human Dignity, provides a critical analysis of how the figure of human dignity has become integral to ecclesial, political, and ethical thought and practice. Gaymon is co-author of Sacred Cells?: Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research and co-editor of The Evolution of Evil and Bridging Science and Religion.

Gaymon has conducted intensive experiments in how to design practices and venues needed for facilitating effectual inquiry into and engagement with contemporary biology. He is a Principal of the Anthropological Research on the Contemporary and a founding co-designer of the Human Practices experiment at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), a joint project of Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, UCSF, and Stanford. He led Human Practices at the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BIOFAB) at LBNL and UC Berkeley, and was a research fellow of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. His design work emphasizes collaborative and multi-sited empirical inquiry, a shift of emphasis from theory to disciplined concept work, and sustained attention to the micro-politics of knowledge production.

Gaymon uses the anthropological techniques of participant-observation to examine the purposes and rationales forming scientific activities and organizations today. His work is informed by the Greek concept of eudaemonia, sometimes translated as “flourishing.” His research asks to what extent the sciences are contributing to human flourishing, and, where they are not, what should or can be done?

This inquiry is oriented by a number of interrelated questions: How are new scientific objects (careers, modes of expertise, institutions, biological systems) brought into the world, named, and circulated? What capabilities must scientists and those working with scientists form in order to bring this about? How has scientific invention come to be framed and elaborated as “salvational,” that is, uniquely capable of saving lives, economies, and ecosystems? Finally, and crucially, what qualifies scientists and those working with them to think and act ethically and critically in relation to these framings of biological work?

At the CBF, Gaymon is developing three research projects. The Ethical Figure of Global Biotechnology will inquire into ethical framings of relations among bioengineering, global health, sustainability, and biosecurity; how these framings specify promises and dangers; and how they are currently being unsettled. Biology and the Ethics of Biosecurity will investigate how attempts to separate bioethics and biosecurity over the past 30 years have limited the modes through which ethical truth claims and capacities can be advanced. Biology and the Question of Pastoral Power will examine how religious denominations and organizations in the U.S. have responded to developments in biology, and how this has reconfigured the governance of science as well as the politics of religious practice.

Additionally, Gaymon is helping develop two projects in support of ethics pedagogy and critique. Ethical Equipment for Contemporary Science studies the habits, dispositions, and virtues needed to produce scientific work and capacities. One of its outputs will be a repertoire of ethics pedagogy modules formulated as guides to conducting inquiry and shaping its ramifications. Reconstructing the Sciences, developed in collaboration with the Anthropology Research Collaboratory at UC Berkeley, will provide an online critique of pressing questions, unresolved problems, and blind spots that accompany the drive of ambitious scientists and engineers to accumulate and consolidate the funding and status required for a competitive mode of operation.