The limits of design, and what is flourishing?

Marlee Tichenor interviewed me on Thursday as part of the Ars Synthetica project. In layperson's terms, I did my best to describe synthetic biology, iGEM, my roles and responsibilities, a typical day, etc. Then Marlee asked the three or four 30,000-foot questions that I knew were coming but had not yet seriously pondered. The questions seemed more philosophically interesting to be asked of research practitioners than me. But with the camera rolling and everything, I had to say something interesting, right? I was surprised by my own responses (if somewhat coarsely delivered) to two questions:

1. Are there limits to what we can design? "No" is the answer I came to. Much or most scientific progress proceeds along the conventional path of the scientist observing a system, hypothesizing an explanation to phenomenon, testing that hypothesis, integrating the new and existing knowledge into new theory, and then subjecting the new theory to the broader scientific community's scrutiny. Yet, there are some famous examples of fortuitous discoveries in the history of science that have not taken such a directed path, including Pasteur's vaccines against infectious disease, Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, and Galvani's discovery of the electrical basis of nerve signal transduction. For this reason, I think that future design has no practical limits because it is beyond what we can currently anticipate. At any given moment, designers can build new objects only in response to a known system. Yet the designed objects themselves will reveal new understandings of the system, and reveal unanticipated opporunities. In turn, the design process recycles. In this sense, design is not even limited by human imagination.

2. What is flourishing? My short answer was something like, "When the most people are engaged in meaningful activities." It just made gut-sense to me that I am flourishing when I get up in the morning and can work on a meaningful project. Then Marlee pressed me to explain what I meant by "meaningful." That was harder to answer, but I came around to the somewhat straightforward view that something's meaningfulness roughly relates to the number of people to whom something is meaningful. It might be meaningful today or in a thousand years, but the meaning has practical importance or utility to a large number of people. To take synthetic biology as an example, the field has a "democratic potential" for enabling researchers around the world to create local solutions to global challenges. Synbio might mean clean water in Africa, biojetfuel in the US, and information systems in Japan (pardon the canned examples). If a single scientific discipline can mean all of these things to all of these people, then I would say that it is very meaningful, and to engage in such a discipline is to flourish.

My ideas are still forming on these imposing questions, but I think I stumbled upon some good starting points.