UC Berkeley

New Materials for Life Inter Vivos: Experimentation with Living Matter at the Biopolis-Dresden, Germany, is premised on extensive participant-observation with life and material scientists in German laboratories. It chronicles a historical and scientific situation taking shape around the conceptualization and constitution of new materials for life: biomaterials. These are man-made materials designed to interface more ably with living systems, and their application in tissue engineering, stem-cell technologies, and drug development increasingly drives the trajectory of ambitious research programs at the intersection of basic biology and translational medicine. Through the figure of the biomaterial, I demonstrate how shifting notions of life and inchoate techniques for its commercial fabrication reconfigure the relationship between the biological and chemical sciences as they endeavor to create new objects of potential value for emerging medical markets and therapeutic milieus. The dissertation attends to the interplay of incipient knowledges and technical practices in the experimental life and materials sciences, the scientists who practice them, and their equivocations regarding the existential and ethical stakes of their pursuits. It seeks, ultimately, to situate novel conceptions of and interventions into living matter within a renewed vision of German engineering and technology manufacture, one that is particular to Dresden’s political and economic history as well as its post-socialist urban and industrial revitalization. Finally, by attending to the new relationships being forged between the biological and chemical sciences, their technologies for manipulating living matter, and their evolving conceptions of life, I argue for an anthropological approach to life and science inter vivos—one conceived in the relations between laboratories, disciplines, and experimental forms of both embodied and disembodied life.