Rice University Press offers authors more

Rice University Press offers authors more
Readers can offer feedback to refine a book

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

By publishing their book through Rice University Press, authors Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett are able to work directly with readers to refine version 0.8 of “Ars Synthetica: Designs for Human Practice” for final publication.

This preliminary version of the book, made available through Rice University’s Connexions platform until March 2009, allows readers the chance to interact with the authors through a blog on the anthropology of the contemporary research laboratory. All feedback used in moving “Ars Synthetica 0.8” to final form will be fully acknowledged and detailed.

The two-stage publication of “Ars Synthetica” is an experiment. Readers are invited to read the book online and participate with the authors in refining it in preparation for final publication by Rice University Press both online and in print later in 2009.

“This is an exciting project for us,” said Fred Moody, Rice University Press editor-in-chief. “Not only are we honored to be publishing such stellar authors, but our digital model allows us to refine the work in full view of, and in collaboration with, its readers.”

“Ars Synthetica” analyzes emergent developments in postgenomic sciences, especially synthetic biology. In an invitation to readers to contribute, the authors said that the study of human sciences is finding itself in the same position and the challenge is to bring the emergent domains into collaboration.

“Today, the life sciences are being redesigned and recast with an eye to productive forms of experimentation and organization,” the authors said. “Postgenomics has seen the intensification of an engineering disposition in biology: understanding through making and remaking. Living systems, and their components, are being redesigned and refashioned.”

“Ars Synthetica” seeks to develop a diagnostic framework and ethical equipment for analyzing current practices among and across the life sciences and the human sciences. It represents a first attempt at providing a diagnostic for researchers and opening a debate about the ethics of inquiry.

Rabinow is professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley and author of many books, among them “Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary.”

Bennett is director of ethics at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center and co-author of “Sacred Cells? Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research.”