Of looping kinds and unruly objects: the conceptual making of organoids

Abstract

Although the traditional approach within ELSA (Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) initiatives is to have certain kinds of objects “set” or ready to be governed within bioethics, I will claim that the established regime of bioethics and bio law act as governance while influencing the conceptualization of the entities at play, in this example, the organoids. As a small contrast case to making organoids, I will use the regulation and categorization of embryonic research as a more “natural kind” entity research compared to conceptually synthetic research, where the objects to be regulated are shaped by existing practices of language and material alike. While analyzing the conceptual making of the organoids, I will follow the general methodological framework of Ian Hacking in Social Construction of What? (1999) from philosophy of science, particularly his understanding of “looping kinds”. And since Hacking’s understanding of looping kinds is in a relatively vague formulation, I will supply with different structures within co – productionist account of science and technology studies, most notably of works of Jasonoff (2015) of co-productionist accounts and Bensaude – Vincent’s concept of “buzzword coalitions” (2014) in the making of conceptual coalition around organoids. I will use the structure of scientific objects to assign different uses of parts of concepts in the making.