This little pathogen I’ve created now has a life of its own. Virality Vitality, on the subterfuges of reproduction and contagion, has just been published!. Unfortunately, only in hardcover for the time being (; if you’d like to read it just get in touch.

RT @bartlebytaco: massive.

Do I know anyone who's attending ISHPSSB? Or who just happens to be in Porto? Let's try to meet up.

Damn I really gotta finish Capital.

RT @spectraimsim: andrew cuomo actually put himself through college by running his father's failed 1977 mayoral campaign, which used the be….

In America, the only two jobs are prison guard or prisoner

My aim is to see the life sciences as deconstruction--their theoretical knowledge and practical mastery only takes place within contingent contexts that are destabilized by their own operations. Virality is one name for this expropriation of borders.

Our model of poliovirus was slightly revised, and he even patented a novel technique for attenuating viruses for vaccines. This is the only way the "new" emerges--as a failed replication.

Wimmer argued, against critics who said he was irresponsible, that he hadn't really done anything at all - merely actualized what everyone knew to be possible. Yet, against those who said it was a pointless publicity stunt, he pointed out that it provided new viral knowledge.

Far from an idle question, this has implications for the practice of public health--suspending a vaccination campaign once a disease is eradicated may only make its contagion more effective as a synthetic bioweapon.

Even fields of public health and epidemiology had to re-consider how they define viral eradication or extinction in light of this newly acknowledged possibility. If a virus can be "resurrected" from a computer database, is it ever really "extinct?".

Mail-order DNA synthesis companies began screening orders to try to prevent copycats from synthesizing their own bioweapons (even the companies themselves acknowledge this is not a fool-proof filter).

Even though the primary funder of this research was DARPA, many politicians called for new regulations of synthetic virology and biology to ward off national security risks, while scientists met to regulate themselves, trying to preempt external oversight.

When we re-think virology and virality on the basis of iterability, we can understand why an experiment that (according to the scientists performing it) demonstrated nothing new, nonetheless brought forward urgent political questions in every field it infected or touched on.

Because the apparent identity of the virus depends on its reproducibility or iterability, that identity is never fixed--every subsequent iteration can displace what seemed essential or intrinsic to it, and a site is always left open for parasitic or technological manipulation.

At the same time as we are confronted with this question, we come face-to-face with its unanswerability in principle. It is an arbitrary decision whether we say matter or information are literal or merely figurative viruses; yet, the pursuant practical concerns are no less urgent.

For a virologist such as Eckard Wimmer, synthesizing poliovirus brought forward the question: is a virus matter or information? Is it the "natural template" circulating as a strand of RNA, or is that sequence recorded in a computer database a true or literal virus?.

I take it in my book as an instance of deconstruction in and as the life sciences -- to many onlookers, this synthetic poliovirus appeared to demonstrate something already known and always true, yet, it shifted the ground under the feet of decisionmakers in numerous fields

It raised ponderous theoretical and ethical questions for scientists, while also provoking a panicked response from government officials concerned with regulating science and with national security, DNA-synthesis companies, epidemiologists, the media, and the public.

In 2002, a small group of virologists and biochemists synthesized infectious poliovirus from mail-order DNA fragments. I consider the implications of this experiment in the introduction of Virality Vitality /THREAD

Is this a joke? Why does it have perfect comedic timing.