Patrick Forterre, Louis d'Hendecourt, Christophe Malaterre et Marie-Christine Maurel, Da l’inerte au vivant. Une enquête scientifique et philosophique, La ville brûle Éditions, 2013
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2038-3460
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Francesca Merlin
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Patrick Forterre, Louis d'Hendecourt, Christophe Malaterre and Marie-Christine Maurel, From inert to living: a scientific and philosophical inquiry, La ville brûle Éditions, 2013
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
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Book Reviews
2016-01-29
2023-06-19
2016-01-29
2023-08-03
176-181
TS
Francesca Merlin
2015
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17266
176
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and CNRS
2038-3460
2
en
181
Patrick Forterre, Louis d'Hendecourt, Christophe Malaterre and Marie-Christine Maurel, From inert to living: a scientific and philosophical inquiry, La ville brûle Éditions, 2013
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6
Book Reviews                                                     Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

make them fit with the predominant classification system.
    A third theme is that of the silent bodies that build their voice organ-
izing in associations contributing to knowledge production and sharing,
recalcitrant bodies that do not fit in classification schemes that build their
legitimacy in the arena of medical experts. The last chapter of the book is
dedicated to Italian DSD associations and to the analysis of their role as
they gain respect and participate side by side with healthcare profession-
als. STS scholars will find significant resemblance with the body of work
on patients associations and, in particular, with the notion of “evidence
based activism” (Rabeharisoa et al. 2013) through which patients’ expert
knowledge is transformed into credentialed knowledge.
    These three themes are not just what might interest the STS communi-
ty but also some topics we hope the author will develop in forthcoming
publications.
    Let us take the last theme as an example. The book focuses only on
Italian associations but their relevance could emerge more clearly if com-
pared more extensively with international ones. Another theme that could
be further developed are the narratives of the patients which, presented
in the frame of medical congresses, lose part of their relevance becoming
somehow marginal. In more general terms, while we found the historical
part of the work accurate, the last sections of the book does no justice to
a 5-years ethnographic work. And we look forward reading more about it.

References
Bowker, G. and Star, S. L. (2000) Sorting things out: Classification and its conse-
      quences, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Mol, A. (2002) The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Durham, NC,
      Duke University Press.
Rabeharisoa, V.R. Moreira, T. and Akrich, M. (2014) Evidence-based activism:
      Patients’, users’ and activists’ groups in knowledge society, in “BioSocie-
      ties”, 9 (2), pp. 111–128.



                                      ***

   Patrick Forterre, Louis d'Hendecourt, Christophe
   Malaterre et Marie-Christine Maurel
Da l’inerte au vivant. Une enquête scientifique et philosophique [From
inert to living: a scientific and philosophical inquiry]. Paris: La ville
brûle Éditions, 2013, pp. 256
Francesca Merlin Université Paris 1Panthéon-Sorbonne and CNRS


!
Book Reviews                                                             177
     This book is quite original in its format. Published in French in the
Series “Collection 360” of the publisher “La ville brûle”, it explores the
multidisciplinary debate on the question of the origin of life, which is
both a philosophical and a scientific question. The general aim of this Se-
ries, directed by the journalist Sylvestre Huet, is to offer a plural insight
on various issues related to science and society through the direct con-
frontation of researchers in the natural and the human sciences. More
precisely, this Series relies on the idea that scientific questions concern
both knowledge and society, and are also a matter of economical and po-
litical power. Thus, by offering and crossing different perspectives on a
given issue, it aims at analysing the way science, man, and society work
together and influence each other.
     The director of “Collection 360”, Sylvestre Huet, directly participates
to the book reviewed here: he conducts a very successful interview of the
invited researchers and succeeds in highlighting the way their thoughts
and questions are connected and articulated. To address the question of
the origin of life, i.e., the passage from the inert matter to the living, he
invites four researchers: the molecular biologist Patrick Forterre, the as-
trophysicist Louis d’Hendecourt, the philosopher of science Christophe
Malaterre, and the biologist and biochemist Marie-Christine Maurel. The
diversity of disciplinary affiliations convened for the discussion is the di-
rect manifestation of the interdisciplinary character of the issue at stake:
the origin of life is an age-old problem, having received mythological or
religious answers in ancient times, which cannot hope today to be tackled
in the domain of just one discipline (whether it be biology, chemistry, as-
trophysics, philosophy, etc.).
     The structure of the book is particularly well-designed in order to
help the reader to gradually get accustomed to the debate on the origin of
life. In this respect, the book is suited to a varied and wide public: some
sections are rather technical, but the issues discussed and the general
message are easily accessible to any kind of reader. A section composed of
short biographies of the four authors opens the book (pp. 11–23). Each
of them speaks in the first person about his/her own career: this is a valu-
able way to provide to the general public, especially young scholars, an
idea of the reason why they wanted to get involved in scientific research,
of how they became scientists or philosophers, and to give a flavour of the
everyday life of people doing science or philosophy as a job. In the intro-
ductory section, the authors talk again about their intellectual and profes-
sional journey and extensively say why they have been interested in the
issue of the origin of life (pp. 25–37). This is also the place for giving a
historical overview of the way this issue has been addressed, from its
emergence as a scientific question at the end of the XVIIIth century to
current debates in various disciplines (organic chemistry, astrochemistry,
molecular biology, synthetic biology, etc.) on prebiotic chemistry, its fea-
tures, and its role in the evolution of living entities.
     The two wider sections – “The scientific debate” (pp. 39–147) and
!
Book Reviews                                                 Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

“The societal debate” (pp. 149–189) – constitute the core of the book.
The first is somewhat technical dealing with debates over the emergence
of life from prebiotic chemistry, the nature of chemical evolution and its
irreversibility, and various hypotheses about the primitive RNA world,
the origin of the genetic code, the evolution of cells and of LUCA (i.e.,
the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms). The second
deals with the management of interdisciplinary research about the origin
of life, its features and limits, and on the potential relevance of on-going
projects such as the exploration of Mars or other planets looking for wa-
ter. The book finishes with a short but effective conclusion, resuming the
main points of the scientific debate and its future challenges (pp. 191–
196). An appendix, a glossary, and reading lists suggested by the authors
usefully complete the volume (pp. 199–223). I think it is worth reading
this book because it offers a panoramic view on the research question of
the origin of life: it is a non-partisan introduction addressing multiple as-
pects of this interdisciplinary issue from diverse points of view.
    Let us focus on the core of the book, which covers in depth the main
issues researchers have to deal with when asking the question of the
origin of life. In the section “The scientific debate”, the four authors dis-
cuss in details the main historical and concurrent hypotheses about the
origin of life: they raise the question of the source of organic matter on
Earth, which could be exogenous (delivered by a meteorite) or endoge-
nous (present below the terrestrial magma); they introduce the controver-
sy about whether chemical evolution preceding life was Darwinian or not;
they exchange about the irreversibility of the evolutionary process at the
origin of life and on the contingency of its final current result; among
other research topics, they also discuss in details the hypothesis of an
original RNA world. Throughout all these discussions, two more general
issues, respectively a conceptual and a methodological one, are particular-
ly worth of consideration: the issue of the definition of life, and the issue
of the method used to address the question of the origin of life. Let us
look at each of them.
    As the philosopher of science Christophe Malaterre notices at the be-
ginning of the book (p. 26), the question of the origin of life, to get an an-
swer, requires that we know what life is. But the molecular biologist Pat-
rick Forterre replies that most of his colleagues are not interested in de-
fining life (pp. 44–45): it is a question for philosophers; biologists rather
prefer to be silent about it and assume that biological entities and pro-
cesses are living and the result of a historical evolutionary process on
Earth which is still going on. This divergence of interests, I maintain,
points not only to the difference between philosophy of science and sci-
ence but also, and mostly, to the kind of relationship between the two. Is
philosophical research useful for scientific practice when it consists in
clarifying and defining concepts used in science (e.g., life)? In the specific
case of the origin of life issue, what would biologists gain in adopting one
particular definition of life provided by philosophers of biology? Would
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Book Reviews                                                               179
this improve their work or, on the contrary, limit the potential scope and
development of their research? The book partly consists in a dialogue be-
tween philosophy and science, but does not clearly address all these ques-
tions. A deeper reflexion is needed, not only on the relationship between
philosophy of science and science, but also and primarily on what philos-
ophy of science is (philosophy of biology, in this case), and even should
be: is it different in nature with respect to science or does it produce the
same kind of knowledge than science? More explicitly, does philosophy
of science consist in a meta-reflection on scientific practice (its epistemic
standards and methods as well as its ethical and societal implications)? Or
rather, is it involved in the same fight as science, trying to solve scientific
puzzles in a more conceptual and theoretical way? These two ways of
conceiving philosophy of science are not necessarily incompatible, can
coexist, and are indeed both represented in the international community
of philosophers of science, in Europe as well as elsewhere. To adhere to
either of them is a matter of intellectual attitude about the very nature
and aim of the philosophical work.
    The other important issue emerging from this section is methodologi-
cal. As the biologist Patrick Forterre says again and again throughout the
book, two approaches are possible in order to investigate the origin of life
(e.g., see p. 69): the bottom-up and the top-down approaches. The first
consists in trying to recreate the initial conditions when Earth formed in
order to find out how organic materials could have accumulated and
formed molecular complexity. The second approach starts from the study
of currently living organisms and looks for fossils which could allow to go
backward into the past. As biologist, not surprisingly, Forterre adheres to
this second approach. Actually, the bottom-up and the top-down ap-
proaches characterize two different sets of disciplines represented in the
book: astrochemistry and prebiotic chemistry on the one hand; biological
disciplines on the other. Such a striking methodological difference comes
from the specific research objects of these disciplines: the chemistry of
inert prebiotic matter and living organisms, respectively. It is also due to
the emphasis biologists particularly put on the historical and contingent
character of the emergence of life, which can be seen as in conflict with
the strict regularity of physical and chemical laws. The main hope, ex-
pressed throughout the book, is that the bottom-up and the top-down
approaches will converge at some point to deliver a coherent account of
the origin of life.
    Despite this methodological divergence, later in the book all the au-
thors agree in claiming that synthetic biology does not really contribute to
research on the origin of life (pp. 122–132). It is a sort of extension of ge-
netic engineering whose objective it not to go back into the past but to
create new evolutionary paths by producing, by tinkering, organisms with
new features. Some research programs in synthetic biology also aim at
creating a minimal genome or cell, i.e., the minimal set of characteristics
common to all living organisms. However, again, this has nothing to do
!
Book Reviews                                                 Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

with the question of the origin of life on Earth because such researches
rely on current evolved features of life (DNA and, more specifically, the
set of genes characterizing currently living organisms). And even when
synthetic biologists try to create forms of life using chemical reactants that
probably already existed when life emerged, they do not pay much atten-
tion to the question of the original environmental conditions on Earth.
They rather create those conditions that are suitable for their reaction,
and so loose sight of the question of the origin of life.
    The other section constituting the core of the book, “The societal de-
bate” section, is worth reading because it raises general questions about
the current features of management of scientific research, in particular
the widespread call for interdisciplinarity. A recent issue of the interna-
tional journal Nature (17 September 2015) is devoted to this hot topic,
analysing its difficulties and advantages, and shares the book’s analysis in
this domain. The problem is that, even though interdisciplinarity has
been highly promoted by public and private funders for a few decades,
and despite the fact that the reasons why it should be promoted are clear
(no single scientific community owns the variety of expertise and skills
required to deal with multifaceted questions such as the origin of life is-
sue), interdisciplinarity seems more a fashion than a real scientific project
because of the way it is actually applied and perceived. First of all, few
researchers actually do interdisciplinary work, which means integrating,
rather than just juxtaposing, research in different disciplines on a given
topic. Moreover, when the interaction involves the natural and the human
sciences, the latter are too often dismissed and considered as having a
service role rather than a symmetrical and constructive one: this is not in-
terdisciplinarity at all! Last but not least, the few researchers involved in
interdisciplinary research are often blocked in their career precisely be-
cause they have scaled disciplinary walls and no instance exists to assess
their work and promote them. Moreover, interdisciplinarity undeniably
takes more time than disciplinary research because it involves people with
different intellectual backgrounds that are not used to work together, of-
ten talking a different language and using different research methods.
Hence, interdisciplinarity is unfit in the “publish or perish” system domi-
nating science today. So, I fully agree with the authors that this is an ur-
gent problem we all have to address, in particular in order to raise inter-
disciplinarity in science from a fashion to an actual team work tackling
and solving society’s main issues (such as climate change, the impact of
new technologies, research on cancer, but also other topics, such as sex
and gender issues).
    To conclude, I strongly recommend this book because it is perfectly
designed in order to deal with the interdisciplinary question of the origin
of life, which is both philosophical and scientific, and because of the in-
trinsic interest of this issue. If I were to mention a weak point of this
book, I would say that the only hitch is that it does not give enough em-
phasis to the economical and political aspects of scientific research on the
!
Book Reviews                                                              181
origin of life. This is unfortunate because of one of the objectives of the
Series “Collection 360”, which is to highlight that scientific questions are
also a matter of economical and political power. But this is just a trifle
compared to the many qualities of the book, most of all, the fact that it
raises urgent questions about how and why to promote and improve the
relationship between different sciences working on the same research top-
ic. These are timely questions because of the interdisciplinary character
several current issues addressed by the society: they concern all of us,
whether we are scientists or philosophers, and the lay man above all.


                                    ***


   Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds.)
Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures.
Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 292

Paolo Magaudda University of Padova
    !
    The collective book Signal Traffic, edited by North American scholars
Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, represents a noteworthy and stimulat-
ing effort to intersect the study of digital media with the STS-rooted ap-
proach of infrastructure studies. In this sense, the book enters a wider
space of convergence already under development during these last few
years. Indeed, recently we are assisting to the increasing interest in the
contamination between STS and a broad area involving media, communi-
cation and cultural studies. This has been the cases, for example, of the
book Media technologies, edited by Gillespie, Boczkowsky and Foot for
MIT Press in 2014 and of the workshop titled Roads Less Travelled. Ex-
ploring New Connections Between Media Research and STS, held at the
University of Siegen in February 2015 (see Sørensen and Schubert 2015).
Of course, this book adds a further significant contribution to this emerg-
ing space of convergence.
    Proceeding at the intersection between STS and media and cultural
studies, the aim of Signal Traffic is to enrich the study of digital media en-
vironment thinking to it in terms of “infrastructure”, thus considering
media primarily as “situated socio-technical systems that are designed and
configured to support the distribution of audiovisual signal traffic” (p. 4).
In their introduction, editors ask readers: “what can media studies gain
by adopting an infrastructural disposition?” and consequently the book
develops by considering several infrastructural dimensions in digital me-
dia technologies, including data centres, digital compression, Internet
protocols and environmental consequences of the media infrastructure
!
