“a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. “Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms of life and what materialities are coming to matter in the twenty-first-century life sciences,” according to Myers, and the book bears out this statement. Those forms of life and materialities emerge from kinesthetic and affective entanglements created and navigated by the scientists in the course of their modeling work. Understanding that work – in part thanks to a thoughtful exploration of the notion of “rendering” that unfolds over the course of the book – helps us understand the ways that scientific knowledge is fundamentally embodied and gestural, and refigures scientific cultures as performance cultures. -Carla Nappi
I belong to a facebook group called “Advanced Psychedelic Chemistry” which is a pretty limited group and has some absolute rockstar names attached like Dave Nichols, Bill Eichmann, Robert August and I’ll go further than this article and suggest that these guys are the Lands/Rezas of the biochem field, doing work that wont be even noticed or understood by the mainstream for decades. These guys are absolutely philosophers of mind and in my opinion deserve to be treated as such, they just speak a language even your average academic scientist doesn’t speak, in the vein of a truly out-there theoretico-structural kind of embodied maths/engineering/design. You have guys that have spent lifetimes designing totally novel molecular neurotransmitter-structures and testing them on themselves and each other, and many of them have done prison time for it, in some cases a lot. Sasha Shulgin’s horde of (amazingly legitimate) children.
very good I’m always more interested in results than pedigree, godz know we need some new ways of coping with what we have unleashed on the earth.