This dissertation, based on roughly eighteen months of fieldwork in two laboratories at Princeton University, examines how practitioners of synthetic biology orient themselves vis-à-vis organic systems, by both engaging with and displacing biological knowledge. It also explores experimental methods in…

The limitations common to linear imaging techniques were formalized succinctly by Ernst Abbe in 1873. In his theory, each Fourier component of a signal propagates independently from the source to the detector, and the corresponding feature can be detected only…