Biodesign is an emerging field integrating design and science; its rise necessitates a reassessment of educational paths and working spaces for cross-disciplinary explorations, such as working with living materials and adhering to safety standards. The article examines laboratory environments dedicated to biodesign practice and education, varying from low-tech to high-tech setups and from university to community spaces, aiming to clarify the role of workspaces and infrastructures in supporting transdisciplinary research between design and science.

We surveyed Biodesign Laboratories worldwide, addressing the current status quo of various lab configurations and their unique spatial typologies to accommodate biodesign’s hybrid nature.

The result is an overview of the socio-technical topos of the laboratory as a literal breeding ground for (future) biodesigners. The qualitative data reported in this article aim to enhance the understanding of Biodesign Labs by analysing the potential of various laboratory configurations to accommodate biodesign’s hybrid nature, potentially developing unique spatial typologies.

This review explores contributions by science policy studies and the sociology of science to our understanding of the impact of governance on research content. Contributions are subsumed under two perspectives, namely an “impact of”—perspective that searches for effects of specific governance arrangements and an “impact on”—perspective that asks what factors contribute to the construction of research content and includes governance among them. Our review shows that little is known so far about the impact of governance on knowledge content. A research agenda does not necessarily need to include additional empirical phenomena but must address the macro-micro-macro link inherent to the question in its full complexity, and systematically exploit comparative approaches in order to establish causality. This requires interdisciplinary collaboration between science policy studies, the sociology of science, and bibliometrics, which all can contribute to the necessary analytical toolbox.

Crossed-beam experiments on the reactions of cyano CN(X2Σ+) and ethinyl C2H(X2Σ+) radicals with the unsaturated hydrocarbons acetylene, ethylene, methylacetylene allene and benzene have been carried out under single-collision conditions to investigate synthetic routes to form nitriles, polyynes and substituted allenes in hydrocarbon-rich atmospheres of planets and their moons. All reactions were found to proceed without an entrance barrier, to have exit barriers well below the energy of the reactant molecules and to be strongly exothermic. The predominant identification of the radical versus atomic hydrogen exchange channel makes these reactions compelling candidates for the formation of complex organic chemicals – precursors to biologically important amino acids – in Solar system environments and in the interstellar medium.