Synthetic biology is still in its infancy, and so are our efforts to understand and evaluate its important philosophical implications. The articles in this issue illustrate, investigate, develop, and evaluate many of synthetic biology’s interdisciplinary interconnections. They report from the front lines of contemporary discussion. These essays convey many of the main open questions about synthetic biology’s research strategies, core concepts, and ethical implications, and they develop promising directions for future investigation.

Reflecting on synthetic biology is not only relevant to the field itself. It also helps clarify more fundamental aspects of biological research. The question of whether synthesis and analysis should be regarded as distinct methods, the assessment of the contributions of engineering approaches to huge-data science, and the interrelationship of making and understanding are all urgent to discuss as well with regard to other fields of bioscience. Answers with regard to synthetic biology should be double-checked with problems of other fields and disciplines. The ethical discussion about synthetic biology also has strong connections to and implications for more general ethical problems. For example, the discussion about a possible intrinsic value of synthetic organisms can hardly be ignored by any general discussion of intrinsic value, and any answer given for specific cases within synthetic biology will have implications for the general ethical discourse. So approaching the fundamental and philosophical issues of synthetic biology draws on the one hand on related debates from other fields of research, and it may on the other hand contribute to the methodology and ethics of and within science in general.

Information Studies as a discretely bounded field is a mere babe compared to other disciplines in science and social science. This study explicates many of the interconnections between Information Studies and other fields of research, drawing on contemporary discourse. A mixed-methods approach highlights the flow of theory, method, and thinkers over time and across a vast philosophical and tktk geography, culminating in the creation of a network of information schools, iSchools. The manner in which each iSchool took shape and became known for particular emphasis and expertise represents the ongoing evolution of a field that has immense implications for improving tktktk information  tktktk