When life is made to work against itself

This chapter explores how synthetic biology reconfigures the relationship between life, labor, and death using the example of Oxitec’s genetically engineered Friendly™ Aedes mosquitoes. Going beyond the conceptual limits of “bio-objects”, it advances the notion of “bio-hybrid objects” to capture organisms that remain irreducibly living while embodying technoscientific design and commodification. These organisms are engineered to labor metabolically toward their own elimination as a species. This paradoxical process is described as “metabolic death labor”. By harnessing metabolic and reproductive abilities for population suppression, this perspective challenges anthropocentric notions of labor and prompts a reconsideration of biopolitics beyond the human. Framing these developments within debates on animal labor, value theory, and necropolitics, the chapter argues that synthetic biology mechanizes death at the molecular level. What results is a form of vitality organized against itself, as life is reengineered to halt its own continuity, thereby producing a specific kind of value, “necrovalue”, while raising both bioethical and biopolitical questions about the futures of life that synthetic biology brings into being.