Mackenzie, AdrianWaterton, ClaireEllis, RebeccaFrow, Emma K.McNally, RuthBusch, LawrenceWynne, Brian2025-05-302025-05-300162-2439ORCID:/0000-0002-2174-4645/work/163628335http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84881153954&partnerID=8YFLogxKhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/733755113Recent accounts of "the biological" emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.22enbiologyinfrastructuresproteomicspublicsstandardssynthetic biologytaxonomy201310.1177/016224391247432484881153954