What can’t freezing hold still? This article surveys the history of substances used to protect ce... more What can’t freezing hold still? This article surveys the history of substances used to protect cells and organisms from freezing damage, known as cryoprotectants. Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) has since 1959 been the most widely used of these agents in cryopreservation. Here, its evolution from pulp and paper waste byproduct to wonder drug to all-but-invisible routine element of freezing protocols is used to trace the direct arc from protection to toxicity in theories of how and why cryoprotectants work, from the 1960s to today. The power of these agents to simultaneously protect and degrade is shown to reside in manipulation of chemical time via hydrogen bonding and electron exchange, thereby reframing freezing as a highly active and transformational process. Countering long-held assumptions about cryopreservation as an operation of stasis after which the thawed entity is the same as it was before, this article details recent demonstrations of effects of cryoprotectant exposure that are nonlethal but nonetheless profoundly impactful within scientific and therapeutic practices that depend on freezing infrastructures. Understanding the operationalization of chemical time in the case of cryoprotectants is broadly relevant to other modern technologies dedicated to shifting how material things exist and persist in human historical time.
In vitro gametogenesis (IVG), the reconstitution of germ cell development in vitro, is an emergin... more In vitro gametogenesis (IVG), the reconstitution of germ cell development in vitro, is an emerging stem cell-based technology with profound implications for reproductive science. Despite researchers’ long-term goals for future clinical applications, little is currently known about the views of IVG held by the stakeholders potentially most affected by its introduction in humans. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 80 individuals with lived experience of infertility and/or LGBTQ+ family formation in the US, two intersecting groups of potential IVG users. Respondents expressed hope that IVG would lead to higher reproductive success than current assisted reproductive technology (ART), alleviate suffering associated with ART use, and promote greater social inclusion, while expressing concerns predominantly framed in terms of equity and safety. These findings underscore the importance of sustained engagement with stakeholders with relevant experience to anticipate the implications of IVG for research and clinical translation.
Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2024
Abstract: Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseas... more Abstract: Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseases prevalent in industrialized countries, including mental, metabolic, and post-viral conditions. For sociologists, the rise of inflammation in explanatory models of chronic disease is an opportunity to grasp a historical shift in thinking about how society gets under the skin as new modes of conceptualization of the relationship between societies and bodies emerge in this domain. Highlighting two historical conjunctures between epidemiology and molecular biology concerning hormones and fat, this paper thereby contrasts an older cybernetic model of the social as a signal transduced via the brain and hormonal signaling system to become a biological accretion of stress or adversity with an explanatory trajectory centered on chronic inflammation. Rather than transducing the social environment, the inflammatory body emerging from the studies of adiposity and diabetes is produced by metabolizing material and psychosocial conditions. Inequalities in the social world are thereby reflected as inflammatory states that exist upstream of, not downstream to, the kinds of social signals previously deemed important to health and health disparities. Signals still matter, but they are not their own key determinant in terms of action or impact – that is a contextual matter within the chronicity of the processual metabolic life of a cellular and bodily milieu.
Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, pla... more Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. In an age of oxidative stress and failures of DNA repair, cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis, social scientific theory stutters in the face of biological consequences of forces it masterfully detailed, from biopower to looping kinds. Concepts of the fallibility of knowledge from the unanticipated consequence to the wicked problem are too generic to fathom the nature of the living within reconfigured biotic-abiotic relations in the aftermath of industrialization. Working through examples—genetic modification in weed control, and solvents in cryobiology—this paper offers a novel analytic for anthropogenic biology specific to the relations between knowledge and life in the wake of the industrial twentieth century: a novel patterning of living matter and process from the molecular to the ecological arising with forms of biological control. Changes in pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are specific to the form of control but not anticipated by it, illegible within its originating logics. Hubris gone moldy, anthropogenic biology grows from forms of power that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, mistaking the ability to temporarily control living things for full knowledge of them.
Thanks to scientific discoveries and commercial efforts to harness the processes of fermentation ... more Thanks to scientific discoveries and commercial efforts to harness the processes of fermentation going back to the nineteenth century, enzymes harvested from microbes have become ubiquitous in detergents and other cleaning products, as well as in food production. They are also now being adapted for an even bigger cleaning task: remediating pollution. Examining how these humble proteins and the biochemical reactions they catalyze became so indispensable reveals a little-noticed history of industrialization underlying modern everyday life.
Embryo models are potentially highly impactful for human health research because their developmen... more Embryo models are potentially highly impactful for human health research because their development recapitulates otherwise inaccessible events in a poorly understood area of biology, the first few weeks of human life. Casual reference to these models as “synthetic embryos” is misleading and should be approached with care and deliberation.
Viruses are not like spaceships, and cells are not just like twentieth-century semitrailer trucks... more Viruses are not like spaceships, and cells are not just like twentieth-century semitrailer trucks, armored vehicles, or passenger jets whose resources can be plundered and whose operators can be coerced into unwanted journeys. As with many apparently innocuous explanatory tropes, this figure of the viral hijacker perhaps hides as much as it reveals.
This is a foreword to Matsutake Worlds, edited by Lieba Faier and Michael Hathaway. What should ... more This is a foreword to Matsutake Worlds, edited by Lieba Faier and Michael Hathaway. What should the foreword to a mycelial mass look like? Unfortunately for narrative coherency and widely held prose conventions, it should go in multiple directions at once. Keeping with the general role that fungi are understood to play in ecosystems, it should also decompose as it is read. Or, conversely, it should synthesize novel materials. In that spirit, here are two interchangeable thematic lenses, a kind of folding pocket magnifier one might usefully stash in one's pocket, on the way into a set of matsutake ethnographies.
This piece was written for the catalog accompanying the exhibitions Vanessa Billy: Redevenir at t... more This piece was written for the catalog accompanying the exhibitions Vanessa Billy: Redevenir at the Villa Bernaconi, Lancy/Geneva, Switzerland, 4 September-14 november 2021 and Vanessa Billy: We Become at the Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland, from 12 September to 21 November 2021. It is a reflection on the relationship between oil and food.
This commentary was part of the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibit, Pakui Hardwar... more This commentary was part of the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibit, Pakui Hardware - Shape Shifters at the Leopold-Hosch-Museum Düren in 2021. It is a reflection on how the laboratory tools used to understand metabolic order and disorder reflect the human bodily condition in contemporary industrialized societies.
What happens after a living thing eats another living thing? In general, we assume that the one d... more What happens after a living thing eats another living thing? In general, we assume that the one disappears, and the other goes on. In fact, it is seen as an absolutely necessary part of life—the eater breaks down the eaten into its molecular components, derives energy and nutrient building blocks for its own body from the food, and excretes the rest as waste. Such is life in the food chain—some eat others until they themselves succumb to being consumed. Both a scientific and metaphysical model of being, modern notions of nutrition—increasingly described under the term “metabolism” since the mid-nineteenth century—have centered on the principle of inter-conversion, what Thomas Huxley described in 1869 as the “transubstantiation” of one kind of protoplasm to another in the body’s internal chemical laboratories, in which food served to fuel both the engine of the body and the flame of thought; I burn, he lectured, so that others may have light.[1] This version of metabolism has served as one of the defining or delimiting characteristics of life itself, alongside the other universal prerequisite: reproduction. Living things are things that metabolize and reproduce.
Contemporary events in the sciences of metabolism and genetics are beginning to show the historical peculiarity of these longstanding and very stable frameworks for defining metabolism. Destabilization of two central and interlinked features of metabolism is underway. The first is the logic of complete conversion: that food becomes, in the machinery of metabolism, components that are used by the eater to ends irrelevant to the eaten. The dispersion of seeds and the lodging of heavy metals in tissues excepted, the general idea that ingested food is fuel, that it is a substrate fed into a chemical system, that heat and movement and bodily substance are made out of it, and the rest is excreted in the form of waste still seems just like “common sense.” Food is nutrition, it is sustenance, and for humans it might also be allowed to be culture—although that quality is generally seen as fairly irrelevant to its biological function. What else could it be?
Political, economic, and climatic upheaval can result in mass human migration across extreme terr... more Political, economic, and climatic upheaval can result in mass human migration across extreme terrain in search of more humane living conditions, exposing migrants to environments that challenge human tolerance. An empirical understanding of the biological stresses associated with these migrations will play a key role in the development of social, political, and medical strategies for alleviating adverse effects and risk of death. We model physiological stress associated with undocumented migration across a commonly traversed section of the southern border of the United States and find that locations of migrant death are disproportionately clustered within regions of greatest predicted physiological stress (evaporative water loss). Minimum values of estimated evaporative water loss were sufficient to cause severe dehydration and associated proximate causes of mortality. Integration of future climate predictions into models increased predicted physiological costs of migration by up to...
Methionine is an amino acid that humans and farm animals must derive from food. This metabolite, ... more Methionine is an amino acid that humans and farm animals must derive from food. This metabolite, a tightly regulated resource in ecosystems, has become a mass commodity in the global economy, with well over 1 million tons being produced annually from petroleum to fortify livestock feed. Viewed from the standpoint of planetary health, anthropogenic methionine synthesis is an important enabler of low-cost animal protein production, with interdependent but unexamined effects on human health and ecosystems. At a time when agrochemical engineering is shifting the way sulphur is assimilated and moves up our food chain, research suggests that dietary methionine restriction alone captures many healthspan benefits noted with calorie restriction. As such, methionine synthesis is an excellent exemplar of planetary scale anthropogenic activity that manifests at the molecular scale of cellular metabolism, with potential systemic effects on human health. In this Personal View we establish the scale and historical trajectory of the methionine industry and provide a preliminary model for tracing this amino acid through the food supply into the human body. We draw together insights across disparate publications of applied animal agriculture, human nutrition, and biomedical research to call for cross-disciplinary dialogue on responsible use of methionine-augmentation technologies.
The food system is a massive, global organism. It imbibes and excretes; it has a metabolism. ... more The food system is a massive, global organism. It imbibes and excretes; it has a metabolism. Capitalist agriculture sometimes views waste as an opportunity to feed other aspects of the industry—namely by repurposing agricultural waste as sustenance for food animals. The redirection of waste—such as vegetable mash leftover from processing, cobs, husks, fish heads, arsenic generated from copper smelting, and even pharmaceutical waste—into the mouths of the animals we eat simultaneously reinforces wasteful food production and its toxic outputs while seemingly “solving” the problem of agricultural waste. However, in our broken food system, toxicity is simply relocated from soil to animal bodies to human bodies. If wastes can be recommodified as animal feed, they will be fed back into the agricultural cycle, regardless of their toxicity or their polluting origins. Capitalist agriculture justifies its continued existence by finding new locations for its toxic waste: either in waterways or animal bellies.
But can thinking of environmental crises in terms of a complex metabolism change the way activists design alternative food systems and local foodways? Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, spoke with MOLD about her research on the emergence of “metabolism” as a concept, the practical uses of metabolic theory today, and the waste and toxicity of capitalist agriculture.
This article focuses on the quotidian but profound remaking of the materiality of eating in the s... more This article focuses on the quotidian but profound remaking of the materiality of eating in the science and industry of animal feeding in the United States. I sketch a big picture: the wholesale remaking of streams of matter and energy between microorganisms, plants, animals and humans in the twentieth century. In the development the medicated feed industry, existing metabolic relationships within and between animals, plants and microbes cells were sundered, selectively augmented, and reconnected anew. My focus is not on any single case of industrialization within this picture - beef or milk or hormones or chickens, but the industrialization of metabolism itself. The systematic remaking, rescaling and reordering of matter’s movement through bacteria, plants, and animals, is what makes the history of medicated feed significant. It constitutes a wholesale rearrangement of relations constituting the metabolic web in which human eating is hung.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2021
Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood... more Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood by what they are not. Yet the function and implication of negative definition for scientific discourse has thus far received scant attention. Using the term epimutation as exemplar, we analyze the paradoxical like-but-unlike structure of a term that must simultaneously connect with but depart from genetic concepts. We assess the historical forces structuring the use of epimutation and like terms such as paramutation. This analysis highlights the positive characteristics defining epimutation: the regularity, oxymoronic temporality, and materiality of stable processes. Integrating historical work, ethnographic observation, and insights from philosophical practice-oriented conceptual analysis, we detail the distinctive epistemic goals the epimutation concept fulfils in medicine, plant biology and toxicology. Epimutation and allied epigenetic terms have succeeded by being mutation-like and recognizable, yet have failed to consolidate for exactly the same reason: they are tied simultaneously by likeness and opposition to nouns that describe things that are assumed to persist unchanged over space and time. Moreover, negative definition casts the genetic-epigenetic relationship as an either/or binary, overshadowing continuities and connections. This analysis is intended to assist practitioners and observers of genetics and epigenetics in recognizing and moving beyond the conceptual legacies of negative definition.
Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment, 2021
Arsenical medications were used as feed additives for growth promotion and disease prevention in ... more Arsenical medications were used as feed additives for growth promotion and disease prevention in animal husbandry in the United States between 1944 and 2015. Although they were the first modern growth promoter, promising more gain with less input, the story of feed arsenicals has been overshadowed by antibiotics and hormones. The history of the uses to which they were put, and the industry science that structured perceptions of their safety for decades is detailed here, with the purpose of understanding how arsenicals came to be so pervasively used, and the role of the animal feed industry in the intentional distribution of trace amounts of arsenic at massive scale. This chapter also tracks changes in perception of what kind of risks were posed by arsenic in the food supply from 1940 to the present, as the epidemiology and metabolic biochemistry of the element changed.
Rather than mere nosh, provender or raw material, food and its components are now being investiga... more Rather than mere nosh, provender or raw material, food and its components are now being investigated for communicative and informational properties and for roles in gene regulation, environment sensing, maintaining physiological boundaries and adjusting cellular metabolic programs. Food speaks, cues and signals. Bodies sense and respond in complicated processes of inner conversation only dimly intuited by conscious thought.
Eating as interlocution is a conceptual development that carries with it potentially disorienting new representations of human interiority and autonomy. It is at the same time an immensely practical development, with implications for nutrition and metabolism as sites of potential technological interventions in health and longevity.
What can’t freezing hold still? This article surveys the history of substances used to protect ce... more What can’t freezing hold still? This article surveys the history of substances used to protect cells and organisms from freezing damage, known as cryoprotectants. Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) has since 1959 been the most widely used of these agents in cryopreservation. Here, its evolution from pulp and paper waste byproduct to wonder drug to all-but-invisible routine element of freezing protocols is used to trace the direct arc from protection to toxicity in theories of how and why cryoprotectants work, from the 1960s to today. The power of these agents to simultaneously protect and degrade is shown to reside in manipulation of chemical time via hydrogen bonding and electron exchange, thereby reframing freezing as a highly active and transformational process. Countering long-held assumptions about cryopreservation as an operation of stasis after which the thawed entity is the same as it was before, this article details recent demonstrations of effects of cryoprotectant exposure that are nonlethal but nonetheless profoundly impactful within scientific and therapeutic practices that depend on freezing infrastructures. Understanding the operationalization of chemical time in the case of cryoprotectants is broadly relevant to other modern technologies dedicated to shifting how material things exist and persist in human historical time.
In vitro gametogenesis (IVG), the reconstitution of germ cell development in vitro, is an emergin... more In vitro gametogenesis (IVG), the reconstitution of germ cell development in vitro, is an emerging stem cell-based technology with profound implications for reproductive science. Despite researchers’ long-term goals for future clinical applications, little is currently known about the views of IVG held by the stakeholders potentially most affected by its introduction in humans. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 80 individuals with lived experience of infertility and/or LGBTQ+ family formation in the US, two intersecting groups of potential IVG users. Respondents expressed hope that IVG would lead to higher reproductive success than current assisted reproductive technology (ART), alleviate suffering associated with ART use, and promote greater social inclusion, while expressing concerns predominantly framed in terms of equity and safety. These findings underscore the importance of sustained engagement with stakeholders with relevant experience to anticipate the implications of IVG for research and clinical translation.
Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2024
Abstract: Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseas... more Abstract: Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseases prevalent in industrialized countries, including mental, metabolic, and post-viral conditions. For sociologists, the rise of inflammation in explanatory models of chronic disease is an opportunity to grasp a historical shift in thinking about how society gets under the skin as new modes of conceptualization of the relationship between societies and bodies emerge in this domain. Highlighting two historical conjunctures between epidemiology and molecular biology concerning hormones and fat, this paper thereby contrasts an older cybernetic model of the social as a signal transduced via the brain and hormonal signaling system to become a biological accretion of stress or adversity with an explanatory trajectory centered on chronic inflammation. Rather than transducing the social environment, the inflammatory body emerging from the studies of adiposity and diabetes is produced by metabolizing material and psychosocial conditions. Inequalities in the social world are thereby reflected as inflammatory states that exist upstream of, not downstream to, the kinds of social signals previously deemed important to health and health disparities. Signals still matter, but they are not their own key determinant in terms of action or impact – that is a contextual matter within the chronicity of the processual metabolic life of a cellular and bodily milieu.
Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, pla... more Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. In an age of oxidative stress and failures of DNA repair, cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis, social scientific theory stutters in the face of biological consequences of forces it masterfully detailed, from biopower to looping kinds. Concepts of the fallibility of knowledge from the unanticipated consequence to the wicked problem are too generic to fathom the nature of the living within reconfigured biotic-abiotic relations in the aftermath of industrialization. Working through examples—genetic modification in weed control, and solvents in cryobiology—this paper offers a novel analytic for anthropogenic biology specific to the relations between knowledge and life in the wake of the industrial twentieth century: a novel patterning of living matter and process from the molecular to the ecological arising with forms of biological control. Changes in pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are specific to the form of control but not anticipated by it, illegible within its originating logics. Hubris gone moldy, anthropogenic biology grows from forms of power that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, mistaking the ability to temporarily control living things for full knowledge of them.
Thanks to scientific discoveries and commercial efforts to harness the processes of fermentation ... more Thanks to scientific discoveries and commercial efforts to harness the processes of fermentation going back to the nineteenth century, enzymes harvested from microbes have become ubiquitous in detergents and other cleaning products, as well as in food production. They are also now being adapted for an even bigger cleaning task: remediating pollution. Examining how these humble proteins and the biochemical reactions they catalyze became so indispensable reveals a little-noticed history of industrialization underlying modern everyday life.
Embryo models are potentially highly impactful for human health research because their developmen... more Embryo models are potentially highly impactful for human health research because their development recapitulates otherwise inaccessible events in a poorly understood area of biology, the first few weeks of human life. Casual reference to these models as “synthetic embryos” is misleading and should be approached with care and deliberation.
Viruses are not like spaceships, and cells are not just like twentieth-century semitrailer trucks... more Viruses are not like spaceships, and cells are not just like twentieth-century semitrailer trucks, armored vehicles, or passenger jets whose resources can be plundered and whose operators can be coerced into unwanted journeys. As with many apparently innocuous explanatory tropes, this figure of the viral hijacker perhaps hides as much as it reveals.
This is a foreword to Matsutake Worlds, edited by Lieba Faier and Michael Hathaway. What should ... more This is a foreword to Matsutake Worlds, edited by Lieba Faier and Michael Hathaway. What should the foreword to a mycelial mass look like? Unfortunately for narrative coherency and widely held prose conventions, it should go in multiple directions at once. Keeping with the general role that fungi are understood to play in ecosystems, it should also decompose as it is read. Or, conversely, it should synthesize novel materials. In that spirit, here are two interchangeable thematic lenses, a kind of folding pocket magnifier one might usefully stash in one's pocket, on the way into a set of matsutake ethnographies.
This piece was written for the catalog accompanying the exhibitions Vanessa Billy: Redevenir at t... more This piece was written for the catalog accompanying the exhibitions Vanessa Billy: Redevenir at the Villa Bernaconi, Lancy/Geneva, Switzerland, 4 September-14 november 2021 and Vanessa Billy: We Become at the Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland, from 12 September to 21 November 2021. It is a reflection on the relationship between oil and food.
This commentary was part of the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibit, Pakui Hardwar... more This commentary was part of the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibit, Pakui Hardware - Shape Shifters at the Leopold-Hosch-Museum Düren in 2021. It is a reflection on how the laboratory tools used to understand metabolic order and disorder reflect the human bodily condition in contemporary industrialized societies.
What happens after a living thing eats another living thing? In general, we assume that the one d... more What happens after a living thing eats another living thing? In general, we assume that the one disappears, and the other goes on. In fact, it is seen as an absolutely necessary part of life—the eater breaks down the eaten into its molecular components, derives energy and nutrient building blocks for its own body from the food, and excretes the rest as waste. Such is life in the food chain—some eat others until they themselves succumb to being consumed. Both a scientific and metaphysical model of being, modern notions of nutrition—increasingly described under the term “metabolism” since the mid-nineteenth century—have centered on the principle of inter-conversion, what Thomas Huxley described in 1869 as the “transubstantiation” of one kind of protoplasm to another in the body’s internal chemical laboratories, in which food served to fuel both the engine of the body and the flame of thought; I burn, he lectured, so that others may have light.[1] This version of metabolism has served as one of the defining or delimiting characteristics of life itself, alongside the other universal prerequisite: reproduction. Living things are things that metabolize and reproduce.
Contemporary events in the sciences of metabolism and genetics are beginning to show the historical peculiarity of these longstanding and very stable frameworks for defining metabolism. Destabilization of two central and interlinked features of metabolism is underway. The first is the logic of complete conversion: that food becomes, in the machinery of metabolism, components that are used by the eater to ends irrelevant to the eaten. The dispersion of seeds and the lodging of heavy metals in tissues excepted, the general idea that ingested food is fuel, that it is a substrate fed into a chemical system, that heat and movement and bodily substance are made out of it, and the rest is excreted in the form of waste still seems just like “common sense.” Food is nutrition, it is sustenance, and for humans it might also be allowed to be culture—although that quality is generally seen as fairly irrelevant to its biological function. What else could it be?
Political, economic, and climatic upheaval can result in mass human migration across extreme terr... more Political, economic, and climatic upheaval can result in mass human migration across extreme terrain in search of more humane living conditions, exposing migrants to environments that challenge human tolerance. An empirical understanding of the biological stresses associated with these migrations will play a key role in the development of social, political, and medical strategies for alleviating adverse effects and risk of death. We model physiological stress associated with undocumented migration across a commonly traversed section of the southern border of the United States and find that locations of migrant death are disproportionately clustered within regions of greatest predicted physiological stress (evaporative water loss). Minimum values of estimated evaporative water loss were sufficient to cause severe dehydration and associated proximate causes of mortality. Integration of future climate predictions into models increased predicted physiological costs of migration by up to...
Methionine is an amino acid that humans and farm animals must derive from food. This metabolite, ... more Methionine is an amino acid that humans and farm animals must derive from food. This metabolite, a tightly regulated resource in ecosystems, has become a mass commodity in the global economy, with well over 1 million tons being produced annually from petroleum to fortify livestock feed. Viewed from the standpoint of planetary health, anthropogenic methionine synthesis is an important enabler of low-cost animal protein production, with interdependent but unexamined effects on human health and ecosystems. At a time when agrochemical engineering is shifting the way sulphur is assimilated and moves up our food chain, research suggests that dietary methionine restriction alone captures many healthspan benefits noted with calorie restriction. As such, methionine synthesis is an excellent exemplar of planetary scale anthropogenic activity that manifests at the molecular scale of cellular metabolism, with potential systemic effects on human health. In this Personal View we establish the scale and historical trajectory of the methionine industry and provide a preliminary model for tracing this amino acid through the food supply into the human body. We draw together insights across disparate publications of applied animal agriculture, human nutrition, and biomedical research to call for cross-disciplinary dialogue on responsible use of methionine-augmentation technologies.
The food system is a massive, global organism. It imbibes and excretes; it has a metabolism. ... more The food system is a massive, global organism. It imbibes and excretes; it has a metabolism. Capitalist agriculture sometimes views waste as an opportunity to feed other aspects of the industry—namely by repurposing agricultural waste as sustenance for food animals. The redirection of waste—such as vegetable mash leftover from processing, cobs, husks, fish heads, arsenic generated from copper smelting, and even pharmaceutical waste—into the mouths of the animals we eat simultaneously reinforces wasteful food production and its toxic outputs while seemingly “solving” the problem of agricultural waste. However, in our broken food system, toxicity is simply relocated from soil to animal bodies to human bodies. If wastes can be recommodified as animal feed, they will be fed back into the agricultural cycle, regardless of their toxicity or their polluting origins. Capitalist agriculture justifies its continued existence by finding new locations for its toxic waste: either in waterways or animal bellies.
But can thinking of environmental crises in terms of a complex metabolism change the way activists design alternative food systems and local foodways? Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, spoke with MOLD about her research on the emergence of “metabolism” as a concept, the practical uses of metabolic theory today, and the waste and toxicity of capitalist agriculture.
This article focuses on the quotidian but profound remaking of the materiality of eating in the s... more This article focuses on the quotidian but profound remaking of the materiality of eating in the science and industry of animal feeding in the United States. I sketch a big picture: the wholesale remaking of streams of matter and energy between microorganisms, plants, animals and humans in the twentieth century. In the development the medicated feed industry, existing metabolic relationships within and between animals, plants and microbes cells were sundered, selectively augmented, and reconnected anew. My focus is not on any single case of industrialization within this picture - beef or milk or hormones or chickens, but the industrialization of metabolism itself. The systematic remaking, rescaling and reordering of matter’s movement through bacteria, plants, and animals, is what makes the history of medicated feed significant. It constitutes a wholesale rearrangement of relations constituting the metabolic web in which human eating is hung.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2021
Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood... more Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood by what they are not. Yet the function and implication of negative definition for scientific discourse has thus far received scant attention. Using the term epimutation as exemplar, we analyze the paradoxical like-but-unlike structure of a term that must simultaneously connect with but depart from genetic concepts. We assess the historical forces structuring the use of epimutation and like terms such as paramutation. This analysis highlights the positive characteristics defining epimutation: the regularity, oxymoronic temporality, and materiality of stable processes. Integrating historical work, ethnographic observation, and insights from philosophical practice-oriented conceptual analysis, we detail the distinctive epistemic goals the epimutation concept fulfils in medicine, plant biology and toxicology. Epimutation and allied epigenetic terms have succeeded by being mutation-like and recognizable, yet have failed to consolidate for exactly the same reason: they are tied simultaneously by likeness and opposition to nouns that describe things that are assumed to persist unchanged over space and time. Moreover, negative definition casts the genetic-epigenetic relationship as an either/or binary, overshadowing continuities and connections. This analysis is intended to assist practitioners and observers of genetics and epigenetics in recognizing and moving beyond the conceptual legacies of negative definition.
Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment, 2021
Arsenical medications were used as feed additives for growth promotion and disease prevention in ... more Arsenical medications were used as feed additives for growth promotion and disease prevention in animal husbandry in the United States between 1944 and 2015. Although they were the first modern growth promoter, promising more gain with less input, the story of feed arsenicals has been overshadowed by antibiotics and hormones. The history of the uses to which they were put, and the industry science that structured perceptions of their safety for decades is detailed here, with the purpose of understanding how arsenicals came to be so pervasively used, and the role of the animal feed industry in the intentional distribution of trace amounts of arsenic at massive scale. This chapter also tracks changes in perception of what kind of risks were posed by arsenic in the food supply from 1940 to the present, as the epidemiology and metabolic biochemistry of the element changed.
Rather than mere nosh, provender or raw material, food and its components are now being investiga... more Rather than mere nosh, provender or raw material, food and its components are now being investigated for communicative and informational properties and for roles in gene regulation, environment sensing, maintaining physiological boundaries and adjusting cellular metabolic programs. Food speaks, cues and signals. Bodies sense and respond in complicated processes of inner conversation only dimly intuited by conscious thought.
Eating as interlocution is a conceptual development that carries with it potentially disorienting new representations of human interiority and autonomy. It is at the same time an immensely practical development, with implications for nutrition and metabolism as sites of potential technological interventions in health and longevity.
Electric Brine with Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, ... more Electric Brine with Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, Lisa Robertson with introductions by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes.
Flowing, seeping, leaking, cascading, shaping. Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing) and its associated online study group Matter in Flux. Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative’s long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry through a quest to situate a vision of material politics through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. The literary and scientific fabulations found in these pages speak of the conjunction of lived embodiment, the materialized quality of language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing. Each of these strands polyperform under TWWWO, for they can be traced, retroactively, to the themes present in the live event series, to Matter in Flux’s private study sessions, to the initiative’s collective writing work presented in public venues and publications. Also included in this volume is an appendix documenting the years of invitation and study, intricately linked to the ideological praxis of these overlaps.
Editor: Jennifer Teets Co-editors: Elise Hunchuck and Margarida Mendes Proofreading: Gareth Hammond and Willy Smart Design: Atelier Brenda, Sophie Keij with the assistance of Adèle Gallé and Axel Villarreal Typeset in Stempel Garamond Paper is Constellation Jade and Munken Printed and bound by die Keure 160 pp. 11.8 x 19.6 cm ISBN 978-3-948212-49-0
First edition, 500 copies. Published by Archive Books. Berlin, Germany, 2021.
Archive Books Reinickendorfer Straße 17 DE 13347 Berlin archivebooks.org
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Papers by Hannah Landecker
Contemporary events in the sciences of metabolism and genetics are beginning to show the historical peculiarity of these longstanding and very stable frameworks for defining metabolism. Destabilization of two central and interlinked features of metabolism is underway. The first is the logic of complete conversion: that food becomes, in the machinery of metabolism, components that are used by the eater to ends irrelevant to the eaten. The dispersion of seeds and the lodging of heavy metals in tissues excepted, the general idea that ingested food is fuel, that it is a substrate fed into a chemical system, that heat and movement and bodily substance are made out of it, and the rest is excreted in the form of waste still seems just like “common sense.” Food is nutrition, it is sustenance, and for humans it might also be allowed to be culture—although that quality is generally seen as fairly irrelevant to its biological function. What else could it be?
But can thinking of environmental crises in terms of a complex metabolism change the way activists design alternative food systems and local foodways? Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, spoke with MOLD about her research on the emergence of “metabolism” as a concept, the practical uses of metabolic theory today, and the waste and toxicity of capitalist agriculture.
Eating as interlocution is a conceptual development that carries with it potentially disorienting new representations of human interiority and autonomy. It is at the same time an immensely practical development, with implications for nutrition and metabolism as sites of potential technological interventions in health and longevity.
Contemporary events in the sciences of metabolism and genetics are beginning to show the historical peculiarity of these longstanding and very stable frameworks for defining metabolism. Destabilization of two central and interlinked features of metabolism is underway. The first is the logic of complete conversion: that food becomes, in the machinery of metabolism, components that are used by the eater to ends irrelevant to the eaten. The dispersion of seeds and the lodging of heavy metals in tissues excepted, the general idea that ingested food is fuel, that it is a substrate fed into a chemical system, that heat and movement and bodily substance are made out of it, and the rest is excreted in the form of waste still seems just like “common sense.” Food is nutrition, it is sustenance, and for humans it might also be allowed to be culture—although that quality is generally seen as fairly irrelevant to its biological function. What else could it be?
But can thinking of environmental crises in terms of a complex metabolism change the way activists design alternative food systems and local foodways? Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, spoke with MOLD about her research on the emergence of “metabolism” as a concept, the practical uses of metabolic theory today, and the waste and toxicity of capitalist agriculture.
Eating as interlocution is a conceptual development that carries with it potentially disorienting new representations of human interiority and autonomy. It is at the same time an immensely practical development, with implications for nutrition and metabolism as sites of potential technological interventions in health and longevity.
Flowing, seeping, leaking, cascading, shaping. Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing) and its associated online study group Matter in Flux. Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative’s long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry through a quest to situate a vision of material politics through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. The literary and scientific fabulations found in these pages speak of the conjunction of lived embodiment, the materialized quality of language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing. Each of these strands polyperform under TWWWO, for they can be traced, retroactively, to the themes present in the live event series, to Matter in Flux’s private study sessions, to the initiative’s collective writing work presented in public venues and publications. Also included in this volume is an appendix documenting the years of invitation and study, intricately linked to the ideological praxis of these overlaps.
Editor: Jennifer Teets
Co-editors: Elise Hunchuck and Margarida Mendes
Proofreading: Gareth Hammond and Willy Smart
Design: Atelier Brenda, Sophie Keij with the assistance of Adèle Gallé and Axel Villarreal
Typeset in Stempel Garamond
Paper is Constellation Jade and Munken
Printed and bound by die Keure
160 pp. 11.8 x 19.6 cm
ISBN 978-3-948212-49-0
First edition, 500 copies.
Published by Archive Books.
Berlin, Germany, 2021.
Archive Books
Reinickendorfer Straße 17
DE 13347 Berlin
archivebooks.org