Microbial diversity has become a leitmotiv of contemporary microbiology, as epitomized in the concept of the microbiome, with significant consequences for the classification of microbes. In this paper, I contrast microbiology’s current diversity ideal with its influential predecessor in the twentieth century, that of purity, as epitomized in Robert Koch’s bacteriological culture methods. Purity and diversity, the two polar opposites with regard to making sense of the microbial world, have been operationalized in microbiological practice by tools such as the “clean” (...) Petri dish versus the “dirty” Winogradsky column, the latter a container that mimics, in the laboratory, the natural environment that teems with diverse microbial life. By tracing the impact of the practices and concepts of purity and diversity on microbial classification through a history of techniques, tools, and manuals, I show the shifts in these concepts over the last century. Juxtaposing the dominant purity ideal with the more restricted, but continuously articulated, diversity ideal in microbial ecology not only provides a fresh perspective on microbial classification that goes beyond its intellectual history, but also contextualizes the present focus on diversity. By covering the period of a century, this paper outlines a revised longue durée historiography that takes its inspiration from artifacts, such as Petri dish and the Winogradsky column, and thereby simple, but influential technologies that often remain invisible. This enables the problem of historical continuity in modern science to be addressed and the accelerationist narratives of its development to be countered. (shrink)

Microbial diversity has become a leitmotiv of contemporary microbiology, as epitomized in the concept of the microbiome, with significant consequences for the classification of microbes. In this paper, I contrast microbiology’s current diversity ideal with its influential predecessor in the twentieth century, that of purity, as epitomized in Robert Koch’s bacteriological culture methods. Purity and diversity, the two polar opposites with regard to making sense of the microbial world, have been operationalized in microbiological practice by tools such as the “clean” (...) Petri dish versus the “dirty” Winogradsky column, the latter a container that mimics, in the laboratory, the natural environment that teems with diverse microbial life. By tracing the impact of the practices and concepts of purity and diversity on microbial classification through a history of techniques, tools, and manuals, I show the shifts in these concepts over the last century. Juxtaposing the dominant purity ideal with the more restricted, but continuously articulated, diversity ideal in microbial ecology not only provides a fresh perspective on microbial classification that goes beyond its intellectual history, but also contextualizes the present focus on diversity. By covering the period of a century, this paper outlines a revised longue durée historiography that takes its inspiration from artifacts, such as Petri dish and the Winogradsky column, and thereby simple, but influential technologies that often remain invisible. This enables the problem of historical continuity in modern science to be addressed and the accelerationist narratives of its development to be countered. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, so-called “glass diseases” seriously affected the use of scientific and technical glassware. It had become apparent by 1900 that glass, a supposedly neutral and inert material, not only interacted with its environment but also interfered with anything it contained—chemically, physically, and biologically. Starting from the assumption that modern laboratory research depends on containers that regulate the spatial, material, and epistemic enclosure of its experimental milieus and objects, this essay argues that the standardization of (...) glass quality from the 1900s to the 1930s must be understood as a reconfiguration of a “marginal” but nonetheless constitutive element of modern laboratory environments. The aim here is thus to weave various threads together into an (un)natural history of a modern material, one that considers epistemology, technology, and ontology—or, more specifically, the changing requirements and functions of glassware in the modern laboratory, the invention of specifically adapted glass substances, and the parallel advancement of glass science and its theories of what glass actually is. (shrink)