This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics (...) of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt. (shrink)

The Second World War is commonly said to have ushered in theera of `big science' in the United States. However, at least inpractically-oriented biomedical research, the American governmentadopted modes of sponsorship that were commonplace between scientistsand industry before the war. Furthermore, many life scientistsleading wartime projects were already familiar with industrialcollaboration. This essay argues that the new federal regimes introduced in the late 1940s and 1950s were more important than wartime experience in shaping the character of biomedical `big science' in (...) the United States during the second half of thetwentieth century. (shrink)

Much of the early history of developmental and physiological genetics in Germany remains to be written. Together with Carl Correns and Richard Goldschmidt, Alfred Kühn occupies a special place in this history. Trained as a zoologist in Freiburg im Breisgau, he set out to integrate physiology, development and genetics in a particular experimental system based on the flour moth Ephestia kühniella Zeller. This paper is meant to reconstruct the crucial steps in the experimental pathway that led Kühn and his collaborators (...) at the University of Göttingen, and later at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes of Biology and Biochemistry in Berlin, to formulate, in their specific way, what later became known as the "one gene-one enzyme hypothesis." Special attention will be given to the interaction of the different parts of Kühn's Ephestia-based project, which were rooted in different research traditions. The paper retraces how, roughly between 1925 and 1945, these elements came to form a mixed experimental setup composed of genetic, embryological, physiological and, finally, biochemical constituents. Accordingly, emphasis is laid on the development of the terminology in which the results were cast, and how it reflected the hybrid state of an experimental system successively acquiring new epistemic layers. (shrink)

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in (...) subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism—Drosophila melanogaster—acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller’s experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two syntheticDrosophilastocks as tests for measuring X-rays’ capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in theDrosophilastocks influenced Muller’s perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller’s concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments onNeurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller’s conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science. (shrink)

In 1948, a dynamic junior member of the Johns Hopkins Biology Department, William McElroy, became the first director of the McCollum—Pratt Institute for the Investigation of Micronutrient Elements. The Institute was founded at the university to further studies into the practicalities of animal nutrition. Ultimately, however, the Institute reflected McElroy's vision that all biological problems, including nutrition, could be best investigated through basic biochemical and enzymes studies. The Institute quickly became a hub of biochemical research over the following decade, producing (...) foundational work on metabolism and a respected series of symposia. In this paper, I argue that McElroy's biochemical vantage on biology also permeated the traditionally morphological and embryological Biology Department at Hopkins. Largely due to the activity of McElroy and the Institute, the faculty, course offerings, and research underwent a radical reorientation toward biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s, even while maintaining a commitment to developmental biology. While the history of postwar biology is often told as the ascendancy of the "new" biology over "traditional" biology, the case of McElroy and the McCollum—Pratt Institute affords an opportunity for historical examination of biochemical and molecular science as a lens through which all branches of biology at an institution were reconceived and unified. (shrink)

The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. Bacteriologists had traditionally invoked the notions of ‘training’ and ‘adaptation’ to account for the ability of microbes to acquire new traits. As the field of bacterial genetics emerged, however, its participants rejected ‘Lamarckian’ views of microbial heredity, and offered statistical evidence that drug resistance resulted from the selection of random resistant mutants. Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological vs. genetic (...) explanations of variation in bacteria. Postwar developments connected with the Lysenko affair gave this debate a new political valence.Proponents of the neo-Darwinian synthesis weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, Tsutomu Watanabe and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by cytoplasmic resistance factors rather than chromosomal mutation. These R factors could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and plasmids. (shrink)