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In early 2016, people across the United States became aware of a new threat—Zika virus. A New York Times article that April featured a description of the discovery of Zika virus in “a remote Ugandan lab” in the 1940s.[1] But while that story acknowledged the contributions of scientists in Uganda, it mistook the laboratory …
Hannah Landecker writes about the new metabolism as “a model in which food enters the body and in a sense never leaves it, because food transforms the organism’s being as much as the organism transforms it” (2011: 177). Articulating Landecker’s insights into the porosity of bodies through an anthropological lens, Harris Solomon (2016) offers an ethnography of absorption in the …
According to accepted wisdom and textbooks, “metabolism” is a nineteenth-century term and concept, established at the confluence of organic chemistry, cell biology, and physiology. In Microscopical Researches (1839), Schwann spoke of the “metabolic phenomena of the cells,” using for the first time the adjective metabolische, from which “metabolic” entered the English language in the 1847 translation (Bing 1971). This standard …
Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor
Duke University Press, 2017. 280 pages
Susan Merrill Squier’s Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor is positioned at the intersection of biological systems and art. Squier is a professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies whose research examines how culture, art and comics influence medicine. The book consists of an extensive biography …
In Marshallese culture the environment itself is sacred.[1] Yet American colonizers used ancestral environments in the Marshall Islands for devastating nuclear weapons testing and related environmental research. Once central to emerging understandings of radiobiology, geology, and ecology, archival records of environmental research in the Marshall Islands offer a wealth of data to historians of science and the environment. These …
Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics
Palgrave MacMilllan, 2016, 284 pages
In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni, one of our most insightful social theorists of contemporary biology, guides us through heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century, through the twentieth “century of the gene” (Keller, 2000) and …