Introduction to the special issue Biology and Technology Reframed: historiographical reflections and opportunities

My first book, Making Mice,¹ chronicled the development of the genetically standardized mouse – and in its title, the use of the word ‘making’ was deliberate. Not only did it fulfill my publisher’s request for a then-fashionable participle or gerund ‘activating word’, but analytically, it conveyed both construction and production – and thus, to my mind, captured some then-new history of technology perspectives that I was trying to bring to the history of model organisms.² Fast forward three decades, and the life form alterations introduced by newer biological technologies, like CRISPR gene editing, far outsize what was the admittedly minor academic drama of calling a laboratory animal constructed. In an age when wild white-footed mice are heritably immunized to Lyme disease, then re-released and ‘deployed as frontline soldiers in the war’ against the disease on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard,³ we are far beyond Donna Haraway’s Cold War-era cyborgs or even OncoMouse_TM. Today’s strategic ‘making’ of biology and technology holds things in common with the past – genetically standardized mice, for instance, that we once referred to as ‘troops which literally by the tens of thousands occupy posts on the firing line of investigation [into the] nature and cure of cancer’.⁴ But as a sociopolitical undertaking, biotechnology’s intentions and methods have grown far beyond metaphors of warfare. At a time when ‘Maker Spaces’ invite artists, engineers, and scientists to ‘bio-hack’⁵ their way to collaborative synthetic biology creations, newer design thinking tropes have thoroughly infused the practices of configuring and studying life, rendering them as (in the analysis of Sophia Roosth) ‘dispersed into technique … Making here operates in a dialectical relationship with the epistemic work of investigation, examination, and analysis. Simply put, people now build biotic things in order to understand the things that they themselves are making’.⁶ Likewise, biological scientists ‘grow explanations’ along with the reductionist techniques they make to elucidate artificial life.⁷

In turn, then, this special issue, ‘Biology and Technology Reframed’ acknowledges that our historical actors’ efforts and experiences are inextricably intertwined with our own accounting of them – and then asks: what would it mean to take such observations seriously in a historiographical sense?⁸ Within the discipline of history, what methods and interpretations have historians of biological technologies used in developing their sub-discipline that might inform better how this current moment, as well as its antecedents, are interpreted by historians of biology? For biologists themselves, such moments typically present an occasion for reflecting on the continuous impact of ‘revolutionary technologies’ on the development of their science: From microscopes, to x-rays, to recombinant DNA, in a recent cover story dedicated to this theme, Science editor Jeremy Berg wrote that new technologies have always been ‘one of the most powerful drivers of scientific progress … [they] resolve long-standing questions and can open up new vistas, revealing new phenomena and allowing the formulation of questions previously unimagined’.⁹ Historians of biology have provided many exemplary accounts of consequential social and intellectual interrelations of biology and technology.¹⁰ But we have also missed opportunities to use the history of technology’s rich analytical frameworks in order to identify new historical problems and more systematically reckon with and reshape our standard narratives. We have taken in and further developed Phillip Pauly’s important early insight about how Jacques Loeb’s ‘engineering life’ ethos infused a generation of laboratory projects in biology, from molecular biophysics to phytotrons.¹¹ Some historians of biology have reflected more deeply on how analytic categories and approaches from engineering and technology studies might be deployed to better understand the industrialization of life and the sociopolitical continuities and discontinuities of neoliberalism in our global biotechnological existence¹² – but there is still much more work to do.

This special issue of History and Technology is an attempt to jump-start that process – and to do so in a way that, ultimately, fosters genuine scholarly conversation and mutual accountability. Such accountability is necessary for writers of history in this moment because biotechnological activities carry immense cultural implications: to understand this, past and future, we need to make clearer how particular technologies enact ideologies of labor, state power, and capital, as well as how particular biologies embody and further those ideologies. With such conversations, I suspect we also become more aware of how the boundaries between disciplines like history of biology and history of technology are themselves instrumental cultural projects. On the pages of this history of technology journal, then, four historians of biology will grapple with the structural, material, and labor dimensions of technological developments in the global life sciences in ways that we hope historians of technology will recognize as established in their trade. Later, on the pages of a history of biology journal (Journal of the History of Biology, which I co-edit), the editors of this journal will aim to flip the experiment: historians of technology will frame and interpret biological work as structured as much by biological knowledge-making goals as by transnational labor and infrastructural systems.

Within the structural limits of digital platforms and publisher cross-marketing, we will aim to seed ongoing and broader cross-field historical explorations of these same themes by making something ourselves that has both a past and a future. To this end, each of the articles in both journals will be tagged with the title to the one-time History and Technology special issue and the Journal of the History of Biology Topical Collection so that this reference term (‘Biology and Technology Reframed’) can be used to call up the conversation in searches through library and journal databases. We hardly claim to be the first to put into conversation these two fields – history of biology and history of technology¹³ – but we hope that by doing so in this manner at this moment we will, at bare minimum, encourage the practitioners in both fields to cross otherwise convenient barriers (such as what journals we regularly read) in order meet one another where we live as scholars (in our database research and reading practices).

Leading things off, Dominic Berry’s self-proclaimed ‘grubby’ study of the techniques and infrastructure for DNA synthesis in America and England from the 1970s to the 2000s draws and builds on a work by the pioneering historian of technology Robert Bud: The Uses of Life. By acknowledging and tending to flexibility in understandings of ‘making DNA’ Berry turns a process-focused lens onto his historical actors – treating with symmetry the work of biotech start-up presidents and celebrated genetic researchers – and their shared goal to render synthetic DNA as simultaneously a biological achievement and a saleable commodity. Berry’s attention to the practices, machines, and tools as well as the discourses surrounding biological and chemical materials mirrors some work already done by historians of biology (on the constructed nature of experimental organisms, as well as ‘backyard’ plant breeding and technological innovation), but also incorporates a history-of-technology approach, through its attention to commodity production and supply chains as well as to the resulting knowledge community that can emerge around engineering ‘attractor’ problems.¹⁴ For historians of biology, Berry’s actors’ claims to ‘engineer life’ will resonate with Jacques Loeb’s engineering ideal – controlling variables and incorporating feedback into their development process – while historians of technology will recognize the ‘interchangeable parts’ ethos strongly at work.¹⁵

Victoria Lee’s account of Japanese mycologists’ re-classification of kōji within post-war systems of microbial taxonomy and systematics shares with Berry’s approach a focus on a single experimental commodity; but it also owes much to earlier histories of standard experimental organisms and to STS work on classification and its consequences for scientific and technological work. Robert Kohler showed how biologists imposed a ‘moral economy’ and system of circulation for Drosophila which simultaneously maintained breeding and knowledge infrastructures.¹⁶ Lee shows how classification practices played a similar role in transforming kōji’s biotechnological narrative: specifically, they became a knowledge infrastructure, designed to highlight how, through centuries of use and selection, Japanese brewers of sake, soy, and miso created and maintained a domesticated ‘productive worker’ strain of kōji’s most productive fungus, Aspergillus oryzae. In Sorting Things Out, Geoff Bowker and Leigh Star emphasized the invisibility of the process through which such classification efforts can powerfully order techno-scientific interactions.¹⁷ In Lee’s case, however, the kōji scientists’ activities were both visible and industrially consequential: the history and meaning of a biological organism were reconstructed by academic biologists, whose work drove the reconstitution and rebranding of commercial practices which saved a large sector of the Japanese food industry following a 1960s aflatoxin scare. Historians of biology will recognize here similar themes to those led by symbolic-interactionist sociologists Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura and other historians of biotechnology, all of whom stressed the importance of understanding in context how biologists often work within and across private and public science organizations and institutions to develop ‘the right tools for the job’ at hand.¹⁸ But Lee takes the industrial nature of this work not as a given fact or a means to an end, but rather, as something that has to be explained in its own right: it is the object deserving our historical attention. Ultimately, she suggests, kōji knowledge infrastructures created and maintained the global consensus that defined biotechnological work, even while at the same time they also introduced inherent complications at the intersections of local history and the universalizing power of science.¹⁹ Thus, historians of technology and engineering studies scholars will find in Lee’s story a case study in the sociopolitical instrumentalities of industrial infrastructure, which include enacting governance and shaping access to resources.

Next, Dmitriy Myelnikov turns to the classical engineering trope of ‘tinkering’ – a vestige of ‘shop culture’ still venerated by many engineers as the creative heart of the discipline – to understand the development of transgenic mice during the 1980s. Such an approach is necessary, he suggests, to add complexity to our image of technoscientific constructs and capture the true contingency of how introducing snippets of DNA into an animal embryo would be ultimately achieved; for, as he reminds us, this now-lauded laboratory success was far from predetermined. Myelnikov notes that tinkering was an actor’s category, used by biologists (not unlike contemporaneous use by Patrick McCray’s mid-century ‘visioneers’²⁰) to describe their (laboratory) labors in ways that highlighted uncertainty and also minimized the potential negative impacts of their (genetic) manipulations. In this way, it resembles the reclassifying moves made by Lee’s kōji scientists. Like Berry, Myelnikov foregrounds the role of instrumentation and technique in driving biological innovation, but he further extends this analysis into STS domains by reading this case of murine biological engineering as a kind of material and social bricolage.²¹ Transgenic mouse creators, Myelnikov suggests, succeeded by effectively assembling of a set of embryological and molecular biological skills that could circulate freely between and across different knowledge-making communities. These skills drew heavily on the emerging global infrastructure of gene exchange, ultimately culminating in standardized packages of recombinant DNA tools. In this way, then, the transgenic mouse story asks historians to reflect more deeply on how the biological and the technological were inescapably intertwined, co-constituting an international university-industrial landscape²² in which the ‘multiple invention’ of new biological tools was the only historical inevitability.

Finally, Vivian Ling and Lijing Jiang chronicle how biological and chemical scientists worked together to translate artificial insulin synthesis into a massive bio-engineering project in Socialist China. They note how ‘the insulin project’ was justified as a ‘grand challenge’, compatible with Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and thus their case is resonant with other moments in the history of engineering or agricultural production when similar large epistemological or political claims were made for biotechnology.²³ But Ling and Jiang suggest that, if examined more closely, the actual organizational mode of work employed in insulin production was far from unified or static; rather, it evolved, moving from small-scale intra- and inter-institutional competition to large-scale Big Science-style collaboration. They argue that China’s insulin industrialization strategies created a new infrastructure of expert-based biotechnological science that masked what (perhaps in another time and place) might have been recognized as a massive laboratory achievement. That insulin’s infrastructural legacy persisted is perhaps not surprising, as infrastructures similarly did in Lee’s and Berry’s cases. But Ling and Jiang suggest that this biotechnological infrastructure was ultimately what empowered China’s biochemists to navigate their own paths between changing state, laboratory, and institutional demands.

Claims for the agency and importance of biotechnology infrastructure, at bare minimum, continue to challenge understandings of ‘technology’ as merely ‘applied science’²⁴ but these accounts have additional historiographic advantages that also inform the larger project. Biotechnology in the west is part of this special issue, but reframing the central role played by global biotechnology infrastructures and industrialization (as both Ling and Jiang’s and Lee’s accounts do) reinvigorates David Edgerton’s call to attend to ‘technology-in-use’ rather than weaving unidirectional tales of invention, innovation and application.²⁵ If, simply by focusing on local instances of ‘technology-in-use’, historians of biology can write fully legible global accounts of insulin or of fermentation without having the west as their central point of reference, then what other interpretive tools and frameworks might historians of technology use to productively refigure understandings of the local and the global in biotechnological enterprises that make and know life? Such intentional mutuality between the history of biology and history of technology is not yet regularly encouraged, which reflects the bounded professional identities and interpretive missions of our fields as well as the need for a different approach. This special issue and the JHB Topical Collection together aim to confront that situation: by beginning and building ongoing cross-field reflection into our scholarly modalities, we work towards a historical understanding that also does not recapitulate the epistemic, institutional, and geographic boundaries of our subjects.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Daniel Liu for inviting me to comment on the HSS session he organized; rarely does agreeing to do this necessary professional task result in such excellent intellectual possibilities and long-term scholarly dividends! Dominic Berry, Lijing Jiang, Victoria Lee, and Dmitriy Myelnikov all helpfully read and commented on an earlier draft of this introduction. Amy Slaton and Tiago Saraiva provided useful feedback as well as sterling editorial guidance.

Finally, I am grateful for my co-Editor in Chief Marsha Richmond at the Journal of the History of Biology, since it is through our longer-term collaboration that initiatives (like JHB’s Topical Collections project) can be imagined and (hopefully) become generative sites for the history of biology as a field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Rader, Making Mice.

2. On SCOT in the 1990s to early 2000s, see Klein and Kleinman, “The Social Construction of Technology.”

3. Rajewski, “Fighting Lyme Disease,” 1.

4. Little, “A New Deal for Mice.”

5. Turner, “Synthentic Biology.”

6. Roosth, “Biobricks and Crocheted Coral,” quote 168.

7. Wise, Growing Explanations; see also Landecker, Culturing Life.

8. We were initially brought together by Daniel Liu to address another dimension of ‘making’ – Liu organized a session at the 2017 History of Science Society annual meeting on “Making and Knowing in Biology,” in which all the contributors to this volume took part. Liu was inspired by Pamela Smith’s “Making and Knowing Project” (see https://www.makingandknowing.org/ (accessed 7 August 2019)), which explores relations between early modern artisans and natural philosophers. Similar investigations have also been made by historians of technology, science, and art for other periods, e.g. Schatzberg, “From Art to Applied Science.”

9. Berg, “Editorial.”

10. See, for instance, Bud, Uses of Life; García-Sancho, Biology, Computing, and the History of Molecular Sequencing; Campos, Radium and the Science of Life; and Curry, Evolution Made to Order.

11. de Chadarevian, Designs for Life; and Munns, Engineering the Environment.

12. Creager, Life Atomic; Yi, “The Scientific Commons”; Murphy, Economization of Life; and Saraiva, Fascist Pigs.

13. See Stine and Tarr, “At the Intersections of History”; Bud, Uses of Life; Reuss and Cutliffe, Illusory Boundary; and Abir-Am, “The Discourse of Physical Power” (plus Yoxen’s response) for some earlier attempts to understand history of technology’s relevance to history of life science and environment.

14. Fitzgerald, The Business of Breeding; Curry, Evolution Made to Order; and Johnson, Hitting the Brakes.

15. Pauly, Controlling Life; Capshew, “Engineering Behavior”; Radin, Life on Ice; and Alder, “Innovation and Amnesia.”

16. Kohler, Lords of the Fly; Creager, Life Atomic; see also Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things.

17. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out.

18. Clarke and Fujimura, Right Tools for the Job. See also work on public versus private science, such as Thackray, Private Science and more recently Rasmussen, Gene Jockeys; and Mirowski, Science-Mart.

19. Slaton and Abbate, “Hidden Lives of Standards”; and Mody, Instrumental Community.

20. McCray, The Visioneers.

21. Latour, Reassembling the Social.

22. Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire” and Designs on Nature; and Yi, Recombinant University; and Yi, “Who Owns What?”.

23. Slaton, “Note to Self”; and Saraiva, Fascist Pigs.

24. Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’.”

25. Edgerton, Shock of the Old; and Russell and Vinsel, “The Maintainers.”