TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds -Luis A. Campos, Michael R. Dietrich, Tiago Saraiva, and Christian C. Young
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0001
[biology;genetic engineering;engineering]
“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms, to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature. (pages 1 - 10)
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Part 1: Control
1. Knowing as Controlling: Gene Drives and the Engineering Ideal -Christian H. Ross
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0002
[gene drive;mechanistic;control;engineering;responsibility;biotechnology;Aotearoa;New Zealand]
Controlling life has long been a central aspiration of the biological sciences. In the twenty-first century, engineered gene drive, a biotechnology that alters how particular genetic traits are inherited among organisms in a targeted population, brings to the fore questions of how we understand and exert control over other biological entities. Initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand to consider the use of gene drives to combat invasive species in the region, spearheaded in part by gene drive creator Kevin Esvelt, provide an example case of how life comes to be known and considered controllable across different scales. Analysis of the notions of control embedded in descriptions of gene drive technology itself shows how mechanistic biological control becomes intertwined with ideas of scientific responsibility and reveals limitations of mechanistic biology in navigating social words and distinct practices of meaning-making. It also prompts reflective examination of the visions of remaking nature that are animated by particular approaches to knowing and controlling life. (pages 13 - 30)
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2. A Tale of Two Rats -Anita Guerrini
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0003
[Norway rat;black rat;invasive species;laboratory animals]
Rats have been the intimate companions of humans for millennia. Their commensal interactions have benefited either party, but rarely both. Rats are invasive species, urban pests, pets, and experimental objects, and the levels of their intersections with human life range from the molecular to the ecosystem. Most attempts to make rats fit for co-existence with humans have entailed finding ways to kill them or exclude them from human presence. When scientists began to recognize the value of rats as experimental laboratory animals in the mid-nineteenth century, remaking the rats themselves began, whether by selective breeding, by training, or most recently by genetic modification. Killing rats remains a goal of urban dwellers, public health officials, and ecologists, while at the same time, rats have also become highly valued tools of life science as indispensable laboratory animals. These incommensurable and indeed incompatible goals highlight the wildly differing value of rats to humans, depending on their contexts. Focusing on two species, the brown or Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) and the black or ship’s rat (Rattus rattus), this essay examines the peculiar relationship between rats and humans, highlighting social, biological, and ethical limits to engineering nature. (pages 31 - 43)
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3. Cloning as Rooting: Cultivating Oranges and the Jewish Settlement of Palestine -Tiago Saraiva
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0004
[citrus;Palestine;grafting;budding;horticulture;shamouti;Jaffa orange;degeneration;cloning;orchards]
This chapter explores the historical role of orange orchards in the contested process of rooting Jewish people in Palestine in the interwar period. It details the importance of asexual reproduction techniques like grafting and budding learned by Jewish horticulturalists from their Arab counterparts to the success of settlement communities. More than reproducing new forms of life, what was at stake was the ability of reproduction of sameness, of delivering to international markets always the same standardized orange – the shamouti, or Jaffa orange. Obsessions over degeneration of orange trees opened the door for experimenting with Californian methods for producing rootstocks and buds, or what Californian scientists called cloning, inaugurating the modern use of the term. Based on the scientific correspondence between agriculture scientists at the Rehovot Experiment station in Palestine and American breeders at the University of California Citrus Experiment Station in Riverside, the text traces the processes by which scientific discussions over how to properly reproduce oranges became discussions of how to differentiate modern Jewish orchards from alleged traditional Arab ones. In other words, engineering life through cloning sustained the vision of a divided Palestinian landscape, separating Jews from Arabs. (pages 44 - 59)
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4. Harvesting Hogzillas: Feral Pigs and the Engineering Ideal -Abraham Gibson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0005
[domestication;animals;engineering;feral animals;feral pigs;American South;scientific breeding;invasion biology;conservation genetics]
Re-framing animal domestication as one long engineering project opens new avenues of research. Like many engineering projects, domestication was not achieved in one fell swoop. Breeders initiated many different projects in many different places, and they sometimes failed. Like other engineering projects throughout history, domestication requires constant maintenance. If any animals leave their partnership with humans and establish residency in the wild, free from direct anthropogenic selection, they are relabeled feral. These animals are ubiquitous in the historical record, but they are typically overlooked. What does the existence of feral animals reveal about the effort to engineer life? To answer this question, my chapter examines the history of a very specific population: feral pigs in the American South. The narrative is divided into three sections. The first section describes the earliest domestication of pigs several millennia ago, and thus helps establish domestication as an engineering project. The bulk of the chapter is contained within the second section, which examines the history of feral pigs in the American South, from the end of the Civil War to the present. The third and final section draws connections between the history of feral pigs and the history of engineering life. (pages 60 - 70)
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Part 2: Knowing as Making
5. Design and Narrative in the History of DNA Analysis and Synthesis -Dominic J. Berry
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0006
[engineering;narrative;DNA;synthetic biology;Erwin Chargaff;Nadrian Seeman;biological information;biological material]
Historians have typically cast DNA as significant thanks to its proposed informational properties. By focusing on two illustrative actors, Erwin Chargaff and Nadrian Seeman, I demonstrate what alternative histories of molecular life might look like, centering DNA’s material rather than informational properties. These two actors, and others like them, pursued greater control of DNA first and foremost as a manipulable material, rather than as a carrier of biochemical information. In the examples I discuss, these manipulations could provide novel access to a phenomena or enable iterative tinkering with a phenomena. For researchers attempting to create plausible narratives of complex interactions, the adoption of experimental systems that used molecular technologies was a particularly fruitful strategy. Design and engineering have been part of the history of DNA, and biology, for far longer than historians have typically allowed, and they have not been the preserve of molecular biologists, "genetic engineers," or their successors. (pages 73 - 88)
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6. Engineering Behavior and the Problems of Animal Misbehavior -Edmund Ramsden
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0007
[animal training;operant conditioning;behaviorism;behavioral engineering;ethology;misbehavior;B. F. Skinner;Marian and Keller Breland]
From the 1940s, psychologists in the United States saw in operant or instrumental conditioning the opportunity for realizing a new era of “behavioral engineering.” While B.F. Skinner imagined a utopian society of the future in his novel Walden Two in which behavior was shaped by the systematic alteration of environmental variables, neo-behaviorists set to work putting his theories into practice in laboratory and field. In 1951, Marian and Keller Breland described their intention to validate Skinner’s theories in the animal world, working to mass-produce animal behavior exhibits for advertisers, farm shows, zoos, and aquatic and amusement parks. However, it was the Brelands who first coined the term “misbehavior” in 1961, describing obtuse and puzzling patterns of behavior in a wide variety of species, such as pigs, raccoons, chickens, and dolphins. By the 1970s, misbehavior was being identified in experiments with the laboratory rat. The machine-like predictability of the engineered organism was beginning to break down. While behavioral engineers had sought to bring the natural world under material control, a new narrative of technological failure brought knowledge and skills of ethologists and ecologists into the research laboratory to help re-establish the experimental organism as an autonomous and significant biological being. (pages 89 - 102)
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7. Engineering Spaces for the Biological Effects of Fission -Joshua McGuffie
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0008
[Pacific Proving Grounds;Castle Bravo;Rongelap;Bikini;fisheries biologists;Applied Fisheries Laboratory;Holmes and Narver;Eniwetok]
On 1 March 1954, a powerful thermonuclear device rocked Bikini Atoll in the United States’ Pacific Proving Grounds. Castle Bravo’s dangerously radioactive fallout blanketed nearby Rongelap Atoll like fresh snow. The US Navy quickly whisked away the Marshall Islanders who called the suddenly uninhabitable atoll home. This chapter tells the story of the fisheries biologists who studied radiation in the local food chain and paved the way for the exiles’ ill-fated 1957 return home. The scientists, from the Applied Fisheries Laboratory at the University of Washington, had studied the Proving Grounds since Operation Crossroads in 1946. I argue that their integration into the infrastructure at the Proving Grounds created the material conditions for them to practice biology that was rigorous but never critical of the site’s atomic mission. Holmes & Narver, Inc., the Los Angeles firm serving as the Atomic Energy Commission’s prime contractor in the Pacific, engineered sites that supported very particular Cold War technological and scientific results. This chapter zeroes in on the Eniwetok Marine Biology Laboratory, built by the firm for Operation Castle, as an element of the infrastructure that supported the Proving Grounds’ mission but failed to protect the health of the repatriated residents of Rongelap. (pages 103 - 114)
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8. A Matter of Taste: Making Artificial Silkworm Food in Twentieth-Century Japan -Lisa Onaga
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0009
[animal feed;mulberry;soybeans;nutrition;food science and technology;silkworm food or chow;molecularization;Bombyx mori;science and technology in Japan]
It is largely understood that the silkworm, Bombyx mori, eats the leaves of the mulberry plant exclusively. In practice, many silkworms reared in industrial, laboratory, and hobbyist conditions today can also eat “artificial food.” Such food, compounded from powdered mulberry, starch binders, and nutritional substances such as soybean extract or purified amino acids, is often used where mulberry is absent or when the production of protein-rich larvae is favored over silk cocoons. The development of silkworm nutritional physiology, motivated by biological inquiries into silkworms’ diets, occurred within the context of food-rationing and searches for human food alternatives during Japan’s imperial expansionist agenda and nation-building projects of the 1930s. Mulberry shortages in Japan and increased production of soybeans in Manchuria propelled research on silkworm food substitutions and silkworm feeding behaviors during the interwar and postwar periods. This history of making artificial silkworm food stresses the continuity of research spanning prewar and postwar Japan. This analysis also illustrates a broad set of political, economic, and technological issues that motivated biological experimentation, especially as races to industrially engineer artificial feeding media coincided with new genetic analyses of the picky feeding behaviors of silkworms—and how to change their natures. (pages 115 - 134)
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9. Cybernetics without the Cyborg: Inventing Biological Modernism in Biomimetics and Biomimicry -Richard Fadok
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0010
[cybernetics;cyborg;biomimetics;bionics;biomimicry;biological modernism]
What is cybernetics without the cyborg? American technoscientific projects to remodel biological life on a technological analogy—represented by the iconic cyborg, or cybernetic organism—have overshadowed the historiography of midcentury cybernetics. This chapter unearths a lesser known lineage centered on the remaking of technology through biological analogies in order to provide a revised history of life, power, and knowledge in cybernetics. Alternating between institutional history and ethnographic fieldwork, it traces how this lesser known tradition evolved out of “bionics,” also known as “biomimetics”: the identification, derivation, and application of biological principles to current design problems in engineering. Where biomimetics in its past and present incarnations largely affirms the ideal of control that animated efforts to manufacture and govern cyborgs, the contemporary design paradigm called “biomimicry,” which spawned from biomimetics in the 1990s, rejects the desire of controlling nature, cultivating instead an array of practices premised on an ethic of humility toward life. By re-examining the history of cybernetics beyond the cyborg, this chapter aims to interrogate the periodization of the contemporary moment through the category of “biological modernism,” arguing that the biologization of technology through biomimicry exceeds the telos of control. (pages 135 - 148)
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Part 3: Envisioning
10. Strains of Andromeda: The Cosmic Potential Hazards of Genetic Engineering -Luis A. Campos
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0011
[Asilomar;genetic engineering;science fiction;Andromeda Strain;Michael Crichton;planetary protection;invasion biology]
At the dawn of the era of genetic engineering, molecular biologists and others at the famed 1975 Asilomar conference wrangled with the potential biohazards of recombinant DNA research, exchanging speculative possibilities about future applications, risks of contamination, and issues of biocontainment. As conceptual, scientific, and regulatory frameworks and practices of planetary protection governing scientific commerce with the heavens above dovetailed with efforts to address potential hazards in the engineering of life down here on Earth, concerns about the prospect of a pandemic were often explicitly framed within the language of science fiction, and with direct reference to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) in particular. While many participants of the 1975 “Pandora’s Box Congress” and its aftermath derided such invocations as improper sensationalism and “molecular politics,” conflating hype and hope, this case highlights the unexpected and sometimes unruly cultural narratives in which cutting-edge science is always embedded. Cosmic narratives not only intruded into earthly decisions about laboratory biocontainment, but were part of the construction of new and contested futures for biological engineering, entangling earthly lessons about biological colonization and invasion with the planetary protection of heavenly bodies, scaling from the molecular to the galactic. (pages 151 - 172)
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11. Engineering Human Nature in the Genome Age: A Long View -Nathaniel Comfort
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0012
[commodification;CRISPR;DNA;eugenics;genetic engineering;human nature;neoliberalism;physiognomy;polygenic risk scores;social control]
All attempts to engineer human biology ride high on promises: They will enable us to predict disease, prevent crime, make our innate nature legible, take control of our own evolution. Here I sketch the longue durée of human engineering. I focus on two twenty-first-century techniques that have drawn much attention, scientifically and publicly. The first, polygenic risk scores for complex traits using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) big data, promises to tweeze nature from nurture and tell our fortunes. Researchers claim to predict wealth, sexuality, educational attainment—any trait you can name—from birth, or even earlier. Historically, such efforts have not gone well. The second, gene editing with “CRISPR,” democratizes genetic engineering in ways that are both exciting and terrifying. Within six years of its invention it had been used on live human embryos. These techniques open up new vistas of human engineering. Or do they? Situating the continuities of scientific aspiration in the context of three centuries of social, political, and economic change suggests both cautionary tales and narratives of at least partial success. Yet the rhetoric and hype around these techniques make them sound like genetic panaceas, like reminders of a benighted past. (pages 173 - 185)
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12. Engineering Uplift: Black Eugenics as Black Liberation -Ayah Nuriddin
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0013
[African American;eugenics;race;biology;public health]
For some African American physicians and scientists, eugenics provided a way to imagine alternative possibilities for improving black life. I call their engagement “black eugenics,” defined as a hereditarian approach to racial uplift. Biological racial improvement undergirded racial uplift ideology, which emphasized respectability politics and social reform. These ideas were central to struggles for racial equality, and thus black eugenics functioned as an articulation of black politics. It functioned as part of a longer trajectory of black engagement with hereditarianism and racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For African American physicians and scientists, biological racial uplift required intervening on the collective stock of the race. They sought to engineer the race through eugenics and envision new possibilities for its future. Though they do not use the language of engineering, it is useful for interpreting their work. For them, racial uplift through black eugenics was about manipulating, developing, and controlling the biosocial life of the race. Black eugenics was concerned with intervening on the heredity of African Americans to engineer the composition of the race. Their work demonstrated how they understood eugenics as a way to engineer racial improvement to uplift African Americans to their fullest biosocial potential. (pages 186 - 202)
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13. Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth -James Rodger Fleming
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0014
[terraformation;geoengineering;climate intervention;planetary manipulation]
Can humanity survive on Earth without taking control of the climate system and biosphere? If we seek to colonize other planets, we will begin to answer this question based on engineering life at multiple scales. Exploring historical cases can help to recognize possibilities and limits. For example, in 1929 J.D. Bernal speculated that humans might eventually colonize space and “live” as part cybernetic beings, with physical and mental capacities that extend individual existence into a collective. In the 1960s, Project Starfish Prime involved detonating a hydrogen bomb to manipulate Earth’s magnetosphere. Together, these case studies can help us consider whether will we need to live sequestered from harsh environments in little residential capsules and venture out only in spacesuits, or should we practice terraformation to make the environment of other planets more Earth-like? In either case, we would need to master bio-geo-chemical engineering to generate fresh air, water, and food. Would it be better then to engineer planets for humans or to engineer humans and perhaps cyborgs to withstand harsh environments? Although speculation about new technological developments or inventions has proven to be notoriously inaccurate, we seek to derive insights from the history of planetary manipulation proposals and fantasies. (pages 203 - 216)
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14. Resurrecting the Sublime -Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226783574.003.0015
[extinction;flowers;smell;art;synthetic biology;sublime;colonization;preservation;reconstruction;collaboration]
Could we ever again smell flowers made extinct through human activity? Having combed Harvard University’s herbarium collections for extinct plant specimens, in 2016, Dr. Christina Agapakis and her team at Ginkgo Bioworks extracted DNA from tissues samples taken from three plants that went extinct in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. With help from paleogeneticists at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Ginkgo scientists identified gene sequences that encode fragrance-producing enzymes. These DNA sequences were synthesized and inserted into yeast, which were cultured to produce smell molecules for verification. The approximations of the lost flowers’ aroma by smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas were then incorporated into immersive installations designed by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, accompanied by digital reconstructions of extinct plants in their lost landscapes.Rather than engage in de-extinction itself, the project uses biotechnology to glimpse a flower blooming in a landscape, each an interplay of a species and a place that no longer exists. The text and visuals in this chapterdemonstrate how collaborative work between synthetic biologists and artists can fruitfully raise complex questions about our relationship with nature, sustainability, biodiversity preservation, conservation, colonization, and the complicated roles of technology and capital in these areas. (pages 217 - 230)
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Notes
List of Contributors
Index
