“Learning from the Rules of Nature”

Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University)

In 1928 Nishimura Makoto built the first modern Japanese robot. Nishimura was not an engineer but a marine biologist and journalist. Prior to his embarking on the robot project, the Columbia University graduate was teaching at the Imperial Hokkaido University and conducting research on marimo—spherical moss balls that inhabited the cold, secluded waters of lake Akan. The marimo posed a series of questions. Were they animals or plants? Were they one organism or many? How did they reproduce and what caused them to die? It was while researching marimo that Nishimura —also an editor of a surrealist literary journal— saw the Japanese performance of Čapek’s R.U.R. which introduced the word “robot” and framed artificial humans as oppressed servants destined to overthrow humankind. Nishimura was excited about the prospect of artificial humans but dismayed by their portrayal, which he found contrary to what he knew about the workings of nature. Determined to build his own artificial human, Nishimura named his project Gakutensoku — “Learning from the Rules of Nature,” and sought design inspiration from the physiological processes of the animal and plant kingdoms he observed in his research as a biologist. My talk explores the particular understanding of “life” that Nishimura developed in his research on marimo and examines his attempts to embed this understanding in the design of his robotic creation.

“The Iron Lung Patient as New Life Form”

Dora Vargha (University of Exeter)

The iron lung ward of the Heine-Medin Post Treatment Hospital, founded in the late 1950s in Budapest, Hungary was one of the largest and longest running respiratory wards for polio patients in Europe. In a state-funded healthcare system, the ward treated and cared for long-term respiratory patients from their childhood through their adulthood, from the late 1950s for over four decades. In the post-war context of a terrible experience of dehumanization in the recent past on the one hand, and a strong belief in technological and scientific progress of the future on the other, iron lung patients in Eastern Europe raised questions about the definitions of human life.

This paper examines how respiratory patients living with and inside breathing machines challenged medical practice, perceptions of the human body and behavior, prompting medical professionals to term the iron lung patient as a “new life-form”. I argue that the unprecedented and new condition of mechanically assisted bodily function in long-term medical care opened discussions on, and new interpretations of the limits of the human body, its life cycle and the social and biological functions it fulfills. Respiratory patients in this sense were not seen as disabled, but as humans who could not be fitted into the concept of human life as it was known – a perception that could simultaneously be liberating and highly discriminating.

“Transfish: The Multiple Origins of Transgenic Salmon”

Hallam Stevens (Nanyang Technological University)

AquAdvantage Salmon was approved for human consumption by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 after a twenty-year deliberation. The fish – with inserted genes promoting rapid growth and cold resistance – was the first transgenic animal designed for eating. Using oral history interviews with scientists as well as documentary sources drawn from the FDA, Securities and Exchange Commission, and published technical accounts, this talk will outline the development of AquAdvantage Salmon from its origins in the 1970s until its approval.

This is a story of multiple forms of transference and transversion. First, like other transgenic organisms, the production of AA Salmon involved the crossing of genes from several species of fish (Atlantic Salmon, Chinook Salmon, and Ocean Pout). Second, the research that led to AA Salmon crossed over not only between academic and commercial work, but also between animal model organism biology, genetic engineering, and genetic modification of foods. Third, transforming AA Salmon into a successful product involved tightly controlling the gender of the fish, ensuring that reproduction could not take place. Fourth, AA Salmon depended on a transnational movement of fish, people, and research products between Singapore, Canada, the United States, and Panama.

Such a trans telling of this fish’s story suggests the complex, hybrid, and multiple origins of twenty-first century technoscientific productions. AA Salmon emerged from a set of productive mismatches between fish, geography, commerce, and science. The eventual approval of AA Salmon by the FDA involved the simultaneous destabilization of binaries of male-female, center-periphery, and animal-plant.

“Turning to Stone”

Sophia Roosth (Harvard University)

Geobiology is a scientific field that combines the tools, methods, and theories of the earth and life sciences to study the co-evolution of Earth and its biosphere. I follow and work alongside these researchers and allied scholars in fields of micropaleontology, biogeochemistry, and astrobiology as they travel the world in search of Precambrian fossils that they hope can further scientific understandings of the origins of life on Earth as well as the ways researchers might seek life forms elsewhere. In this paper I report on recent fieldwork in Montana in which three geobiologists and I visit the outcrops that remain of a pre-Cambrian shallow ocean that stretched from Montana to Saskatchewan 1.4 billion years ago. As I discover, geobiologists travel to road-cuts and outcrops to compose a time that is fractured and dislocated, juxtaposed and disjointed, a time told in and by stone. Drawing upon recent anthropological and queer theoretical accounts of time, as well as science fictional literary devices, I read these texts in tandem with and against geobiological storytelling to amplify a temporal “theory out of science” that operates against cultural-historical and anthropological conceptions of time as linear, millenarian, continuous, and accelerative. Finally, I read geology, ethnography, and science fiction as textual triplets that use temporality (“going elsewhen”) as a medium for projection, retrojection, and extrapolation – for coeval estrangement.