“Experimental Making and Analytical Knowing: The History of DNA Synthesis”

Dominic Berry (University of Edinburgh)

In the past few decades an effort has been made to establish a new field of the biological sciences under the broad umbrella of synthetic biology. A number of scholars have already contributed to the historical understanding of this community, but in my own social and historical investigation I have been particularly inspired by John Pickstone’s ways of knowing and making. While synthetic biologists themselves often emphasize an unbounded world of imaginative biological possibility, their laboratory life is characterised by efforts to improve platforms to make such work possible. In short, they are often experimenting with ways to make and make better. At the same time as they emphasize their powers to create, they also make claims to knowledge production. Where they are often unclear about what kinds of knowledge are being produced, I offer Pickstone's category of analysis. In sum I present of a history of synthetic biology that characterises it as an epistemological programme of reform that extracts value from the movement between experiment and analysis, making and knowing.

“Wild Toxicity, Cultivated Safety: Aflatoxin and Kōji Classification”

Victoria Lee (Ohio University)

In 1960, over 100,000 poultry in England died from an unknown disease named Turkey X. Investigators linked the disease to peanut meal in the turkeys’ industrial feed, and identified the cause as a toxin produced by the fungus Aspergillus flavus. Following the Turkey X outbreak, “aflatoxin” emerged as a powerful carcinogen, which especially damaged the liver and clearly affected numerous animal species including trout and rats. New anxieties highlighted aflatoxin—produced as the mold grew on nuts and grains during storage—as a serious potential hazard to humans, including people who either consumed affected animals, or ingested aflatoxin directly in their own food, perhaps in the course of eating a diet indigenous to particular regions. As part of the research after 1960 to understand the risks posed by aflatoxin, mycologists focused on distinguishing molds within the Aspergillus flavus taxonomic group that were toxigenic from those that were not, a difficult task because the A. flavus group included a large number of microbial isolates. Among them were the varieties known as kōji, which were widely used in the Japanese brewing industries to make sake, soy sauce, and miso. Consequently, Japanese scientists attempted to establish kōji varieties as a distinct group from A. flavus, constructing an evolutionary narrative in which human cultivation had created a non-toxigenic, domesticated species different than its toxigenic wild relative. By tracing their work, this paper explores the ways in which classificatory practices of microbes and their use in making food defined and shaped each other.

“The Great Leap Making and the Accumulative Knowing: Insulin Synthesis During the Early Cold War”

Vivian Ling (Independent Scholar)

In the 1950s, when the genetic code was still unknown, the studies of proteins through their synthesis captured the attention of a number of biochemists. Particularly, Panayotis Katsoyannis in the United States, Helmut Zahn in Germany, and a large team in the People’s Republic of China independently set out to synthesize insulin, a 51-residue polypeptide. As the three teams worked within disparate social and political environments, scientists involved held differing visions, which not only shaped the specific ways these projects were organized, but also different designs of making insulin, which revealed different aspects of the molecule’s structure, function, and its synthesis in vivo. How did the political and material dimensions of these three groups related to these ways of making and knowing of insulin? This paper addresses the question by focusing on the Chinese team while comparing it with other cases. Particularly, the Chinese project was initiated primarily to gain national glory, which mobilized a large number of research institutes and a military style of cooperation in its early stage. The Great Leap Forward, often interpreted as an industrial and agricultural disaster, actually unleashed researchers’ motivation and creativities so that they could quickly achieved the synthesis in the early 1960s through trials and errors with different methods of splitting disulfide bonds and reconstituting the whole structure. This was different from the design rationales demonstrated in both American and German cases, in which insulin synthesis was viewed as either a challenging problem for biochemistry or primary research toward making synthetic fibers.

“How the Artificial Cell Invented the Cell Membrane and Other Colloids, 1864–1935”

Daniel Liu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Suggestions that colloidal precipitates were either artificial forms or mimics of life stretch all the way back to the seventeenth century, when “chemical gardens” were alternately serious alchemical endeavors and popular chemical diversions. In the 1860s, however, precipitations of copper ferrocyanide and boiled glue dropped in tannic acid became the analogical and material bases for two of the most important research questions biology: the physical causes of plant growth, and the problem of the cell’s selective powers of permeability. In this paper I will argue that the modern theory of the cell membrane as a semi-permeable barrier must be traced to Moritz Traube’s 1867 claim that such colloidal precipitations were in fact “artificial cells,” and Wilhelm Pfeffer’s adaptation of Traube’s artificial cell as an experimental tool to investigate osmosis and plant-water relations. Pfeffer’s use of a Traube’s artificial cell was experimentally and conceptually narrow, yet it quickly became the theoretical and cognitive prototype for the cell membrane—during a period when the anatomical existence of the cell membrane was widely disputed among biologists. Yet the canonization of cell membrane theory was but one of the many afterlives seventy years of research on what one commentator called the “physiology of Traube’s copper ferrocyanide cell.” I argue that Traube’s artificial cell redefined the cell and even life itself as a controlled relationship to its environment, that it reinforced the divide between plant and animal life, and that it became a graveyard of materialist philosophical speculation about the nature of life.