Hannah Landecker

Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism

Nutritional epigenetics seeks to explain the effects of nutrition on gene expression. For social science, it is an area of life science whose analysis reveals a concentrated form of a wider shift in the understanding of food and metabolism. Rather than the chemical conversion of food to energy and body matter of classic metabolism, food is now also a conditioning environment that shapes the activity of the genome and the physiology of the body. It is thought that food in prenatal and early postnatal life impacts adult-onset diseases such as diabetes and heart disease; exposure to food is seen as a point of potential intervention in long-term health of individuals and populations. This article analyzes how food has become environment in nutritional epigenetics, with a focus on the experimental formalization of food. The experimental image of human life generated in rodent models, it is argued, generates concepts of food as a form of molecular exposure. This scientific discourse has profound implications for how food is perceived, manufactured and regulated, as well as for social theories and analyses of the social body that have a long history of imbrication with scientific models of metabolism.

Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film

The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and the possibility for telling a social history of science through investigation of the production and reception of cinema.

Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History

Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.

How the genome got a life span

In the space of little more than a decade, ideas of the human genome have shifted significantly, with the emergence of the notion that the genome of an individual changes with development, age, disease, environmental inputs, and time. This paper examines the emergence of the genome with a life span, one that experiences drift, instability, and mutability, and a host of other temporal changes. We argue that developments in chromatin biology have provided the basis for this genomic embodiment of experience and exposure. We analyze how time has come to matter for the genome through chromatin, providing analysis of examples in which the human life course is being explored as a set of material changes to chromatin. A genome with a life span aligns the molecular and the experiential in new ways, shifting ideas of life stages, their interrelation, and the temporality of health and disease.

Seeing things: from microcinematography to live cell imaging

From histology to microcinematography, from cytochemistry to live cell imaging, the history of visualization technology in the life sciences may be understood as a series of cycles of action and reaction between static and dynamic modes of representing life.

New times for biology: nerve cultures and the advent of cellular life in vitro

Abstract This article is about the beginnings of tissue culture—the culture of living, reproducing cells of complex organisms outside the body. It argues that Ross Harrison’s experiments in nerve culture between 1907 and 1910 should be viewed as part of a larger shift in early twentieth-century laboratory practice from in vivo to in vitro experimentation. Via a focus on the temporality of experiment—contrasting the live object of Harrison’s investigation with the static object of histological representations—this article details the production of a new and surprising form of life, cellular life in vitro. Tissue culture, developed from Harrison’s experiments, was greeted with great surprise and disbelief, despite Harrison’s protestations that he had merely juxtaposed extant techniques. An analysis of these initial reactions to tissue culture illuminates the extent to which cells living visibly outside of the body in glass broke with in vivo practices and assumptions of the hiddenness and interiority of certain processes of growth and change.

The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live-Cell Imaging

How do we see life after the century of the gene? This article argues that the post-2000 postgenomic turn was and is a thoroughly visual turn, as well as a theoretical and practical shift away from the central dogma of DNA as master molecule. Live-cell imaging is a rapidly expanding area of scientific visualization of living things whose practice is central in postgenomic biological research and theory. Fluorescent probes enable the visualization of the movement in vivo, over time, of a wide range of vital molecules, for example the movement of motor proteins along the cellular skeleton. Despite its prominence in the life sciences, these moving images have attracted little critical attention outside the scientific community. Comparison with microcinematography of the early 20th century, another time-based medium that also placed the capture of movement at the center of the technique, is used here to frame the emergence of live-cell imaging in the late 20th century and discuss its theoretical significance. This article argues that live-cell imaging was at its origins an animation of a theory of life dominated by the gene. However, focused as it is on the life of proteins, the practice actually facilitated a move away from such dominance, with a rise of a ‘molecular vitalism’: an interest in all cellular molecules as knitted together in a complex moving net in the time and space of the cell. As such, the present moment echoes early 20th-century tensions between the study of structure and function in cellular anatomy versus physiology and puts the focus on molecular movement just as cellular movement was central to earlier practices. Contemporary live-cell imaging does not depict a structure described in a unique moment that explains a life process, but rather visualizes a continuity of movement that constitutes life processes.

Technical matters: method, knowledge and infrastructure in twentieth-century life science

Conceptual breakthroughs in science tend to garner accolades and attention. But, as the invention of tissue culture and the development of isotopic tracers show, innovative methods open up new fields and enable the solution of longstanding problems.

Creeping, Drinking, Dying: The Cinematic Portal and the Microscopic World of the Twentieth-Century Cell

Film scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use oftime-based media such as film coupled with the microscope allow scientists to experience that other visualization practices do not? Examining three episodes in the twentieth-century study of the cell, this article argues that the apparatus ofmicrocinematography constitutes what might be thought of as a technical portal to another world, a door that determines the experience of the world that lies on the other side of it. In this case, the design of apparatuses to capture time-lapsed images enabled the acceleration of cellular time, bringing it into the realm of human perception and experience. Further, the experience of the cellular temporal world was part of a distinct kind of cell biology, one that was focused on behavior rather than structure, focused on the relation between cells, and between the cell and its milieu rather than on cell-intrinsic features such as chromosomes or organelles. As such, the instruments and technical design of the microcinematographic apparatus may be understood as a kind of materialized epistemology, the history of which can elucidate how cinema was and is used to produce scientific knowledge.

Sociology in an Age of Genomic Instability: Copy Number Variation, Somatic Mosaicism, and the Fallen Genome

Abstract Purpose This study analyzes the rise of genome instability in the life sciences and traces the problematic of instability as it relates to the sociology of health. Genome instability is the study of how genomes change and become variable between generations and within organisms over the life span. Genome instability reflects a significant departure from the Platonic genome imagined during the Human Genome Project. The aim of this chapter is to explain and analyze research on copy number variation and somatic mosaicism to consider the implications of these sciences for sociologists interested in genomics. Methodology/approach This chapter draws on two multi-sited ethnographies of contemporary biomedical science and literature in the sociology of health, science, and biomedicine to document a shift in thinking about the genome from fixed and universal to highly variable and influenced by time and context. Findings Genomic instability has become a framework for addressing how genomes change and become variable between generations and within organisms over the life span. Instability is a useful framework for analyzing changes in the life sciences in the post-genomic era. Research implications Genome instability requires life scientists to address how differences both within and between individuals articulate with shifting disease categories and classifications. For sociologists, these findings have implications for studies of identity, sociality, and clinical experience. Originality/value This is the first sociological analysis of genomic instability. It identifies practical and conceptual implications of genomic instability for life scientists and helps sociologists delineate new approaches to the study of genomics in the post-genomic era.