Sophia Roosth

Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities

Introduction Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as yeast, is a unicellular fungus with a cell cycle similar to that of humans. The first eukaryote to have its genome fully sequenced and a standard model organism in biology research,2 yeast is an organism that lends itself to multisensory experiences. It has been imaged extensively with light and atomic force microscopy, and anyone who has seen the bottom of a pint glass or walked past a bakery can speak to Saccharomyces cerevisiae’s olfactory and gustatory allure. It is fitting, then, that this species is also the first to have its cellular noises amplified and recorded. Sonocytology, a recently developed technique within nanotechnology research, uses a scanning probe microscope to record the vibrational movements of cell walls and amplifies these vibrations so that humans can hear them. Yeast cells vibrate approximately one thousand times per sec-

Sounding the limits of life : essays in the anthropology of biology and beyond

List of Illustrations vii Sounding Life, Water, Sound ix CHAPTER 1 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies 1 CHAPTER 2 Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth) 19 CHAPTER 3 An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater 35 CHAPTER 4 Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-First-Century Whale 44 CHAPTER 5 How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839-2010 48 CHAPTER 6 Homo microbis: Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome 62 CHAPTER 7 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination 73 CHAPTER 8 Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization 94 CHAPTER 9 Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004 106 CHAPTER 10 From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures 116 CHAPTER 11 Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science 137 CHAPTER 12 Seashell Sound 155 CHAPTER 13 Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner) 164 CHAPTER 14 Chimeric Sensing 173 Life, Water, Sound Resounding 183 Acknowledgments 189 Notes 195 Index 283

Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication

Argument What does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.