Hannah Landecker’s recent visit invited us to think not only of the history of biology – the ways in which the sciences have shifted, over time, their approach to the living creatures in this world – but to the biology of history – how biology itself changes in response to human history. This relation does not run in parallel, as she demonstrates, but is recursive. She writes, “how human historical events and processes have materialized as biological events and process and ecologies,”1 is linked to our ideological and cultural assumptions about the biological world. For example, how we think about food production changes the very animals that we consume, which, in turn, change who we are at a biological level. And this materialization then forces us to reevaluate our scientific techniques, epistemologies, and ideologies. In relation to the history of antibiotic resistance, she writes, “What looked then like a laboratory technique ready to remake the world can also be retold as a remade world about to remake the laboratory.”2 Her work provides a cautionary note about how we think about the natural world, as it will have materialized effects. Perhaps, then, even in these times when we are called upon to act, and to act quickly, in relation to rapid environmental crisis, there is still a need to pause, and to think.
This complex feedback underpins our contemporary understanding of what genetic expression is, Landecker argues. Following the excitement of the genome project, where DNA was understood primarily as information, we have now entered into a period of more modest, if more vital, metaphors of our relationship to genetic inheritance. For, Landecker does not see a strict division between epigenetics and the genome itself. As she points out, epigenesis, from which epigenetics is derived refers to the gradual unfolding of development.3 So the strict distinction that genetic science still clings to between DNA and epigenetics, is, Landecker argues, false. Increasingly, there is an understanding of the ways in which the development of an organism is constantly taking in environmental factors that then shape even its cellular structures. Our bodies are much more porous than we would like to believe. And there is far less continuity in our being than once previously thought, even if we continue to express cellular memories for particular traumas or patterns of behavior long after the actions or event has passed.
Her work is incredibly provocative for people across a range of disciplines, genuinely linking social and natural sciences, showing the ways in which different epistemologies are mutually reinforcing and productive. This recursive relationship between materiality and history, whether on the level of an individual organism, a species, or the history of ideas, provides strong support for thinking with each other. For, as Landecker shows us, our metaphors are material.
- Landecker, Hannah. “Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History,” Body and Society (2015): 3. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X14561341.
- Ibid., 11.
- Lappé, Martine and Hannah Landecker. “How the genome got a life span.” New Genetics and Society 34 no. 2 (2015): 154.