More-than-human immunities and intimacies in life science and public health

Abstracts

Environmentality: Microbiome research and a relational rethinking of environments

Adam Bencard, Medical Museion/University of Copenhagen

In the past 10-15 years, microbiome research has amply shown that human health is deeply intertwined with the ecology of microbial communities living on and in our bodies. This has challenged any easy demarcation between organisms and environments, a distinction that was central to the development of scientific medicine from the mid-19th century onwards. In other words, microbiome research in the 21st century seems to be bringing about changes in the status of the environment within biomedicine, as categorical distinctions between organisms and environments are brought into question, and the biological boundaries between them become less clear. We argue that this introduces challenges regarding usage of the term environment: what constitutes an environment, for whom, and with which consequences for health? Attending to the microbiome makes foreground and background repeatedly switch place, and biological boundaries move.

In this paper, we will propose a conceptual tool - environmentality - to think through these problems. Environmentality, we argue, is the state or quality of being an environment or a causal context for something else in a particular context: a fully perspectival proposition. Its power lies partly in what Isabelle Stengers has called the efficacy of the word itself, contrasting the dominant sense of the word environment as something both external and fixed. Through two vignettes/case studies, we will show how environmentality can help think about the causality of microbiota vis-a-vis host health in a processual, relational and situated manner, across scales and temporalities.

Self as other and other as self: absorptive bodies and cells in personal immunotherapy research

Mie Seest Dam, University of Copenhagen

This paper traces the translational paths in a Danish research center engaged in all steps of personalized cancer immunotherapy research from basic cell and animal studies to clinical trials. Based on immune cells isolated from the patient’s own tumor tissue to enhance the body’s defense against cancer, the scientific rationale behind this group of anticancer therapies is contouring public and scientific imaginations of the immune system as constituted by a rigid border between the body (self) and the external world (other) (Martin 1994). While developed for one person only, my fieldwork demonstrated that personal cancer immunotherapy holds the potential to attack not only the cancer but also the patient from whom it originated. In this case, the patient’s immune cells no longer act as part of the patient (self) but as foreign intruders (others). Drawing on a cluster of ecologically oriented ethnographers that share an interest in the permeability of bodies and environments (Solomon 2016, Tsing 2015, Mol 2021), I show that the translational movements across laboratory and clinic that have made the Danish research center world-leading in its field rest on absorptive transformations (Solomon 2016) across (human and animal) bodies and cells. In these transformations, I argue, notions of self and other are continuously disrupted and upheld along with the production of scientific results.

Between the genotype and the phenotype lies the microbiome. Symbiosis and the making of ‘postgenomic’ knowledge.

Cécile Fasel, STS Lab, University of Lausanne; with Dr. Luca Chiapperino

Thanks to the development and increasing accessibility of sequencing, computational technologies, and system approaches, microbiomics has become a defining feature of post-genomics, proposing a totemic object to the life scientists’ aspirations to go beyond the XX century biomedical research’s so-called ‘reductionists’ and ‘gene-centric’ experimentations. Our paper explores the technical and epistemic tensions involved in the construction, negotiation, and validation of microbiome-related knowledge in post-genomics. It documents and carefully analyzes the negotiations behind the publication of a paper on the role of microbiota in Drosophila’s development. The scientists’ aim in this paper was to demonstrate that the drosophila gut microbiome acts as a developmental buffer — that the presence/absence of the microbiome masks/unveils the effects of genotypic variations. While the claims and concepts presented in the article and interviews with authors refer to the complexity work, non-gene-centric promises, and multispecies narratives of this research, the written exchanges between the team, the referees, and the editors through a lengthy peer review process show that plenty of conceptual, epistemological, and ontological criticisms are addressed to this kind of microbiome research. Analyzing these exchanges brings to light how, along with the switch of the team’s model’s (drosophila) representational target toward the exploration of a non-gene-centric multi-species phenomenon, came a dramatic loss of their model’s representational scope which heavily hampered the approval of their paper for publication. This story, we conclude, epitomizes the affordances and limitations of putting pre-HGP highly standardized models and tools to the service of writing complex but still generalizable postgenomic stories of symbiotic development.

Constructing visibilities of a more-than-human body

Joana Formosinho, University of Edinburgh

Within the natural sciences, binary categories such as body/environment, human/non-human, and individual/collective are creaking under the weight of ill-fitting data. Technologies such as metagenomics reveal a human body composed in part of environmentally acquired microbial cells operating in (partial) functional integration with our own. Resident microbes emerge as key actors in immunity, digestion, metabolism, and maybe even social behavior. Thus, the environment emerges as a functional component of the human body—with clear implications for the intersection of human and environmental health and articulations of collectives. Amidst this landscape of cross-disciplinary 'binary trouble,' the concept of holobiont (host + microbiota) has risen to visibility. Through para-ethnographic juxtaposition of natural and social science discourse, I argue that the holobiont is acting as a "boundary object," catalyzing cross-disciplinary dialogue while acquiring discipline-specific meanings. Migrating from its roots as an explanatory framework for symbiotic relations within biology, the holobiont has been mobilized as a unit of biological individuality, unit of health and sustainability, as onto-political model, and as a figure of hope and repair in the Anthropocene. While almost hyper-visible as a concept, the holobiont body per se in its material and embodied viscosities remains largely invisible within science studies discourse. I propose that attention to emerging biological data on host-microbiota 'cross-talk' at the gut mucosal wall—a host structure shaping and being shaped by microbiota communities—is a pathway towards constructing material visibilities of holobiont bodies. I then reflect on the role of cross-disciplinary collaboration in constructing social visibility of more-than-human relations as factually constructed within the natural sciences.

Working Mice: In/visibility in the Knowledge Ecologies of Translational Medicine

Carrie Friese, London School of Economics and Political Science

This paper traces the biologies or corresponding work practices of mice used in an experiment designed as basic science regarding the mechanism by which aging affects vaccine uptake. This question was asked in collaboration with a pharmaceutical company, and more pharmaceutical concern regarding the fact that older people tend to take up vaccines less effectively than younger people. Based on participant observation research conducted in both the animal facility that bred, reared, vaccinated, and culled the mice as well as in the life sciences laboratory that used the mouse bodies in experiments, I ask why cancer developed in aged, feminized mice mattered so much to animal technicians working in the animal facility and ceased to matter to immunologists working in the laboratory. I contend the answer is that there are two different understandings of the ontology of the laboratory animal, wherein a more processual model pervades the animal facility and a more mechanistic model pervades the laboratory. The built environment and broader discourses on sex and gender worked to support these practices in both knowledge and ignorance.

Caring for home places through Sámi landscape practices

Solveig Joks, Sámi allaskuvla - Sámi University of Applied Sciences

In Sámi gathering practices, such as cloudberry picking and egg gathering, people have become familiar with the gathering places. Some places welcome them, others do not. Over thousands of years, Sámi have learned how to gain consent from the gathering places to be there and to make peace with the land and waters. Listening to the surroundings or, perhaps more importantly, to one’s own feelings, can help discern whether the place is welcoming. This close relationship to places creates mutual humility and respect.

Sámi can observe changes in the landscape during their yearly visits to gathering places. Cloudberry pickers and egg gatherers also see how both their own activity and lack of activity affect the birds and the life of holms. To preserve the balance, the holms need different kinds of birds and people who care for and respect the land and waters. In this way, people become caretakers of their surroundings.

Through gathering practices, people not only observe the world, but they are also acting on and constituting that world. The landscapes of gatherers come into being through relations between people and their surroundings as humans and non-humans. This humble way of moving is knowledge that Indigenous Peoples have acquired through acting in home places.

Terrestrial Entanglements: Genomic Selection across Human, Animal, and Plant

Olivia Spalletta and Mette Nordahl Svendsen, University of Copenhagen Center for Medical Science and Technology Studies

How do commitments to and technologies of human health frame and intervene in who and what will come to inhabit our planet? How do scientists select kinds of life and ways of living that will be kept in existence here on earth? Grappling with questions like these tests our disciplinary boundaries and pushes us to consider how to incorporate inorganic matter and the planet as a place in our analyses. In this paper, we will present ideas for a research project which brings together cases of human medicine, animal breeding, and plant science to investigate how the collective effect of genomic selection in healthcare, livestock production, and agriculture not only reshapes living populations but also constitutes material and ethical relationships between living populations and the places they inhabit.

For example, genomic innovations in human medicine and agriculture may be motivated by claims to planetary sustainability and mutuality, yet simultaneously deplete planetary resources by prolonging human life, dedicating land necessary to raise production animals, and editing plants to better withstand the practice of monocropping. Through the notion of terrestrial entanglements, we direct analytical attention to the human actors’ moral practices of navigating the tension inherent in sustaining human life and protecting the earth.

Modelling a ‘lived life’ immune system: The obese mouse model as an epistemic space

Hanne Castberg Tresselt, University of Oslo

This paper will explore how relations between human populations and animal models are negotiated within cutting-edge vaccine development. It draws on my PhD research on a group of immunologists and their work to develop new DNA-vaccines. Using gene technology allows them to work on the immune system in new ways, one that aims to be more effective, targeted, and tailor-made. While the development of prophylactic vaccines tailored to the specific individual is not feasible today, targeted vaccines allow them to work on subgroups of the population such as age, genetics, gender, immunological history, and weight.

This research rests on a conceptualization of the immune system as what I term ‘lived life’. In this paper, I focus on the work they do around obesity and how they construct relations between obesities and immune systems. More specifically, I focus on the challenges to establish an animal model that can work as a translational space for human obesity and human immunological challenges. How do they practically and conceptually navigate the inherent tensions in this translation work, and how can we best understand the role of the mouse in this work?

To begin to explore this novel empirical terrain and possible analytical trajectories for understanding the role of the obese mouse, I suggest the concept of ‘epistemic space’. This opens up a broader understanding of the mouse as a specific site in the laboratory where this particular research is taking place. It further allows me to explore the mouse as a material artifact being worked upon and with, and also how it, in return, works upon sites, things, and actors.

Challenge experiments and choreographies of cod immunology

Tone Druglitrø, University of Oslo; with Silje Morsman og Kristin Asdal

This paper explores the new role of fish in immunology and the possible implications it has for how biological life is compared and valued in the life sciences. To do this, I share empirical insights from recent ethnographic fieldwork among immunologists in Norway working to map the immune system of the Atlantic cod. I focus on a specific part of this fieldwork, where we followed scientists doing challenge experiments to identify specificity in the cod’s immune responses. The cod is of interest to the scientists because it is known to have a “poor antibody response” yet still being able to reproduce and live sustainable lives. Where immunological memory is located in cod, is described as the “cod immune puzzle”, and if solved promises to meet challenges of innovation in cod aqua culture as well as the treatment of autoimmune disease in humans. This paper is a first effort to tease out the choreographies required for doing experimental work on cod – a non-model organism - and to say something about how the cod is becoming instrumentized in these procedures.

Organizers

Mie Seest Dam, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, MEST – University of Copenhagen; Carrie Friese, London School of Economics;  Hanne Castberg Tresselt, University of Oslo