“Industrial Accumulations: Microbes and Materials in Motion in the Late Nineteenth Century”

Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, across Western Europe, North America, and regions of the globe colonized by European nations, lines of scientific inquiry on the etiology of infectious diseases and the efficacy of industrial fermentations converged with longer-standing academic interests in single-celled life forms. Across varied contexts of investigation, researchers adopted similar techniques for cultivating microorganisms, developed on the premise that different varieties of microbes possessed distinctive nutritional needs and capacities for growth. To make these organisms into objects of scientific and technical knowledge, researchers assembled so-called “pure cultures” and “enrichment cultures.” These complementary approaches entailed manipulating the composition of growth media, which consisted of concentrated microbial sustenance separated from its surroundings by the walls of sealed glass containers. While ostensibly functioning to isolate cultivated microorganisms from the world outside, these containers remained in some meaningful sense porous, as researchers routinely incorporated into their growth media the products or byproducts of human affairs unfolding outside of the containers. Over the course of the talk, I will introduce several examples of such nested milieus, tracing connections between the life forms in- and outside microbial cultures. This exercise, I will argue, sheds new light on the molecular views of life that increasingly typified the life sciences over the course of the twentieth century. As researchers repurposed cultivated microorganisms as powerful instruments for probing nature’s order, they also recorded, sometimes unwittingly, a proliferation of humans’ technical interventions in that order.

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