ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Dispatches from the Other: Proto-Immunology, Microbiome Science, and the Epistolary Life of Biology

• In Event: Crafts of Microbes: Women and Gender from Antibiotics to Genetic Engineering and the Microbiome

English Abstract

This essay traces how immunity and microbiome science re-emerge today as forms of ecological nostalgia—invoking “ancestral” pasts through the material and gendered labour of care embedded in the scientific letter. By following the circulation of correspondence across two distinct historical moments, I show how the letter, as both medium and method, unsettles the biotechnological determinism and innovation rhetoric of modern biomedicine. Letters, I argue, have long served as microbial relays: transmitting not only biological materials and ideas but also the cultural values, hierarchies, and kinship structures that shape what counts as knowledge and care.
Through the Turkish Embassy Letters (1717–1721) of British writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Science of the Letter revisits the proto-immunological origins of variolation in early eighteenth-century Constantinople. Montagu’s dispatches—often treated as anecdotal curiosities in the history of immunology—reveal instead how the immune system was first conceived through translocal exchanges among women, healers, and communities whose expertise was situated outside the emerging scientific establishment. Her letters illuminate how race, class, and empire became intertwined with immunological imaginaries of recognition, protection, and the elimination of difference.
Three centuries later, a similar configuration recurs in contemporary microbiome research. In 2012, a leading U.S. female microbiologist conducted pioneering work in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon in search of “ancestral microbes” capable of restoring the dysbiotic microbiomes of Western populations. Here again, the materiality of the letter—this time in correspondence between the scientist and a Catholic missionary of the Salesian Congregation—proved decisive. Their exchange enabled access to an Achuar community and the production of globally influential microbiological data, reinscribing older colonial and gendered dynamics within new ecologies of planetary health.
Bringing together Science and Technology Studies (STS), feminist theory, and the history, philosophy and anthropology of science, this presentation argues that the letter constitutes a persistent, gendered infrastructure of biological knowledge. By tracing the epistolary threads that link proto-immunology to twenty-first-century microbiome science, Dispatches from the Other foregrounds the entanglement of women’s labour, non-Western health cultures, and material communication in the making of the microbial sciences.

Author

• Andrea Núñez Casal, CSIC, Soain