Experimenting in Multispecies Multidisciplinary Microbial Research: Doing STS, Doing Biology, and Doing Yeast

• In Event: Organisms and Us in Dialogue

Abstract

In the midst of what Paxson and Helmreich (2014) call a “microbial moment,” social scientists are attending to microbial life to reconfigure heretofore macrobe-heavy social concepts. Simultaneously, biologists have been reconfiguring microbes as social creatures rather than predicating microbial inquiry on isolation in a Petri dish. Such changes in how biologists conceptualize microbes inform how social scientists visualize and conceptualize microbes. Here, I question the obverse—how social scientists questioning the social/scientific construction of microbes inform methodological and conceptual developments in biology—as an STS scholar working alongside yeast synthetic biologists.
How can changes in scientific discourse used to bring microbes into being revise scientific protocol? How can methodological questions about microbial ethnography bring “protocol” into shared experimental space, where experiments might constitute both social scientific and biological research? How, thinking of Rheinberger’s and Fox Keller’s (among others) advocacy for the productivity of imprecision and ambiguity, can juxtaposing potentially incompatible-seeming “microbes” establish a productive space for mutual scientific and social scientific surprise?
I conclude that particularly in dealing with microbes, with whom human interactions are so heavily mediated by our conceptual apparatus for manifesting them, lines between microbiology and social studies of science sometimes blur in ways that enable scientists and social scientists, together, to productively ask: what are microorganisms, and how do we work with them? In so doing, I reflect on working with synthetic biologists and synthetic yeast, challenges of achieving mutual epistemic legitimacy, and the necessity and timeliness of multispecies multidisciplinary microbial research.

Author

• Erika Amethyst Szymanski, University of Edinburgh