Making a Controlled Environment for Plants in the Phytotron, Biotron, and Algatron

• In Event: Controlling Environments, Growing Plants - II

Abstract

The pursuit of technological control over organisms and experiments has been and remains a fundamental agent of change for biology in the twentieth century. To explain how scientists think about the world and how they create knowledge, historians have long followed and observed what technologies they have built and used, notably famed biological technologies like electron microscopes and radioisotopes that have shaped biologists’ ability to see and trace molecular processes. Running parallel to the technologies that have helped reveal genes have been equally important technologies that have revealed the biological environment, notably phytotrons and biotrons and even an algatron. Their control enabled the “environment” to be defined as a part of an experimental science of life in the 1950s and 1960s. This paper will describe that part of what delays intervention in the Anthropocene is the view inherited from the molecular biologists, but rejected by plant physiologists, namely the “view of an organism as solely active and the environment as solely passive.”

Author

• David Munns, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY