The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900S-2012
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900s-2012 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Sangodeyi, Funke Iyabo. 2014. The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900s-2012. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274300 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900s-2012 A dissertation presented by Funke Iyabo Sangodeyi to The Department of the History of Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2014 © 2014 Funke Iyabo Sangodeyi All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Anne Harrington Funke Iyabo Sangodeyi The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900s-2012 Abstract This dissertation examines how the relationship between microbes and the human body has been reconfigured over the course of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. It presents a counter-narrative to the ways in which we have tended to view microbe- human relations to make sense of the emergence of twenty-first century microbial selves by focusing on the normal microbiota. This dissertation investigates why the notion of a microbial framework for the body gained cultural, scientific and medical force in the twenty-first century. It tracks the prehistory of this development and ends with the National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, which marks the mainstreaming of an appreciation for the importance of the microbes that live in and on the body as a scientific area of study, as an important aspect of biomedicine, and as a cultural phenomenon. I argue that there was a reorientation of medicine, science and culture that engendered a new appreciation for and shed new light on the kinds of problems and questions that researchers in marginal microbiologies were struggling to make sense of earlier. I argue that these kinds of questions and concerns came to matter more broadly with the rise of the environmental movement and the ecological sciences in the mid- to late twentieth century because they were ecological and environmental in orientation. iii Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 PART I: GERMS AND BODIES .............................................................................................. 21 Prologue: The Making of the Pasteurian Body ............................................................................. 22 Chapter 1: Gut: The Gospel of Good Germs, 1900-1940s ........................................................... 43 Chapter 2: The Ecology of the Mouth: Dental Bacteriology and the Sciences of the Normal Flora, 1900s-1950s ........................................................................................................................ 82 Chapter 3: The Microbial Body 1.0, 1950s-1970s ...................................................................... 104 PART II: THE NATURAL TURN .......................................................................................... 139 Chapter 4: Natural Hygiene and the Rejection of Chemical Cleansing...................................... 149 Chapter 5: The Limits of Pure Culture: The Natural Turn in Microbiology .............................. 192 PART III: THE MICROBIAL TURN .................................................................................... 233 Chapter 6: The Human Microbiome Project ............................................................................... 235 Conclusion: The Microbial Body 2.0.......................................................................................... 275 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 286 iv Page intentionally left blank v Introduction “…our most sophisticated leap would be to drop the Manichaean view of microbes: “We good; they evil.”… Perhaps one of the most important changes we can make is to supersede the 20th-century metaphor of war for describing the relationship between people and infectious agents.” -Joshua Lederberg, 20001 When the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), the National Institute of Health’s initiative to study the microbes that live in and on the human body, announced its first results to the world in summer 2012, Nature hailed the work as a milestone in understanding “our microbial selves.”2 The cover of the journal presented a mirror image of a photographed flesh-and-blood woman’s profile and her outline, filled with swarms of microbes teeming within her.3 The Economist, along with a number amount of other popular magazines, newspapers, websites and blogs, also welcomed the announcement that summer.4 For their microbiome-themed cover, The Economist 1 Lederberg, Joshua. "Infectious History." Science 288 (2000): 287-293. 2 Nature 486 (2012): cover. 3 Ibid. 4 For example, see Scientific American June 2012; Leroy Hood, “Tackling the Microbiome,” Science, 336, 1209; Aw, James, “Are Bacteria Going to Be a Magic Bullet for Fighting Disease?” National Post, July 10, 2012. Accessed July 1, 2013. http://life.nationalpost.com/2012/07/10/are-bacteria-going-to-be-a-magic-bullet-for-fighting- disease/. Zimmer, C. “How Does Your Body's Microbial Garden Grow?” International Herald Tribune, June 20, 2012; Winslow, Ron and Jonathan D. Rockoff. “Gene Map of Body's Microbes is New Health Tool,” Wall Street Journal. Accessed February 15, 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303410404577464961870114758. 1 redrew the Vitruvian Man as a somewhat grotesque human-microbe chimera.5 “Microbes Maketh Man,” the cover proclaimed, and described the implications of this new vision of the human as “things you’d rather not know before breakfast.” The flurry over the HMP did not fade away after an initial celebratory moment. The New York Times Magazine ran a cover article a year later, suggesting extended cultural fascination with the human microbiome.6 This article, written by cultural critic Michael Pollan, was titled “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs,” and paired with an image of a baby smeared in dirt and licking an equally dirty toy car. The framing of the HMP by these publications indicated the scope of the HMP’s impact. The HMP was provocative in that it provided a strong contrast to dominant attitudes towards microbes and their relationship to our bodies. Nature provided the most straightforward and dispassionate contrast, in word and image. Its portrayal of the body as comprised of a panoply of microbes posed the question in neutral terms: What are we to make of our microbial “fellow travelers”? Are they part of our selves? How can a self be multiple? The Economist presented a more graphic and disturbing image of a microbe-comprised man as a monstrous entity—a bug- human hybrid. The notion of a body overrun by bacteria and of the things associated with such a thing were the sort of things “you’d rather not think about before breakfast,” a nod to our cultural disgust with the notion of anything covered with microbes. For the New York Times, the framing of the discussion was broader, suggesting to the idea of germs as we have been culturally conditioned to see them, as associated with dirt. The image of the dirt-smeared baby immediately brings up all the ways in which we would think to respond---grab the toy truck out of the baby’s 5 The Economist, August 18-24, 2012. 6 New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2013. 2 mouth, grab some mouthwash, bathe baby. The title of the article plays with the cultural status of microbes as well—“Some of my best friends are…”. It’s a clever take on the historically negative view of microbes that suggests both that the speaker is guilty of holding such views and that the view is a recognizable prejudice against a group. These images capture what the Microbiome Project presents to the 21st century: a recalibration of old and deeply held ideas about microbes and consequently, I argue in this dissertation, about human beings. This dissertation asks how this recalibration happened, and explores the scientific, medical and cultural histories that shaped it. It examines the changing status of microbes in science, medicine and culture over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, and how their relationship to our bodies has been reconfigured. It presents a counternarrative to the ways in which we have tended to view microbe-human relations to make sense of the emergence of twenty-first century microbial selves. The 20th century was in many ways the antibacterial century. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize winning microbiologist, molecular biologist and leader in the fight against emerging infectious disease, has described the dominant cultural view of microbes and their relationship to us over this period in simple terms: “We good; they evil.”7 For many, that was essentially the end of the story and the extent of the narrative about microbes in an age that saw the advent of antibiotics and a scrupulously antibacterial hygiene. In the sciences, microbes were not considered