Paper short abstract:

We analyze four companies focused on capitalizing on the promises of gendered microbiome research (addressing vaginal health and breast milk analogues) and situate them within unsettled science about microbial enumeration and attempts to quantify a “normal” baseline.

Paper long abstract:

The first wave of human microbiome research inaugurated a paradigm of human health and well-being contextualized within an interest in microbial counts and dynamic relations. The second wave has attempted to make those counts matter by translating basic science into products and therapeutics. In this paper we analyze four companies focused on capitalizing on the promises of gendered microbiome research (addressing vaginal health and breast milk analogues) and situate them within research attempts to quantify a “normal” baseline. Such initiatives rely on unsettled science about microbial enumeration, in our cases, that vaginal microbes census can stand as a proxy for vaginal health or that counts of pro/pre-biotic microbial strains can simulate human breastmilk’s microbial contribution to infant development. Drawing on a dataset of companies’ public media, consumer discussion forums, and scientists’ research talks, we trace the development of direct-to-consumer initiatives emerging from human microbiome research. We use these data to analyze how they cultivate an embodied narrative that microbial quantification matters and that revealing these counts opens new possibilities for human health and well-being, while the science behind it is negotiating processes of microbial quantification. We argue, gendered microbiome initiatives present corporeal quantification as an essential tool for addressing persistent challenges in reproductive health while papering over the still incomplete processes of translating basic sciences into applied therapeutics. Focusing on the quest to turn in-process science into applied therapeutics illustrates the microbiopolitics of marketing undetermined science through microbial calculations.