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Long abstract:

Antibiotics are closely linked to microbes. They not only stop their growth and expansion, but are in the first place produced by them. It has been through antibiotics as research tools that microbiology, as a scientific discipline, has been able to interact with bacteria to a large extent. Conversely, bacteria have also become laboratory tools for the study of antibiotics. This paper aims to address the social and political assumptions that give meaning to microbiological research. To this end, it focuses on the research carried out by Spanish women microbiologists on antibiotics and its resistances during the eighties and nineties. At a time when antimicrobial resistance was becoming a public concern due to the fear of losing the scientific and normative way of relating to infections and the microbes that cause them, microbiological research practices offer a good starting point for thinking about social relations with microbes. The experimental detail of methods such as screening and bioprospecting of bacteria, surveillance of resistant strains, and tracking and characterization of R-plasmids are spaces to interpret clinical and social relationships with bacteria; moreover, they are spaces to acknowledge the female scientists who contributed first line to microbiological research by touching, observing, and thinking microbes.