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Short abstract:

While BW seems at first to be a typical Cold War technoscientific exercise, I contend that it is actually a site of intense human-microbe relations. In this paper, I grapple with the idea of “containment,” centering my inquiry around the biological safety cabinet.

Long abstract:

Scholarly work in microbe studies has begun to disentangle the complex and rich relations at work when humans engage with microbial life. However, most work focuses on situations where the microbes are in positive or at least neutral relation to human bodies: for instance, the production of fermented foods, the human gut microbiome, or microbial ecologies. What can we learn by turning these insights toward moments where humans and microbes are decidedly not in positive relation? Here, I present a part of my ongoing work on the history of biological weapons (BW) in the United States. While BW seems at first to be a typical Cold War technoscientific exercise, I contend that it is actually a site of intense human-microbe relations. Indeed, BW is perhaps the most extreme case of politics made in/through/with microbial life. In this paper, I focus on how BW is enmeshed with human ideas of biological safety. I grapple with the idea of “containment,” centering my inquiry around the biological safety cabinet (BSC). This piece of equipment, one of the hallmarks of modern technoscientific control of microbial life, emerged out of the American BW program in the 1950s. I follow the history of the BSC, and in so doing address questions such as: What is the nature of containment? What forms does containment take? What contestations arise in a regime of containment that seeks to control microbial life so completely while simultaneously aiming to put humans in very close contact with microbes?