Hannah Landecker will be visiting the STS methods lab to present her work titled 'Enzyme Power'. Here is an excerpt from her talk.
"Investment in enzymes as tools for remediation of plastic and hydrocarbon pollution or “green” production of chemicals and biofuels is increasing, driven in part by new techniques of enzyme evolution underpinned by artificial intelligence in protein research. Empirically, I’m interested in how the industrial landscape of enzyme production today is deeply contoured by the 20th century history of enzymes as commodities in detergency, food and fiber processing, textile manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. The building of enzyme production facilities owned in the global North and built in the global South moreover seems a form of colonization of the global biomass that has gone largely unremarked and yet will pattern what is to come. Beyond asking after the past of the project futures of green technologies, at a broader level, enzymes seem to me to be a case of a set of larger questions about the harnessing and mobilization of metabolic power, which I don’t have a strict definition for but do have a sense of as a potentially useful complement to histories and analyses of fossil fuels as shaping and shaped by modern state power. Metabolic power is not metaphorical; rather it is an aspect of energy and material transformation that has gone under-studied and undertheorized relative to coal, oil, and renewable energy from wind, in part because the history of biotechnology has focused rather exclusively on developments in molecular biology around genetic engineering. On the one hand, one could say that there is nothing new about observations that controlling agricultural and biological resources is important - on the other, are there new avenues open to us by reframing analytics around metabolic objects and processes rather than informatic, reproductive or thermodynamic ones (genes, brains, embryos, and oil)?"