A significant subset of novel biomaterials designed as environmentally sustainable solutions to problems of pollution and resource extraction are based on protein manipulation, whether to build the body of the material out of proteins or to harness enzymes for less resource-intensive and non-polluting chemical transformation of materials.  A wide range of social scientists have homed in on important aspects of the rhetoric, marketing, financialization, and politics of alternative proteins, cell factories, and circular green gold economies. Yet it has been hard to fathom what, if any, technical and scientific transformation is occurring in this renewed focus on proteins in the proposed remaking of everyday commodities, and how to set it in relation to extant historical work on the immediately prior era of biological manipulation, an age of genetic engineering and biomedical technologies such as stem cells. Classic histories of biotechnology have had little to say, moreover, about the technical generation of aesthetics in the human use of cells and enzymes in mass production, a key aspect of today’s manipulation of properties such as recoil, hydrophobicity, and tensile strength via tinkering with the reactivities of amino acids and post-translational modifications. This talk brings the history of biotechnology to bear on the significance of having proteins in post-translational space rather than genes and transcription in the engineer-designer’s sights.

Hannah Landecker uses the tools of history and social science to study contemporary developments in the life sciences, and their historical taproots in the twentieth century.  She has taught and researched in the fields of history of science, anthropology and sociology.  At UCLA she is cross-appointed between the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Sociology Department.  She is currently working on a book called “American Metabolism,” which looks at transformations to the metabolic sciences wrought by the rise of epigenetics, microbiomics, cell signaling and hormone biology.

Landecker’s work focuses on the social and historical study of biotechnology and life science, from 1900 to now.  She is interested in the intersections of biology and technology, with a particular focus on cells, and the in vitro conditions of life in research settings.