Precarious Matters. The Radium Economy, Episteme of Risk and the Emergence of Tracer Technique in National SocialismFollowing the traces of radioactive material is – as scholars have recently shown – a valuable historical approach in order to evaluate the material ’factor’ of science in action. Even though the origins of materials like radium and artificial isotopes are quite different, their circulation is interconnected. A material pathway can be drawn from the radium industry to the scientific rise of artificial isotopes as (...) indicator substances in the 1930s, continuing to the building of networks by German scientists working for the war efforts. Also, this pathway reveals the role of radiation protection in establishing that material culture. Finally, the dynamics of material traces and institutional linkages is shown by the tracer work of biophysicists and radiation biologists working at the Genetic Department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin and at the Institut de Chimie Nucléaire at Paris, which at that time was occupied by German troops. (shrink)

This contribution draws attention to the circulation of materialities and persons as a central feature in the constitution of experimental cultures. The protein and ribosome research at the Max Planck Society (MPG)—with a main focus on the research conducted by Brigitte Wittmann‐Liebold at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics—serves as an example to highlight some of the central conditions that determined the material circulation in molecular biology: the very organizational framework of gender and economics. In doing so, this contribution (...) argues for a historical narrative that stresses the conditions facilitating the circulation of technologies, materials, and personnel. Histories of this kind contribute to an integrated view of the scientific, technological, social, political, economic, and cultural specificities of experimental cultures. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper brings together the history of risk and the history of DNA repair, a biological phenomenon that emerged as a research field in between molecular biology, genetics, and radiation research in the 1960s. The case of xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), an inherited hypersensitivity to UV light and, hence, a disposition to skin cancer will be the starting point to argue that, in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA repair became entangled in the creation of new models of the human body at (...) risk – what is here conceptually referred to as the vulnerability aspect of body history – and new attempts at cancer prevention and enhancement of the body associated with the new flourishing research areas of antimutagenesis and anticarcinogenesis. The aim will be to demonstrate that DNA repair created special attempts at disease prevention: molecular enhancement, seeking to identify means to increase the self-repair abilities of the body at the molecular level. Prevention in this sense meant enhancing the body's ability to cope with the environmental hazards of an already toxic world. This strategy has recently been adopted by the beauty industry, which introduced DNA care as a new target for skin care research and anti-aging formulas. (shrink)

The Stiftung Ökologischer Landbau (SÖL), founded in the mid-1970s, set out to promote organic farming in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). To this end, it brought together protagonists from the scientific community and the environmental movement to build a knowledge base for organic agriculture by drawing on the science-based concepts of natural and organic farming of the 1920s and 1930s. Based on the history of its founding, its structure, and work, this article demonstrates that temporality played an essential role (...) in the establishment of alternative bodies of knowledge. Contrary to the established model of linear scientific-technological progress, the aim was to return to bodies of knowledge and practices that had largely disappeared from the scientific canon of knowledge, but also from agricultural practice, in previous processes of forgetting and marginalization. This is exemplified by the so-called “spade diagnosis,” a method developed in the 1930s by soil biologists to assess arable soil. Concepts and practice of counter-knowledge amounted to a model of conservative modernization in organic farming. (shrink)