Strategic naturalizing in the Anthropocene: Managing cells,bodies and ecosystems

Abstract

Discussions on the Anthropocene have called for increased attention to how the effects of human actions on the planet are accounted for. While much of this debate remains at a theoretical level, more studies on situated Anthropocene realities have been called for. Contributing to the latter, this article explores how experimental and clinical interventions are being accounted for in life science laboratories. Drawing on three research cases, genetically modified mosquitoes, laboratory-grown stem cell lines and assisted reproduction in the IVF clinic, the article traces how ‘strategic naturalizing’ is conducted to make sense of and justify human interventions on cells, bodies and ecosystems. Strategic naturalizing in laboratory work is situated, fluid, and also implicates the presence of the social scientist. Although naturalizing biotechnologies is not a new phenomenon, according to our observations scientists increasingly draw on notions of a planet profoundly transformed by human intervention as they conceptualize their own accountability. Consequently, we propose that strategic naturalizing is emerging as an elemental logic in the patchy local enactments of the Anthropocene and its concerns. In the context of experimental and clinical laboratory work, it is a key element in enacting good science and orienting the work towards making biotechnology acceptable in wider society. In studying this, the social scientist also is implicated in situated local enactments of the Anthropocene.

Introduction

Biotechnological innovation tends to lean on a promise of some form of good life attainable in the future. New possibilities to shape the beginning of life or manage its ending become graspable through biotechnology. In addition to human and more-than-human bodies, biotechnological interventions promise to alter their environments. This article examines how biotechnologies are made usable for medical therapy and environmental interventions, and how bioscientific laboratory work engages with the unpredictabilities of the living embodied and ecological environments it seeks to operate in.

Through analysing experimental and clinical laboratory work in three research cases – genetically modified mosquitoes, laboratory-grown stem cell lines, and assisted reproduction in the IVF (in vitro fertilization) laboratory – we engage with and further develop Thompson’s (2005) argument on ‘strategic naturalizing’: the persistent work on the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’. This work takes place in many societal fields and practices, but is especially meaningful in life science laboratories (Thompson, 2005). We trace strategic naturalizing in laboratory practice to explore how bioscientists account for the technologies they work with and the interventions these biotechnologies aim at. We argue that strategic naturalizing seems to endure as a particular mode of operation in addressing questions about human action and responsibility for the planet. Moreover, it offers new insight into human–environment interaction in ‘the Anthropocene’.

Across the numerous ways in which the notion has been mobilized, the Anthropocene has become a new epochal ‘mega-category’ that builds upon and subsumes more specific concerns such as biodiversity, climate change and sustainability (Lorimer, 2017). In social science, the idea of the Anthropocene has been applied in ‘a social theory of the planetary’ (Clark & Szerszynski, 2020) to develop new ethical and epistemological perspectives on the human–environment relationship. While acknowledging the historical role of human activity on Earth, theoretical discussions about the Anthropocene seek to problematize the notion of the autonomous human subject (Ejsing, 2023) and argue that our planetary existence should be recognized as a more-than-human relationship (Sperling, 2019). In developing any new argument or conceptual description of the Anthropocene, Tsing (2015) proposes that we do not overlook its ‘patchy’ constitution. Understanding this proposed era requires detailed attention to a multitude of landscapes, temporalities, and assemblages of humans and more-than-humans. Thus, theorization should be slowed down (Blok & Jensen, 2019). This enables us to focus better on ‘specific lived Anthropocene realities’ (Ejsing, 2023, p. 257).

This article explores situated Anthropocene realities in bioscience laboratories. We argue that slowing the analytics of the Anthropocene down requires empirically grounded investigation of strategic naturalization, meaning accounts of plural and fluid, ‘nature’ and ‘natural’, as they are produced in technological intervention and used to ground it. Our analysis is based on these questions: how do accounts that appeal to nature or a natural order figure in laboratory practice? How are biotechnological interventions into cells, bodies and ecosystems explained and justified by our study participants? By ‘accounts’, we refer to instances where the bioscientists make sense of their practices to some audience: in ethnographic fieldwork with us as social scientists, or in promotional and educational materials for external audiences. As we will see, this involves weaving together connections between cellular, embodied, demographic and ecological processes and understandings of good practice, desirable futures and proper science. Moreover, the accounts of nature bring into light the co-productive role of social scientists in creating these accounts. This means, we propose, that social scientists become part of strategic naturalization and, consequently, the enactment of situated Anthropocene realities.

Long-standing scholarly work has shown how the ontological separation of nature and culture, or natural and social, emerges in scientific practice (e.g. Haraway, 2008; Latour, 1993; Strathern, 1992). According to Conty (2016), the nature/culture divide is intrinsic to the Anthropocene discourse, manifesting in debates over human responsibility. Studies have also argued that the divide may be losing its relevance in current technoscientific worlds, noting a shift towards a hybrid, more-than-human understanding of technology and the management of life (Lorimer, 2020; Lorimer & Driessen 2014). This is sometimes understood as marking a less exploitative form of intervention, but as Goldstein and Johnson (2015) note, a more active understanding of ‘nature’ can still be put to work in old logics. It is this latter point that this article expands upon. Our research shows that the bioscientists experience their work as a form of collaboration with the biological entities grown in the lab. They aim at working with nature instead of on or indeed against it. Nevertheless, according to our observations, ‘nature’ has not lost its value as a point of reference. We show that strategic naturalizing is routinely an element of how bioscientists enact good science. The development of present and future biotechnologies relies on acts of differentiation as to which material processes, mechanisms or entities a technology is thought to mimic or modify, and which to leave ‘intact’, unmodified, and thus more ‘natural’.

While strategic naturalizing is not a novel phenomenon, we argue that it takes on a particular salience and direction in relation to discussions on the Anthropocene. Growing awareness of the effect of human activity on the Earth’s systems is infiltrating the field of biotechnology, sometimes explicitly manifesting in scientists’ ‘self-awareness of the planetary consequences of that technology’ (Latour & Lenton, 2019, p. 662). Our study participants conduct strategic naturalizing to establish interventions into cells, bodies and ecosystems as more or less invasive, or more or less distanced from the objective of mimicking biological processes. How ‘nature’ is defined is situated and strategic. Often, nature is seen as a resource for and an object of human stewardship. At other times, nature is defined as a domain best left untouched. As we will show, the need for strategic naturalizing is grounded in this fluidity of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ processes in human–environment relationships. As an emerging horizon of political action and moral commitment, the Anthropocene shapes this strategic activity, producing considerations about not geological (or chemical) but biological and ecological balances on the planet.

Next, we explain the analytical framework concerning strategic naturalizing in more detail, followed by an introduction to the materials of our study cases and the method of analysis pursued in studying the three cases alongside and through each other. In the following sections we discuss, firstly, how strategic naturalizing was part of making genetically modified mosquitoes (i.e. in curbing malaria); secondly, how it emerged in research on stem cell degeneration (i.e. in modulating ageing); and, thirdly, how strategic naturalizing played out in IVF clinics (i.e. in enhancing fertility). In the first two cases, strategic naturalizing emerges in highly experimental bioscience research. The third case presents a routinized practice of biotechnological modification as a context of strategic naturalization. The final analytical section brings the cases together to discuss how strategic naturalization figures through shared concerns about the implications of biotechnology for wider eco-social processes.

Analytical framework

Previous research has shown how biotechnological interventions into environments and bodies, both human and nonhuman, entail crafting together elements from the natural and social worlds (e.g. Latour & Woolgar, 1986). At the same time, these interventions are processes in which this order of nature is itself being produced (Hinchliffe, 2007; Thompson, 2005). In this process, naturalization often serves as a crucial method of legitimization (see Daston & Vidal, 2004). These locally-produced natures, consequently, are always multiple, in motion, and co-constitutive of more-than-human relations (Haraway, 2008). Thus, naturalizing here indicates ways of explicating, justifying and executing human interventions into biological processes and relations that are technologically modified or created.

We analyse the categorizing and justifying practices present in our interlocutors’ accounts as strategic naturalizations. The concept was developed by Thompson (2005) to characterize ontological work on ‘natural’ and ‘social’ in an IVF clinic. In this practice, some configurations of kin relations, human bodies and biomedical technologies were rendered as desired and some undesired; some invisible, immutable or taken for granted; and others as potential targets or tools for intervention. In Thompson’s analysis, ‘making’ living babies and, consequently, new parents in the clinic is ‘a deftly balanced coming together of things that are generally considered parts of different ontological orders (part of nature, part of the self, part of society)’ where the ‘same processes might result in the category of nature and culture distributed differently’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 5). This is how nature and culture come to acquire new meanings, and how they can be made to bolster other orderings and valuations (Thompson, 2005). The biotechnologies used could result in both reinforcing existing moral orders and generating new ones.

Later studies have used Thompson’s conceptualization to note how hierarchies of naturalness are generated and come into play in establishing technologies and interventions. Waterton (2010, p. 165) has described how instituting DNA barcoding to classify species involved naturalizing ‘a new genomic way of ordering nature’. In practice, this meant defining species in a way that emphasized pragmatic concerns that had to do with universalizable and transferable scientific innovation. Gesing (2021) has identified processes of strategic naturalizing in establishing environmental coastal protection measures in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this case, the way in which some elements of the coastal ecology were foregrounded as ‘natural processes’ produced nature as a largely static, abiotic system that could then serve as the backdrop to certain coastal protection measures. As Gesing (2021) notes, naturalizing can also be a way to elide the political decisions involved in establishing a ‘close to nature’ environmental strategy.

For Thompson, the ‘strategic’ in strategic naturalizing points to the ways in which ‘the natures’ in clinical work were always produced in relation to the desires attached to the practice. Following Waterton’s (2010) and Gesing’s (2021) examples, we expand the notion of strategic naturalizing beyond the issue of technologically assisted parenthood. In our research cases, interventions in ‘nature’ are pursued not only in the name of reproductive desires but also in advancing human health and curbing disease. Tracing strategic naturalization across multiple fields of biotechnology enables us to explore how the invasive and non-invasive characteristics of interventions in life processes are managed by our interlocutors. We consider strategic naturalizing to be a part of the bioscientists’ and clinicians’ material-discursive practices: it is integral in shaping the decisions made and interventions pursued. For us, ‘strategic’ does not imply that appeals to nature are merely rhetorical strategies deployed by bioscientists to justify their work post-hoc or a form of science communication. As a situated practice, strategic naturalizing emerged in the more-than-human encounters in which the bioscientists conducted their work. As we shall see, these encounters at times also involved the social scientist present in the lab.

Materials and methods

Our data originate from three qualitative, interview- and observation-based studies conducted by each of the authors individually. Following the methodological orientation of multi-sited ethnography (Falzon, 2009; Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995; Wittel, 2000), we have paid attention to how ethnographers bring their object of study into being ‘through the territory they map out whilst attending to the diverse accountabilities which they experience’ (Hine, 2007, p. 657). This implies a heightened sensibility to how we as researchers become placed within a field of varying identifications, moral positions and onto-epistemological connections.

The first study examines scientists developing genetically modified ‘gene drive’ mosquitoes for malaria control. Mäkelin conducted 16 interviews and two laboratory visits among three separate gene drive mosquito projects in 2019–2021. The projects were led by a European and a North American university. They combined laboratory work on gene drive mosquitoes in the European and North American university laboratories with mathematical modelling and entomological fieldwork. The final aim of both projects was to conduct experimental releases of gene drive mosquitoes in target sites in several African countries to curb malaria.

The second study concerns the field of stem cell research. In 2018–2019, Meskus paid several visits to a newly established university laboratory in Finland, set up for basic research on the role of stem cells in ageing. During the visits, she interviewed and followed the work of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers as well as senior members of the lab (10 interlocutors in total). She also accompanied the researchers to several international ageing research conferences. This fieldwork laboratory explored cellular interactions related to the accumulation of age-related damage in the body. Through basic research on stem cell functions, the broader aim of the bioscientists’ work was to find ways to ‘modulate’ the processes of ageing and enhance human health-span.

The third case we cover in this article is Helosvuori’s study of the assemblage of clinical practices, laboratory labour and patient experiences of assisted reproduction in Finland. The study focused on IVF, that is, fertilization that takes place outside the female body. The materials were gathered in 2010–2015 (see Helosvuori, 2021). In addition to interviews (21 with patients and clinicians in total), the fieldwork included participant observation in fertility clinics, expert and lay conferences, and face-to-face peer support groups. Helosvuori also collected patient guidebooks and online material on fertility treatment and services provided by the clinics. Indicative of existing fertility treatment practices, the materials of this study show how reproductive biology is known and enacted through technologies such as embryo imaging incubators and laboratory microscopes.

Brought together, the three study cases allow us to trace strategic naturalizing across several kinds of biological objects, from cells to bodies to larger ecosystems. The studies on gene drive mosquitoes and stem cell regeneration are examples of experimental laboratory research that have not yet been translated into practical use. Meanwhile, the third study on fertility treatments represents a routinized and well-regulated biotechnological practice. What unites all three cases as forms of biotechnology development is that they shape biological mechanisms that give rise to strategic naturalizing by our interlocutors.

Following the research questions, our analytical sensibility followed the idea that the research participants’ accounts were not merely conveying conceptual or cognitive ‘perspectives’ about nature and biotechnologies. Rather, they were part of the enactment of the orders of human–nature relations (e.g. Law, 2004; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). This is what strategic naturalizing as a generative practice is essentially about. To operationalize this methodological premise, we paid attention to moments in our fieldwork and textual data where (1) technological interventions into biological processes were phrased and explained; and (2) the ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘naturalness’ were more or less explicitly connected to the laboratory-driven interventions and the biological materials and tools in use. When we read our study cases against each other, we focused on how technological tools and biological processes were differentiated along the natural–artificial axis, on the continuum from the more experimental spectrum of biomedicine to the more routinized practice. Finally, we (3) traced and compared moments in our research encounters where we felt we had been invited to or otherwise enrolled in the practice of naturalizing the biomedical technology under question. This could involve, for instance, mutual ponderings about societal implications of the biotechnologies in question and the interventions based on these technologies, or the potentially immersive role of the social scientist in the research encounters with the bioscientists.

The multiple and justificatory natures of insect biotechnology

Gene drive mosquitoes are mosquitoes equipped with a genetic sequence that increases the likelihood of the specific genetic sequence being passed on to the next generation. If released in the wild, the modified mosquitoes were expected to transform existing populations, either making them resistant to the malaria-causing Falciparum parasite or making them produce significantly higher rates of male offspring, effectively reducing or eradicating the population (Bier, 2022). The approach has gained traction with the advent of the much-publicized genome editing method called CRISPR-Cas9, which has significantly streamlined the process of engineering gene drives into organisms such as insects. Gene drive mosquitoes are being developed in several research projects, but releases outside laboratory conditions have not been carried out at the time of writing.

Studying gene drive research offers us an opportunity to analytically grasp strategic naturalization concerning life on the planet in the context of environmental interventions with uncertain repercussions. In the researchers’ accounts, strategic naturalizing functioned as a way to compare gene drive mosquitoes to, or distance them from, past and existing technologies. In malaria control, these have largely been shaped in the search for technology-based and transferable solutions in global health (Birn, 2005; Cueto, 2013). These vector control measures have contributed to shaping human–insect relations as they have been deployed in various locales (Reis-Castro, 2021). Likewise, previous uses of genetically modified organisms and ways of producing them in the laboratory figured in the researchers’ accounts as a backdrop of routinized practice against which the strategy could be assessed.

Our interlocutors’ work included crafting genetically modified mosquitoes in experimental bioscience laboratories and producing data about populational and ecological dynamics with the aim of creating a living tool that could be used to curb the spread of malaria. The project scientists’ accounts linked existing biological, or ‘natural’, and human-induced aspects of the work in a way that placed novel inventions within a historical line of shaping biological mechanisms and ecosystems. As we show in this section, this also indicates that the question of what an intervention ‘is’ is part of establishing the naturalness of biotechnology.

Hugo, a PI in one of the gene drive research projects, attributed the way in which their research had advanced to how the technology was able to cooperate with cellular processes:

This is how a gene drive works. It’s really simple. You need in principle three elements: a recognition sequence on a gene you want to destroy or to modify, you need a nuclease that recognizes or is engineered to recognize that particular sequence, and the rest is done by the repair machinery of the cell.

The expectations placed on large-scale use of biotechnologies are often in tension with the embodied work of crafting cutting-edge biotechnology (Meskus, 2018). Hugo stressed how the success of his research was essentially a more-than-human achievement. On the one hand, the scientists possessed knowledge of the specific sequence the intervention would be targeted at, and the intention to do so. On the other hand, the cells themselves seemed to be working in concert with the scientists. Martin, a microbiologist, talked about how ‘[making gene drives is] the most straightforward [process], it’s in genetics [. . .] and that’s what makes it so successful’. The way in which Martin and Hugo accounted for both the advances of the research and the workings of the CRISPR-edited gene drives illustrates what we mean by strategic naturalization. Some aspects of the technology developed are seen to derive from biological mechanisms and others from researchers’ input into those mechanisms. In the bioscientists’ accounts, naturalization involved making distinctions between what was a technological intervention and what was already ‘in the genetics’. Consequently, a seemingly clear line between the nature studied and the scientific research that takes this nature as its object is being maintained.

Accounting for gene drive mosquitoes as a laboratory tool, naturalization of the interventions conducted in the insect laboratories was linked to issues of previous technological interventions. For Patrick, a microbiologist, a concern for environments that were being affected by existing malaria control methods had motivated and justified his work:

One of the big motivations for the gene drive, and one of the reasons I was attracted at the beginning before I even joined [the lab], was the fact that it would, in my mind, reduce the impact on the ecosystem from the use of insecticides and other interventions that are potentially destructive to the environment. There’s a lot of ideas about removing larval breeding sites and [about] mass administration of insecticides and this is obviously killing other insect species somewhat indiscriminately.

In comparison to existing methods of malaria control, a gene drive mosquito could be seen as a less manipulative intervention. Another senior gene drive researcher, Anton, assessed the new biotechnology in relation to other methods of altering mosquito biology that he had worked with:

[With radiation], I mean, blasting mosquitoes by sticking them in a reactor, it’s like hitting something over the head with a sledgehammer, right? Now we have methods where we can manipulate the genome which is far more elegant and just works better than radiation.

We argue that accounting for the ‘advances’ and ‘successes’ of genetic engineering methods through such comparisons is a form of strategic naturalization. It is a way to establish CRISPR gene drives as a ‘close to nature’ technology. It connects the researcher’s intention to change a particular genetic sequence with the cellular processes that make it happen. Uncertainties are no longer inherent in the technology itself, but a question of the researcher having the right knowledge to identify the appropriate genes to be edited.

The development of biotechnologies is dependent on complex modifications of biological processes and embodied material encounters (Meskus & Oikkonen, 2020). We argue that these modifications are always conducted in relation to shifting and porous boundaries between what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘social’, or acts of human intervention. This tension at the heart of strategic naturalization extends beyond singular technologies, generating discussions on the long-term effects of human intervention on planetary life. In Mäkelin’s study, the question of what kinds of genetically engineered mosquitoes could be publicly accepted was considered crucial to advancing the project. Elizabeth, who worked as a regulatory advisor, formulated the issue as follows:

And then perhaps the most critical is the public acceptance. [. . .] I think we’ve got a presensitized environment [. . .] because the years of controversy over GM crops have not helped and people just see this as another GM, another genetic technology that some elements of the population don’t want and will do everything in their power to stop. And yet the people who are suffering from malaria really want a new tool. [. . .] There’s not a level playing field either because, a bit of a controversial statement, but they can say whatever they want, and they don’t have to have evidence to back it up. Whereas we have to provide evidence to back up everything we’re saying to a regulator.

Elizabeth’s concern over how gene drive mosquitoes might be connected to earlier controversies is one example of the hard-to-grasp moments where we felt we had been tacitly invited to or enrolled in the practice of naturalizing the biomedical technology in question. Elizabeth pondered about the societal implications of the gene drive mosquito and, in so doing, acknowledged that while the project had its scientific aims, it also had audiences to which it had to explain and justify the biotechnologies developed. The social scientist participating in the situation presented one form of audience, as we also show in the following sections of the article. Here, ambivalence over the ecological and biodiversity effects of gene drive mosquitos if released increased the pressure to naturalize the technology. Regulatory uncertainty also played into the situation. In gene drive research, establishing hierarchies of more and less modificatory interventions was done in a context where the regulatory demands for the possible use of the technology were still open. Key questions were to what extent existing regulation on the use of genetically modified organisms would be applicable to gene drive mosquitos and what kind of evidence for the ecological effects of the mosquito releases in the wild would be required.

Altering insect bodies in the laboratory was a routinized part of scientific practice, but the possibility of altering ecosystems brought up the need to assess more or less invasive measures. In the case of gene drive mosquitoes, strategic naturalizing meant emphasizing how both CRISPR and gene drives emulated cellular processes. What if the bodies that are targets of biomedical intervention are human – how does strategic naturalization take form in such cases? In stem cell research, to which we turn next, the ‘naturalness’ of cellular functions was a part of assessing the invasiveness of the research conducted and the tools developed. However, in comparison to the gene drive mosquito case, assessing what interventions aligned with ‘natural’ processes took on a different path in the stem cell lab. What was at stake in stem cell research on humans was the issue of genomic modification that in experimental insect research was considered ‘closer to nature’ than previous technological means.

Ageing research as a site of strategic naturalizing

Adult stem cells – such as those residing in the fast-renewing epithelium – are considered key biological material for investigating the ageing process. As stem cell proliferation is crucial for organismic maintenance and tissue regeneration, it is thought to offer opportunities to ‘modulate ageing’ (López-Otín et al., 2013). Due to their role in mechanisms of regeneration and degeneration, scientists’ experimental curiosity is drawn towards stem cells in various in vitro models. In stem cell research, naturalizing also involves the justification of the tools and intervention methods used, while connecting cellular mechanisms to human bodies and populations.

Hannah Landecker (2011, 2016) has shown that the history of twentieth-century laboratory science is essentially about the making of surrounds. The human-made surrounds of life enacted in research laboratories include culture media and other biochemical materials, constitutive of the objects of research in the laboratory work. Consequently, the idea of naturalness in bioscience is grounded in the long-standing technological construction of experimental arrangements. In the excerpt below, a postdoctoral researcher talks about the significance of the medium in which cell lines are grown. A growth medium is simultaneously the naturalized and the technologically modified environment in which biological materials are grown, as illustrated by this quote from Sonja, the postdoc:

The growth media mimics the extracellular matrix as the surrounding of the cells, plus of course the growth factors which in the tissues are obtained through blood circulation. But most cells also produce extracellular matrix in the petri dish by themselves. Although it is difficult to see, they produce a small protein network.

In the case of tissue stem cells, as with the mosquito genomics, the living material worked with could be viewed as closer to or further from ‘the natural state’: that is, more or less modified by human intervention. In the laboratory where Meskus conducted her fieldwork, researchers talked about how their ‘task’ was to ‘push the cells backwards’ in their developmental path – the ageing process – for the cells to regain their capacity to regenerate. By changing the surrounds and testing various cues for the stem cells, they attempted to experiment on different ways that a tissue ages or resists ageing. The hope was that by better knowing how regeneration seems to occur in vivo (through in vitro models), the regenerative potential of cells in a tissue could be harnessed in future translational applications. Commenting on this prospect, Sonja remarked that while it would be ‘great’ that such translation applications could be achieved, she remained ‘fascinated just by how life works, or how nature works’.

In this laboratory, strategic naturalizing figured prominently with genetic engineering, which was considered by members of the group as overly technologically invasive. Unlike gene drive researchers, the bioscientists in the ageing research lab considered gene editing technologies such as CRISPR heavily manipulative. The interlocutors working in this lab identified themselves as a group interested in ‘lighter means’, as compared to other labs working with ‘artificial’ stem cells such as iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells; see e.g. Meskus, 2018 on iPS cell technology). Their ultimate focus was the ageing human body, which should in the first instance be assisted with ‘less invasive’ means. Julia, a PhD student finishing her thesis on stem cell metabolism, explained that stem cells were an interesting tool ‘because we can modify, modulate stem cell activity quite easily by eating well or exercising well and taking care of ourselves’. Focusing on how adult stem cells function as part of what she called ‘normal ageing’, Julia found it interesting that, with metabolic cues, biomedical science could guide and enhance cellular activity to ultimately improve the health spans of aged people. She suggested that ‘here the body’s self-healing properties meet the clinics’, elaborating that ‘you’re using the body’s own ability to heal and you’re trying to help the body to heal itself’.

What is notable here is that strategic naturalizing takes place on several levels and in reference to various aspects of the bioscience work and its aims. The biological material, or the living tools worked with, can be regarded as more or less ‘natural’ depending on how and to what extent they have undergone human modification in the laboratory. Furthermore, the intended therapeutic aims and clinical applications can be viewed through similar hierarchies of naturalness. Some interventions are justified through their closeness to mechanisms in the ‘natural’ body while others are considered further along the flexible relation between natural and artificial. Prevalent through these discussions is the quest for an assumed state of naturalness and a concern for ‘too much’ intervention. At the same time, new biological processes are modified in the name of treating disease and suffering (e.g. Meskus, 2018).

This tension, we propose, is a source of ongoing strategic naturalizing. Although the human body, and the biological tools and models used to study it, are already thoroughly technologically modified, the persuasive idea of ‘the natural’ persists, generating accounts of strategic naturalizing. Here, too, strategic naturalizing is conducted in relation to various audiences. Bioscientists are aware of the societal context of their work and extend their accounts of justification from the social scientist interviewing them in the lab to larger publics. As we suggested in the previous section, the social scientist may become implicated in the acts of strategic naturalizing: in explaining and justifying biotechnological tools and practices to the larger public. In the ageing research laboratory, one of the PhD students, Julia, reminded Meskus:

[W]e are so dependent on the public opinion about research, which I guess is why I also feel so strongly about science communication. Because I think there’s this huge gap between how we perceive our work and how non-scientists perceive our work. And I think that that is the problem.

To be able to rehearse her ability to ‘do’ science communication, Julia agreed to let Meskus follow her work in the lab – with the explicit permission of the head of the lab, who affirmed that Julia was interested in the public engagement aspect of their work.

Our fieldwork points to the observation that bioscientists are considering, perhaps more openly than before, the implications of substantial modification of life in terms of long-term effects on biodiversity. Such reflexivity may be interpreted as a sign of the ‘intellectual zeitgeist’ of the Anthropocene (Lorimer, 2017), that is, shared pondering and concern about the state and future of life on Earth. The ‘patchy’ constitution of the Anthropocene (Tsing, 2015) would then involve, amongst other developments, biotechnologies becoming more prominently a matter of not only human health but also substantial environmental change. From this it follows that strategic naturalization faces the questions of deep time and futures that mark the mainstream Anthropocene critique (Lorimer, 2017). We return to this in the final section, but first let us consider what happens to strategic naturalizing as we move from an experimental setting into routinized therapeutic practice. Next, we discuss the quest for naturalness and the tensions emanating from technological modification in the case of fertility treatments.

Differentiating natural and assisted reproduction at fertility clinics

Of our three cases, IVF is the most routinized version of biotechnological modification at a cellular and bodily level. Indeed, IVF is normalized to the extent that the clinical and laboratory practices are, for instance, introduced, explained and marketed to prospective patients via online and printed informative texts. The informational texts instruct and encourage people who suffer from involuntary childlessness and are considering fertility treatments:

You may have reservations about assisted fertilization. There is no need for this. Extensive experience both in Finland and elsewhere in the world has proven it to be effective and safe. Read our guide, talk to your partner and your doctor. Sometimes nature needs a helping hand. (Organon, 2006, p. 3)

The texts also address readers’ assumptions regarding what is natural and what is artificial or unnatural. As explained in the websites of a private clinic operating in Finland, fertility treatments are required when ‘pregnancy cannot be achieved by natural means’ (Ava-klinikka, 2010). In the informative texts, treatments are defined as interventions in the natural processes of the reproductive system – ‘the basics of life’ (Merck Serono, 2010).

At the fertility clinics, assisted reproduction is routinely compared with ‘natural’ reproduction in clinical practice. In the encounters that took place between Helosvuori and professionals of assisted reproduction, medical interventions into human reproductive biology were assessed in terms of how invasive or non-invasive they were compared to biological processes understood as natural. These accounts identify, differentiate and compare natural and technologically generated processes.

For example, in an interview, a nurse explained how IVF might be perceived by the patients as a more invasive intervention for fertility issues, compared to intrauterine insemination – the injection of sperm into the uterus, which the nurse characterized as mimicking ‘natural intercourse’. The nurse explained that an important part of their professional work is being sensitive to patients’ feelings about different reproductive technologies and the level of intervention used. These concerns, and how the IVF clinicians managed them, illustrate how strategic naturalization is deeply ingrained in fertility treatments. The key, according to the IVF practitioners, is to find the right methods that will enable pregnancy as effectively as possible – but at the same time to avoid unnecessary interventions.

In other words, the clinicians navigate between various methods that are explicitly placed on a continuum of their level of intervention into human reproductive biology. At an open lecture about current methods of fertility treatments that Helosvuori attended, doctors discussed a patient who had previously been in treatment in another clinic where IVF was conducted. After careful re-examination performed in this clinic, the doctors were able to eventually assist her to get pregnant with hormonal medication. They also advised the couple on the optimal timing for vaginal intercourse. As the doctors explained, sometimes ’only’ hormonal medication and advice is enough – ‘everything does not have to be high tech’.

In line with the encouraging logic of the informative texts, the clinicians and nurses support the patients in assessing and taking on treatment options. However, unnecessary interventions are described as something to be avoided:

I am sitting in the laboratory with an IVF biologist. I observe as she injects sperm into eggs in the dish. We begin to discuss how intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) – the needle injection of sperm straight into an egg – differs from IVF. In IVF, ‘natural selection’ takes place because the egg and sperm are ‘only’ placed in a Petri dish. In ICSI, ‘I have to choose myself,’ the biologist says, and contends that ‘it’s a different thing’. She adds that she wouldn’t recommend using ICSI without good reason. There are risks for the child-to-be, even though it’s not clear whether the risks are due to the method or the biological material: the viability of the cells. (Fieldnotes)

The professionals in fertility clinics accounted for their work in relation to processes of life that should be managed in situated ways. The egg and sperm doing the choosing instead of the IVF clinician was considered beneficial, reminiscent of how gene drive researchers characterized genetic engineering as a more-than-human process. The routinized practices of assisted reproduction and IVF navigate relations between the laboratory and its outside worlds, which involved accounting for and assessing the invasiveness of human interventions. The social scientist forms an audience that becomes enrolled in making sense of the assisting technological interventions:

I am participating in an event that takes place in Clinic X and is open to various stakeholders. After the presentations [. . .] I make eye contact with one of clinic X’s gatekeepers (a physician) who is familiar to me and aware of my study. We shake hands and briefly discuss the presentations and the event. The physician had earlier agreed to participate in my study, and I thank him for that again. He states that all activity related to fertility treatments is beneficial from the clinic’s perspective, including sociological research conducted on the topic. He then adds smiling that of course it depends on what kind of results I get. The next day I discuss with my senior colleague about how it has felt relatively easy to get access to conduct my research at private fertility clinics. The colleague reminds me about the business logic of the clinics: maybe they just want someone to advocate their services – even sociologists. I feel almost hurt, since at the event it had felt that both me and the staff members were simply gathered around the ‘assisted facts of life’, jointly fascinated by them. (Fieldnotes)

Although assisted reproduction and IVF have in many ways become stabilized as biotechnological methods for bringing babies into the world, globally a wide variance remains in perceptions and acceptance of the technologies that are basically the same (Lie and & Lykke, 2017). Indeed, the ‘routinization’ of medical technology exhibits local rationalities that are open for negotiation (Wahlberg, 2018). The fieldwork extract points out that, in addition, biotechnologies are translated through the looking glass of sociological enquiry. We suggest that this translation process may be understood as adding to the processes of strategic naturalization of biotechnologies. The encounter described above highlights the tension between doing social studies of science and the field’s expectations regarding how the research will be communicated to potential customers, who may turn to social scientific accounts in addition to patient guidebooks while pondering what interventions they are willing to take part in.

To finalize the analysis, the next section examines how notions of environmental crisis provide new grounds for strategic naturalizing in biotechnology. We suggest that the Anthropocene is emerging as a horizon against which bioscientists situate their work.

Managing human interventions

Our interlocutors extended their discussions on the implications of biotechnology to wider eco-social processes. This was particularly the case in the more experimental and exploratory work on gene drive mosquitoes and adult human stem cells. The uncertain effects of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes and anxieties about ageing populations posed a temporal horizon against which justificatory accounts were constructed. Meanwhile, the practices of IVF could serve as a point of reference in making connections between populational and ecological futures and the long-term effects of biotechnology. In addition to framing biotechnological interventions as sound and acceptable in the present moment, strategic naturalizing was a way to build linkages to uncertain futures. Our interlocutors’ accounts often built on a notion of a planet in crisis and ‘nature’ as foundationally moulded by human action.

Concerns for the environment were most evident in gene drive mosquito research. A tension between promoting human health and the possibility of uncertain environmental consequences underlay much of the public discussion on gene drives (see Callaway, 2016). Anticipating regulatory needs was central to gene drive research (Mäkelin, 2024). For the microbiologists, naturalizing genetic engineering was a question of asserting the terms under which such interventions would or should be assessed, as discussed by Patrick:

So the idea of gene drives was, you target those few species of mosquito that transmit malaria and not the three and a half thousand that don’t. In my mind that was a much better solution for the environment. I’m very much driven towards having a better ecosystem, more sustainable world, most sustainable everything. [. . .] It’s almost frustrating when the use of GM must be on the opposite side of that [. . .].

Patrick’s account is an example of how unwanted effects brought about by earlier biotech interventions could be mobilized in strategic naturalizing. The wider context offered is the ‘more sustainable world’ that is intertwined with biotechnological development. A PI in a gene drive project, Martin, pointed out how both mosquitoes in the wild and the environments they live in are modified by human action:

In reality if you want to just talk about pure facts, the mosquitoes that are out there are already genetically modified. With the use of insecticide-treated bed nets [. . .] we’re putting a huge selective pressure on these mosquitoes and the response that they have was amplification of resistant genes, changes in behaviour. The mosquitoes that are out there now have nothing to do with mosquitoes that were out there in 1995. They’re completely changed genetically. Of course, not by an individual or by a group of people deliberately, but that’s the only thing that seems to matter for people. Ironically, the mosquito genome was published in 2002. That mosquito strain from which it was published no longer exists. We have already eradicated that strain with insecticides. So, even the virtual mosquito that we have in our database, it no longer exists. We’ve already introduced so many changes [to ecosystems].

While accounting for the effects that previous attempts to curb malaria have had on ecosystems, this bioscientist affirmed the temporal and geographic extent of human intervention. He also pointed to the collective challenge of managing such interventions. In gene drive research, ecological relations and processes were understood as already merged with biotechnology. Gene drive mosquitoes can, in this way, be at the same time a novel invention and a continuation of a historied and routinized practice of insects being altered or eradicated for the purpose of eradicating diseases. Consequently, interventions can be considered to mimic or preserve some ecological processes more closely than others. In both Patrick’s and Martin’s accounts, the nature being protected is already in a state of crisis and fundamentally affected by human activity.

In stem cell research, the concerns about planetary futures took slightly different forms. For many bioscientists, the issue of genomic engineering is an ambivalent one as it involves managing technological interventions outside the laboratories (Meskus, 2018). Genomic engineering was considered by our interlocutors to be commonplace in research laboratories. However, ecological futures with such substantially transforming techniques on human bodies raised concern. Upon discussing what for her constituted unacceptable modification of ageing, the postdoc Sonja stated that ‘I do not see similar threats in ageing research as, for instance, in reproductive biology’. For her, editing the human germline would constitute a lasting impact on biological processes that she contrasted with routinized and acceptable ways of doing IVF. Lee, a PhD student in the stem cell lab, seconded Sonja’s view on ageing research by deliberating that ‘let’s do as nature does as much as possible’. Lee thought ‘killing every disease’ (in reproduction as well as in ageing) could be harmful in the long run – in the deep time of evolution. She concluded: ‘in nature, you need some evolution also’.

What is noteworthy here is that, compared to the more experimental biotechnological management of life, the status of IVF as an intervention shifts. In the clinical context, IVF may be taken as ‘the heaviest treatment option’ in its need for strategic management. When considering genome editing, however, the routine biotechnological practice of IVF becomes a naturalized reference point against which more daring interventions are contrasted. Together, the experimental practices of mosquito and stem cell research and the routine practice of IVF provide perspective on how managing human interventions is conducted in the Anthropocene. Modified ‘nature’ can simultaneously require justification and provide legitimacy to interventions perceived as large-scale, enduring, and even disruptive.

We interpret the shifting ordering of technological interventions as part of strategic naturalizing, currently amplified by the Anthropocene debate. Bioscientists’ deliberations manifest concern for the consequences of biotechnological modification of life, where global balance systems are at stake (cf. Latour & Lenton, 2019). Stem cell researchers talked specifically about tensions between biomedically modulated, healthier futures of ageing and threats attributed to changing demographic structures and population growth. Several members of the group talked about how prolonging human lives could be viewed as a negative ecological effect. Henri, the head of the laboratory, pondered that ‘we are too many on this planet. . . we [in ageing research] have no desire to extend the human age to 300 years, because this planet is already suffocating with people and other stuff’. Sonja suggested that, following the logic that new generations might have better ideas for saving the planet, ‘it would be good to make space for the future generations’.

Managing human interventions on bodies and ecosystems extends strategic naturalizing beyond the realms of the laboratory and routinized clinical practice. As the idea of the Anthropocene reopens the connection between nature and politics and morality (Latour & Lenton, 2019), strategic naturalizing remains a common practice. Furthermore, our interlocutors’ accounts illustrate a logic that increasingly connects biotechnological developments with populational and ecological futures and questions of the distribution of responsibility for technological interventions.

Conclusion

Our article has investigated how appeals to ‘nature’ are produced in laboratory practice and are used to justify, explain and shape biotechnological interventions into cells, bodies and ecosystems. To do this, we have revisited Thompson’s (2005) concept of strategic naturalizing and further theorized on how this practice unfolds in bioscience laboratories. Mimicking biological processes or ‘working with’ nature permeated our interlocutors’ work. Procedures that might seem technically similar could be assessed as more or less close to ‘nature’ depending on the aims of the intervention. While the researchers considered their work as a more-than-human collaboration with the processes of life it engaged with, the analytical lens of strategic naturalization allowed us to zoom in on moments in laboratory practice where an axis between natural and artificial emerged and served to ground the practice.

The contribution of our article is to argue that strategic naturalizing is present in the Anthropocene in accounting for and assessing the invasiveness of experimental as well as existing interventions. Importantly, it is not conducted in a void. Different publics are part of the development of biotechnological interventions in research and clinical laboratories. In our research cases, this has meant that the naturalness or invasiveness of the procedures used, or interventions proposed, was constituted in relation to expected customers and patients as well as anticipated regulation. The importance of an audience to strategic naturalizing means that social scientists, through their engagements with study participants in the laboratories and clinics, could also become enrolled into the practice of strategic naturalizing.

Our three cases each illustrate how justifying accounts emerged in relation to cells, bodies and ecosystems. Bioscientists conducted strategic naturalizing alongside expressing novel sensibilities of human responsibility for collective futures. As we have shown, strategic naturalizing is applied in various instances in biotechnological modification: to advocate for novel interventions, like in the case of gene drive research, to justify the limiting of proposed interventions, as the stem cell scientists did, and to further normalize existing technologically-driven practice, as in the case of IVF services.

Discussions on the Anthropocene have called for attention to situated temporalities and more-than-human assemblages (Giraud et al., 2019; Sperling, 2019). The aim of our empirical analysis has been to slow down theorization in this sense. We argue that the Anthropocene should be approached not as a theoretical conundrum but something that happens in practices; as an awareness that animates reflection on responsibility and the scope thereof. Accounting for human-induced changes to planetary processes still entails continuous redefining of human–nature relations. At the same time, the porosity of the nature–culture boundaries seems to be evident to us as social scientists, as well as to our interlocutors. This means that relations between humans, technologies and ecosystems can be strategically harnessed in new ways. Thus, we suggest that strategic naturalizing should be understood as an enduring logic in the Anthropocene.

Conty (2016) notes that discussions on the Anthropocene tend to focus on the role of human agency over complex and often unpredictable chains of influence. The expanding role of biotechnology in managing human and more-than-human life likewise comes with categorizing and justifying practices that aim to deal with the unpredictabilities inherent in them. We have described how a shared awareness of the Anthropocene figures in these practices in the context of experimental and clinical laboratory work, and in how this work aims to be acceptable in wider society. Furthermore, we claim that the social scientist is not a passive observer in strategic naturalizing but takes part in it with her own accounts of biotechnology.