Life as Aftermath: Social Theory for an Age of Anthropogenic Biology

Abstract

Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. In an age of oxidative stress and failures of DNA repair, cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis, social scientific theory stutters in the face of biological consequences of forces it masterfully detailed, from biopower to looping kinds. Concepts of the fallibility of knowledge from the unanticipated consequence to the wicked problem are too generic to fathom the nature of the living within reconfigured biotic-abiotic relations in the aftermath of industrialization. Working through examples—genetic modification in weed control, and solvents in cryobiology—this paper offers a novel analytic for anthropogenic biology specific to the relations between knowledge and life in the wake of the industrial twentieth century: a novel patterning of living matter and process from the molecular to the ecological arising with forms of biological control. Changes in pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are specific to the form of control but not anticipated by it, illegible within its originating logics. Hubris gone moldy, anthropogenic biology grows from forms of power that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, mistaking the ability to temporarily control living things for full knowledge of them.

Introduction

Taken together, the voluminous research literature on COVID-19 reads like a perverse tale of the twenty-first century. Deforestation for agriculture causes increases in the number and kind of species of animals sharing zoonotic pathogens with humans (Tollefson 2020). Agricultural pesticides and herbicides drive the rise of treatment-resistant infections and cancer rates, while the anti-fouling compounds, plasticizers, and preservatives greasing the transport chains bringing these products to consumers have magnified the prevalence of environmental metabolic disruptors, a specific subset of endocrine disruptors that derange lipid processing and affect how the brain controls food intake (Heindel et al. 2017). Individuals with obesity, diabetes, and hypertension are at greatly increased risk of hospitalization and death from a SARS-Cov-2 infection (Drucker 2021). Because they are often treated with corticosteroids, severe COVID-19 cases provide fertile ground for invasive fungal infections, some already resistant to drug therapy (Hoenigl et al. 2022). Resistance to medical antifungal drugs is due to the broad use of fungicide sprays to control crop plant mildews, blights, and rusts. Hospitals are advised not to plant tulips near their front doors, given the likelihood that the flowers’ bulbs, dipped in the same anti-fungal compounds used to treat humans, are sources of treatment-resistant mold spores inhaled by vulnerable patients (Koehler et al. 2021; McKenna 2018).

Facing this scene of knowledge of life, in which one anthropogenic biology (deforestation and zoonosis) plays out on the ground of another (metabolic disruption), which in turn intersects with an unexpectedly disastrous relation between crop sprays and hospital infection control, one might well be tempted to declare not biopower today, but biofallibility today (Rabinow and Rose 2006).

Anthropogenic Biology as an Analytic for the Aftermath

One does not have to look to the COVID-19 pandemic—although it is hard to look away—for paradoxical occurrences in which all manner of measures and substances designed to manage human vitality, productivity, and fertility are changing ecologies and biologies in ways that then fold back unexpectedly to complicate the very venture to increase yield or protect health in the first place. It would be one thing if this were a handful of examples of interventions gone wrong, each with its own linear cause-and-effect tale of consequences. But it is the character of these anthropogenic biologies that they flow from international markets for industrial goods, from decades of layered use of biocides, growth promoters, growth inhibitors, fertility drugs, fertilizers, surfactants, disinfectants, vitamins, enzymes, and any number of other technical measures designed to be biologically powerful (Liboiron 2021). As such, there is no one at a time. Rather, a reticulated web of interactions shaped by human social life knits together the sequelae of multiple interventions: the metabolites of excreted antidepressants in the waterways drive antimicrobial resistance (Lu et al. 2022), the fine particulate matter exhaled from the engines of the food supply chain suppresses human fertility (Gaskins et al. 2019).

The angel of history has developed a diabetic ulcer; the office tower of biopolitics stands empty, its laborers disconsolately scrolling newsfeeds as they work from home; risk society has come down with a fungal infection it can’t shake. As food and hygiene have gone from extending life spans to becoming the twinned drivers of climate change and the primary risk factors for refractory disease and death, twentieth-century theoretical repertoires concerning the management of populations in the name of vitality begin to look more like specific historical data about the causes of the contemporary condition than excellent theoretical tools for analyzing it.

The concepts and rubrics developed in the social sciences and political theory in the twentieth century for understanding the relationships between knowledge and biological life do not capture the dysbiotic times in which we live. But we don’t need to abandon them in favor of shiny new objects with which to forget our immediate (theoretical) past. As Catherine Malabou (2016) has succinctly put it: “one life only.” The contemporary condition is produced, with a high degree of specificity, by and in the aftermath of the forms of life identified by those analytics. So, the question here is how to double down and dig in, to direct attention to the slimy things growing from the underside of these concepts, once you think to turn them over. Not concepts other to previous ones, but their carbuncular lesions, their excrescences, life as aftermath.

Anthropogenic biology refers to a disparate set of biological processes unfolding with globalized and industrial modes of control of the life that share these core characteristics: anthropogenic yet not necessarily human, nonrandom, and specific to the fallibilities of knowledge formations. In principle, all biology could be anthropogenic in some aspect or another, touched by pollutants, temperature changes, or shifting nutrient availability. Such a broad scope, however, would not be analytically useful. Here, I use anthropogenic biology to name a set of phenomena consequent on the industrialized effort to control vital processes and define it as follows.

First, it concerns the novel patterning of living matter and processes across space and time, from the molecular to the ecological, that arises with forms of biological control and biotechnology and because of them. The mode of control is specifically designed to be biologically authoritative at the scale and within the time of cells, molecules, and biochemical interactions—to stop protein synthesis, to cross membranes and displace cellular water content, and to prevent oxygen damage by controlling electron exchange. Such substances and practices are mobilized to feed or treat populations, to cross the skin, to coat the leaf, and to freeze the germplasm. It is control that achieves its intended effects in the management of human vitality, reproduction, or conduct. At the same time, it changes the biological life of the world in which it acts far beyond its intended target—in ways that are still specific to that power.

Second, while these changes in the life of pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are tied to the form of biological control, they are not anticipated by it nor legible within its originating logics. The living differentiates, mutates, thrives, perishes, speeds up, interacts, scars, or grows on and with the very contours of knowledge frameworks. Things flourish in blind spots: forms of scientific knowledge and their allied biotechnological strategies such as genetic engineering give rise directly to biological developments they nonetheless cannot fathom within their own reasoning. That these outgrowths are specific to these logics (yet unrecognizable within them) gives anthropogenic biology a character beyond the ambit of the unanticipated consequence. The material historicity that binds assumption structures to their ensuant biology necessitates an analytic appropriate to both the state of the world and to the iterative character of sciences renucleating around their prior effects. These encrustations on the hull of human intention begin to occupy the alarmed attention of the sciences of life, in time also becoming Anthropogenic Biology.

Third, the instances of anthropogenic biology that are most disturbing to human life today are most predictably found with modes of control that overestimate the comprehensiveness or durability of their own efficacy. These control measures do not fail, indeed they are generally powerful for a time, and thus enhance the tendency to mistake some control of the living for complete knowledge of the living, what Anne-Lise François (2008, 45) perceptively identified as the “change in one’s relation to the living world wrought by the fantasy of having fabricated, and therefore knowing, the extent of the existent.” Not all knowledge is equally fallible. That which claims and exerts power over life through fabrication is pathognomonic of the class of phenomena under examination below. The conceptual and technical shape and scale of such assumptions and their blind spots feed and move and stress the living world in very particular ways: hubris gone moldy.

Finally, anthropogenic biology does not simply replace what was there before. Rather, it grows with and in it, as aftermath. The word aftermath usually denotes a state of affairs arising from an unfortunate or disruptive event. The aftermath of war, of the pandemic, of a long-shuttered fine chemical plant that went bankrupt after decades of burying toxic sludge near an aquifer. Yet it simultaneously holds an older meaning as well, that of a second crop, of what grows back after mowing, with a now obscure origin in math, from the Old English mæth < māwan, to mow, with -th suffix (Crane 2023; Fennell 2015). It was well-known that the second crop did not simply recapitulate the first; aftermath cheese was specific to the milk from cows fed on the aftermath, and it tasted different because the plants that grew after mowing were not necessarily the same in terms of species, physiology, or chemistry—yet, of course, were in continuity with what came before.

Aftermath seems a good nonsentimental word for the dysbiotic times in which we live, a productive complement to other efforts to name this condition, from late industrialism to alterlife, to resurgent life in capitalist ruins (Fortun 2014; Murphy 2017; Tsing 2017). Having mown down Nature, what of the second crop and that which feeds on it? For the “after” is not an end time at all, it is more of life that goes on metabolizing and dividing; not a problem of flourishing, rather a question of what flourishes at which time, and what kind of problem that presents to contemporary society, politics, technoscience, and social theory (Ahmann and Kenner 2020; Walford and Bonelli 2021).

In what follows, the analytic of anthropogenic biology is demonstrated through two empirical examples. Both operate within the spatiotemporal landscape of cells, membranes, molecules, and biochemical interactions. This is because the interventions in question were designed specifically to act on cellular structures and processes (such as enzyme-mediated protein synthesis), and this is the locus of their power as an abundant literature on molecularization demonstrates. ¹ The first example of genetic modification of crops to tolerate the effects of herbicide in the name of weed control is well-known, yet its aftermath is still unfolding. Adaptations by the targeted weeds that are metabolic rather than genetic in nature demonstrate the concept of biological shifts with high specificity to a control measures’ design, and which are not comprehendible within its originating logic. The unfolding of biological events has thus recast genetic control as an exercise of power that mistook the ability to synthesize a new-to-nature herbicide matched to a new-to-nature genetic construct for full control over plant life and death in time and space.

Second, a very different example that will be far less familiar to readers: the solvents used in cryobiology to protect cells from the damage of ice crystals during freezing. The “universal solvent” dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is the example here, a chemical by-product of papermaking waste that has been infrastructural to the freezing and suspension of germ cells, cultured cells, and tissues for transplant in research and medicine since the 1950s. Occluded by the hubris of “cryopower” has been the possibility that frozen things might be alive but different after thawing, possessing a biology both ensuant and attendant to DMSO (Radin and Kowal 2017). This second and equally revealing form of anthropogenic biology and its reckoning unfolds within a broader scene of science turning from a confident sense that an unmediated Nature is its object to fathoming forms of aftermath biology.

Finally, the article turns to the question of anthropogenic biology as a social theory. There are prodigious relitigations and new uses of the concepts of biopolitics. These mostly run in parallel rather than in conversation with work that has discarded such theoretical repertoires as merely discursive or linguistic frameworks, foils against which the novelty of more fulsome more-than-human new materialist approaches may be appreciated (Lemke 2021). This analysis is neither of these things, staying with what I have termed elsewhere “the biology of history”: the encompassing material historicity of the biology of what humans thought they knew and what they thought they could do with and to life: the material growths of, on, and through discursive forms (Landecker 2016a).

That life exceeds such attempts at control is not a surprise: it constitutes the starting point for inquiry, not its finding. Anthropogenic biology is a positive analytic for what has been left as negative space in the framework of the unanticipated consequence, in a wide variety of foregoing social scientific assessments of technological or industrial societies. Given the scale and scope of the last century of biotechnological and medical interventions, this analytic may also be used to think through the figure of an Anthropocene of the cell as a distinctive sociohistorical domain, beyond a microcosm of the globe or a trickle-down effect of climate change and geology.

Genetic Modification and Metabolic Evasion

In their agenda-setting article, “Biopower Today,” Rabinow and Rose (2006) promoted the analytical utility of Foucault’s concepts of biopower and biopolitics as tools for critical inquiry into contemporary life and health sciences. They insisted that “the concept of biopower designates a plane of actuality” that includes “truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings, intervention strategies into collective human existence in the name of health, and modes of subjectification for work on the self in relation to those truth discourses and interventions” (p. 97). Foucault’s concept, they wrote, was neither trans-historical nor metaphoric, rooted in historical/genealogical analysis of particular phenomena, and they reworked it as such—through the genomics of race, reproductive technologies and population control, and the molecularization of mental health.

Anthropogenic biology exists in the same “plane of actuality” as biopower and grows in and on it. It also is not metaphoric; it denotes the materialized partiality of knowledge practices, taking an identifiably characteristic form as an excrescence of an exercise of power. It recognizes that decades and centuries after the large-scale manufacture, commercialization, and application of vaccines, antibiotics, disinfectants, fertilizers, hormone therapies, vitamins, birth control, genetics, endocrinology, hydrocarbon chemistry, and so on, these strategies for intervening in bodies and populations have been, and are, biologically consequential in ways never anticipated by the original logics of those measures. The analytic utility of anthropogenic biology will, like biopower, only be proved on the field of action. Let us turn, therefore, to some modern techniques of making live and letting die and ask how that is working out for folks as time goes by.

Genetic engineering seems a good place to start. This famously editorial power rode in on the idea that the DNA sequence was a code that could be read, understood, and then, starting in the 1970s, rewritten using the cut-and-paste tools of restriction enzymes (Rheinberger 2000). It seemed an awesome power, to rewrite life, and was nicely compatible with intellectual property regimes organized around novelty. Commentators declared the “end of nature” or the advent of “nature modeled on culture”; ethicists decried playing God and drew eminently crossable red lines around the human germ line; scientists declared a short-lived self-moratorium; and debates raged about regulating and eating genetically modified (GM) crops (Rabinow 1996; Darnovsky 2008; Berg et al. 1975). The recent advent of CRISPR-Cas9, a bacteria-derived technology that cuts DNA with high specificity, has expanded the possibilities for gene editing in all organisms including humans, reigniting these debates (Kirksey 2021).

Genetic modification has proved powerful and profitable. More than 90 percent of corn, cotton, and soybeans in the United States is grown from GM seeds tolerant to biocides; globally, GM soybeans and cotton dominate crops and markets (Hetherington 2020). While not the only system of this kind, glyphosate-tolerant “Roundup Ready” GM seeds developed by Monsanto have dominated, shaping the very definition of agribusiness around the world (Delvenne 2017). Roundup is a brand of herbicide that contains glyphosate, which blocks a plant enzyme essential in the synthesis of amino acids, the building blocks of protein. ² Unable to make proteins, the plant dies, choked by the dead-ending of the metabolic sequence. The engineered plant, by contrast, contains a bacterial gene encoding a version of that same enzyme, one impervious to the chemical. The grower may then spray herbicide on a field, weeds and all, without harming the crop itself. Global sales of Roundup Ready seeds paired with Roundup herbicide began in 1996 (Heap and Duke 2018).

This approach initially increased crop yields substantially. Adoption was rapid, with steeply climbing percentages of GM seeds planted in the “golden age of weed management,” the decade following the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant crops (Duke 2018). The technology was lauded as highly targeted, reducing the use of more toxic herbicides and lowering the costs of food production, a stance critiqued from many directions (Robin 2014). While there is a vast literature on GM crops and glyphosate, let us take a specific route through it defined by the three tenets of the rubric proposed to identify the contours of anthropogenic biology: (1) a novel patterning of living matter that arises from a form of power but is not anticipated by it, because (2) it is not legible within its originating logics. Moreover, (3) these phenomena are more likely to be observable in settings that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, particularly when it seems to people they are fabricating new-to-nature forms of life.

The logic animating biocide-tolerant GM crops lies squarely within twentieth-century genetics. The intervention involves identifying a gene in bacteria and moving it into seeds; every cell of the plant that develops therefrom produces herbicide-tolerant enzymes. Commercialization relied on property arguments based in the new-to-nature form of the genetic construct (Lezaun 2004). The value of the technology lay in the assumption that weeds were forever bound by their nonengineered genes (encoding susceptible enzymes) in a state of perpetual vulnerability to this chemical targeted at a fundamental life process.

The possibility of the herbicide acting as a selective pressure for mutations was addressed from the outset. However, measurement of the infrequency of mutational events rationalized pursuit of the technology rather than posing an argument against it. It was brashly asserted that “the complex manipulations…required for the development of glyphosate-resistant crops are unlikely to be duplicated in nature to evolve glyphosate-resistant weeds” (Bradshaw et al. 1997, 189). Confidence was based on the rate of mutation observed in the natural world and the allied assumption that such mutations exact a fitness cost given the centrality of protein synthesis to life. Moreover, as glyphosate was a new-to-nature chemical derived through synthetic chemistry, plants were expected to have no intrinsic capacity to metabolize glyphosate.

And yet, the International Herbicide-Resistant Weed Database reports that counting by species and site of action, there are 513 unique cases of herbicide-resistant weeds globally (International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds n.d.). Counting by site of action—by molecular herbicide target—weeds have evolved resistance in twenty-one of the thirty-one targets in these cases, compromising the efficacy of 165 different herbicides. By 2017, thirty-eight weed species possessed resistance to glyphosate; the Amaranth family is particularly threatening to the economic viability of soy and cotton (Heap and Duke 2018). Monsanto responded by developing “stacked” seeds with multiple inserted bacterial genes, each encoding a trait that enables tolerance to a different herbicide. Tolerance to Dicamba, an older plant hormone–mimicking herbicide, was added despite a great deal of controversy over Dicamba’s tendency to drift and damage neighboring crops. With increased use has come the relatively rapid emergence of Dicamba-resistant weeds (Bobadilla et al. 2022).

On the one hand, confidence about the slow rate of natural mutation compared to the “complex manipulations” of genetic engineering was unwarranted, misleadingly supported by the twenty-year lag between mass application of glyphosate and the appearance of widespread resistance. An important weed of corn, cotton, and soybean, Palmer Amaranth has now evolved resistance to eight different herbicide sites of action, including glyphosate. It shows genetic changes that help the plants survive herbicide application, including what one might expect: mutations in the gene encoding the herbicide-targeted enzyme. These mutations result in amino acid substitutions, causing a decline in the herbicide’s ability to bind the enzyme. Less expected is a phenomenon called copy number variation. Resistant plant genomes show massive amplification of the number of copies of the gene encoding the targeted enzyme, as many as a hundred. Increased copy number “translates” as more enzyme, such that some of it remains uninhibited by the applied chemical. Science journalist H. Claire Brown (2021) describes this nicely as “a door with a thousand locks” to which glyphosate can bring only a hundred keys. ³

On the other hand, significant forms of glyphosate tolerance are not reflected in genetic changes at all but in different forms of metabolic evasion. Indeed, these may be more significant for weed survival than the mutations described above. For example, physiological changes can alter the degree of uptake of the herbicide, its movements, or its chemical breakdown. The herbicide is captured by adsorption to the plant cell wall or enclosed in a lipid-wrapped vacuole; it is sequestered away from the target enzyme located in the chloroplasts of the cells. The importance of such compartmentalization, in which different chemical entities are organized spatially or temporally to control the timing and degree of metabolic reactions within cells and bodies, is increasingly being appreciated as a core tenet of biological organization across the kingdoms (Floris et al. 2021). In other words, the plant organizes its body and its subcellular compartments to keep the herbicide set apart; it grows enclosures around the toxic agent just as plants grow galls around invading insect species.

Plants can also metabolize herbicide directly by upregulating enzymes that break apart or modify toxins, for example, adding a little chemical tag to glyphosate molecules that render them water-soluble and therefore excretable. ⁴ Such metabolic resistance rarely entails DNA mutation. Plants can maintain an epigenetic “memory” of such exposures and the previous need to upregulate gene expression to provide more detoxifying enzymes, without changes to DNA sequence (Clements and Jones 2021). Metabolic evasion tactics may be general to many herbicides, conferring “cross-resistance,” which accounts for otherwise puzzling phenomena such as fields of weeds demonstrating resistance to herbicides with which they have not been previously treated, as if human actions against them were already anticipated (Shyam et al. 2021).

Thus, the world is now facing rampant anthropogenically driven metabolic adaptation, with many weeds that affect commercially important crops resistant to multiple herbicides, much as bacteria and fungi have evolved multiple or pan-drug resistance over the last decades (Hendry, Gotanda, and Svensson 2017). The very success of chemical control paces the rapidity of development of evasion mechanisms, due to the global reach and simultaneity of application. One could tell this story with glyphosate alone, “the most valuable herbicide in history,” whose use has risen globally fifteen-fold since the introduction of GM glyphosate-tolerant seeds in 1996; by 2014, growers were spraying enough of the herbicide to apply 1 kilogram per hectare of cropland in the United States, and 0.5 kilograms per hectare of cropland globally (Benbrook 2016; Heap 2014, 1309). But of course, glyphosate is just one important element of a larger story of chemical control of pests, weeds, and diseases in the name of human health and nutrition.

The intense stressor represented by weed killer has driven rapid generation of novel genetic constructs tethered to the conventional genome, at the same time as shifting plant metabolism and changing the subcellular landscape of plant cells. This is no doubt the case for other creatures as well; a recent report from the US Centers for Disease Control found glyphosate in 80 percent of urine samples from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Survey in 2013-2014 (Schütze et al. 2021). What novel bee, microbial, or human biology is consequent to this chronic presence of herbicides and pesticides is poorly described and deeply contested, a topic outside the scope of this paper (Adams 2023; Kosek 2019). Nonetheless, the contours allow identification of the characteristic pattern by which a technology built to be biologically powerful works as intended; at the same time, and at another temporal scale, other effects spool out from the mass application of biological control, generating change highly specific to the very design of the control agent and the political and economic modes of its application and governance.

Second, these outgrowths occurred not despite but according to the shape given them by assumptions of Mendelian genetics. Having fabricated an herbicide-resistant organism by moving genes across kingdoms, it was less imaginable how life forms could exist otherwise. Yet the limits of this knowledge formation are limned by organismal change precisely in its blind spots. For example, metabolism has never been accorded much of a place in the canonical articulation of the central dogma, in which DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein, and genes dictate what metabolism does. This foundational rationale for genetic engineering holds: “control the DNA and you dominate the biological system it encodes” in a chain of command (De Lorenzo 2014, 228). Metabolic adaptation could come first, followed by survival to reproduction and spread, is, as microbiologist Víctor de Lorenzo notes, not particularly legible within an evolutionary theory that requires that genetic novelty/variety preexists an environmental stressor and is selected by it.

Thus, anthropogenic biology, the phenomenon, begets Anthropogenic Biology, the scientific study and theorization of the strange growths now crowding the hull of human intention. While it is tempting to read this as a story of life exceeding human grasp, gleeful weeds growing over the fallen temple of reductionism, or the escape back into wildness of a domesticated form, I would ask readers to set aside their natural wish to occupy the role of advocates for the downtrodden and understand this as a mode of analysis that builds material historicity into our accounts of science and technology as these domains veer toward the study of aftermath biology. The point is not that the current theory is “right” (nor morally virtuous) where the previous one was “wrong” (blind capitalist extraction). Here before us is the confronting living form of what we thought we knew. This encounter is the empirical opportunity to grasp the biology of previous modes of biological control rather than once again focusing on the control stories themselves; to ask what is happening to conceptual work in the sciences as they take on this problem of life processes weighted by history “at all scales and in all systems” (Fortun 2014, 315).

For example, retheorizing “resistance.” Even our favored language of resistance, de Lorenzo (2014, 232) suggests, is misleading and perhaps intellectually lazy: “the gain of a new metabolic ability is essentially different from resisting” a lethal biocide and should not be understood as mere escape from a lethal pressure. Rather, the organism “conquers another portion of the chemical landscape,” basically by incorporating (breaking down, excreting, sequestering, and reusing) the biocide. DNA, he concludes, could be rethought as a repository of transmissible memory about effective metabolic flourishing strategies that have worked in the past, a record that is changed as needed. To put it bluntly, plants are able to take your glyphosate and stuff it. The scale of biocidal death is answered by the scale of novel biocide metabolism. This does not mean that either plants or bio-burdened humans remain the same or persist unscathed or feel perfectly well. In fact, what grows back as the living aftermath of herbicides is historically and evolutionarily and genetically and subcellularly different than in other historical periods, taking the specific form of an excrescence of modernity.

The Universal Solvent of Cryobiology

Appreciation of the implications of an anthropogenic biology cannot be limited to genetics or the evolution of resistance. If an analytic is to be useful, it must be readily transferable across very different kinds of examples. It should be generally meaningful in shifting critical focus from control measures themselves to questions of life in the wake of control. And it should be a tool that is more precise than broad-brush characterization of effects that exceed the intentions of the humans that invent or commercialize technologies or harness biological processes; that escape occurs should be the assumption from which analysis begins. With the aim of further elaborating this analytic, I now work through an entirely different but similarly revealing empirical story, from the field of cryobiology.

Cryobiology enables the freezing of living things such that they are still alive and viable when thawed. Long-distance frozen transport of animal sperm for the management of livestock reproduction began in 1949 when glycerol was found to protect avian sperm from freezing damage, such that it could be used for breeding via artificial insemination (Polge, Smith, and Parkes 1949). Subsequently, cryobiological techniques have become infrastructural to the long-term storage and transport of bacteria, cell cultures and tissues used in research; conservation efforts to preserve seeds and germplasm from endangered species; the freezing of human eggs and sperm and ovarian tissues in assisted reproductive technologies and fertility preservation; the banking of clinical materials and donations such as breast milk, blood, and biopsies; the preservation of DNA and reproductive materials of endangered or extinct species; and the therapeutic infrastructure of bone marrow and umbilical cord blood stem cells stored and transported for transplantation into patients with hematological disorders. ⁵

This “hold of cold over an increasing array of human and nonhuman life forms” produces a domain of latent life that troubles the opposite poles of life and death; it makes ambiguous the distinction between making live and letting die with instances in which cold-suspended beings are made to live and not allowed to die (Radin and Kowal 2017). Radin and Kowal (2017, 7) suggest cryopolitics as an analytic with which to expand and challenge the original formulation of biopolitics: “a field of power where the regulation of life is extended indefinitely through technoscientific means such that death appears perpetually deferred,” in which governance of that life is often thereby suspended. As with genetic engineering, the power to intervene seems awesome and epochally defining. And why not, since with cryopreservation, “traditional obstacles to reproduction such as age, death, extinction, non-synchronous maturation and the availability of male and female reproductive cells become less important” (Kopeika, Thornhill, and Khalaf 2015, 210). Death has indeed been a rather marked obstacle to reproduction—who would not forgive the heady rush that such astonishing capacities seem to open out?

Viewing these developments as an instance of anthropogenic biology does not diminish the many insightful analyses of conservation science, commercial networks for human fluids and cells, social egg freezing, or agriculture. Altered temporalities surrounding human reproduction, species preservation, and human body parts created different kinds of reproductive subjectivity and suspended modes of life. The technology raises new quandaries about what to do with frozen embryos or the germ cells of the dead; in more banal but no less important arenas, it determines food supply chains and structures the laboratory supply economy (Friedrich and Höhne 2016). Anthropogenic biology, as noted, operates in the same “plane of actuality” as biopower (or cryopower). Nonetheless, one does have to know how to look for it: how to ask what might be sprouting in the cracks and quietly sliming the back of the freezer while pronouncements are made about having attained the capacity to stop time, suspend life, and reverse death.

Let us turn the stone. A little-remarked pillar of cryobiology, entirely overshadowed by the cold part of the process, is the cryoprotectant. Cryoprotectants are supplements to the cellular media that prevent freezing damage in biological materials. An apocryphal laboratory accident in which a mislabeled bottle of glycerol-albumin solution was used in place of fructose syrup led to the use of first of these substances, glycerol (Lake 1986). Glycerol forms strong hydrogen bonds with water, preventing the formation of ice crystals and reducing damage to membranes and DNA. However, many cells are not permeable to glycerol, triggering a search for other options. The chemical supply shelf of the 1950s was a place of proliferation of novel industrial products, and one, DMSO, stood out for its relatively small molecular size, its capacity to dissolve many other substances, its miscibility with water, and its ability to rapidly permeate membranes.

A cheap by-product of wood pulp processes in paper manufacturing, DMSO was marketed for use in the production of polymers, resins, and plastics. Where two hours of equilibration with glycerol provided little protection from freezing damage, it took thirty seconds for DMSO to permeate the blood cells, with better outcomes (Lovelock and Bishop 1959). From 1965, DMSO was classed as a “cryoprotectant” alongside fifty other chemical agents (Karow 1969). Yet few other solvents demonstrated DMSO’s capacities: apparent low toxicity, ability to displace water from the cell, antioxidant properties; it was the cryoprotectant of choice for most of the entities inducted into the freezer in the decades since (Awan et al. 2020). Most freezing protocols today, from assisted reproduction to cell line storage, include DMSO. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) places it in the safest solvent category, alongside ethanol. It is often listed as an inert ingredient.

As seen with GM seeds and other theories of “meaning and value” prevalent across twentieth-century industrial practice, a distinctive logic of optimization can be identified in the biomedical sphere as well, driving the knowledge generated by and about DMSO: “the focus is on what works” (Fortun 2014, 312). The literature concentrates on questions such as the percentage of DMSO, the combination with other cryoprotectants, and the speed of freezing and thawing in relation to improving outcomes. Measurements of outcomes depended on the thing being frozen. For sperm, viability, motility, and ability to fertilize were end goals. Vials of blood cells were tested for hemolysis after thawing: cell lines should return to mitotic cell division, whereas embryos needed to survive, divide, and implant. Seeking optimality was an empirical, tinkering approach, described in the context of in vitro culture media as “letting the embryo choose,” that is, the researcher would try different formulations, and the embryo would “choose” which one was better by surviving or not (Summers and Biggers 2003). Freezing protocols assumed “the more viable the embryo, the better the medium” (Johnson 2005, 89). Survival, viability, and reproduction were seen as straightforward measures of the correctness of the protocol and the power to suspend life and death (Landecker 2016b).

Concerns were raised about DMSO’s human toxicology profile in the 1960s, which never impacted its use as a cryoprotectant because high concentrations were not applied directly to human bodies. ⁶ Although patients who receive transplants of thawed cells cryopreserved with DMSO are exposed, it has been regarded as a limited toxicity with transient effects, outweighed by the risks of not undergoing treatment. ⁷ DMSO has attained a reputation as “the universal solvent,” used almost ubiquitously in cell freezing (Galvao et al. 2014). Indeed, “the use of DMSO is so obvious that applied concentrations are often unreported” (Verheijen et al. 2019, 1).

Accordingly, “concerns about cryopreservation have tended to focus simply on the survival and viability of cells following the cooling and thawing processes, the assumption being that having survived the process and resulted in a live birth, the cryopreserved sample or tissue was in essence completely identical to its ‘fresh’ state” (Kopeika, Thornhill, and Khalaf 2015, 210). The assumption here is that survival equals sameness and that viability ensures identity with the prefrozen state. Sameness is central to the time structure of the power claimed for cryobiology to slow metabolic processes down to stasis in a “reversible” fashion, to suspend time, and to bring an entity back to life not from death but from being frozen (Lemke 2021). To be brought back to life, proven by tests of viability and motility and cell division potential, is seen as the capacity to reattain the previous state and rate of being. It is most certainly not seen as the progression into a novel biological undead after-state on the other side of being infused with cryoprotectant and frozen.

The power to still, and then animate at will—as with the power to fabricate a genetic construct—gave specific form to the knowledge arising from control. Since 1960, much scientific literature has been given over to understanding how DMSO crosses membranes without damaging them (small size, aprotic character), how it acts inside the cell to prevent ice crystal formation, how it stabilizes the temperature-sensitive meiotic spindles of oocytes, and how it acts as an antioxidant to combat free radicals thrown off by oxidative stress in cells undergoing the rigors of freezing. ⁸ Even when DMSO was linked to adverse indicators, the results were framed as temporary obstacles to optimization (Honda et al. 2001). In short, successful attainment of biological control at low temperatures in the 1950s kicked off decades of research into the mechanism of that control, seeking to perfect it.

None of this was incorrect and nothing has gone startlingly wrong in contrast to the more confronting instances of weed control failure discussed above. Rather, a dawning, uneasy sense of the underside of DMSO has emerged. As the drive for optimization continues to fall short of optimal, questions of why (some) things die or deform in the freeze–thaw cycle become as salient as previously dominant questions of why (some) things survive. Paradoxically, shortcomings are made more apparent by success. Many procedures such as autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplants between unrelated donors and embryo freezing have become increasingly frequent due to donor drives, commercial umbilical cord blood banking, or efforts to reduce twin pregnancies (Liburkina 2022). As cryobiology expands in medical management of disease and reproduction, outcomes become more epidemiologically legible. In turn, this has foregrounded unresolved toxicology issues.

A handful of studies have begun to speak to these issues at both a physiological level and a molecular level. “Unexpected low-dose toxicity of the universal solvent DMSO” was seen in rats in vivo, triggering mitochondrial failure and cell death in the retina, replicated in cultured retinal neuronal cells (Galvao et al. 2014). Cultured cells exposed to typical DMSO treatment show pervasive changes to membrane density, a shift in the prevailing conformation of DNA, and altered organization of many protein structures (Tunçer et al. 2018). In other words, something that affects the density of membranes, the quantity of DNA and the shape of the proteins in a cell, is interacting with everything that makes a cell what it is.

Another group of researchers exposed three-dimensional human tissue cultures to 0.1 percent DMSO solutions, measuring changes to gene expression, DNA methylation, and microRNA generation (Verheijen et al. 2019). Typical vitrification of embryos or cells uses 10 or 15 percent DMSO solutions. Even at 0.1 percent, researchers saw changed expression of more than 2,000 genes, altered DNA methylation genome-wide, and reduction in microRNAs, particularly in cardiac tissue. Summarizing these “drastic changes in human cellular processes and epigenetic landscape,” they come to the terse conclusion that “DMSO is not inert” (Verheijen et al. 2019, 1). Now, these investigations are still relatively sparse, and it is unclear how lasting such changes would be in whole organisms, in what tissues, and what life stages. Regardless, the results profoundly challenge assumptions that survival equals sameness or that life returns to a state identical to that prior to freezing.

These findings concern patients receiving cryopreserved cell transplants, human germ cells and embryos used in assisted reproduction, and topical drug treatments using DMSO as a vehicle. Harm reduction might mean substituting a different cryopreservative or limiting exposure, but the more profound implication is that DMSO is not so much suspending life as distorting and reconforming its shape, density, and informational capacity. The pervasive effects discussed here suggest that since 1960, biologists using cell cultures have unwittingly been studying DMSO biology, when it seemed they were probing the secrets of “life itself.” DMSO means life that is something else than the same thing, aftermath life. Every time DMSO has been used as a vehicle to carry an experimental intervention into a body, and DMSO alone has been used as the control, the ground state assumed to be normal has instead been that of a DMSO-altered biology. ⁹ Alterlife is not just a property of humans and other creatures exposed to industrial chemicals from waterways and smokestacks, and then studied through the lens of endocrine disruption or carcinogenesis; the by-products of industrial paper manufacturing already inhabit the very heart of biological knowledge (Murphy 2017).

Even on the heels of such a dire pronouncement, it is important to reject the frame of the exposé, revealing a failure of biotechnology where success seemed to reside. As science studies scholar Joseph Dumit (2021, 88) has put it, “The cautionary tale for the scientists, and us, is how much science went along just fine without knowing this. This is the power and tragedy of theories: even as they make substances open to manipulation and understanding, they can simultaneously hide what might be really important.” Anthropogenic biology is not somehow separate from the nature that science sets out to fathom. It arises with a form of biological control and because of it—in this case, the interventions in the name of health and reproduction—becoming the temporality and spatial organization of cells and embryos. As with antimicrobial resistance, such forms “emerge within and are intricate with the exercise of social and medical power” (Hinchliffe 2022, 145).

Yet the resulting biology is not legible within its originating logics and is in fact occluded thereby: in this case, viability, motility, and the capacity to fertilize were read as signs of the capture of sameness of life after freezing, shutting down queries about the difference freezing might make. Finally, the political, economic, and knowledge impacts of anthropogenic biology may be most pronounced in instances in which briefly successful control is mistaken for full knowledge, and humans have become dependent on this version of things. The modern scientific instrument of research may be fallible in proportion to its very power to intervene. Therefore, this is not a story of success or failure, but of a biology consequent to these commercialized interventions, within the historically specific condition of their application at global scale.

What about the argument offered by scientists taking a renewed look at DMSO, that we now have more sophisticated instruments such as high throughput genomics and the ability to image protein and DNA conformation in exacting detail? That the life sciences have realized the importance of epigenetic, not just genetic factors in the maintenance of ongoing life in a stably replicable form? This would imply that we knew less before, and now know more. That science is possessed of more wisdom and better instruments, and it is therefore able to realize things that were not graspable before. Are these cases of metabolic evasion, extrachromosomal circular DNA, and protein deformation not simply instances of normal self-correction, long ago identified as a key characteristic of the historicity of scientific knowledge (Rheinberger 2010)?

No. These forms of explanation for changes in perspective do not account for how interventions pursued in the past—freezing cells or genome editing for herbicide tolerance—have generated their own forms for life at a scale equal to that of twentieth-century globalized commercialization of technology. These alterlives become the object of biological science as their unanticipated eruptions push back on the world created by those interventions in the first place. The original interventions cannot simply be abandoned because they are so foundational to current ways of growing food or having babies or treating diseases that they are not substitutable parts of a whole, often constituting the very possibility for the crops, manipulations, or treatments in the first place (Guthman 2019). Antimicrobials are a similar “plane of actuality,” not simply a notion or a politics of vitality (Rabinow and Rose 2006, 97); the way we do medicine and agriculture is built around them to the degree that they cannot be excised from those practices; the reach and extent of their previous efficacy precluded the pursuit of alternative strategies as a scientific, economic, or social priority in the years in which antibiotics as a solution were transforming into antibiotic resistance as a problem (Kirchhelle 2018; Podolsky 2015).

Social Theory in the Aftermath

Having worked through two detailed empirical cases, let us return to the question of the theoretical contribution of a concept of anthropogenic biology. What work does it perform beyond helping narrate the intricacies of plant vacuoles and aprotic solvents? On the one hand, the contribution might be understood rather narrowly, a chastened reflection twenty years later on the rise in enthusiasm for social scientific attention to biotechnology and high-tech biomedicine, from genes to stem cells. Particularly with the rise of genetic engineering, it seemed that theoretical attention should be directed at how humans were making life or at least remaking it to their own ends and modeled on their own desires—the advent of nature modeled on culture (Rabinow 1992; Giddens 1991).

A crop of “bio” prefixes flourished—biosociality, biocapital, and biocitizenship—as a “gathering consensus in anthropology, sciences studies, and philosophy of biology” suggested “that the theoretical object of biology, ‘life,’ is today in transformation, if not dissolution, [because] proliferating reproductive technologies, along with genomic reshuffling of biomatter in such practices as cloning, have unwound the facts of life” (Helmreich 2011, 673). These analyses (including my own) took the bio that prefaces sociality or citizenship or capital to be the biology of biotechnology, of life taken in hand and engineered, controlled, sequenced, banked, patented, frozen, capitalized, transplanted, immortalized, implanted, and cloned (Landecker 2007).

By contrast, this second-crop analysis has focused on the biology of the outcome not contained in the original logic of the biotechnologies that drive it. Its empirical site is aftermath life—in the double sense of the wake of events and that which grows next. Where the early decades of the twentieth century saw an interest in concrescence, the rather hopeful growing together of organs in embryonic development, of prehension and integration, excrescence is unfortunately more historically appropriate to our time of living with the material heritage of such modern horizons (Whitehead 1929). Life that grows in the space of the original form but does not repeat it can or might not be pathology. In the spirit of the call for an “alternative temporal grammar for critique,” these biological alterlives and excrescences of aftermath constitute sites for empirical inquiry into the contemporary condition that contain historical time but do not assume or implicitly contain progress or epochs or apocalypse or betterment (Folkers 2021, 3).

At the same time, it is too narrow an interpretation of anthropogenic biology to address only biopolitics and those who might care about theory under that banner. There are two further contributions that emerge from the foregoing analysis—one, a positive empirical approach to the unintended consequence, which, two, may then be followed out in the specific historical context of the Anthropocene. First, identification of the specific relation between knowledge, intervention, and biology offers a positive empirical analytic for the so-called unintended consequences of scientific and technological control measures for living processes. As Parvin and Pollock (2020, 322) have suggested, the unintended consequence is a phrase “emptied of substance while doing substantial work,” providing “a category that is descriptive of the social, environmental, and political impacts of science and technology as ones that lack prior, deliberate action.”

While it has long been obvious that control of living things or life processes rarely (if ever) turns out as planned, twentieth-century social scientific responses to the fallibility of knowledge, such as theories of the unanticipated consequence or the wicked problem, provide little for the social scientist wishing to understand, in detail as well as in principle, life processes as a specific aftermath of modernity. We may never have been modern, but nonetheless the substances, fantasies, techniques, and epistemologies of modernity have become the living in a most literal manner, from the conformation of DNA repair enzymes to the biomass distribution on Earth (Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo 2018; Bertin and Averbeck 2006; Fortun 2014).

Calling these outcomes unanticipated consequences of modern pharmaceuticals and agriculture is both uninformative and a hindrance to an effective empirical grasp on the material outcomes of science and technology as social processes intrinsic to industrialized societies. We learn from Merton (1936) onward that there are laws of nonanticipation such as ignorance, error, short-term emphasis on immediate interests and discounting of long-term considerations, and dogmatic thinking. The “wicked problem” is similarly taxonomic in identifying the characteristics of problems with interdependent factors that defy either a single formulation or an enumerable set of possible solutions (Rittel and Webber 1973).

While insightful in a general sense regarding the social functioning of anticipation and fallibility in technocratic societies, these frameworks do not speak to the specificity and historicity of the relation identified here: the one that exists between fallibility of scientific knowledge and the biological consequences of state and commercial efforts to control growth, disease, fertility, reproduction, and vitality. Such molecular outcomes may seem a matter for toxicologists and biologists to reckon with, yet these biological consequences are always already social because they are formatted by social life, and they impact how social life is organized, down to where the tulips are planted.

In seeking to grasp the nature of this imbrication, we would look in vain to risk society theorists describing second modernities in which the nation-state is besieged by the planetary (Beck 2013). Ours is an age of oxidative stress, cellular senescence, and failures of DNA repair of cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis. Answering the admonition to “reason from organisms’ metabolisms outwards,” the concept of anthropogenic biology allows for the empirical apprehension of the wake of the industrial century’s efforts to control life in terms other than the geological (Lenton, Dutreuil, and Latour 2020).

In other words, the “biology of history” is not synonymous with the “climate of history” (Landecker 2016a; Chakrabarty 2009). Anthropogenic biology draws on the Anthropocene framework and arguably is only made possible by the geological systems perspective on atmospheric impact of fossil fuel extraction and use, with the development of metrics measuring the impact of human activity on processes such as the nitrogen cycle. At the same time, Anthropocene “anthropogenesis,” what Yusoff (2016, 20, 5) calls a “new origin and ending story for man…a genesis that names man as the originator of a new geological nature,” is founded on “mineralogical rather than metaphysical or biological ground.” Consequently, changes to the living are framed as ensuant to temperature shifts and habitat loss, a kind of trickle-down theory of geological change for biology. Yet not everything that matters will sediment.

Indeed, for many researchers engaged in the wider range of life and ecological sciences, the concept of the anthropogenic is not necessarily exhausted by that of the Anthropocene. For example, the concept of the anthropogenic biome was introduced in 2008 to describe “terrestrial biomes based on global patterns of sustained, direct human interaction with ecosystems,” covering more than 75 percent of Earth’s ice-free land (Ellis and Ramankutty 2008, 439). The original classification used population density and land use to distinguish, for example, populated forest biomes from populated irrigated cropland biomes. But the concept has since been extended to include categories such as the anthropogenic subterranean freshwaters biome to describe the highly particular ecosystems of underground canals and sewers (“Global Ecosystem Typology” n.d.). Here, the use of anthropogenic is directed at understanding the dynamics of the kind of ecosystems of which it is part and the differentiation between kinds.

The plurality of biomes identified by these rubrics and their focus on interacting effects in ecological “timescapes” underscores what the search for an epochal marker cannot, which is the anti-intuitive character of human activities as being simultaneously pervasive yet heterogenous as outcome, anthropogenic yet primarily nonhuman, and mass-produced yet a generator of disparity, a sameness that differentiates at heterogenous rates with looping effects (Bensaude-Vincent 2022). In short, a set of causal features that have uneven effects everywhere, as in the Anthropocene patches that anthropologists Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt (2019, S187) see emerging in the ecological outcomes of the “relationship between simplifications and proliferations” in their situated accounts of the “feral biology” arising from monocultures of capitalist infrastructure.

We may all “live in places” but we simultaneously live through a different realm of experience and physical emplacement mediated by the narratives, therapeutic materials, and representations of life sciences and biochemistry, telescopically situated within the cells and fluids and atoms of our own bodies and others, as the recent rush of work on the elemental and microbial world underscores (Neale, Addison, and Phan 2022; Benezra 2023; Tsing 2016, 3). As Gabrielle Hecht (2018, 114) has emphasized, the molecular biology of endocrine disruption does not nest within the global models of climate change; there is no neat micro-macrocosm mirroring, only the challenge to “jump in” with analytics that allow critical work on the complex scalar interrelations of aftermath. Moving beyond an organismal and zoocentric perspective into the terrain and time of membranes, proteins and antioxidants, opens the possibility of working on the political ground of “molecular decolonization,” what Redvers and colleagues (2020) call the recognition that the local biological microscapes of cellular life are as much the appropriate site of action around the uneven effects of extractive colonialism and twentieth-century industrialization, as are the lakes, rivers, and skies.

Enzymes derange themselves around an arsenic rather than a zinc ion; biofilms shift in their architecture under a rain of xenobiotic disinfectants whether in pipes or guts. We simultaneously live within and encompass a paradoxically a-human and nonindividual biochemistry; anthropogenic biologies reside as much in relations, relative proportions, reactivity, viscosities, and respatialization of membranes and molecules as in traditional notions of discrete organisms. For those of us concerned with the world historical matters of the soft tissues, so to speak (living patterns that may or may not fossilize or end in extinction), this question about the biology specific to our historical time is not downstream to climate and geological change, it occurs alongside them.

Conclusion

An age of anthropogenic biology is one in which we see a turn from a science of nature, from a science of the “secrets of life and death” to life science and biomedicine as a pursuit of the question of life shot through with the substances, temporalities, and stressors of industrialization (Keller 1993). Typical of this particular biology of history are a variety of bulging and necrotizing forms growing from previous measures that seemed at the time to be icons of progress, coexisting with and emerging in relation to more intentional outcomes. Comprehension of biological power, fallibility, and their interrelation calls for different conceptual work by which we can recognize that techniques of knowledge and control that unwind the facts of life can work perfectly well, be powerful, and know and do many of the things they were meant to, at least for a while or at least open out new futures for experimentation, and can at the very same time have a supplemental set of growths, a second crop, that comes about at different speeds and scales, becoming legible sometimes sooner, sometimes later.