Scholarly work in microbe studies has begun to disentangle the complex and rich relations at work when humans engage with microbial life. However, most work focuses on situations where the microbes are in positive or at least neutral relation to human bodies: for instance, the production of fermented foods, the human gut microbiome, or microbial ecologies. But what can we learn by turning these insights toward moments where humans and microbes are decidedly not in positive relation?
This project examines the complex and contested relations between humans and microbes in the context of American, Canadian, and British biological weapons research, with a strong focus on the American biological weapons lab at Fort Detrick. While biological weapons work seems at first to be a typical Cold War technoscientific exercise, I contend that it is actually a site of intense human-microbe relations. Indeed, biological weapons production is perhaps the most extreme case of politics made in/through/with microbial life. Thus, I am most interested in biological weapons as a site of making-with microbes, rather than the making of weapons. How microbes are managed, controlled, and understood in order to enable this making-with is the focus. I turn toward the practices, technologies, concepts, and people who made biological weapons work possible. This includes attention to biological weapons networks and strain circulation during World War II, the history of biological safety and notions of containment, the microbiopolitics of this kind of multispecies work, and the waste practices involved in disposing of weaponized microbial life.