Claas Kirchhelle
Biographic Data
| ID | 511479 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Claas Kirchhelle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Claas |
| FAMILY NAME | Kirchhelle |
| SIGNATURE | KIRCHHELLE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0910-8133 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Pharmaceutical pollution from health care
Human pharmaceuticals are increasingly detected in environments around the world, with growing international calls to mitigate the ecological and human health risks posed by these novel entities. Exposure to pharmaceutical pollutants can negatively affect the behaviour, reproduction, and health of wildlife, contributing towards declining ecological health and global biodiversity loss. Pharmaceuticals in the environment are also driving rising lev…
A research agenda advancing climate change and antimicrobial resistance as interconnected issues
« This little microbe went to market »L’économie politique de la surveillance sentinelle et gestion microbienne
Cet article explore l’usage des neuroleptiques à action prolongée (NAP) dans la psychiatrie française de 1966 à aujourd’hui, en articulant trois ambitions complémentaires. D’un point de vue historique, il retrace les dynamiques d’appropriation des NAP, montrant comment leur diffusion accompagne, sans les déterminer, les transformations institutionnelles de la psychiatrie, notamment à travers la sectorisation. Sur le plan socio-anthropologique, l’…
Paradoxes of the antibiotic pipeline
The escalating challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has led to a surge of global research and policy discourse on refilling an empty antibiotic pipeline. The empty pipeline metaphor is, however, wrought with paradoxes. Drawing on critical social sciences and humanities research on pharmaceutical innovation, this comment article presents five of the key paradoxes that structure contemporary innovation discourse: Was the so-called “Golden Ag…
Northern Normal
This Erratum relates to the following article: Kirchhelle, Claas, and Charlotte Kirchhelle. 2024. “Northern Normal: Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939–2000).” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 292–336. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1445. On page 311, in the main copy it should read: “This was particularly evident in the case of France. Closely aligned with the goals of French imp…
Northern Normal
Bacteriophage-typing – using bacterial viruses to identify bacteria at the species and strain level – was the gold standard technology underlying the rapid expansion of international surveillance for major bacterial pathogens after 1945. The microbiological networks, taxonomies, and culture collections produced by phage-typers underpinned important advances in scientists’ understanding of microbial diversity and infection control efforts. However…
[Intro] Standards and Their Containers
Standards and infrastructures have become ubiquitous objects of study in STS. They are critical to the global work of microbiology. However, the role of early twentieth-century colonial, military, and capitalist expansion in the production of these infrastructures is underappreciated. Further, the role of microbial “resistance” in shaping and changing the global microbiological order needs better elucidation. This requires connecting the technica…
The Antibiocene – towards an eco-social analysis of humanity’s antimicrobial footprint
Over eight decades of mass antimicrobial exposures have changed microbial populations and genes at a global level. This thought piece argues that adequately responding to the anthropogenic transformation of the microbial commons requires reframing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as the pheno- and genotypic signal of a new geological era – an Antibiocene. Thinking through the multiple spatiotemporal, biological, and social scales of this Antibiocen…
Between paternalism and illegality
Manual scavengers, or ‘Safai Karamcharis’, as they are known in India, are sanitation workers who manually clean human waste for a living and face considerable occupational health risks. They are subject to deep-seated, caste-based stigma associated with their perceived ‘caste impurity’ and lack of cleanliness, which result both in consistently dangerous substandard working conditions and lack of social mobility, with women facing greater hardshi…
Giants on Clay Feet—Covid-19, infection control and public health laboratory networks in England, the USA and (West-)Germany (1945–2020)
In early 2020, COVID-19 exposed differences in public health laboratory systems' testing abilities. Focusing on Germany, the USA and the UK between 1900 and 2020, this article argues that studying the distinct evolution of laboratory infrastructures is critical to understanding the history of infection control and the limits of template-based reforms in global health. While each analysed laboratory infrastructure was shaped by a unique national c…
Governing Global Antimicrobial Resistance
Antibiotic Arrivals in Africa
The mass production of antibiotics in the 1940s enabled their travel beyond Europe and America, but to date the significance of the ways in which these medicines co-constituted colonial regimes at the time has not been systematically described. Through a case study of yaws and syphilis, this research article traces arrivals of antibiotics in three countries of Eastern Africa-Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. We draw attention to the emergent roles of…
Waves of attention
This article uses quantitative and qualitative approaches to review 75 years of international policy reports on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our review of 248 policy reports and expert consultation revealed waves of political attention and repeated reframings of AMR as a policy object. AMR emerged as an object of international policy-making during the 1990s. Until then, AMR was primarily defined as a challenge of human and agricultural domains…
Risk on the Table
Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the t…
Carsten Timmermann, Moonshots at Cancer
In Moonshots at Cancer, medical historian Carsten Timmermann traces oncology research at Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche between the 1950s and 2010. The book is based on extensive research at the company’s Basel archives and was published by Roche’s own Editiones Roche. Timmermann’s aim is to write the company’s history of cancer research as a case study for the wider evolution of industry research on cancer treatments. Moonshots is divided into…
Bearing Witness
Pyrrhic Progress
Setting the standard
There is increasing concern globally about the enormity of the threats posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to human, animal, plant and environmental health. A proliferation of international, national and institutional reports on the problems posed by AMR and the need for antibiotic stewardship have galvanised attention on the global stage. However, the AMR community increasingly laments a lack of action, often identified as an ‘implementation…
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an o…
The forgotten typers
Using bacteriophages to type (identify) bacteria was one of the most important tools of twentieth-century epidemiology. Challenging existing accounts’ focus on Anglophone research, this paper shows that modern phage-typing arose in German-speaking continental laboratories from 1921 onwards. Several factors contributed to this rise: the limitations of existing phenotypic systems; demobilized German bacteriologists’ interwar engagement with phages …
Pyrrhic Progress
Angela Cassidy, Vermin, Victims and Disease
Vermin, Victims and Disease: British Debates over Bovine Tuberculosis and Badgers by Angela Cassidy is an ambitious account of the scientific, public and regulatory controversies about bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and badger control in post-war Britain. The book is divided into three parts. Part One introduces readers to bTB, the cultural history of human–badger encounters and pre-1970s bTB control. The 1971 discovery of an infected badger carcass t…
Swann Song
Antibiotics have played a significant yet ambivalent role in Western livestock husbandry. Mass introduced to agriculture to boost animal production and reduce feed consumption in the early 1950s, agricultural antibiotics were soon accused of selecting for bacterial resistance, causing residues and enabling bad animal welfare. The dilemma posed by agricultural antibiotic regulation persists to this day. This essay traces the history of British ant…
Discovering Tuberculosis
Christian W. McMillen’s book is an ambitious global history of tuberculosis (TB) since 1900. ‘Writing about TB control as failure’ (p. 2), the author breaks with previous Western-centric research and covers new spatial and chronological terrain. His book comprises three parts: the first studies the impact of racial theories of susceptible ‘primitive populations’ on TB diagnosis and treatment; the second analyses the roll-out of TB control program…
Fighting back
Bearing Witness
Giants on Clay Feet—Covid-19, infection control and public health laboratory networks in England, the USA and (West-)Germany (1945–2020)
In early 2020, COVID-19 exposed differences in public health laboratory systems' testing abilities. Focusing on Germany, the USA and the UK between 1900 and 2020, this article argues that studying the distinct evolution of laboratory infrastructures is critical to understanding the history of infection control and the limits of template-based reforms in global health. While each analysed laboratory infrastructure was shaped by a unique national c…
Governing Global Antimicrobial Resistance
Salmonella Infections, Networks of Knowledge, and Public Health in Britain, 1880–1975, by Anne Hardy
Focusing on Salmonella’s various manifestations and the epistemological role of modern laboratories, Anne Hardy provides a unique overview of Salmonella’s rise as a modern health hazard and of the concomitant development of microbiology, epidemiology and public health. The book is divided into three parts. Part I (‘Pathways of Nature’) traces different pathways of Salmonella infection. Chapter One (‘Human Animals’) analyses British responses to t…
Discovering Tuberculosis
Christian W. McMillen’s book is an ambitious global history of tuberculosis (TB) since 1900. ‘Writing about TB control as failure’ (p. 2), the author breaks with previous Western-centric research and covers new spatial and chronological terrain. His book comprises three parts: the first studies the impact of racial theories of susceptible ‘primitive populations’ on TB diagnosis and treatment; the second analyses the roll-out of TB control program…
Swann Song
Antibiotics have played a significant yet ambivalent role in Western livestock husbandry. Mass introduced to agriculture to boost animal production and reduce feed consumption in the early 1950s, agricultural antibiotics were soon accused of selecting for bacterial resistance, causing residues and enabling bad animal welfare. The dilemma posed by agricultural antibiotic regulation persists to this day. This essay traces the history of British ant…
Pyrrhic Progress
Setting the standard
There is increasing concern globally about the enormity of the threats posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to human, animal, plant and environmental health. A proliferation of international, national and institutional reports on the problems posed by AMR and the need for antibiotic stewardship have galvanised attention on the global stage. However, the AMR community increasingly laments a lack of action, often identified as an ‘implementation…
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an o…
The forgotten typers
Using bacteriophages to type (identify) bacteria was one of the most important tools of twentieth-century epidemiology. Challenging existing accounts’ focus on Anglophone research, this paper shows that modern phage-typing arose in German-speaking continental laboratories from 1921 onwards. Several factors contributed to this rise: the limitations of existing phenotypic systems; demobilized German bacteriologists’ interwar engagement with phages …
Pyrrhic Progress
Angela Cassidy, Vermin, Victims and Disease
Vermin, Victims and Disease: British Debates over Bovine Tuberculosis and Badgers by Angela Cassidy is an ambitious account of the scientific, public and regulatory controversies about bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and badger control in post-war Britain. The book is divided into three parts. Part One introduces readers to bTB, the cultural history of human–badger encounters and pre-1970s bTB control. The 1971 discovery of an infected badger carcass t…
Waves of attention
This article uses quantitative and qualitative approaches to review 75 years of international policy reports on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our review of 248 policy reports and expert consultation revealed waves of political attention and repeated reframings of AMR as a policy object. AMR emerged as an object of international policy-making during the 1990s. Until then, AMR was primarily defined as a challenge of human and agricultural domains…
Risk on the Table
Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the t…
Carsten Timmermann, Moonshots at Cancer
In Moonshots at Cancer, medical historian Carsten Timmermann traces oncology research at Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche between the 1950s and 2010. The book is based on extensive research at the company’s Basel archives and was published by Roche’s own Editiones Roche. Timmermann’s aim is to write the company’s history of cancer research as a case study for the wider evolution of industry research on cancer treatments. Moonshots is divided into…
Bearing Witness
Between paternalism and illegality
Manual scavengers, or ‘Safai Karamcharis’, as they are known in India, are sanitation workers who manually clean human waste for a living and face considerable occupational health risks. They are subject to deep-seated, caste-based stigma associated with their perceived ‘caste impurity’ and lack of cleanliness, which result both in consistently dangerous substandard working conditions and lack of social mobility, with women facing greater hardshi…
Giants on Clay Feet—Covid-19, infection control and public health laboratory networks in England, the USA and (West-)Germany (1945–2020)
In early 2020, COVID-19 exposed differences in public health laboratory systems' testing abilities. Focusing on Germany, the USA and the UK between 1900 and 2020, this article argues that studying the distinct evolution of laboratory infrastructures is critical to understanding the history of infection control and the limits of template-based reforms in global health. While each analysed laboratory infrastructure was shaped by a unique national c…
Governing Global Antimicrobial Resistance
Antibiotic Arrivals in Africa
The mass production of antibiotics in the 1940s enabled their travel beyond Europe and America, but to date the significance of the ways in which these medicines co-constituted colonial regimes at the time has not been systematically described. Through a case study of yaws and syphilis, this research article traces arrivals of antibiotics in three countries of Eastern Africa-Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. We draw attention to the emergent roles of…
The Antibiocene – towards an eco-social analysis of humanity’s antimicrobial footprint
Over eight decades of mass antimicrobial exposures have changed microbial populations and genes at a global level. This thought piece argues that adequately responding to the anthropogenic transformation of the microbial commons requires reframing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as the pheno- and genotypic signal of a new geological era – an Antibiocene. Thinking through the multiple spatiotemporal, biological, and social scales of this Antibiocen…
Paradoxes of the antibiotic pipeline
The escalating challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has led to a surge of global research and policy discourse on refilling an empty antibiotic pipeline. The empty pipeline metaphor is, however, wrought with paradoxes. Drawing on critical social sciences and humanities research on pharmaceutical innovation, this comment article presents five of the key paradoxes that structure contemporary innovation discourse: Was the so-called “Golden Ag…
Northern Normal
This Erratum relates to the following article: Kirchhelle, Claas, and Charlotte Kirchhelle. 2024. “Northern Normal: Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939–2000).” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 292–336. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1445. On page 311, in the main copy it should read: “This was particularly evident in the case of France. Closely aligned with the goals of French imp…
Fighting back
Northern Normal
Bacteriophage-typing – using bacterial viruses to identify bacteria at the species and strain level – was the gold standard technology underlying the rapid expansion of international surveillance for major bacterial pathogens after 1945. The microbiological networks, taxonomies, and culture collections produced by phage-typers underpinned important advances in scientists’ understanding of microbial diversity and infection control efforts. However…
[Intro] Standards and Their Containers
Standards and infrastructures have become ubiquitous objects of study in STS. They are critical to the global work of microbiology. However, the role of early twentieth-century colonial, military, and capitalist expansion in the production of these infrastructures is underappreciated. Further, the role of microbial “resistance” in shaping and changing the global microbiological order needs better elucidation. This requires connecting the technica…
A research agenda advancing climate change and antimicrobial resistance as interconnected issues
« This little microbe went to market »L’économie politique de la surveillance sentinelle et gestion microbienne
Cet article explore l’usage des neuroleptiques à action prolongée (NAP) dans la psychiatrie française de 1966 à aujourd’hui, en articulant trois ambitions complémentaires. D’un point de vue historique, il retrace les dynamiques d’appropriation des NAP, montrant comment leur diffusion accompagne, sans les déterminer, les transformations institutionnelles de la psychiatrie, notamment à travers la sectorisation. Sur le plan socio-anthropologique, l’…
Political science (17 works) · Biology (15 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · History of Science and Medicine (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Antibiotic resistance (6 works) · Historical Medical Research and Treatments (6 works) · Antibiotic Use and Resistance (5 works)