H Landecker
Biographic Data
| ID | 67173 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Landecker |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Landecker |
| SIGNATURE | LANDECKER H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1282-9962 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 469 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Genome Engineering, Chemical Exposure, and the Germline: An Ethical Synthesis
Concerns about the human germline in the context of genome editing have been at the forefront of contemporary bioethics, with the clear recognition that the heritability associated with such intervention merits special moral consideration. In contrast, the question of moral responsibility for modifications of the germline genome that result from anthropogenic environmental toxicants has received little attention. Yet, whether the impact of human …
Our thanks to founding editor Professor Nikolas Rose
Life as Aftermath: Social Theory for an Age of Anthropogenic Biology
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 wicke…
Making and disposing of life's 'starting materials: A focus group study of attitudes concerning reproductive scarcity and abundance in in vitro gametogenesis
This paper explores stakeholder attitudes toward gametes and embryos in the context of in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a new stem cell technology whose future clinical application would entail the production of eggs and sperm in vitro. A key concern raised by the prospect of making gametes from originally non-reproductive body cells has been its potential exacerbation of the issue of "surplus" cryopreserved embryos through the production of unprece…
Cell freezing and the biology of inexorability: On cryoprotectants and chemical time
What can’t freezing hold still? This article surveys the history of substances used to protect cells and organisms from freezing damage, known as cryoprotectants. Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) has since 1959 been the most widely used of these agents in cryopreservation. Here, its evolution from pulp and paper waste byproduct to wonder drug to all-but-invisible routine element of freezing protocols is used to trace the direct arc from protection to to…
States of Resistance: Nosocomial and environmental approaches to antimicrobial resistance in Lebanon
Drawing on institutional historical records, interviews and student theses, this article charts the intersection of hospital acquired illness, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), environments of armed conflict, and larger questions of social governance in the specific case of the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in Lebanon. Taking a methodological cue from approaches in contemporary scientific work that understand…
How the Social Gets Under the Skin: From the Social as Signal to Society as a Metabolic Milieu
Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseases prevalent in industrialized countries, including mental, metabolic, and postviral conditions. For sociologists, the rise of inflammation in explanatory models of chronic disease is an opportunity to grasp a historical shift in thinking about how society gets under the skin as new modes of conceptualization of the relationship between societies and bodies eme…
Living Differently in Time: Plasticity, Temporality and Cellular Biotechnologies
The plant and microbial worlds have long been targets for discovery of therapeutic drugs, but insects have been left virtually untouched... Among the substances found in insects are molecules that kill cancer cells, proteins that prevent blood from clotting, enzymes that degrade pesticides, proteins that glow in the dark, anti-microbial peptides and toxins. (Cauchi, 2002; emphasis added)Interest in biotechnology has been increasing in the humanit…
Enzyme Power
Thanks to scientific discoveries and commercial efforts to harness the processes of fermentation going back to the nineteenth century, enzymes harvested from microbes have become ubiquitous in detergents and other cleaning products, as well as in food production. They are also now being adapted for an even bigger cleaning task: remediating pollution. Examining how these humble proteins and the biochemical reactions they catalyze became so indispe…
Heritable changeability: Epimutation and the legacy of negative definition in epigenetic concepts
Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood by what they are not. Yet the function and implication of negative definition for scientific discourse has thus far received scant attention. Using the term epimutation as exemplar, we analyze the paradoxical like-but-unlike structure of a term that must simultaneously connect with but depart from genetic concepts. We assess the historical forces str…
La résistance aux antibiotiques et la biologie de l'Histoire
Au début des années 1940, la production en masse des antibiotiques a nécessité la culture à grande échelle de micro-organismes afin de recueillir leurs produits métaboliques. Malheureusement, l'utilisation des antibiotiques entraîne une sélection par la résistance à cette même échelle. Nous examinons ici comment la microbiologie et la médecine se sont tournées vers l'étude de la résistance aux antibiotiques, en nous concentrant sur le constat que…
Lockdown texts
A metabolic history of manufacturing waste: Food Commodities and Their Outsides
The early twentieth-century industrialization of food production and processing generated large volumes of processing waste. Following the fate of waste products cast off from the new food commodities, this article describes the logics and practices of large-scale waste reuse as animal feed and microbial nutrient medium in industrial chemical production in the United States. A "chemical gaze" on matter recast disparate burdensome byproducts such …
Environmental Politics of Reproduction
What constitutes "human reproduction" is under negotiation as its biology, social nature, and cultural valences are increasingly perceived as bound up in environmental issues. This review maps the growing overlap between formerly rather separate domains of reproductive politics and environmental politics, examining three interrelated areas. The first is the emergence of an intersectional environmental reproductive justice framework in activism an…
It is what it eats: Chemically defined media and the history of surrounds
The social as signal in the body of chromatin: The social as signal
Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History
Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affe…
The Social as Signal in the Body of Chromatin
Human social interactions and material cultures are increasingly understood as biologically consequent environmental signals. Within the explanatory framework of epigenetics, such signals become biologically inscribed when transduced into bodies as persistent patterns of molecular conformation. In the life sciences, persistence of the social as the biological is understood as establishment of gene expression potentials, physiological changes, or …
Being and eating: Losing grip on the equation
How the genome got a life span
In the space of little more than a decade, ideas of the human genome have shifted significantly, with the emergence of the notion that the genome an individual changes with development, age, disease, environmental inputs, and time. This paper examines the emergence of the genome with a life span, one that experiences drift, instability and mutability, and a host of other temporal changes. We argue that developments in chromatin biology have provi…
Comments and Reply
What’s in the Dish? Comments on Franklin’s In Vitro Anthropos Hannah Landecker Conceptual Clarity for Conception Frameworks: Comments on Franklin’s In Vitro Anthropos Charis Thompson Reply Sarah Franklin
Postindustrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge
Through examination of four examples from contemporary metabolic sciences, this article characterizes the rise of a postindustrial metabolism. Concerned with regulation, timing, and information, this emergent metabolism is analyzed as a shift away from the factory or motor model of classic metabolism, in which food was fuel, providing energy and building blocks to the body. Accordingly, metabolic disorders—treatments for which are the explicit ai…
From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology
Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated-how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic research is highly biochemical, it is of interest to sociologists because some epigenetic changes are environmentally mediated and can persist across the life span or into further generations. Environmental epigenetic research tracks mechanisms by which social …
The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live-Cell Imaging
How do we see life after the century of the gene? This article argues that the post-2000 postgenomic turn was and is a thoroughly visual turn, as well as a theoretical and practical shift away from the central dogma of DNA as master molecule. Live-cell imaging is a rapidly expanding area of scientific visualization of living things whose practice is central in postgenomic biological research and theory. Fluorescent probes enable the visualization…
Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism
Nutritional epigenetics seeks to explain the effects of nutrition on gene expression. For social science, it is an area of life science whose analysis reveals a concentrated form of a wider shift in the understanding of food and metabolism. Rather than the chemical conversion of food to energy and body matter of classic metabolism, food is now also a conditioning environment that shapes the activity of the genome and the physiology of the body. I…
From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology
Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated-how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic research is highly biochemical, it is of interest to sociologists because some epigenetic changes are environmentally mediated and can persist across the life span or into further generations. Environmental epigenetic research tracks mechanisms by which social …
Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History
Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affe…
Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film
The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and t…
Environmental Politics of Reproduction
What constitutes "human reproduction" is under negotiation as its biology, social nature, and cultural valences are increasingly perceived as bound up in environmental issues. This review maps the growing overlap between formerly rather separate domains of reproductive politics and environmental politics, examining three interrelated areas. The first is the emergence of an intersectional environmental reproductive justice framework in activism an…
A metabolic history of manufacturing waste: Food Commodities and Their Outsides
The early twentieth-century industrialization of food production and processing generated large volumes of processing waste. Following the fate of waste products cast off from the new food commodities, this article describes the logics and practices of large-scale waste reuse as animal feed and microbial nutrient medium in industrial chemical production in the United States. A "chemical gaze" on matter recast disparate burdensome byproducts such …
Postindustrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge
Through examination of four examples from contemporary metabolic sciences, this article characterizes the rise of a postindustrial metabolism. Concerned with regulation, timing, and information, this emergent metabolism is analyzed as a shift away from the factory or motor model of classic metabolism, in which food was fuel, providing energy and building blocks to the body. Accordingly, metabolic disorders—treatments for which are the explicit ai…
Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory
A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-systems, and Film
Refereed
Life as Aftermath: Social Theory for an Age of Anthropogenic Biology
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 wicke…
Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science
The ArgumentCell lines and other human-derived biological materials have since 1980 become valuable forms of patentable matter. This paper revisits the much-critiqued legal caseMoore v. Regents of the University of Cahfornia, in which John Moore claimed property rights in a patented cell line made from his spleen. Most work to date has critiqued the text of the decision and left the relevant scientific and technical literature unexamined. By mapp…
It is what it eats: Chemically defined media and the history of surrounds
The Social as Signal in the Body of Chromatin
Human social interactions and material cultures are increasingly understood as biologically consequent environmental signals. Within the explanatory framework of epigenetics, such signals become biologically inscribed when transduced into bodies as persistent patterns of molecular conformation. In the life sciences, persistence of the social as the biological is understood as establishment of gene expression potentials, physiological changes, or …
Creeping, Drinking, Dying: The Cinematic Portal and the Microscopic World of the Twentieth-Century Cell
ArgumentFilm scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled wi…
New times for biology: Nerve cultures and the advent of cellular life in vitro
La résistance aux antibiotiques et la biologie de l'Histoire
Au début des années 1940, la production en masse des antibiotiques a nécessité la culture à grande échelle de micro-organismes afin de recueillir leurs produits métaboliques. Malheureusement, l'utilisation des antibiotiques entraîne une sélection par la résistance à cette même échelle. Nous examinons ici comment la microbiologie et la médecine se sont tournées vers l'étude de la résistance aux antibiotiques, en nous concentrant sur le constat que…
The social as signal in the body of chromatin: The social as signal
How the Social Gets Under the Skin: From the Social as Signal to Society as a Metabolic Milieu
Inflammation has risen to the forefront of biomedical research into many chronic diseases prevalent in industrialized countries, including mental, metabolic, and postviral conditions. For sociologists, the rise of inflammation in explanatory models of chronic disease is an opportunity to grasp a historical shift in thinking about how society gets under the skin as new modes of conceptualization of the relationship between societies and bodies eme…
Heritable changeability: Epimutation and the legacy of negative definition in epigenetic concepts
Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood by what they are not. Yet the function and implication of negative definition for scientific discourse has thus far received scant attention. Using the term epimutation as exemplar, we analyze the paradoxical like-but-unlike structure of a term that must simultaneously connect with but depart from genetic concepts. We assess the historical forces str…
Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science
The ArgumentCell lines and other human-derived biological materials have since 1980 become valuable forms of patentable matter. This paper revisits the much-critiqued legal caseMoore v. Regents of the University of Cahfornia, in which John Moore claimed property rights in a patented cell line made from his spleen. Most work to date has critiqued the text of the decision and left the relevant scientific and technical literature unexamined. By mapp…
New times for biology: Nerve cultures and the advent of cellular life in vitro
A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-systems, and Film
Refereed
Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory
Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film
The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and t…
Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (review)
Reviewed by: Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy Hannah Landecker (bio) Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. By Sarah Franklin. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. x+253. $79.95/$22.95. After the advent of Dolly the sheep in 1997,many books were published by the participants in or the observers of cloning which gave accessible scientific descriptions of the process, or engaged the innumerable discussions of the ethics of hu…
Nahrung als Exposition. Epigenetik der Ernährung und die Molekularisierung der Umwelt
Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism
Nutritional epigenetics seeks to explain the effects of nutrition on gene expression. For social science, it is an area of life science whose analysis reveals a concentrated form of a wider shift in the understanding of food and metabolism. Rather than the chemical conversion of food to energy and body matter of classic metabolism, food is now also a conditioning environment that shapes the activity of the genome and the physiology of the body. I…
Creeping, Drinking, Dying: The Cinematic Portal and the Microscopic World of the Twentieth-Century Cell
ArgumentFilm scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled wi…
The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live-Cell Imaging
How do we see life after the century of the gene? This article argues that the post-2000 postgenomic turn was and is a thoroughly visual turn, as well as a theoretical and practical shift away from the central dogma of DNA as master molecule. Live-cell imaging is a rapidly expanding area of scientific visualization of living things whose practice is central in postgenomic biological research and theory. Fluorescent probes enable the visualization…
Comments and Reply
What’s in the Dish? Comments on Franklin’s In Vitro Anthropos Hannah Landecker Conceptual Clarity for Conception Frameworks: Comments on Franklin’s In Vitro Anthropos Charis Thompson Reply Sarah Franklin
Postindustrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge
Through examination of four examples from contemporary metabolic sciences, this article characterizes the rise of a postindustrial metabolism. Concerned with regulation, timing, and information, this emergent metabolism is analyzed as a shift away from the factory or motor model of classic metabolism, in which food was fuel, providing energy and building blocks to the body. Accordingly, metabolic disorders—treatments for which are the explicit ai…
From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology
Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated-how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic research is highly biochemical, it is of interest to sociologists because some epigenetic changes are environmentally mediated and can persist across the life span or into further generations. Environmental epigenetic research tracks mechanisms by which social …
Being and eating: Losing grip on the equation
How the genome got a life span
In the space of little more than a decade, ideas of the human genome have shifted significantly, with the emergence of the notion that the genome an individual changes with development, age, disease, environmental inputs, and time. This paper examines the emergence of the genome with a life span, one that experiences drift, instability and mutability, and a host of other temporal changes. We argue that developments in chromatin biology have provi…
It is what it eats: Chemically defined media and the history of surrounds
The social as signal in the body of chromatin: The social as signal
Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History
Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affe…
The Social as Signal in the Body of Chromatin
Human social interactions and material cultures are increasingly understood as biologically consequent environmental signals. Within the explanatory framework of epigenetics, such signals become biologically inscribed when transduced into bodies as persistent patterns of molecular conformation. In the life sciences, persistence of the social as the biological is understood as establishment of gene expression potentials, physiological changes, or …
A metabolic history of manufacturing waste: Food Commodities and Their Outsides
The early twentieth-century industrialization of food production and processing generated large volumes of processing waste. Following the fate of waste products cast off from the new food commodities, this article describes the logics and practices of large-scale waste reuse as animal feed and microbial nutrient medium in industrial chemical production in the United States. A "chemical gaze" on matter recast disparate burdensome byproducts such …
Environmental Politics of Reproduction
What constitutes "human reproduction" is under negotiation as its biology, social nature, and cultural valences are increasingly perceived as bound up in environmental issues. This review maps the growing overlap between formerly rather separate domains of reproductive politics and environmental politics, examining three interrelated areas. The first is the emergence of an intersectional environmental reproductive justice framework in activism an…
Lockdown texts
Heritable changeability: Epimutation and the legacy of negative definition in epigenetic concepts
Epigenetic concepts are fundamentally shaped by a legacy of negative definition, often understood by what they are not. Yet the function and implication of negative definition for scientific discourse has thus far received scant attention. Using the term epimutation as exemplar, we analyze the paradoxical like-but-unlike structure of a term that must simultaneously connect with but depart from genetic concepts. We assess the historical forces str…
La résistance aux antibiotiques et la biologie de l'Histoire
Au début des années 1940, la production en masse des antibiotiques a nécessité la culture à grande échelle de micro-organismes afin de recueillir leurs produits métaboliques. Malheureusement, l'utilisation des antibiotiques entraîne une sélection par la résistance à cette même échelle. Nous examinons ici comment la microbiologie et la médecine se sont tournées vers l'étude de la résistance aux antibiotiques, en nous concentrant sur le constat que…
Biology (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Environmental ethics (9 works) · Genetics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Race, Genetics, and Society (9 works)