The Anthropocene in the Cell

Concepts and measures of the Anthropocene tend to operate at the scale of the planet even when considering elements or isotopes in carbon economies or epochs.  This talk goes small instead, and thinks through biology and biochemistry to examine the idea of an Anthropocene in, or of, the cell.  It is perhaps fanciful to refer to anthropogenic drivers of cellular climate and topography.  Yet as an inflammatory storm engulfs us during a Covid-19 pandemic, it seems important to ask the question nonetheless, and in a more direct way than metaphors drawn between rising temperatures of different kinds.  In the stability of genome replication and repair, the evolution of mobile genetic elements, the dynamics of free radicals and antioxidants, or the circadian-metabolic nexus of energy and gene regulation, a molecular footprint of industrialization, mining, electrification, and fossil fuel economies is clearly evident across a range of biomedical and biological studies.

Using examples such as shift-work and antimicrobials, I propose that we can today see very particular spatial and temporal conjunctures of socio-historical and biochemical forces in unexpected locations and processes such as the pancreatic beta cell, the gut wall, or the dynamics of chromatin.  The intracellular space after industrialization might be understood as a microscopic landscape in which anthropogenic activity disorganizes, rearranges, and shifts the tempo and periodicity of the biophysical and architectural character of molecular life.    

Whether the Anthropocene concept holds as it is resized and rescaled from the planet to the cell is an open question, but either way the transposition exercise reveals important connections and slippages between geological and biological thought in the study of anthropogenic nature.

Hannah Landecker holds a joint appointment in the Life and Social Sciences at UCLA, where she is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics, an interdisciplinary unit committed to cultivating research and pedagogy at the interface of the life and human sciences. Landecker is the author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard UP, 2007), and has written widely on biotechnology and the intersection of biology and film. Her more recent work concerns the rise of antimicrobial resistance, and the history and sociology of metabolism and epigenetics.  

Main image: Carlos Andrés Reyes. Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence Location