Seeing Through an (American) Temperament: Max Ernst’s Microbes, 1946-1953

While he was living in Arizona between 1946 and 1951, Max Ernst created at least 70 tiny gouache paintings that he called “microbes.” They range in size from a half-inch on one side to over five inches, with most between one and three inches. Many evoke fantastical landscapes while others appear completely abstract. Ernst’s interest in this series of work was sustained: he made these paintings over a period of five years, and they were exhibited regularly during his own lifetime. Today, however, the microbes are virtually unknown. Because of their relative obscurity within Ernst’s oeuvre, this essay outlines their production and early exhibition and reception, with special attention to Sept microbes vus à travers un tempérament (Seven microbes seen through a temperament). This book, comprised of life-size reproductions of 31 microbes and a poem by Ernst, positions the microbes as a distinctly surrealist, subjective interpretation of the American Southwest. The essay then contextualizes the microbes within the wider contemporary American art world and suggests that Ernst made these diminutive paintings in dialogue with the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists as those artists were rising to prominence in the wake of World War II

Feverish Duty: Mysterious Ailments, Medical Innovations Emerged During The War

With a degree in medicine and a doctorate in American history, Frank Freemon brings a unique perspective to the topic of Civil War medicine, as he earlier demonstrated in Microbes and Minie Balls: An Annotated Bibliography of Civil War Medicine. His new work, Gangrene and Glory, cove...

Human Disease - Unintended Globalization

Before man was exchanging goods and ideas, he was exchanging germs. As such, the spread of infectious disease constitutes the first truly global phenomenon and, therefore, marks the beginnings—primitive though they may have been—of what today we have finally termed ‘globalization.’ The global spread of disease, then, proves that globalization is not new and that its origins were the result of a different narrative than the ones we read from globalization theorists; it further demonstrates that the modern conception of the phenomenon is only now so well recognized because the accelerated and efficient processes that inform its daily activities have heightened our conscious acknowledgement of its existence

Investigation into the Causes and Severity of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

The 1918 Influenza outbreak is regarded as one of the worst pandemics in human history due to its widespread effects across the globe and its high death rate. This death rate was unusual among influenza infections as most strains do not cause the amount of death that is seen in this outbreak, with 20 million dead as a conservative estimate and 100 million by other estimations. This pandemic was not very well contained for a plethora of reasons. Two main reasons are that it came at a time when understanding viral mechanics still escaped medical professionals, and due to the ongoing war quarantine was not a measure imposed by many cities. To understand how this virus was able to so effectively wreak havoc in the human population, it must be shown how this virus was unique not just in spread, but also in its method of killing its host. These two traits must be looked at together as the virus was able to spread so quickly and this virus was able to kill not just those with a weak immune system, but in many cases those individuals who had the best immune system to fight the infection still died from the disease. The virus was able to be so effective at spreading and causing death, due to alterations to its genome which allowed both for an asymptomatic period of the infection where the PA gene was used as a less pathogenic version (PA-X) this allowed the virus to multiply to a point where it could easily overwhelm total body defense with number of viral particles. This asymptomatic period allowed the viral transmission to spread faster than people expected as the virus would be transmitted before an infected individual knew they were sick. This allowed for another unique trait of the virus to take over, the cytokine storm. This storm used the body’s own defenses to weaken it and paralyze the immune system in a way that allowed for a secondary infection to easily infect the host and cause death. This happened during this pandemic as many of those who died fell to a bacterial pneumonia infection and not the virus itself. These characteristics, combined with the virus’ timing allowed for it to be the worst pandemic that mankind had experienced. As the virus both exhibited novel traits, and came at a time when preventative measures were not in place and human migration was occurring due to the war

Representations of SARS in the UK newspapers

In the Spring of 2003, there was a huge interest in the global news media following the emergence of a new infectious disease: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This study examines how this novel disease threat was depicted in the UK newspapers, using social representations theory and in particular existing work on social representations of HIV/AIDS and Ebola to analyse the meanings of the epidemic. It investigates the way that SARS was presented as a dangerous threat to the UK public, whilst almost immediately the threat was said to be ‘contained’ using the mechanism of ‘othering’: SARS was said to be unlikely to personally affect the UK reader because the Chinese were so different to ‘us’; so ‘other’. In this sense, the SARS scare, despite the remarkable speed with which it was played out in the modern global news media, resonates with the meanings attributed to other epidemics of infectious diseases throughout history. Yet this study also highlights a number of differences in the social representations of SARS compared with earlier epidemics. In particular, this study examines the phenomena of ‘emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases’ over the past 30 or so years and suggests that these have impacted on the faith once widely held that Western biomedicine could ‘conquer’ infectious disease

From metagenomics to the metagenome: Conceptual change and the rhetoric of translational genomic research

As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project as one such translational initiative. The HMP is a new ‘metagenomic’ research effort to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order to pursue the interesting hypothesis that our ‘microbiome’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Rather than describing the human genome as the ‘blueprint’ for human nature, the promoters of the HMP stress the ways in which our primate lineage DNA is interdependent with the genomes of our microbiological flora. They argue that the human body should be understood as an ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete, and that human beings should be understood as ‘superorganisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. These metaphors carry interesting philosophical messages, but their inspiration is not entirely ideological. Instead, part of their cachet within genome science stems from the ways in which they are rooted in genomic research techniques, in what philosophers of science have called a ‘tools-to-theory’ heuristic. Their emergence within genome science illustrates the complexity of conceptual change in translational research, by showing how it reflects both aspirational and methodological influences

Big Dreams for Small Creatures: Ilana and Eugene Rosenberg’s path to the Hologenome Theory

A biographical sketch of the Hologenome Theory

Outlook Magazine, Autumn 2017

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