Join CSEEES for our annual Graduate Choice Speaker Lecture. Each year CSEEES' MA students are invited to select a speaker and/or topic of their choice to add to CSEEES' lecture series. This year we will be joined by historian of science and anthropologist, Dr. Rijul Kochhar (Harvard U.).
Abstract: Drawing on Cold War archives, oral histories, and ethnographic materials collected at the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, this talk excavates the century long quest for bacteriophage therapy. A bacteriophage (or colloquially, phage) is a “bacteria-devouring” virus, long used a model organism in fundamental biological research, and as a therapeutic entity against bacterial infections. In tracing the virus's fortunes in the pre-Soviet Georgian republic, under Stalinism, and through the pioneering efforts of the biologists Giorgi Eliava and Felix d’Hérelle, I help illuminate an intriguing chapter in the historical anthropology of the modern life sciences. Thereafter, I focus attention on the fate of the Eliava Institute after the fall of the USSR, exploring efforts to preserve a novel technique of infection control under tumultuous post-Soviet conditions of war and destitution in the newly independent republic of Georgia. Whilst it received extensive patronage under Stalin, bacteriophage therapy ultimately failed to compete for dominance against Western antibiotics in the 20th century. Yet, it is being resurrected today as Eliava’s scientists recover from the devastations of the Soviet Union’s collapse to position the Institute as a space of technoscientific salvation in emerging, post-antibiotic worlds. The Eliava functioned in the Soviet era as part of a wider scientific archipelago given to offensive research alongside the therapeutic use of bacteriophages. It subsequently attracted substantial western support to better manage its idling—and, for some, fearsome—expertise at the end of the Cold War. Through the concept of the pharmakon—and by tracing a history located at a juncture of both remedy/poison and scapegoat—this presentation outlines the promise and perils of collaborations between Eliava scientists and transnational audiences. Behind its efflorescence in a tense Caucasian neighborhood, today, reside a myriad medical, regulatory, and political challenges implicated in efforts at scientific recognition and mainstreaming of bacteriophage therapy. These challenges, I suggest, will ultimately motor, or sacrifice, phage therapy’s still unfolding futures.
If you have any questions about accessibility or wish to request accommodations, please contact CSEEES at cseees@osu.edu. Typically, a two weeks' notice will allow us to provide access, but we will try to accommodate requests that come in after the two week mark.
