Having an Anthropocene Body

Anthropocene Bodies and their Molecular Properties

It has been argued for decades that fossil fuels have shifted the dynamics of acquisition of energy (Illich, 1974). The Anthropocene, a somewhat uneasy and contested name for the contemporary geological present, introduced by Paul Crutzen over a decade ago (Crutzen, 2000), articulates an increasingly anxious awareness of the deep connections between human lives, technologies and the energy flows that link oceans, climate and ecosystems. The notion of the Anthropocene acknowledges that acquiring hydrocarbons through drilling for oil or mining coal, and then refining, transporting and burning these fuels has tilted geophysical energy flows. Fossil fuels have changed what we eat too: intensive agriculture and agro-food industries (in the so-called ‘Green Revolution’) depend on hydrocarbon fuels as a source of methane used to make nitrogen fertilizers.

Does the Anthropocene necessarily entail some account of the constitution of bodies at the level of hydrocarbon derivation? Much depends here on what it means to have a body. The cultural theorist Ed Cohen suggests that we should question the assumption that ‘we have a body’. ‘Having’ is a form of possessing, and some possessing takes the form of property. He proposes:

By interrogating the assumption that we are the bodies we have, or that we even have bodies in the first place – since bodies are after all actually bio-chemical transformations of matter and energy localized in time and space – we might begin to open ourselves to vital new possibilities, at once political and personal, material and spiritual, local and global. (Cohen, 2008: 122)

His analysis traces the notion of having a body back to ideas of property and selfhood running through European thought since at least the 17th century. Cohen shows some of the ways in which bodies have been rendered as property. He does not conclude, however, that all forms of having are reducible to property. Indeed, as I will later argue drawing on the work of Gabriel Tarde, many forms of having are irreducible to property relations, and these other forms of having imply non-proprietarial modes of having a body. At the same time, Cohen identifies the body with molecular processes: ‘bodies are after all actually bio-chemical transformations’ (2008: 122) or ‘corporeal being unfolds in time as a concatenation of bio-molecular transformations of matter and energy localized in space’ (2008: 106). This is consonant with other recent materialist work on bodies (see for instance, the last page of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter [2009]). While I largely concur with Cohen’s critical analysis of ‘owning’ a body, saying that ‘bodies are after all actually bio-chemical transformations’ might still imply having a body. His seemingly reductionist identification of bodies with biochemical transformations is a useful provocation, but I think moves too quickly to identify body and biochemistry. Indeed, my motivation in presenting hydrocarbons as simultaneously biological and technical, as metabolic and industrial, is to slow down this identification. An ecological conception of the body might have to entertain much messier and contaminated forms of having or possessing. Pointing to the complex couplings of molecules, landscapes and bodies in the case of environmental toxins, the historian Michelle Murphy has described ‘the historical emergence of a chemical regime of living, in which molecular relations extend outside of the organic realm and create interconnections with landscapes, production, and consumption, requiring us to tie the history of technoscience with political economy’ (Murphy, 2008: 697). Like Murphy, rather than directly identifying Anthropocene bodies with molecules, I see hydrocarbons as chains of derivatives criss-crossing human bodies, landscapes, infrastructures and ecosystems. These derivatives bring with them different forms of having or possessing. Considering hydrocarbons in fuels and in metabolic processes together, I am suggesting, might help us to articulate what having an Anthropocene body means.

As mentioned above, the hydrocarbon derivatives I discuss here are biofuels, and in particular, relatively novel hydrocarbons known as ‘next-generation biofuels’. The scientific and technological materialities of these hydrocarbons are important to my argument. These hydrocarbons bring with them specific localizations of energy. Biofuel-derived hydrocarbons in the form of ethanol, biodiesel and assorted other products are already quite commonly found in fuel supplies. Biofuels, whether they are next-generation or conventional biofuels produced from food crops, maintain reliance on hydrocarbon forms of energy. ⁴ At the same time, the derivation of hydrocarbons themselves shifts in next-generation biofuels. They are increasingly derived from the metabolic processes of contemporary life, not the mineralized remains of past lives. A recent article on the concept of the Anthropocene points to the epicentre of this shift: ‘[p]erhaps one of the most controversial twists of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century is the accelerating drive not only to understand the molecular and genetic basis of life, but to synthesize life itself’ (Steffen et al., 2011: 855). Work by synthetic biologists such as J. Craig Venter and Jay Keasling exemplifies this ‘accelerating drive’, a drive largely, at least at the present time, practically directed towards biofuel production. In re-shaping the metabolic processes through which certain microbes feed and grow so that they instead produce hydrocarbons for fuels, synthetic biologists working on next-generation biofuels construct different pathways of hydrocarbon acquisition.

Whether they become commercially successful or not remains to be seen, but I nevertheless treat them as providing fuel for thought. In the discussion that follows, I approach biofuels from two angles, one that is practical, one that is more speculative. From a practical perspective, the hydrocarbons exemplified by biofuels stem from broader biotechnological transformation in life and in relations between forms of life. From a more speculative angle, the metabolic production of biofuels as long-chain hydrocarbons from biomass suggests some alternative ways of thinking about the forms of possession entailed in having an Anthropocene body.

Changing Biology in Biotechnology

How does fuel become biotechnological? In historical terms, biotechnology encompasses a range of different endeavours, scientific disciplines, knowledges, techniques and industries. Biotechnologies include many biomedical applications intimately entwined with human bodies (monoclonal antibodies, synthetic hormones, vaccines, and so-called biological drugs), as well as the familiar examples such as GM crops and DNA forensic tests. Although biotechnology as such is not particularly new (see Bud, 1994), next-generation biofuels are products of late 20th- and early 21st-century genomic science. In his account of 21st-century biomedicine, Nikolas Rose highlights the role of molecularization:

Whether it is the transfer of genes along with their properties – luminescence, salt tolerance – from one species to another, or the transfer of tissues, blood plasma, kidneys, stem cells, molecularization is conferring a new mobility on the elements of life, enabling them to enter circuits – organic, interpersonal, geographical and financial. (Rose, 2006: 15)

Since recombinant-DNA techniques were developed in the 1970s, biotechnology has relied heavily on the techniques of molecular biology to transfer genes. Post-genomic sciences such as synthetic biology and metabolic engineering extend the molecular circuits further (see Cooper, 2008; Rajan, 2006). Genomic science treats living things in terms of molecules (especially DNA) as did molecular biology, but endeavours to understand all biological processes via an immensely convoluted signalling system regulated by and through genomes. There is a gamut of post-genomic biotechnology associated with drugs, genetic and diagnostic tests, crops and livestock, or even the increasing awareness of human bodies as microbial ecosystems (Smillie et al., 2011). Next-generation biofuels rely on genomic science both at the level of specific techniques of manipulation of DNA sequences and also in terms of the span of knowledge of molecules and metabolic processes they draw on (Carlson, 2010). ⁵

Using knowledge and techniques developed in molecular biology and genomics, synthetic biologists and biological engineers are re-designing microbes (and sometimes plants) in various ways to make fuels. Drawing on the results of several decades of recombinant-DNA biotechnology, coupled with the massive fund of biological data generated by two decades of genomics and high-throughput DNA sequencing, synthetic biologists and biological engineers are reconfiguring microbes such as E. coli as fuel factories. The fabulous sophistication of microbial metabolism (Zimmer, 2009) might, they hope, help avoid some of the problems of food security and biodiversity that afflict current biofuels. This concerted technoscientific investment in microbial metabolism specifically targets hydrocarbons. Venter put the case very baldly in his 2007 Dimbleby Lecture:

I believe the best examples of disruptive technologies that could change our future are in the new fields of synthetic biology, synthetic genomics, and genome engineering. These fields can change the way we think about life by showing that we can use living systems to increase our chances of survival as a species. Simply put: this area of research will enable us to create new fuels to replace oil and coal. (Venter, 2007)

Venter connects use of living systems (microbes) to ‘our chances … as a species’ via a change in ‘the way we think about life’. This change, ‘simply put’, means seeing living systems as fuel producers. In turning to work on next-generation biofuels, genomic scientists move into a busy intersection between climate change, geopolitics and transport infrastructure. Contemporary biological techniques, attained mainly from high-throughput genomic analysis of large swathes of human, animal and microbial DNA, has hitherto had little connection to industrial fuel production. Scientists, drawing on techniques and datasets developed in the last few decades of genome-driven biology, dive deep into biological architectures and metabolic pathways of algae, cyanobacteria, plants, insects, bacteria and fungi of various kinds in search of ways of making fuel.

In her history of microbiology, Hannah Landecker argues that ‘as an approach to the living, biotechnology changes what it is to be biological, a step that must be analysed before leaping straight into how biotechnology changes what it is to be human’ (2007: 233). One change in the biological associated with biofuels is the tendency to treat all life as potential fuel producers. Many scientists present microbes such as microalgae, cyanobacteria and bacteria as having geophysical-scale world-making capacities (see the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory report on microalgae [NREL, 2010]). For instance, the marine cyanobacteria Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus are said to carry out roughly half the total photosynthesis on the planet (Palenik et al., 2003). Biological engineers identify in this almost unalloyed biospheric good – the photosynthetic production of oxygen through absorption of sunlight and carbon dioxide – the potential to, as Venter says, create new fuels that will replace oil and coal. In many next-generation biofuels, the collective metabolic agency of the biosphere dating from the Paleoproterozoic age, when the atmosphere first became oxygenated, is re-directed towards making hydrocarbons for fuel. In a sense, the microbial origin narrative of so-called ‘next-generation’ biofuels reaches back much further than the Anthropocene age, with its reliance on the fossilized remains of much later lives.

As a result, biotechnology as a technical practice blurs the line between human and non-human biology. Take for instance, the biofuels under development at Synthetic Genomics Incorporated (SGI) in La Jolla, California. Headed by Venter, SGI (like several hundred other biofuel start-up companies, research consortia and programmes) focuses on next-generation or advanced biofuels as its major project. SGI has received $US500 million from the oil company Mobil-Exxon to develop next-generation biofuels using microbial life-forms such as algae (Jha, 2009).The principal scientists at SGI, including Daniel Gibson, Hamilton O. Smith and J. Craig Venter, made their reputations (including winning Nobel prizes) in highly technical research in brain science, cancer genetics and human genetics (Adams et al., 1992; Smith et al., 1995, 2000; Venter et al., 1996). It is striking that such scientists, who must know much more about the biology of human bodies than they do about microbes, are working on biofuels (Jha, 2009). It suggests that knowledge of human bodies and microbially produced biofuels are connected through the molecularizing techniques developed largely in biomedicine.

The biotechnological cross-over between human bodies and microbial organisms stems from the mobility of molecular techniques. In their San Diego facility, SGI researchers and colleagues at the adjacent J. Craig Venter Institute analyse and design genomes. Synthetic Genomics’ principal expertise lies in its ability to design whole genomes that can be chemically synthesized in vitro and transplanted into a host cell to produce quasi-synthetic cells. Several months after announcing the Exxon deal in 2009, Venter’s group published work demonstrating the transfer of an entire synthetically made bacterial genome to a yeast cell (Benders et al., 2010). Drastic modification of microbial cells via synthetic genomes opens up the possibility of re-shaping multiple aspects of the cellular life-cycle simultaneously. Within a synthetic biology framing of microbial life, plurality and fecundity function as technical resources. Rather than that variety being an object of wonder and admiration, as they might be in a taxonomic or ecological life sciences, microbial genomes and their associated metabolisms become engineering sites and investment targets. ⁶

Like every next-generation biofuel project, SGI faces many technical challenges in getting microbes to make fuel. Lipid extraction, metabolic optimization, salt tolerance, or CO₂ uptake – if all of these and other factors can be designed or engineered at the genomic level, microalgae might be able to produce the hydrocarbons such as pentane that feed the whole complicated energy infrastructures of the Anthropocene (Dellomonaco et al., 2010). Such microbes might begin to function as geo-bio-technical platforms. The key point for our purposes is not so much their commercial success in making fuel, but the change in ‘the way we think about life’ as Venter puts it, such fuels emblematize. This change derives from the flow of techniques such as whole genome design that open living systems to a much wider set of biotechnological connections to human lives.

Biofuels as Biomass Speculation

This is a somewhat novel conjunction for biotechnology. We know of the biopolitical molecularization of life as described by Nikolas Rose (2006). And we know much of the century-long political economy of petroleum, as described for instance by Timothy Mitchell (2009). Yet the derivation of fuel from microbial life still lies a long way from any familiar sense of having a body. On this point, the affinity between fuels as hydrocarbons and our bodies as hydrocarbon derivatives (the opening ‘hydrocarbon reductionist’ hypothesis) can, if handled carefully, help us think about what it means for us to have a body. To make this point, I draw on Gabriel de Tarde’s Monadologie et sociologie (1999), a work written in 1893. The re-kindled interest in Tarde’s work (as seen in Barry and Thrift, 2007; Borch, 2005; Candea, 2010; Latour and Lepinay, 2008; Latour et al., 2012; Lazzarato, 2002; Toews, 2003) has highlighted numerous intersections between Tarde’s concerns with desire, belief, imitation, fashion, statistics, quantity, urban life, media, plural forms of value and property. Maurizio Lazzarato, for instance, suggests that Tarde’s work may well offer an alternative understanding of the biopolitical to Michel Foucault’s, in which living bodies become important not as the object of power relations but as a site where powers of co-production and cooperation that tend to vivify things expand (Lazzarato, 2002: 360). Recent commentators on Tarde have also observed that although there is much in Tarde’s work on repetition, mediation, imitation, desire and belief that makes his work of great interest to network-media societies, it is at the same time heavily marked as late19th-century social thought. As Andrew Barry and Nigel Thrift note, it is ‘the peculiar mixture of these preoccupations with the power of foresight into contemporary concerns which we suspect is what now makes Tarde such an attractive figure to so many’ (2007: 511).

Tarde’s stance on life sciences was complicated: ‘his position on the precise articulation of biology and sociology was somewhat more ambiguous’ (Candea, 2010: 13). Tarde develops a form of seemingly radical molecular reductionism that might be useful here. Tarde was aware of the growing knowledge of chemical bonds and structures particularly associated with late 19th-century biochemistry. He writes, for instance, of the hydrocarbon derivation of living things: ‘after carbon, the bodies which present in the highest degree the capacity for partial or total saturation of self by self are oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen; strikingly, precisely the substances which life employs’ (Tarde, 1999: 42). ⁷ In the opening chapters of Monadology and Sociology, Tarde ranges across various sciences of the day, particularly chemistry, cellular biology, physiology, astronomy, archaeology, mathematics and physics, drawing out threads of what he regarded as key scientific tendencies. ⁸ His analysis of these tendencies, however, does not confirm any particular scientific world view as such, but affirms the value of re-thinking being from the perspective of having. The momentum of sciences, according to Tarde, derives from their adherence to questions of possession, properties and acquisition, instead of entities and essences. The sciences, he writes, ‘have taken the verb “to have” as their guide’ (1999: 88). Well before the understandings of translation, displacement, enrolment and mobilization developed by actor-network theory (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1988), Tarde elaborates how various relations of possession – unilateral, reciprocal, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many – comprise the material becomings of the world. He also enjoins philosophers and social theorists to closely attend to applied sciences (‘technoscience’ in contemporary parlance) for guidance. This guidance does not come from what scientists say exists (atoms, ether, genes, etc.) but rather from the techniques and methods by which they experiment, observe, model or simulate the properties of things. The effectiveness of technoscience, according to Tarde, derives from its focus on relations of possession or in molecular terms, bonds. Multiple ways of thinking the verb ‘to have’ are the leitmotif that scientific practice offers to critical thought. From this starting point, Tarde goes on in Monadology and Sociology to ascribe increasingly ‘sociological’ tendencies to the sciences, and also argues for the sociality of molecules, cells and all things. Tarde’s work, at least for the purposes of my argument, limns a strategic molecular reductionism that might help link hydrocarbons, in their structural and energetic specificities, to Anthropocene bodies. Again, I see next-generation biofuels as highlighting practical forms of possession associated with hydrocarbons and thereby helping us to re-think having a body as a hydrocarbon derivative. ⁹

One of the key challenges for biofuels is acquiring biomass. Whether it comes from carbon dioxide (in the case of microalgae) or woody plant residues, biomass has to be acquired somehow. As discussed in the case of SGI, biological engineers are using knowledge and techniques of working with genes, genomes and diverse life-forms to technically reconfigure microbial genomes. The key focus here is on redirecting the processes through which microbial cells obtain energy from their environments, especially energy in the form of sunlight but also in the form of biomass, toward synthesis of hydrocarbons. Researchers in genomic sciences, allied with marine and crop sciences, and above all synthetic biology, are actively experimenting on either up-regulating existing metabolic pathways (that, for instance, already produce lipids as a way of storing energy; many algae do this), or introducing new metabolic pathways into microbial cells so that they produce more of certain hydrocarbons. Practically, nearly all plans and projects for next-generation biofuels depend on highly precise modification, configuration and optimization of hydrocarbon production in cells by the introduction of ‘foreign genes and pathways into central metabolism’ of the target organism (Connor and Atsumi, 2010: 4).

Microbes have to grow somewhere and on something. The ‘having’ at the heart of microbial biofuels concerns biomass. In next-generation biofuels, microbes either digest putatively vast quantities of ‘waste’ biomass (the woody or lignocellosic part of plants and grasses) or, more optimistically, in microalgae and cyanobacteria-based biofuels directly photosynthesize carbon dioxide and sunlight into hydrocarbons secreted from the biomass of the microbial cells themselves. Acquiring copious biomass – from land, sea, sun, waste or the body of the organism itself – remains crucial in all cases. The abundance of biomass in various forms is emphasized and contrasted in scientific, policy and commercial documents promoting next-generation biofuels with the depleted, declining or precarious supplies of fossil fuel hydrocarbons. Typically, they draw on an eco-planetary framing to say that the problem is never lack of energy as such, only its acquisition in a sufficiently dense form (Packer, 2009; Savage, 2011a, 2011b): in a single day enough sunlight falls on the Sahara to power the earth’s cities for a year, yet we acquire almost none of it (Packer, 2009; Savage, 2011a, 2011b). Biomass is one way to acquire it, since plants, algae and microbes store energy by growing.

Digesting Biomass: From Possession to Property

While microbes have evolved an incredible variety of ways of making and digesting biomass (and, in a few cases, digesting rocks and minerals), only rarely do they actually produce pure hydrocarbons. Mostly they produce biomolecules that are less energy dense, and hence less ‘engine ready’ (Savage, 2011a). Certain relatively obscure microbes produce pure, energy-dense long-chain hydrocarbons. But bringing together biomass digestion and rarer pure hydrocarbon synthesis doubly constrains synthetic biologists. Not only do their microbes have to be able to live on waste biomass (although in practice many are also fed on sugar-rich nutrients), they also have to secrete pure, energy-dense fuels. The premise of next-generation biofuels is that whole metabolic pathways can be re-orchestrated so that microbes acquire energy from biomass, but metabolically convert it to fit the many constraints of Anthropocene technical systems by producing ‘drop-in replacement’ biofuels. This is precisely where the genomic or synthetic biology techniques come in:

by offering the ability to combine any number of transgenes in a modular, combinatorial way, synthetic biology offers a new approach to elucidating the synergistic action of combinations of biomass-degrading enzymes in vivo and may ultimately lead to a transferable biomass-degradation system. (French, 2009: 547)

From Tarde’s perspective, contemporary genomic sciences and biotechnology map the variety of possessive relations on which life metabolically depends. ‘The true property of an owner’, Tarde writes, ‘is an ensemble of other owners’ (1999: 88), not an abstract property such as extent, mass or energy. The property form of possession depends on many underlying forms of reciprocal possession that support it. Forms of property characterized by ‘well-defined appropriability’ (Cohen, 2008: 106) actually depend on the many reciprocal relations of possession that allow property regimes to stabilize. Something similar defines for Tarde relations of having or possession in cells or organisms.

The diversity and vitality of microbes testifies to the flux of different relations of possession, especially reciprocal possession, they encompass. This diversity is rendered visible in genomic science, as it identifies the plurality of variations and differences in sequences. But as these relations are proprietarized they are selected and organized in the pursuit of engine-ready hydrocarbons. Take the process of biomass digestion. The Harvard Medical School synthetic biologist George Church sketches how soil microbes digest plant materials:

As plant biomass is constantly recycled in the environment…a reservoir of enzymatic machinery must exist in the soil microbiome that allows for the tolerance and complete processing of its constituent chemicals.…We show the utility of culture-independent metagenomic functional selections for discovery of novel functional genes from the soil microbiome, enabling expansion of the synthetic biology toolbox for lignocellulosic biomass conversion and tolerance. (Sommer et al., 2010: 1–2)

The soil ecosystem contains metabolic processes useful in increasing the rate of biomass digestion. As with Venter, Church’s scientific reputation lies largely in the area of human genomics, but in his synthetic biology work, now under commercial development by Joule Unlimited (Joule Unlimited, 2010), the diverse mechanisms by which soil microbes recycle biomass are transformed into ‘microbial hosts of interest’ (such as yeast or E. coli), and then subjected to ‘functional selection’. The point here that the sheer plethora of molecular relations and reciprocal forms of possession that animate constant metabolic recycling of biomass are needed in order to produce the specific energy-dense hydrocarbon molecular chains in fuels.

Throughout Monadologie et sociologie, Tarde compares the omnilateral bonding found in molecules or cells with the more attenuated and abstract relationalities found in human groups. Forms of possession are incredibly varied, due to the ever-receding proliferating differences on which all having is predicated (‘diversity not unity is at the heart of things’ [Tarde, 1999: 78]). Moreover, the forms of possession that comprise molecules, cells, organisms, bodies, laws, cultures, etc. continually entwine and intersect. As Tarde writes:

Atomic or molecular adherence in the physical world, nutrition in the living world, perception in the intellectual world, law in the social world, possession in innumerable forms continually extends itself from one being to others, through a more and more subtle intertwining of varied domains. (1999: 90)

Metabolism might be just a name for the molecular adherence or subtle intertwining of relations of possession. Just as biomedical researchers can switch to work on biofuels via the mobility of their genomic techniques, microbes produce fuels from biomass as the varied molecular, biological, technical and economic domains become entwined.

On this point, the molecular structure of fuels brings property relations to bear on the forms of possession associated with microbial digestion of biomass. Tarde argued that despite the laudable tendencies of the sciences of his day to countenance an ever-increasing flux of differences (something that might also be said of recent genomic science, as it progressively blurs and broadens the outline of the genome to encompass many forms of exchange, swapping, modification and differentiation), one major problem remained: the sciences had mistakenly identified possessing with property. That is, they had treated properties (as in attributes or qualities) proprietarily:

each atom of a molecule has for its chemical property not atomicity or affinities, but all the other atoms of the same molecule … each cell of an organism has for its biological properties not irritability, contractility, innervation, etc. but all the other cells of the same organism. (Tarde, 1999: 88)

Tarde argued that while sciences had fruitfully concerned themselves with the properties rather than the essence of things, they had ‘misused the relation of owner to property [abusé du rapport de propriétaire à propriété]’ (1999: 88).

Despite the many anachronisms of Tarde’s work, and in particular the difficulties of making sense of a monadological account of social life (see Latour et al., 2012), Tarde’s emphasis on multiple forms of possession both highlights the problems in assuming we have a body in any simple sense, and at the same time suggests some ways in which the forms of having modulate as we follow different paths of extension or derivation. From Tarde’s standpoint, the hydrocarbon bonds of the molecules synthesized by microbes in bioreactors would index the layered forms of possession, as well as slippages or reductions of possession to property.

Pure Hydrocarbons?

When microbes convert biomass, they struggle to tolerate the rising concentrations of ‘inhibitors’ such as acids and alcohols produced as they digest biomass. This is a problem since high concentrations of acids and alcohols are the desirable biochemical precursors to fuels. Joule Unlimited’s microbes, however, keep breaking down biomass such as woody plant material, even under levels of hydrocarbons normally toxic to life. Tarde’s emphasis on molecular forms of possession both highlights the problem in identifying bodies with molecules (which molecules, in what relations, at what rate, etc.) in any simple sense, and, at the same time, suggests some ways in which forms of having modulate as we follow different paths of hydrocarbon derivation. Combining transgenes into novel metabolic pathways in bacteria, yeasts, cyanobacteria and microalgae to digest biomass is only one high-profile part of the process of deriving hydrocarbons from biomass. Next-generation biofuel production is also constrained by the systems of energy usage already in place, and their intolerance of anything but pure hydrocarbons. Next-generation biofuel proponents are obliged to promise ‘drop-in’ or ‘engine-ready’ replacement biofuels (Rude and Schirmer, 2009). Engine-ready biofuels imply that nothing needs to change in the existing infrastructure of fuel delivery and use (in engines and turbines). The relations of possession channelled through the scientific work include oil prices, the specific energy density and physico-chemical properties of current fuels, the cost of nutrients for fertilizing microbial growth, and the geographical location of bioreactors and ponds in proximity to sources of water, concentrated carbon dioxide or plant biomass. Put simply, ‘engine-ready’ means the inscription or wholesale incorporation of the Anthropocene technical system, and its property forms, into the biological form.

Perhaps the most salient contemporary case we have of this channelling of existing property relations into the microbes comes from the work of Jay Keasling and the company Amyris. Like J. Craig Venter and George Church, Keasling personifies the connection between genomic biology and next-generation biofuels. Starting around 2001, Keasling, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Discover magazine’s ‘Scientist of the Year 2006’ (Lafsky, 2008) and one of Newsweek magazine’s ‘Global Elite 2008’ (Interlandi, 2008), led a team of scientists developing a way to produce the anti-malarial drug artemisinin more cheaply using re-designed microbes and yeast. They constructed a new metabolic pathway in yeast and bacteria E. coli to produce terpenoids (or isoprenoids), an extremely diverse set of biomolecules that act in animals as precursors to cholesterol and steroid hormones. The isoprenoid or mevalonate pathway is regarded as ‘one of the most complex known’ (Nelson et al., 2008: 835). Terpenoids can be readily processed into many industrially useful products ranging across drugs, foods, cosmetics and fuels (Chang and Keasling, 2006).

Keasling’s work on synthetic anti-malarial drugs attracted US$42.6 m in philanthropic funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the biotechnological process was refined on a not-for-profit basis by the start-up company Amyris. A pharmaceutical company, Sanofi Aventis, agreed to manufacture it on a similar not-for-profit basis. Keasling was awarded the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s first ‘Biotech Humanitarian Award’ (Reuters, 2009). When anti-malarials turned out to be unexpectedly expensive to actually manufacture, Amyris announced that ‘its expertise could prove equally profitable when applied to biofuels’ (Mossman, 2008: 4). In September 2010, Amyris launched its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange with the following announcement:

Our first commercialization efforts have been focused on a molecule called farnesene, which forms the basis for a wide range of products varying from specialty chemical applications such as detergents, cosmetics, perfumes and industrial lubricants, to transportation fuels such as diesel. We have focused our research and development, business development and production operations on the use of Brazilian sugarcane as our primary feedstock for the foreseeable future, because it is abundant, low cost and relatively price stable. ( Biofuels Digest, 2010)

The entwining of forms of possession become very complex. The Brazilian sugar-cane industry is the largest producer of sugar in the world. Rather than producing ethanol, a short-chain hydrocarbon, through the long-established industrial techniques of fermentation, some of the Brazilian sugar-cane will become something different in Amyris’s bioreactors at Usina São Martinho in Brazil. Amyris’s re-engineered yeast strains digest the sugar in a much more complicated and efficient metabolic pathway, the isoprenoid or ‘HMG-CoA reductase pathway’, a pathway that the Amyris researchers have carefully constructed using a network of 12 genes. The years of metabolic engineering that Keasling’s team put in to the isoprenoid pathway in yeast pays dividends now in the form of a longer-chain hydrocarbon derivative, farnesene (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Farnesene molecule.

Compared to the standard biofuel ethanol (C₂H₆O), farnesene is a much more complex molecule (C₁₅H₂₄). Its 15-carbon atom chain structure is much closer to the blend of hydrocarbon molecules that make petroleum such an energy-dense fuel. With such a molecule, ‘we can be the Microsoft of fuels and chemicals’ claimed the CEO John Melo, in a television interview on the day of Amryis’s share launch (Regalado, 2010). As Melo signals in the phrase ‘Microsoft of fuels and chemicals’, molecules such as farnesene can be used in many different ways. On the one hand, as a long-chain hydrocarbon, it stores energy densely, and therefore releases enough energy to drive engines. Yet as a terpenoid or isoprenoid, it can be assembled into complex biomolecules with many applications (such as steroids and cosmetic moisturizers). The contract that Amyris also signed in 2010 with Proctor & Gamble, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of beauty products, suggests that in the first instance, the farnesene will end up in cosmetics. Precursors to various kinds of moisturizing beauty or hygiene products, terpenoids produced by Amryis’s yeasts will end up on the skin of the hundreds of millions of people in Proctor & Gamble’s global markets.

What has happened to microbial metabolisms here? The microbial metabolism of yeast has been re-designed as a platform for the derivation of complex hydrocarbon molecules from plants grown in tropical plantations. The complex hydrocarbon derivative farnesene links engines, foods, crops, cosmetics and drugs. The propensity of farnesene to couple with other molecules is much more complicated than, for instance, ethanol. This 15-carbon molecule, with its comparatively complicated multi-branched structure, is susceptible to multiple transformations and possessive or property relations. Its molecular structure allows it to branch out into applications ranging from cosmetics, to drugs, and to energy-dense fuels. Farnesene, as a ‘platform chemical’ (hence a ‘Microsoft’-style platform for chemicals), is, for instance, more attuned to the volatility of oil and food commodity markets. The molecule can be diverted into different markets and supply chains depending on what is happening to global oil and sugar prices. In synthesizing farnesene, Amyris’s yeasts construct a novel coupling between geophysical, infrastructural-technical and metabolic-attentive energies, a coupling that can respond to contingencies of weather, market prices and energy demand.

Conclusion

Hydrocarbon fuels are a deep and largely unsensed horizon of any Anthropocene corporeality. This article is an experiment in thinking about having a body in terms of hydrocarbons that bond non-living and living processes in fuels and metabolism. It aims to see whether it is possible to think of having a body differently by drawing on transformations in the production of hydrocarbons associated with next-generation biofuels. In discussing hydrocarbon derivatives, I’ve suggested we should first pay attention to transformations in scientific technique that allow biomedical sciences to reshape fuel production. This transformation explicitly couples the living and non-living. Second, drawing on Gabriele Tarde’s account of possessive relations, I proposed that engineering the metabolism of microbes to make next-generation biofuels as drop-in replacements for petrochemicals entails many forms of having a body. In processing biomass, we saw that metabolism involves much reciprocal possession. In producing engine-ready hydrocarbons, we saw that metabolic engineering channels different forms of property relation, ranging from global commodity markets to cosmetics, into biochemical processes.

Currently, our sense of having a body is increasingly split between a sense of having a body too much, and realizing that what we thought was our body is a manifold of overwhelmingly reciprocal relations of possession. On the one hand, according to ecological calculations of planetary biomass, humans consume 23.8 percent of potential net primary productivity of all life on the planet (Haberl et al., 2007: 1242). On the other hand, there is a growing sense that we have a body less than we thought. Preliminary results from the Human Microbiome Project, a large five-year genomic science project to characterize the species and population diversity of microbial life typically living on or in human bodies, indicate that even people living in the same populations maintain and intimately rely on very disparate ecologies of microbial life (Caporaso et al., 2011). On this front, we might be tempted to abandon the very notion of having a body, as Cohen strongly suggests, in favour of a direct identification with molecular or energetic transformations.

But this article has experimented with a hydrocarbon and metabolic essentialism in order to resist simple identifications of bodies with molecules, and elisions of molecular differences. Myra Hird has recently argued:

metabolism … may even be deployed to collapse the life/nonlife bifurcation. Given its immanence to the origins of life on earth and its centrality to all life, we might propose metabolism as ontology – an ‘ontology of metabolic difference’ if you will. (2012: 216)

The next-generation biofuels engineered by synthetic biologists, as we have seen, connect metabolic transformations of biomass to non-living technical objects such as engines. They combine different forms of possession, some of them propertied, others omnilateral and reciprocal. Having an Anthropocene body might be understood as a tissue of living and non-living forms of derivation. All of the cases discussed above – Synthetic Genomics Inc., Joule Unlimited Inc. and Amyris Inc. – not only put life-forms into technical infrastructure, they also thread certain features of transport and energy infrastructures into living metabolism. As we have seen, biological engineers negotiate various relations of possession, ranging from the capture of sunlight through to the volatile embodied energies of market attention to microbial life.

Can we model a different account of having a body on these cases? Next-generation biofuels stand at the intersection of biotechnology, agriculture, the oil industry and the global supply chains of commodities such as oil, chemicals and food. At the end of Monadologie et sociologie, Tarde speculatively offers a theory of life as redemption of molecules: ‘life appears to us as … a great generous enterprise of salvation, of redemption of elements enchained in the narrow bonds of chemistry’ (1999: 101). A living body breeds a multiplicity of many-to-many relations of possession. But having an Anthropocene body, we might add, is a great enterprise of entering in the bonds of chemistry. The question for us is: can a body ‘redeem’ or ‘convert’ hydrocarbons differently? The sociality of hydrocarbon in next-generation biofuels is perhaps a good model for the complex chains of conversion between living and non-living typical of our bodies more generally.