Microbial Worlds

In the 17th century the first microscopes allowed the earliest glimpses into the world of microorganisms living and thriving just outside the range of our vision. Scientists and lay people alike have been fascinated with these almost invisible worlds. In the beginning microscopy was seen as an erudite endeavour reserved for a closed circle of naturalists. It took a while for these visions to reach broader audiences. But even some of the earliest observers dedicated considerable effort to reproducing their visions in detailed illustrations that circulated beyond their exclusive confines. Over the course of the 19th century, advances in microscopy made these technical apparatuses more readily available. Additionally, printed illustrations became more widely distributed. Soon, the lay public discovered these organisms and a fascination with visions of magical and unknown miniature worlds took hold. As microbes received more and more attention from scientists, their role in many human activities – from brewing, to cheesemaking, to baking – became evident. This was quickly harnessed by various industries.² At the same time, medical sciences were gradually uncovering the role of microbes in causing diseases and embarked on a massive effort of eradication and containment. Microbes became framed as enemies of humankind.

By the second half of the 20th century the ever-increasing resolution and interconnectedness of scientific visions revealed the centrality of microbial forms of life. This somewhat rehabilitated microbial worlds and contributed to a more benevolent disposition towards microbes.³ We now recognise that microorganisms are essential not only to the history of life on the planet but to the functioning of planetary systems and ecologies on every scale, including our bodies. Without microbes we would not be alive. In accepting this fact, more moderate approaches to working with microorganisms have begun replacing the war-like attitudes of the past. But they continue to require a still growing number of microscopic media in order to be made visible and intelligible. Microorganisms continue to surprise us and to challenge our received assumptions about life on our planet.⁴ In particular, throughout the stories told on this website, they challenge our preconceived ideas about what animals can be. They shed light on unexpected ways in which living things can become objects and data , and how they make natural history. Furthermore, the histories of how microbial worlds went from the unseen background to center stage can help us remember that what we see, and how we see it are deeply interlinked.

From Fairies to Cells

Before the 19th century, the observation of microorganisms was carried out by inquisitive naturalists and polymaths who often developed their own instruments. Pathfinders like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, and Francesco Redi drew detailed illustrations of the microscopic organisms they observed through makeshift devices. These early illustrations circulated mainly in scientific and intellectual circles, such as early scientific societies and similar institutions.⁵ At first the world of science struggled to make sense of these life forms, as is detailed, for example, in Early Micropaleontology. When microscopes became more readily available and more accurate after the introduction of achromatic lenses in the 1830s,⁶ a broader public was let in on the invisible miniature worlds contained in every droplet of water and grain of sand. This coincided with the mass production and reproduction of images and their increased circulation,⁷ which facilitated the diffusion of peepholes into these microbial worlds. In this early period of modern microscopy, microbes captured the fancies of Victorians who often saw them as real-life incarnations of folktale’s fairies and pixies.⁸ Concurrently to the spread of such magical views, scientists portrayed microbes as tiny animals worthy of scientists’ attention. Indeed, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, one of the most prominent authorities on microbes – or Infusoria, as they were known at the time – described them as full organisms, complete with multiple digestive systems, in his celebrated monograph published in 1838.⁹ Over the following decades, a new understanding of the structures of cells began to replace the view of microbes as tiny animals. They were now considered unicellular life forms fundamentally different from animals and yet related to them. This understanding coincided with the diffusion of Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of evolution, which singled out microbes as remnants of primitive forms of life that populated an ancient past of less evolved forms.¹⁰

Useful but Dangerous

Since the second half of the 19th century scientific understandings of microorganisms thus began undergoing radical transformations. In many cases, these transformations are still ongoing today. As cell theory shed new light on the functioning of living organisms and their evolutionary interconnectedness, microbes also revealed their functional importance. This was particularly evident in the context of some age-old industries, like brewing, baking, cheesemaking, and fermentation. The almost magical and alchemical processes at the heart of these activities came under the scrutiny of scientists and their microscopic media and were discovered to centrally depend on microbial collaborations.¹¹ Yeasts, bacteria, and other microbes all play key roles in these transformations and modernizing industries were quick to harness these newly discovered microbial processes to advance their production. Together with these early biotechnological mobilisations, microorganisms also came under scrutiny in the medical sciences. There, they were increasingly depicted as the culprits behind all sorts of diseases and illnesses. This view became particularly prominent thanks to the enormous success of pioneers like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, who mobilised their knowledge of microbial life in successful battles against diseases, from rabies and anthrax to tuberculosis and cholera.¹² Shaping the foundations of contemporary public health, hygiene, and medicine, these protagonists presented microbes as the agents causing diseases. They developed the so-called ‘germ theory of disease’ which still informs current medical practices and popular attitudes. The public received these discoveries as revolutionary because they helped defeat many ailments of modern society. But, despite their still celebrated importance, many of these innovations partook in painting the negative image microbes still suffer from today, for other examples of how animals are given a negative image, see Where the Rats Live. Furthermore, the fame these figures enjoyed consolidated a heroic and individualistic view of the work of scientists – a view that still fuels poor scientific practices and hampers social justice in current technosciences.¹³

Microbes’ Worlds

While the success of medical microbiology consolidated the dominance of a pathological view of microbes as causes of diseases, alternative views of microorganisms were already taking shape at the time. These were advanced by, for example, Sergei Nicholaievich Winogradsky and other lesser known scientists who focused on the environmental role of microbial life.¹⁵ Studying soils and the ecological action of microbial communities rather than individual microbial species, these scientists anticipated some discoveries of the 20th century with regards to the vital interconnections of microbes and planets. Yet, despite their groundbreaking work, it was only in the second half of the next century that the environmental relevance of microbial life would gain a hard-won recognition.¹⁶ This feat was made possible by transdisciplinary work with the more applied geophysical sciences, evidenced for instance in the experiences of micropaleontology at sea.

From the 1960s onwards, a different view of microbes began to consolidate, one that focused on their ecological and biogeochemical roles, displacing the centrality of the human that subtends medicine and its modern anthropocentrism;¹⁷ on the changing roles, uses and images of animals, see also the examples of elephant “Siam”, polar bear “Knut”, gorilla “Bobby” and Berlin’s former border dogs. Helping this endeavour were novel techniques in genetics, genomics, and the more recent developments of what is sometimes called post-genomics, which contributed to the success of these alternative views of microbial worlds, and blurred the boundaries that define the modern human.¹⁸ Attending to microbial life and its ecologies allows scientists to interpret the heartbeat of our planet and ground its complex dynamics over deep geological time scales. But it also challenges received understandings of the relations between such scales, and our role in them. Rather than offering a black and white picture of microbes as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the history of how microbial worlds are shaped and understood invites us not to rush to any simplistic plot, and to “stay with the trouble”, as feminist technosciences scholar Donna Haraway puts it. Microbes are complex organisms, and the closer you look, the more sides, versions, and entanglements of what life can be emerge.

How we see microbial life also transforms what we see. The emergence of microbiological knowledge made possible the development of specific forms of governance that are attuned to the invisible masses of microbes. Far from being infallible, these attempts at governing microbes are often frustrating because microorganisms continue to change and transform. This is visible, for instance, in the history of antibiotics: extracted from competitive soil microorganisms, these molecular tools became widespread thanks to human industry and its dreams of continuous growth. On the one hand, they enabled revolutionary changes in agriculture and biomedicine, on the other hand, they transformed the biology of microorganisms themselves and provoked the rise of antibiotic resistance.¹⁹ In this sense, the study of microorganisms also keeps challenging the universalizing ambitions of modern technosciences. If microbes rule the planet, they do so in a myriad of forms and ways, which are deeply interconnected, transformative, and easily cross the scales and boundaries we are accustomed to think with. For this reason, microbial worlds continue to retain the magic that fascinated the Victorians, as they refract our view of the world in an always shifting kaleidoscopic multitude of alternatives.