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This chapter illustrates an account of the shift, commencing in the late 1980s, to the molecularization of Alzheimer disease (AD), and the attempt to identify significant bodily changes as much as 20 years before behavioral changes can be diagnosed in individuals. It considers the rationale for efforts to formulate a “prodromal” diagnosis before behavioral symptoms or memory loss are detected, followed by a presentation of the involved molecular diagnostic tools (biomarkers) with emphasis on spinal taps, neuroimaging, and genetic testing. The significance of the first two of these biomarkers is attributed to their apparent ability to detect the onset of the amyloid cascade process. The chapter also discusses the anomalies and uncertainties associated with biomarker testing.

It is largely understood that the silkworm, Bombyx mori, eats the leaves of the mulberry plant exclusively. In practice, many silkworms reared in industrial, laboratory, and hobbyist conditions today can also eat “artificial food.” Such food, compounded from powdered mulberry, starch binders, and nutritional substances such as soybean extract or purified amino acids, is often used where mulberry is absent or when the production of protein-rich larvae is favored over silk cocoons. The development of silkworm nutritional physiology, motivated by biological inquiries into silkworms’ diets, occurred within the context of food-rationing and searches for human food alternatives during Japan’s imperial expansionist agenda and nation-building projects of the 1930s. Mulberry shortages in Japan and increased production of soybeans in Manchuria propelled research on silkworm food substitutions and silkworm feeding behaviors during the interwar and postwar periods. This history of making artificial silkworm food stresses the continuity of research spanning prewar and postwar Japan. This analysis also illustrates a broad set of political, economic, and technological issues that motivated biological experimentation, especially as races to industrially engineer artificial feeding media coincided with new genetic analyses of the picky feeding behaviors of silkworms—and how to change their natures.

Chapter 3 describes the development of environmental genomics, which seeks to explain how genetic differences betweenindividuals shape susceptibility to the harmful effects of environmental exposures. It provides a short historical overview of how physicians and scientists have conceptualized the variable susceptibility of human bodies both to diseases and to the drugs used to treat them. In the twentiethcentury, scientists used research on individual variation in drug metabolism, in particular, to molecularize these ways of thinking about bodily differences and extend their relevance to environmental chemicals. At the NIEHS, this line of research has been institutionalized in the Environmental Genome Project. The chapterconcludes by examining the practical, ethical, and policy conundrums raised by environmental genomics.

Chapter 5 examines scientists’ efforts to facilitate the diffusion of a specific molecular practice-toxicogenomics-from the laboratories of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the NIEHS to the regulatory review protocols of the EPA. It demonstrates that the efforts of scientists, bioethicists, lawyers, and policymakers to anticipate and address the requirements of environmental risk assessment at the EPA have been an intrinsic part of the development of the science itself. It also describes the emergence of new initiatives, such as Tox21, a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency

The conclusion summarizes the argument made in the book, provides an update on current research initiatives focused on gene-environment interaction (e.g., epigenetics, exposomics, and Environmental Wide Association Studies [EWAS]), and then returns to questions about how to understand the structural vulnerabilities of scientific fields that are located in politically contentious arenas. It elaborates the need for alternative strategies to address the ongoing structural vulnerabilities of the environmental health sciences-approaches that go beyond the consensus critique. It concludesby suggesting directions for future research and opportunities for new forms of public discourse about the multiple determinants of population health.

Chapter 5, “Between Animality and Divinity,” takes the reader from Switzerland to California and from human to animal research. Difficulties in the translation between human- and animal-model psychosis studies uncover a much larger crisis of animal models in psychiatry. At the same time, they point to a molecularization of the differentia specifica distinguishing humans from animals in philosophical anthropology and the emergence of a recombinant anthropological form joining the natural and the divine.

Having mapped the scope of human chromosome studies in the postwar era, chapter 5 addresses the relation between microscope-based and molecular approaches to human heredity. In particular, it reconsiders what is often referred to as the molecularization of chromosome research in the light of the simultaneous turn of molecular biology to human and medical genetics, a field long occupied by chromosome researchers. The chapter focuses on two areas of overlapping interest: the molecular biologists’ concern with the structure and function of chromosomes and the cytologists’ focus on gene mapping, a practice now often associated with genomic science. Chromosome banding and somatic cell hybridization techniques allowed cytogeneticists to map thousands of genes before molecular techniques started making an impact. The organization of the Human Genome Project in many ways built on the work and organization of the Human Gene Mapping Workshops, convened by cytogeneticists starting in the the early 1970s. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the epistemic and historical commonalities between the two contending approaches. In particular, it considers the increasing role of fluorescent microscopic techniques such as FISH (fluorescent in situ hybridization) in cell and molecular biology that provides a common ground for the two endeavors.

This chapter considers the ant as a limit case of becoming-animal in order to problematize a troubling reciprocity of becoming. For the ant, already multiple, already molecularized, adapts to every niche on earth, constitutes its territory through a limitless processural colonization of the other that involves endless becomings, endless deterritorializations and reconstitutions as a species body at multiple scales. In short, the ant is the perfect Deleuzean animal, and yet as H. G. Wells captures so astutely in his story, “The Empire of the Ants,” it is also the most imperial and hierarchized. If the human becomes animal so that the animal can become something else, becoming-ant affords the potential for the ant to, alarmingly, become human. In addition to discussing Wells’ story, the chapter explores Bernard Werber’s 1991 novel Les Fourmis as well as Google’s game interface, Swarm!, which allows for a more robust engagement with the dynamics of scale for Deleuzean philosophy, which often (though not always) engages scale as a continuum when in fact all becomings make use of scalar quanta. By jumping scales rather than “scaling,” a molecularization is able to generate new degrees of freedom which would engage the alterior dynamics of other scales.