Article ID: CBB784934864

Seeing nature as a ‘universal store of genes’: How biological diversity became ‘genetic resources’, 1890–1940 (2019)

unapi

Till late in the 20th century, biological diversity has been understood and addressed in terms of “genetic resources”. This paper proposes a history of this “genetic resources” concept and the biopolitical practices it was related to. A semantic history of the ‘resource’ idiom first sheds light on how, in the age of empires and fossil industrialism, the Earth came to be considered as a stock of static mineral and living reserves. Then we follow how the gene became the unit of this “resourcist” view of biological diversity as static stocks of entities open to prospection, harnessing and “conservation”. Erwin Baur, Nikolai I. Vavilov, Aleksandr S. Serebrovsky and Hermann J. Muller were key biologists who introduced a spatial turn to the gene concept. Beyond the space-time of Neo-mendelian and Morganian laboratory genetics, genes became understood though a geographical gaze at a planetary scale. The world became a “universal store of genes” (Vavilov, 1929). From 1926 to World War 2, this advent of genes as new global epistemic objects went hand in hand with genes' new modes of existence as geopolitical objects. The article documents Interwar years' scramble for genes as well as first collaborative international efforts to conserve and exchange genetic material (which prefigured post WW2 initiatives), and situates the rise of the ‘genetic resources’ category within mid 20th century's imperialism, high-modernism, agricultural modernization and biopolitics.

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Authors & Contributors
Velmet, Aro
Núñez, Paula Gabriela
Jin, Xiaoxing
Chapman, Herrick E.
Lema, Carolina
Campbell, Ian W.
Concepts
Science and politics
Imperialism
Biology
Conservation of natural resources
Genetics
France, colonies
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
20th century, late
18th century
Enlightenment
Places
United States
Europe
India
Brazil
Russian Empire
South Asia
Institutions
Ecological Society of America
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