 All right if you're ready. Yeah, I'm Kim Hendricks. I'm a research associate for the FNRS and I'm based at the University of Liège in a research group called SPIRAL. And this is a We're within the faculty of law and political science, but we're a multidisciplinary group composed of mainly political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, a couple of philosophers as well, and we work on everything that connects science, technology and society. So STS as such is one of our research access and this probably unites all of us and there are some more specialized orientations like risks, for example, risk society, qualitative methodologies, policy evaluation, and also the access, research access, ecology and society, so that those are broadly themes that we work on. So our research, and I think I can say that for the whole group, we're about 20-25 persons and is empirically informed, so we do all of us do empirical research with a variety of qualitative methods. But of course empirical research also combines with conceptual work that is proper to STS as a discipline, and some of us also use more philosophical concepts and so on. So that is the research group that I am a part of. And oh, yeah, let me just say that I'm with a couple of other colleagues who are also on the steering committee of the BSTS network, so the Belgian Science, Technology and Society Network, and since COVID, there hasn't happened a lot within the network, and so we're relaunching it now. And so first meeting is scheduled. This was sent on the BSTS mailing list yesterday, I think. I'm a colleague of Pierre Delvin. So we're organizing and hosting a meeting in Liège on the 3rd of July. It's on a Monday, right, for the most people will probably take off for holidays. And so the idea is to get together of people who already know each other, but also when we encourage you to invite and spread the word, also junior researchers and other people that we haven't met yet, too. Because there are a lot of people in Belgium, in the two parts of the country, science and technology topics, even though STS as such is not really institutionalized in Belgium yet. So yeah, so the BSTS network is one way of getting those people to talk together and so this will be an entire day with two parts. We're still fine tuning the program. We will send around the program and probably with a link to to register for the conference so that we have an idea of how many people to expect. And this will happen in the city center in La Grande Post, which is a renovated and thinking creative space. It's a bit of just Silicon Valley in a way. They call their auditoria and their meeting rooms incubators and things like that. So it should be yours now. Yes, there was a couple. Yeah, that's included in the program, there's a beer part in the program. So OK. All right, so now just give you some background about this particular talk, because I'll have to say just a couple of words about my previous research because I'm going to attempt to, you know, knit together some of my previous research strengths and try to render visible an undercurrent that's been working in my previous research. And one way of summarizing that is that I've always been interested in the body as a site of interpretation, also as a site of demonstration. As something that's mobilized in evidence basis. And my my first research in this broad thematic is what was my PhD dissertation on the demonstration of food related health claims. So are you proof that this or that food or food component is good for you? And it's actually quite a complex issue because we as soon as you look into the the methods for demonstrating this, then this whole food business starts interfering with medicine and drugs and the way that drugs are tested and the way that human bodies are actually mobilized to provide proof of efficacy. And so here the body is not only as let's say a site where we try to inscribe and take markers to see that something that the body reacts to something. It also becomes a site of where we make political difference between two markets that of food and of drugs. And so that was the like the first research where I really got interested in this, the body as a site of markers of science and how they are mobilized. Another research trend is epigenetics and where we also detect markers and try to understand the significance in terms of transgenerational transmission of certain certain biochemical states, really. And then the by my most recent research project is a human bio launching where the human body, well, not only the human body, because there are also mobilized plants and animals as indicators of environmental pollution. And so the empirical question by that is how does that work? Do we do that? How do we choose which kind of toxic toxic chemicals we're going to monitor? And what do we do with the results? And in all of these, there is a common there is a tension common to these these these three research strands that are just outlined. Every time I come across this tension between the facts that are made to exist through these intricate apparatus of proof or dispositive. So attention between the facts that are made to exist on the one hand and the ways in which they are made to matter on the other hand. For example, in bio monitoring, the detection of toxic chemicals in the body points to a history, a geographical distribution of chemicals, a political economy that released all these chemicals and put them in circulation in ways that we're trying to understand now. But most of the time, the interpretation of bio monitoring results is governed by thresholds, thresholds that tell us, OK, above this level we can expect health risks or even acute effects of toxicity. And below the threshold, supposedly everything would be OK. That's the way in which this is often mobilized in the end in the media, but also in when politicians need to take measures. In epigenetics, evidence that a certain epigenetic status or biochemical signature, if you like, changes the way a cell is going to function. And if that function or dysfunctioning is passed on to the next generation then immediately this quickly opens the base about parental responsibility for health, for the health of your children, for example. I will give an example later on of a specific epigenetic mark, a methylation that's passed from fathers to their children. And then the debate starts about, OK, are these fathers responsible for their children's future health status because the epigenetic mark is related to a health risk. And I sort of wonder why shouldn't we be asking how this might change our conception of kinship, for example, or individuality of what a risk is of what a disease is rather than immediately jumping to the great ethical questions of responsibility, who's responsible, and so on. So in all these examples, there's a relation of disproportion between the apparatuses that make us possible of calling into existence new facts that are interesting and that say something about the real that allow us to create new and multiple points of articulation with the real, if you like. And on the other hand, the moral and political categories we mobilize to think these results and these practices. And by consequence, what often happens is that the scientific findings we have, we mobilize them as data or evidence. We're reduced into the status of data or evidence for some other question in the service, for example, of, say, policymaking. So my question is, aren't we closing down in many cases the possible interpretations or speculations too quickly? Shouldn't we slow down? And then this might be a strange question because we're living in times of urgency but we need to act immediately on what's happening in terms of the environment, in terms of toxicity, and so on. And we get data and evidence on pollution, for example, are important. So it's not against these data that I will be arguing, not at all, but the thing is maybe we should slow down and slowing down this might help us accelerate later on where we don't expect it, for example. One possible metaphor for this is going on a height, for example, you want to get from point A to B. Slowing down might make you attentive to certain shortcuts or, on the other hand, might make you realize that point B is perhaps not worth going to after all, that there's another direction which is much more interesting. So it's just a metaphor, it's a bit of a clumsy metaphor but it sort of gives you a taste of what I want to get at. Okay, so these are the sort of thoughts that I wanted to pack into this slogan, keep biology weird, and then why a slogan? Do we need a slogan for this? Not necessarily, but I think it's, for me, it works as a sort of call to attention. And I did get some inspiration from the U.S. when I was in the U.S. because they like slogans there and stickers and t-shirts with these kinds of things on. And one of those, some examples now, keep Austin weird, keep Portland weird, keep Santa Cruz weird. Apparently it started in Austin and all these variations on the same theme initially were meant to support local businesses and to maintain sort of diversity in local shops. But it extends to this thought of, you know, encouraging artistic communities and diversity and inclusion against gentrification really. So it's a call to keep alive and promote all these kind of things that go into this term weirdness, keep it weird. Now, as it turns out, weird is actually quite an interesting term. It comes with associations that I think might enrich the basic problem that I sketched earlier. Namely, where are we going to take these multiple indexes, signatures, traces, symptoms that we mobilize the biological and for the life sciences for to understand bigger issues about our environment. Where are we going to take these traces? And it's the etymology of the word weird, which is really interesting, it's an old Germanic or old English word, weird with a Y, which is related to this idea of destiny, of fate and the control or the failure to control destiny. In this slide I opted for the word lure because in a lot of stories and mythologies the idea is that people or kings, for example, are lured into this idea that they can know the future and then act to realize that future. But acting on this prophesized future actually alters the way that things are going to happen. So the lure of this control. Shakespeare's play Macbeth refers famously to the weird sisters, which are also referred to as the three witches or the three fates. So this is the sort of cloud of connotations of associations that the word weird invokes and I'll try to put these multiple associations to work in what I'm going to talk about in terms of fieldwork that I did. Okay. So here's an overview of the three parts of my talk today. In the first part I will be talking about the lab and how we work with the model organisms. And then I'll make a stopover in literature and more specific in weird fiction and all the new forms of weird fiction. And I'll ask how this might help us to think with this concept of the weird. The weird has a motive of attention and that's the final suggestion that I will make. Is this an interesting way of thinking could be a motive of attention that we need especially now. So in the lab with model organisms. Now I mentioned the bumper stickers and the t-shirts but this wasn't the first time that the word weird really came to my attention. The first time really was in the lab when I was working with molecular biologists so I spent a couple of months working with molecular biologists at the University of Santa Cruz in California so the whole thing made sense because they said that things were weird and you had the stickers keep Santa Cruz weird so there was this thing going on that made me think about this weird. This happened to be a really interesting place to be not only because there's a leading lab working with a model organism C elegans that I will show you in a couple of minutes but it's also a great intellectual community to be with a lot of thinkers that have anthropologists and empirical works that have informed my work like I think for example Space There, Donna Arroway, Jenny Reardon who hosted me there who did a lot of interesting work on genomics and post-genomics. One of her books is the post-genomic condition and the question so we've sequenced the human genome and now the question is what do we all think we have all this data but what do they mean? How do we mobilize this data? What do they mean? It's a really interesting work and I think it sort of connects to what I'm saying here today and so there's a leading lab on the C elegans research and that was particularly interesting for me because I was working on epigenetics at that time and my initial question was okay in a lab with model organisms maybe I'll be sort of liberated from all the moral and political discussions on responsibility within a human community here people are working with tiny little worms and so it would be really interesting to see how they mobilize or make sense of this of epigenetics and especially the concepts of body and environment because epigenetics sort of blurs this distinction because phenotypic changes can occur and occasionally be passed on without any change in the DNA molecule as such so what we're talking about here is differences in signaling biochemical differences that somehow are transmitted and that are sensitive to what happens in the environment but the environment is a bit of a vague notion so what is the environment for cell biologists itself is already an environment for the DNA and the histones and all these units that they work with within the cell but of course there's a broader notion of the environment as well the human body as such and then the environment of the human body so I want to know how do they work with this do they operationalize this distinction in some way and the question that I was asking quickly retreated into the background because they weren't asking these questions at all now this doesn't mean that the questions aren't worth asking but it's sort of reoriented my own interested at that time because I thought okay if they are not working with this then what is it that they're concerned about what is it that they're interested in and what they're interested in is the worm itself so let me just catch a very very brief history of this particular model organism it was isolated from its natural habitat at some point it has to be isolated from somewhere it has to come from somewhere and this happened in the 1970s there are different strains now that are used in labs once from Hawaii for example but the one that they were working with and I think this was historically the first one that was isolated from the environment that was in Bristol, England so it's called the Bristol N2 Strain which is a worm that is used and reproduced and everything is being done to keep its genome stable to make research findings comparable across different labs but also within one lab because what they do is create all sorts of mutations in order to learn about the mechanics the molecular mechanics of what these changes do what is responsible for which biological mechanism is responsible for a specific kind of change so they need, apart from all the mutants that they create they also need a stable reference genome and this is originally the Bristol worm that they are working with and so this worm was isolated and in the history books it's Sidney Brenner who is a biologist American British but he's the one who had a vision and a reason to isolate this particular worm because you could ask why this worm why not some other organisms because there are other organisms in use as well as zebra, fish, or fruit flies different kinds of model organisms and the population of model organisms is also expanding they're using different sorts of model organisms now so why this one and this has to do with a number of interesting physiological properties of the worm it's small so it's easy to store it doesn't take a lot of space it has a reproductive cycle which is important if your basic method is to induce mutations and then compare them to to non-mutated worms or to different kinds of genetic make-ups it has a reproductive cycle which allows experimenting with DNA or with epigenetic changes they're easy to feed they feed on a bacterium they can be frozen and kept and the worm and different mutants and variants of them are really kept in freezers and they call these worm libraries and its small size also allows mapping the whole organism and that was one of the main reasons that Brenner wanted to use this worm because a whole organism hadn't been... a whole genome hadn't been sequenced up to then the worm is one of the first animals that had its entire genome sequenced and along with this was this whole idea that we need to biology needed to transform its questions and work and its methods and work on entire organisms and produce a lot of data so the worm was selected for its relative genetic simplicity and also the fact that its entire neural network could be mapped and they did so they have the worm's connectome they have its genome and finally and last but not least the worm is also physiologically transparent so we can actually see through it and under microscope observe what happens in its body so all these physiological properties are actually of a logistically interesting so it's a logistic project and favors a specific type of science or knowledge and the idea that was already looming on the horizon at that time was the human genome project the idea was if we can test this on a worm if we can sequence the DNA of the whole organism and if our way of doing that works then we can scale this project up and at some point we'll be able to map the genome of the human being and the image is a bit blurry but it's one of the first logos of the human genome project and it represents it symbolizes pretty well the extent to which this project is really an infrastructural thing it's knowledge, science as an infrastructure or a new infrastructure for a new kind of science because the computers are there the idea that we need to assemble a lot of data and this is without knowing what the biological significance of it is in advance so it's a new way of approaching biological questions Brenner one of the citations of Brenner is that he said that at the time that they were selecting the worm and starting to work on these new questions was that he was of the opinion that nearly all the classical problems so I'm quoting here nearly all the classical problems of molecular biology have either been solved in the next decade so the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology notably development and the nervous system so the worm in a sense embodied, literally the logistic requirements of a particular type of science or knowledge and the worm itself could be considered in that sense a structure for research so we call it a model organism and if you ask the biologist to work with the worm what is it a model of then they're never really certain what is a model of but one thing is certain that it's a model of this new kind of science at least that was the case in the 70s, 80s, 90s but since so we have the human genome now we have all the data like I said, the biological significance of all these data is far from clear but the worm is still being used as a model organism it wasn't just say a pretext for bigger projects to come there have been some unexpected twists in the fate of the worm epigenetics is one of them but the thing is, and that's the main thing that I took home from this research collaboration there was that the the scientists there will keep on being surprised the worm doesn't stop surprising the people who work with it and so the organism isn't a topic of interest in itself it's not necessarily a model for other things now what is important also is that there is a lot of work that goes into domesticating what you could call domesticating the worm so in that sense a model organism is also an organism that behaves properly according to what we need in the lab and to that effect interventions such as bleaching are used which means that the gut of the worm which is full of microbes are washed out chemically so there is no interference of these microbiotic unruly interactions it's a way of keeping the genome stable the food itself the bacterium on the petri dish is itself standardized as well and like I said all this is necessary for their classification keeping track of the worm and its mutations its versions if you like so these worm libraries and today they focus on epigenetic questions so this is a title just an illustration because the transparency of the worm also becomes became a way of seeing biology where as a sort of transparent window onto biology as if the worm is sort of a passive interface between the question and the answer of the whereas like I just said the worm itself needs to be worked on constantly it needs to be fabricated it needs to be stable and that's important because the worm I insist on this because the worm doesn't stay stable like all the efforts put into keeping it stable over the years that the worm has been used has been put to use in research labs is genome did mutate we don't know precisely how it arrived but it's an effect perhaps of the domestication efforts themselves so this is where something unruly unexpected something that shouldn't happen happens within apparatus or dispositive to keep everything stable and that is an interesting issue that I want to you know insist upon here so this is what they look like under microscope so they're about a millimeter or less maximum one millimeter long this is a close-up with powerful microscope and you can actually see the texture and the internal organs here and this is a particular technique where markers that are related to neurons light up under the blue part of the UV spectrum so specific microscopes are used here and these GFP reporters as they called they light up so they signal that there's neurons or it allows to visualize the nervous system of the worm and this so-called GFP reporters so GFP is a green fluorescent protein a protein extracted from jellyfish originally and inserted as a transgene into organisms to have this particular function to make this visible so the worm does have a brain or something equivalent to what we call a brain as neurons the dorsal and ventral cord here are also neurons so it's a nervous system now I want to say a couple of words about this particular specimen this is a photo that was one of the researches that I worked with and I'll refer to her work properly later in the presentation she shared this photograph with me while she was doing research on this particular worm and a whole set of worms who had similar properties now this worm is actually lacking an enzyme that represses expressions other than germ cell development so what the biologist told me is that the fate of a cell, so the future development of a cell is in a way protected by this biochemical coating in the form of enzymes, proteins protein complexes and so on and so forth this is one of the big mysteries in biology, how does a cell know what it has to become later on and so this is part of this answer certain enzymes triggered the cell to become something there are germ cells that remain germ cells for reproduction and somatic cells that specialize into orbital sorts of functions for the body so in this particular room the protection of the fate as they call it which is again an interesting term in view of the word weird, the etymology of the word weird the fate of the germ cells here the protection of this fate is rendered inactive the specific cells in this worm were supposed to become germ cells but in principle they can become anything now and this was present in the father of the worm the genetic condition has been passed on to its offspring, this is the offspring so to put it the same thing differently in different manner is that the memory of non-repressions has been passed on from the words they use from father to child and this specimen here is of particular interest because there are places that light up in green that shouldn't be green if I go back here this is what a normal worm should look like but there shouldn't be green and the places here were green and when I discussed this with her I made a joke that this worm has gone mental and that's exactly what's happening, he's trying to develop neurons instead of germ cells where germ cells should have been developing, he's trying to develop neurons so this is a finding and a new problem within the finding so a memory of a specific regulator is passed on and the worm has become sterile because it doesn't develop germ cells but some cells go down another pathway now and so one of the current mysteries, riddles in biology is that one of the preferred pathways seems to be neurons I don't know why but that seems to be the first option and that's what these green areas are all about so the fact that the worm lights up under the blue part of the light spectrum shows or indicates that a neuronal marker is being expressed in addition there are some other indications as well the density of some of the green areas they likely indicate that cell membranes are developing and that is something that germ cells and these worms don't have and a third indicator is what seems to be the development of exodendritic structures so these connecting threads between neurons and this photo is from the publication that came out on her research two or three years later after I was there it's a close-up of a very similar kind of image as this one and the red arrows point to these thread-like structures exodendritic structures let me return to the word weird because that's what I started from why might this term be relevant here apart from the fact that the biologists from time to time used this word first of all the context in which the word was used is actually interesting because I have the impression that it was never used to point out the obvious weird the eccentric sides of biology sometimes the strange deep-sea creatures with ugly teeth and a lot of appendages it seems to indicate more or less that something happened that shouldn't have happened so it doesn't point to a situation where a parameter is simply unknown or something that we don't know yet that's not weird, it's just something we don't know yet but we have all the means to discover it and the methods and so forth weird seems to point to a situation where something unexpected happens or something that wasn't supposed to happen considering the normal rules of development so it's not a just an epistemological question we don't know this, this is strange it's a really it denotes what I would call an ontological event it's not just that we don't know something but the criteria the organism did something that maybe was a surprise for itself as well and so when this used something of the etymology of the word again related to fate and destiny something wasn't supposed to happen but it did a twist of fate now this twist of fate has consequences and the interesting thing is that this twist of fate occurs exactly within the infrastructure of normalization and standardization which was known to guarantee a stable course of events as if we could control the entire destiny of the world by controlling its genome now at the same time the standardization work is precisely the sort of milieu that allows this weirdness to come to the fore where we can actually see it and work with it in that sense the black parts of these pictures are interesting because that also shows all the work that needs to be done to keep all kind of things out of the picture so it's again it's not only about visualizing things it's also about keeping other things out that might come to interfere and like I said over the course of time the genome of the worm has mutated, has changed and this makes the worm sort of nearly invisible but in many ways an impressive provocation to the idea of control control of some kind of fate and this wasn't what we expected either I think when the worm was isolated from its environment it was a sort of test bed to start testing methods of sequencing and mapping and visualizing whole things and the idea also very much present in the human genome project that if we have the sequence and we have deciphered it we know it and there's a lot of metaphors that relate to writing and reading in the human genome project if you can read the code code itself being another metaphor for biochemistry, if you can read it then we'll understand it and if there are errors in the syntax or in the sentences we just need to correct them so that's another way of approaching disease and health it's a disease as a misspelling so but the human genome project, the sequence was published in the 1990s ever since people haven't stopped working with this this world is the interesting thing there are a lot of new questions being asked now so there's an interesting tension between control on the one hand and unruly manifestations on the other between the normal and the abnormal and the monstrous tension between normal and abnormal happens to be at the heart of the specific genre in fantastic literature as well which is so-called weird literature and I would propose to look briefly into this because I think there are a couple of things that can further enrich this conception of what it might mean to me the first kind of fantastic literature referred to as weird was in the late 19th, early 20th century and more recently there's a host of authors very much inspired by this what we now call the old weird which we can group into the new weird it's a sort of more or less official category of course they're just markers themselves and group things together there's no absolute definition of what the old or the new weird is or should be unfortunately but the thing is that a contrast that I will quickly try to draw between this old and new weird is actually interesting because it's here that we reflect a history it reflects two positions if you like, the old and the new weird two positions toward the abnormal or the monstrous and also how the monstrous is the shadow image of what we think of as what should be the normal it reflects a history of positions of deep-seated moral and political attitudes so this literature I think allows exploring the shaping of effective political status towards unknown, uncharted territories and human control or to put it differently, I think it articulates different modes of relating to this and different declinations of the unknown itself and it puts forward the question whether and how we can address this unknown now these attitudes don't just spring from the minds of the writers only the writers are also writing in their time, in their context so there are some interesting political elements I think that will help to get a to draw this question so a common characteristic whether it's old or new is that it does deal with the monstrous and the tension between normal and abnormal so it deals with the monstrous, it deals with horror in a sense but the horror here doesn't reside in the tropes of common tropes of vampires or werewolves or zombies because we're sort of familiar with them within the literature itself and within the whole mythology and imagery around it we also know how to deal with them we know about the full moon, the silver bullets and wooden stakes and things like that so we have references on how to address them or not and relate to them but weird tales are really this is not the case in weird literature the weird is really weird so we don't get a grasp of what it is we're dealing with and this not knowing has two different qualities if you like in the old and the new weird so the old weird, you might know this author our Philips Lovecraft the best known author of weird tales so we're talking late 19th, early 20th century here and in Lovecraft for example the stories he tells are really forays into the unknown and they're often narrated as well as gradual discoveries or expeditions we find the remnants or documents of a lost expedition we find the diary of a captain on a sailing boat for example telling us what happened that night that night late December so these weird tales are about terrifying in Lovecraft especially terrifying encounters with something unspecified and the fact that it's unspecified makes it even more horrifying and what Lovecraft really insists on is that this something, this unspecified has, we don't have a name for it it's even, it's ungraspable by reason so no connection is possible really between between humans and that which is encountered the encounter can only result in death or madness those are roughly two options that he offers in these stories, so the monstrous is really radicalized and the interesting thing is that this radicalization of the monstrous really points to a relation between the monstrous on the one hand and the failure of reason or control on the other and the encounters that he describes the humans that are looking drawn to something and there's some kind of strange encounter and usually this goes through the negation of sort of everything that we might call rational so they encounter impossible geometries and it's there's a sort of cosmic horror and that's a name that Lovecraft gives to this sort of the horror that he tries to call into existence and he has, Lovecraft had theorized his own writing as well and he was of the opinion that fear is one of the most deep-seated emotions in the human species and so he tries to tap into the most fundamental types of fear that we might have which he considered as universal so that's his theory of of horror but if you look closer and especially in contrast to the new weird then you might ask the question whether this horror is really universal or if it's because horror is really the negation of the orders that we value the society values and the common thread in Lovecraft's type of horror is the annihilation of reason itself the characters in the stories, once they're confronted with the ultimate terror sort of active blackness as it is described often something tentacular but the description don't go much further it always involves some kind of not passive, not the absence of light but some sort of active darkness intruding into the world, something tentacular and merely seeing it is what drives people mad and they usually die a bit later on for causes that are unknown so it's the negation of reason itself and we need this background to understand the new weird because in the new weird, the unknown, the uncanny they no longer signal a limit to the possibility of human reason and existence it is not a limit to what we can bear in contrast to the stories by Lovecraft, so the encounter with something other a radical other, it's not radicalized it seems to be a possibility of interaction of some sort these are just some illustrations that artists have made on the basis of Lovecraft's stories and you can clearly see people, individuals turning into a sort of frightened mass of unreason and madness in the face of something which is really very much unspecified but which does have tentacles this is another artist's impression of the kind of absolute sort of terror that Lovecraft invokes in his stories it makes for very good reading, it means a great writer the stories are really great to read but I think it's worthwhile to question Lovecraft's claim to universality as this being a sort of universal terror because I more suspect that like I said, horror is more something that what we find horrendous is when something is completely negated that we value what's valued here is reason and I think this sort of goes with the time that in which Lovecraft was writing and this is a citation that I copy-pasted at length here because he talks about the sciences it's actually one of the characters so it's the beginning of a story called Tulu I'm saying Tulu, I think that's the way to pronounce it but that's also one of the things in Lovecraft's writing is that this absolute terror you cannot even properly pronounce the name so it goes right into the very possibility of language so the character he says the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it wasn't meant that we should avoid so far the sciences, each training in its own direction have armed us a little but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age so that's our next a piece of very dark writing for you and it sort of illustrates what I want to show so the impossibility of reason or the horrors of total knowledge as well is sort of opposite to this now this is an example of a novel and a film by the writer Geoff Van Der Meer it's a trilogy and the first book is called Annihilation and this is a really nice example of what now is considered the new weird and it's also a form of eco-fiction and the photo here is still of the movie and you see human forms which at some point unspecified because it's still weird so things are never explained have turned for some mysterious reason into vegetable forms and it is a story about an area called Area X which seems to live a life of its own seems to be some strange sort of ecological niche but no one really knows and this not knowing is extended right to the end of the books so you'll never know really what it is but it's a strange kind of area where what we might call nature it's an ecology that sort of shapes and reacts to our dealings with it but the difference is there are interesting echoes of lovecraft in the way he writes and the idea of this strange ecological niche itself but the difference is that there is still a possibility to sort of know this area until they go into it, do not go instantly mad or do not die many of them in the end do die but not after some kind of transformation and I cannot go into the details of this work which is really rich and really interesting but my point is that this mobilizes this idea of weird and the unknown and the control that we think we should exert on things it thematizes it in a different way than the old weird so the encounter with this other with the unknown is not radicalized but there is a possibility of interaction but this possibility and that's the interesting thing interaction requires something of us all the things that requires is that we might need to loosen our obsession with control and the alternatives very binary between light and darkness between knowing only part or knowing the whole but knowing the whole might destroy us but in lovecraft there is sort hints at this possibility of knowing the whole thing even if it will destroy us and this is not really the case as I feel in this sort of literature especially not in this novel because there is no project of total knowledge and knowledge is not a project of either redemption something total knowledge is going to save us or of doom but it's simply not possible because the territory that we're trying to chart the territory that we're trying to understand mutates while we're trying to know it and I think with this we're coming much closer to the things that happen for example in the lab with the model organisms so what the new weird thematize and articulates and what lovecraft stories actively deny is this possibility of encounter and of being in a situation without knowing where it will lead we don't know the fate of where it is we're discovering or deciding where it should lead so if we're etymologically related to fate then weird literature works works around this idea that trying to know our fate induces twists of fate like I said knowing fate leads to the destruction of humanity and annihilation of reason but that's a teleology in itself because we know what total knowledge will lead to the new weirds composes with these twists of fate and tries to stay with them to trouble in narrow ways words so final part I'll try to speed up because I'm taking more time than the we did start a little late but yeah but I can wrap this up pretty quickly so back to the the slogan keep biology weird which was to me a sort of call to attention to pay due attention to what certain scientific findings such as in the lab might actually require of us in order to accommodate these new facts rather than sort of directly projecting our fixed moral and political discussions onto them so the weird is to me an interesting mode of attention a way of thinking with scientific findings and perhaps a way to avoid closing discussions out too quickly as scientific facts being data or evidence for something else maybe it's something that could help thinkers in terms of propositions scientific findings propositions in the sense of white head and also mobilized as such by Bruno Latour propositions indicating how the world might further articulate so not just an epistemological question but not a logical question of if we follow this proposition how might we and the scientific fact call into existence new kinds of possibilities to further articulate so there's no destiny involved here but only twists and changes while we engage with the world itself now to go back to epigenetics very briefly my initial proplexity with epigenetics was actually triggered by a commentary of a research article the research article showed that I'll give the proper references in the final slide it's a research that was coordinated by Adelaide Soubril who is a researcher at Caillou and the article was about paternal obesity in humans which they showed that this paternal obesity was associated with a specific epigenetic condition a methylation and this was passed down to the children and they did a study on newborns where they actually found this very specific epigenetic marker that was associated with obesity of the father and in their research they managed to rule out maternal differences in the gene so that was what the research said and this was published in VMC Medicine in 2013 and in the same issue of this scientific journal a comment was published on the same article so these were researchers who got to read the article before it was published so a commentary was published along with it with the title fat dads must not be blamed for their children's health problems there's already a contradiction to me in the very title because they should not be blamed, they should somehow be protected but we still call them fat dads whereas the original research article never spoke about fat dads and it had no moral content so the point of me to look into the details of this study and the title of the study which is paternal obesity is associated with IGF2 hypometallation in newborns but it reflects the contents of the article there's a statistical association between obese fathers of the study population and the presence of this hypometallation in newborns but there are no other inferences made or suggested it's a scientific finding that one could probably if one has the scientific background and competences that one could probably criticize for a variety of reasons but not for its moral content so it's a study that simply shows look there's this relationship that we see now that we didn't suspect before but the commentators apparently took issue with this that the fat dads should not be blamed and their argument is quite remarkable because they point out a series of issues with the research design and the statistics that they criticize but then they say this and I quote we must not be too hasty to blame either parent for their offspring's health outcomes without being certain that these effects are consequently robust end of quote so the question then becomes ok so if we have a better study is it then ok to start blaming the so-called fat dads is it just a question in other words of more facts evidence and then it's ok then we can unleash all our moral and political categories and blame them for and that's what the authors seem to imply we cannot blame them without being certain so this is the mindset of a a police investigator or a judge and this is not the mindset that I am the mode of attention that I am trying to evoke here with my reference to the weird and so on so it's not a very careful response to these findings I think it's not a response of care and to me it subordinates newly discovered biological and phylogenetic relations to moral standards without thinking further how these relations that the article shows might prompt us to think differently actually about kinship about the ecology of what we term obesity as a condition we might need to think differently about responsibility now this newly discovered relation becomes a question of judicial, juridical scrutiny and it's no evidence that sorry it's no coincidence that we insist so much in these debates on evidence and that's why I want to problematize the word evidence and the way we mobilize it and I contrast it to this other mode of attention which stays with the weird is the fact that there is a new relation here discovered and how should we think about this what does it actually mean but the question of responsibility and causes turns up again and again and epigenetics is full of these kind of controversies so I think that in this case keep biology weird might be an appropriate thing to say don't decide beforehand on the fate of the discussion that we are going to have here and on the fate of the persons who are actually involved in the study and I think this is perhaps important especially today in times in which biology the life sciences ecology in particular are very much present and important in the production of signs and indexes and symptoms to which we try to understand the world that surrounds us in terms of chemical pollution with biology for example in terms of epigenetics with respect to health and disease so that's the point that I wanted to make through this excursion through the weird which I try to elaborate a bit more for this talk and I don't know if I should consider the happy recipients of these reflections or the unfortunate victims of a confusing intervention but I look forward to discussing this with you and thank you again for inviting me take five talking about observing the weird about the elegance see elegance for friends you argue well that the standardization is important because you see better the phenomenon but you were defending a notion of weird that is not just epistemological so could you elaborate a little bit between the aspect epistemological like the standardization is a technique to see and the standardization is also a technique to produce the weird and the new phenomena maybe the see elegance in nature can you not show at all that kind of special behavior the the worm as a model as a model organism is actually I like to see it as ontological bifurcation between the worm that lives in the wild and the one that's going to be domesticated in the laboratory because the domestication itself changes the worm it changes, it's being kept stable what doesn't happen in nature it's probably much more complex because like I said for example the gut microbiome is actually what they call bleached washed out by chemical means so the it's still an organism but it is a laboratory organism, it changes it's not the same organism as in the and this is all being done to keep to be able to keep certain parameters stable which are in all sorts of wild conversations in nature like compost heap for example, because that's where they live on a fruit and their natural habitat it's impossible to work with a so called wild worm they call them wild worms these wild types it's impossible to work with them, you cannot isolate variables because they can come from the microbiome from what is feeding on and so on and so forth so if a new organism in a sense is created to keep as much parameters stable as possible and you could criticize as a saying, okay so you're making an artificial animal but it has the advantage of showing us things that we simply won't be able to observe if we took a worm from any compost heap and so that's why I said that yeah that this enables us to standardization makes this possible and I also want to distinguish the weird as I try to mobilize it here or think along with it here that would simply be another name for something we don't know yet rather it's something that happens and it's not only on our part on the knowing scientist part the worm itself it's not because we're trying to keep it stable in a different environment that the worm is not continuing a sort of course in its own existence and we interfere with it and this of course alters the course of the worm but the worm still reacts or does things along this developmental pathway that we didn't expect such as changing a genome along the way it's really there to keep that genome stable and what I like about the biologists that I work with and I think this is what many characterize many biologists they think this is funny and they really like it so this keeps them going because unexpected things keep on happening so let me push you a little bit you're from STS so if a scientist claim we have discovered some physiological blah blah blah in this worm and can they claim they discover something about wildlife or should they say something that is interesting that is in the domain of biology but it's not about life order it's about what we built so it's not artificial but it's a little bit engineering yes it is but as far as I know they're not concerned with what the worms do specific worms in nature interested in discovering certain mechanisms understand how for example say a methylation of a protein complex is being passed on to the next generation but they hope that this methylation exists not just in this worm this laboratory yeah but of course but they don't make claims about the wild no but how would they know if it's really weird and weird is a creation it's not just a kind of efficient kind of epistemological if you claim it's autological it's very little so you should be careful to say there is no proof to say that even the biomelecular mechanism you discovered there exists outside the laboratory you hope for I suppose yeah but then again they're not claiming that so this is what we discovered and it exists outside of the laboratory this is what happened in our research so they only claim things about the worm but it does inspire other biologists we're also working with other model organisms to try and see if they see similar things and then gradually there are similar patterns but sometimes there are important differences as well because sometimes we might think that discovery in C. elegans will be the same in fruit flies and some biologists will insist on not all fruit flies are completely different but that's also the beauty of it because there is to the scientists working with these model organisms these are really unique but they're constantly I agree that they are in between the uniqueness of this organism and the hope that somehow the mechanism they discovered within the organism will sort of that similar things will be discovered elsewhere and then I will be enthusiastic about that as well but I haven't come across a research paper where they say so this teaches us something about the worms in the wild and actually the worms in the wild are there's not so much research on that so that's a bit of an irony the worm in laboratory conditions we know the connectome, the genome can drop all the parts of it even if we don't understand all the interactions but the natural history of the worm itself is not very well known Super cool, I could say a lot and maybe you will but for now this relates to something that I just wanted to mention to ask you directly the point of the talk when you said that you heard the biologist talking about something being weird, I expected it to go a different way and I just wonder how it relates to your picture of weirdness because there's also the idea that weird is the discovery moment weird is the driver, weird is the weird is a positive thing too because it's not just that they're weird but it's that when you see something weird when you get dendritic structures in the gut of a worm you go that's weird but that's the good weird so how does that kind of weird as like weird as a motor factor then well that's the reason I think why I was interested when they said oh that's weird because they like weird and like surprises and things like that, unexpected things happening some biologists also talk of sense of water and really philosophical sense sense of water about what life is capable of and seeing that happen on a molecular scale in organisms I was just interested in in seeing okay connecting the word weird with its historical its narrative heritage and see what we get from that and try to perhaps make a distinction between weird and sense of wonder or weird and a weird surprise sure yeah that is interesting that they could just say that they didn't expect something but they are usually in the lab they usually say that it's weird and I don't think they are saying that with thinking about the whole etymological heritage of the term but maybe it's not entirely coincidental the wager that I and then the the whole thing perhaps here and the reason to sort of try to be more precise on this term weird is perhaps also to sort of try to cultivate it as a mode of attention and when I've discussed one of the articles the first article that I mentioned here with some other people I didn't insist so much upon this heritage of the weird I said yeah you're right it's very interesting what you're saying but it's weird just not another word for a surprise because weird should take into account the history of this word and so I was also prompted by colleagues to to stick through this a bit more I saw someone I want to go back to the idea of standardization standardization yeah because I understood that for standardization because we need to standardize the stable of time and it asks for a lot of control a lot of love for the world already so when you scale up to the human stuff and to the problematic of your obesity stuff and all these health care issues for humans how does it change because I would expect that the standardization is harder to get because if you're speaking you can just take a human human and wish it better for you yeah it could be quite an issue right but at some point I guess it depends on the time scale of your studies but the far longer in time for us it seems to be a standard future that we expect out of humans because the rate of of various people about to normal people in the game is increasing so at which point does it become a standard, does it become a regret anymore I guess it rates the idea of how you set up a standard for human life and it's kind of an issue so do you mean do you mean how did they define obesity? that is a question that's under a lot of STS work on classifications of conditions and all the diseases or not yeah sure that standardizing human beings like worms is impossible that's why they use bodily organisms and not humans but there are attempts at some sort of standardization if you want to see the site where the standardization is at its strongest in humans is in clinical trials probably just drugs but then again like I said I did work a bit on clinical trials and trying to prove the benefits of food which are not drugs so the effects cannot be effects of curing or preventing disease so this is a lot more difficult because you're not administering one simple model it's not simple but one potent agent one molecule but people are eating all the time and the thing that they're trying to test say calcium or so or a blood sterol or something might be present in a lot of things that people eat so they try to standardize their diets they usually exclude vegetarians and there are all sorts of things that happen when people are enrolled in these kind of clinical trials and as for food they actually thinkered with the definition of obesity because as food cannot prove it's it's a forbidden by law to make medicinal claims on food and in clinical trials you cannot use obese subjects and prove that if you prove that your food somehow works in whatever way then officially your food is no longer food but medicine so for the whole thing to be kept food to keep it food people need to be kept normal but how you prove that normal people become healthier so no but they're not really normal they're sort of in a suboptimal health into being and then for obesity for example it will be people between a body mass of 25 and 35 I think so there's also classification work, active work going on there the question is as well over time if you take a discrete distance if you take 60 per person so if you limit to this population this is the problem because it is not an awareness system this is how things are over time it's not an average human in the world yeah but average human that doesn't work because it might be a local standard but you have to take into account also the social and political conditions in which people live and obesity is far more prevalent in situations of poverty so I think you can always make averages with statistics but you need to take into account the social and political background as well and that's another reason to rethink this in terms of individual obesity not just as a specific condition or disease it's really a reflector but ecology in a sense made of social and political factors and access to food and habits and also food things but we like to especially in political projects, public health projects draw distinctions between people who really have a real disease and people who have a sort of behavioral problem we like to use the term behavior because it's easier to try and make recommendations for better behavior for people than to change the social and political conditions which define their life and their health and define normatively transcendental ways and define what is discreetly in the case and the abstract for it is the abstract manner right because if over time 90% of the population has become a certain way can you still keep the older standard the older standard so what you're asking is how the standards evolve if the reality they are trying to describe evolves as well even if 90% of the population is still being normatively niche I think that depends on from one case to another I mean there are politicians who have lowered unemployment rates by changing the definition of unemployment is they've lowered them that's the magic of statistics but you still must believe that if there's some causal factor it's not just a convention if there's a causal factor that you show through this normalization it cannot be just a convention so if you do the same experiment paternity or visiting it's impossible not to have that that are not obese in your sample because that's the standard of that population would you be able to show the effect even if it exists? that's your question first one of clarification so I think I must have missed something because I didn't really see what you said about the fact that but the relation is with the whole weird thing because it's a case clearly where people are too quick in jumping to moral conclusions or blaming others for where it's not there's also kind of wrong inference going on in this paper and the comments one but what does that have to do with weirdness? it's not a weirdness that is being morally despised or something or rejected it's a certain behavior in society that is not weird at all because the US society is quite common so I didn't see the link with the rest of the talk what I call the weirdness the fact that a new relation has been discovered in molecular terms so let's say that this points to the fact that something can be transmitted which previously perhaps we didn't think possible something is being transmitted in this case a hypometallation and this might not be weird in itself but I think it's important to try and stay with these specific findings and allow for some discomfort perhaps around okay let's think a bit further so this indicates a new kind of relation it has some implications also for kinship relations which also seem to extend through pathways that we didn't previously consider and so this is what I this is also what they saw with the worm in a certain sense it was also about transmitting something to the offspring and the effects that that has and in the more general sense what I'm trying to get at is that is to avoid you know the trap that you set of moralization and not accommodating the concepts that we have in the face of something that invites us to rethink the nature of that which we are investigating namely people and their relations to molecular mechanisms I think that if you cannot see the weirdness in a sense of this then have you really understood the implications have you really understood what's happening in the research and my main question is more philosophical I would like to understand whether the sort of weirdness you are interested in has to do more with descriptive aspect scientific aspect like pure science aspect or more technology aspect like this of course like monster Frankenstein and so on this sort of monsters weird things that you can like to know or good biologists could create it and this is a mobile organism that is kind of boring in itself it's not like monster Frankenstein monster it's but for a while trying to make it standard or try to make it as boring as possible then the weirdest things show up but not because anybody was trying to construct a monster quite the opposite they were trying to control the control they were trying to study it as if it was something of which the fate would be predicted and then because of this modernization and so on it seems that it becomes easier to discover the monster this goes completely in different direction than saying maybe it's interesting in science to sometimes let evil geniuses or geniuses in general go wild and build stuff that normally shouldn't happen and survive in nature and doesn't correspond to any of the standards we have but use your imagination and try to combine two organisms into one or whatever I don't know what you're thinking about but not going for standardization not going for predictable subjects but create something new, biological technological, new in the lab that is unpredictable nothing will be a big surprise because anyway there is no you did something new so what is coming out will anyway not be according to your expectations and this might also be something that is sometimes good to try out the weird stuff but this strategy towards two kinds of weirds seems very different, quite opposite actually so it's like what's wondering whether you see this tension or what you were trying to get into and whether it's two sides or the same attractive attitude I don't know or not it's quite an open question this sort of completely wild creating without expectation I don't think this happens anywhere maybe I present it a little bit too wild it's a very theoretical action but there are creations of come closer to the Frankenstein option where there are expectations and this happens in biotech labs I think where we make for example transgenic plants which resist pesticides and then they are used and they encourage the increasing use of pesticides and the consequences of all that we are only starting to understand those but that is the solutionist technological enterprise where there is no I don't think there is any room for weird in this sense is just trying to have a solution you have a solution you have a solution in mind which redefines the problem of poor harvest in the south for example as a technical problem, as a technical fix and either it works or it doesn't I think that in fundamental research there is a technological component as well in the whole process to standardize the organism there are a lot of technical procedures that are being followed but it's not the creation of a new technology because it's driven by specific hypotheses and questions and it's in that context that you can actually be surprised by the way your boring organism shows itself not to be boring at all there's one thing that I start to understand while working with these biologists that they are really fascinated by this work despite the fact that we know it's genome and it's connectome for a couple of decades now so I think that's a difference to make the creation of a technological solution to something or the research that's happening in this kind of laboratory you want to see it on this one menu of modern organisms that biologists could choose and there was a very nice paper about science quite recently which was entitled how to choose your research organism that's a listing but what criteria societies use is that they want to choose research that you can choose a warm rat, a monkey and so on and for instance cost is specifically considered of the easiness to grow in the laboratory your organism in the lab it's a very practical thing but also very more epistemic things how does it relate, how does the organism specifically relate to the phenomenon of interest or how does it, how closes it to for instance the human species because this is in the end what we are most interested in is to do your right to do your right one and can serve two people so you have a lot of considerations but then you can use, you can say that it takes a role because it's more normal but then it's too expensive to grow as well so then weirdness, what would be the role of weirdness as a factor in this kind of choice of models I see two directions weirdness is a kind of strategy to save a model from bottom it's a, see a warm is quite far from human spaces it's like there's a lot of disadvantages in terms of maybe if you want to go to clinical applications and models have a life they have a life cycle and at some points everyone does flies and then no one does anymore anyone is free so maybe some of your researchers so the way it was put real do they see maybe for them it's a strategy to just save a model that is going to disappear from bottom or is it do you see the risk when we say if it's too weird the risk is that it's not useful anymore because if it's too weird it means that it's too far away from what we understand or from what we are interested in in other parts of science or from some form in human being so how would you researchers for realness be relate to other kind of models I cannot speak in their name of course but I did organize a seminar at the end of my research day where I presented a talk which partly resembled a bit this talk and there was a discussion and they were very appreciative of the talk and there was discussion going on in which they more or less all confessed that in fact they are not interested in humans at all and if they could stay away from humans as far as possible that would be great because the work is really what they are interested in I mean after several months and then after that I stayed in touch through email I sent them the paper for EMBO reports as well at some point even inviting them to co-author it if they liked but this didn't happen for reasons of timing and so on but the only thing that I can conclude so far from all the discussions that I had and the reactions on this particular paper and this particular idea of the weird is that they fully supported and it's as simple as that they resisted it in the world because it's you know what the more they work with it they appreciate it's unique qualities and how it makes them think differently about certain biological mechanisms without necessarily assuming that these mechanisms will operate in the same way somewhere else sometimes even knowing that it doesn't work the same way in the fruit flies so that becomes an interesting thing in itself oh look I thought this would be the same thing it might give fruit flies but no it's not the same thing at all that's weird I'm not sure I think it's badly chosen I'm not sure if in all cases the term model is still appropriate and there are biologists also say well actually more appropriate name is experimental organisms an organism to experiment with it's not necessarily a model and in many cases when I asked you know what is it a model of it's not necessarily a model it shouldn't be a model so that was their answer it's fair it's a fair answer I think it's an experimental organism and they have the same kind of fascination one of the researchers compared it especially the photos with the green fluorescent protein which allows them to see certain things in more detail the neuronal markers they say well to me it's just like looking into deep space seeing territories that we didn't know before they had a real excitement and maybe the comparison is valid I mean I haven't worked with astrophysicists or astronomers but maybe the fascination what drives them is something very similar possibility for a genuinely encounter encountering something with the real even if it has to go through a lot of artifice which makes the account possible in the first place I can't talk about astrophysicists but when you do a history for instance you do have that history you find some archive and well that's crazy but yes in this example they didn't pass but now I can't see this right now and yes I think I've learned a lot it's not similar and you also have the oh this is weird maybe I'm missing some archives to make sense of it in a bad sense this is weird in a bad sense but it's also weird in a good sense I also need to look at his he's also done history do you know him? that's interesting though it sort of echoes what you said a bit earlier on that might be good and a bit weird because also I don't know it's similar in history where maybe you misread like when it's like maybe you misread something but in science you can also mess up so that's weird it can mean oh we messed up the test we messed up the lab, we messed up something probably it happens a lot yeah that was all the test and not just this and that you can back with the COVID-19 positive test and then a negative and that's weird is this a bad work or is it a mistake in the lab that you have to consider? rule we should all adopt avoid cosmic art because it cannot be researched and do any science that's the rule number one but it's great literature they're good stories definitely time