The datafication of nature: data formations and new scales in natural history

In this essay, I consider the scales and connections lost and gained as natural history adopts digital data infrastructures. On the basis of ongoing work in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, I track the relations between insect specimens and their material and digital informational ecologies. Using Latour's notion of the ‘circulating reference’, I follow the insect specimens as they make their way into taxonomies, databases, and digitization apparatuses. In focusing on human-data mediations in museum practices of ordering, describing, and distributing specimens, I show how the datafication of nature makes present conventionally dissociated contexts, including German colonialism. Proposing the concept of a data formation, I suggest that ethnographers have much to contribute in bringing forward the sociocultural and historical specificities and contingencies within data.     

What if Fleming had not discovered penicillin?

What would have happened had Alexander Fleming not discovered penicillin in 1928? Perhaps the obvious answer is that, someone else would have discovered penicillin during 1930s and the Oxford group, would still have purified it sometime in the early 1940s. Here, however, in this counterfactual account of the penicillin story, it is argued that without Fleming, penicillin might still be undiscovered and the antibiotic age would never have dawned. As a result, many of the recent developments in medicine, such as organ transplantation, might have been delayed or, at best, made more hazardous. Penicillin might have come onto the scene a few years later but, had Fleming overlooked the discovery, it seems certain that penicillin would not have saved countless Allied lives, during and after D-Day. Instead of having enjoyed fifty and more years of the antibiotic age, it is argued here, that we would have had to rely upon highly developed sulphonamides, so-called “supasulfas”, and other chemically-derived antibacterial drugs. Indeed, it might be the case that, even well into this new millennium, the antibiotic age has yet to dawn, and medicine is still waiting for someone to chance upon penicillin. Here we discuss what might have happened had Fleming not discovered penicillin and come to the conclusion that the medical armoury available today would have been far different and might have relied solely upon highly developed varieties of sulphonamides or similar, synthetic, non-antibiotic antibacterial agents.     

The influence of zinc,copper, iron and manganese on the mycological production of citric acid in surface cultures

Summary When analytical reagent grade chemicals were used in the preparation of the fermentation medium for citric acid production, enrichment with zinc was found to be essential for establishing, good acid production addition of manganese on the other hand, was found to be inhibitory. Slight inhibition or no effect was obtained on addition of copper and iron respectively.A Greeting to the 70th Birthday of Prof. Dr. A. Rippel-Baldes.