Hormone Mimics and their Promiseof Significant Otherness

SARA WYLIE

History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society Program, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

ABSTRACT Some scientists argue that we face a worldwide reproductive crisis known as

‘endocrine disruption’, a term used to encompass the effects of hormonally active

chemicals in our environment. Everyday chemicals such as plastics, pesticides and

flame retardants can mimic hormones and thereby disrupt the reproductive,

neurological and immunological development of humans and other animals. This

surprising discovery is causing consternation in scientific, policy, academic and

corporate arenas as they attempt to define, assess and control for this understudied

phenomenon. How can the social sciences participate in understanding and solving the

problem generated by endocrine disruption? First, there is an early history of

endocrine disruption; the development of insect hormone mimics as pesticides, that has

yet to be brought to bear in contemporary discussions of endocrine disruption. Second

a social science analysis of the mishaps resulting from the 1970s’ development of insect

hormone mimics as pesticides offers a new way of thinking scientifically about mimesis.

Employing the social science insight that mimesis is productive of social change sheds

light on how insect hormone mimicking pesticides produced a number of scientific

surprises. By analyzing the outcome of using mimesis in the laboratory, this paper

participates in the discussion of endocrine disruption by arguing for a re-evaluation of

the predominance of laboratory based sciences when dealing with epigenetic phenomena.

KEY WORDS: Endocrine disruption, epigenetics, mimesis, companion species, pesticides

We are confronting a worldwide reproductive crisis known as endocrine disrup-

tion, a term that refers to the effects of hormonally active chemicals in our

Science as Culture

Vol. 21, No. 1, 49–76, March 2012

Correspondence Address: Sara Wylie, History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society Program,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Building E51-148, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139,

USA. Email: sawylie@mit.edu

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/12/010049-28 # 2012 Process Presshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2011.566920

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environment. Everyday chemicals, such as plastics, pesticides and flame retard-

ants, can mimic hormones and thereby disrupt the reproductive, neurological

and immunological development of humans and other animals. This surprising

discovery is causing consternation in scientific, policy, academic and corporate

arenas as they attempt to define, assess and control for this understudied

phenomenon (Colborn et al., 1993, 1997; Krimsky, 2000; Colborn, 2004).1 In

2008, Canada banned the use of Bisphenol A (BPA), a plasticizer found in most

clear hard plastics, from use in baby bottles because it can act like an estrogen

(Layton and Lee, 2008). Similar bills have since been introduced in the United

States (HR 1523, 2009).

Endocrine disruption, however, has a history stretching back many decades.

This paper offers a historical corrective to the idea that endocrine disruption is

a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, a researcher at Harvard, Carroll Williams, con-

ceived of disrupting hormonal signaling in order to control pest insects. Williams

proposed that an insect hormone, discovered by the British ‘father of insect physi-

ology’ V.B. Wigglesworth, which prevents metamorphosis in insects, could be

used as a pesticide. In the 1970s, the first insect hormone mimicking pesticides

were produced. As Williams had suggested, these hormone mimicking pesticides

were intended to trick insects into not metamorphosing. Studying both the

assumptions involved in the development of hormone mimicking pesticides,

and the outcomes of their use, sheds light on how endocrine disruption came to

be independently rediscovered some 20 years later as an epigenetic human and

environmental health crisis.

In her research on epigenetics, Hannah Landecker calls for social scientists to

engage with scientists in an epochal shift occurring within the sciences to

account for the role of the environment in development. Though the last

century has been described as the century of the gene, science studies scholars

have noted that, with the completion of the human genome, the book of life is

proving not so easily read, particularly due to epigenetic phenomena (Fox

Keller, 2000; Kay, 2000). Epigenetics, the study of the inheritance or expression

of a phenotype, or gene expression pattern, that is not based upon the nucleotide

sequence of the genome, examines how environmental factors can influence

inheritance and development. Such research is now central to understanding

how the genome is interpreted, activated and passed along from the level of indi-

vidual cells to that of the organism and their offspring. The important question cur-

rently posed in epigenetic research, according to Landecker, is how to determine

what counts as the environment. As scholars of environments, both physical and

cultural, social scientists should not leave scientists to answer this question alone,

Landecker argues. Social scientists have a role to play in the endeavor to recon-

textualize both the fetus within the mother and the genome with its environment.2

Science studies scholars and environmental historians have ably analyzed why

environmental health problems have been hard for the laboratory sciences to

see (Sellers, 1997; Allen, 2003; Murphy, 2006; Nash, 2006; Langston, 2010).3

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The study of pesticide exposures in Californian agricultural workers showed that

laboratory assumptions made by studying micro-organisms were insufficient in

identifying laborers’ chemically-induced diseases (Nash, 2004, 2006). Toxicology,

which developed safe threshold limits for chemicals by looking for reproducible

and gross disorders in standardized laboratory adult organisms exposed to single

chemicals (Sellers, 1997), failed to predict the effects on genetically diverse

human populations exposed to multiple chemicals at sub-threshold doses

(Murphy, 2006). The process of epidemiological research on toxicants can often

be at odds with the social justice needs of exposed populations (Allen, 2003).

These studies contribute to an understanding of why laboratory methods are ill-

suited for environmental problems, precisely because the laboratory cannot

mimic external environments. Are there other effects of assuming that laboratory

conditions can stand in for and mimic environments outside the laboratory?

Informed by theoretical work from the social sciences on mimesis, this paper

studies the impacts of using the laboratory as a mimetic environment without

fully understanding the ability of mimesis to produce social and biological

change. Analyzing the scientific process of developing juvenile hormone mimicking

pesticides this paper asks: how have the scientists developing juvenile hormone as

an endocrine disruptor understood and employed mimicry to manage human pests,

and how can social science definitions of mimesis help explain the surprising things

that went wrong with juvenile hormone mimics when they were used? By studying

the specific example of the uses of this insect hormone, and the mishaps that have

arisen from its use, this paper aims to show what the social sciences have to offer the

sciences in the efforts to understand endocrine disruption.

Conceptual Background

In biology, mimesis is commonly thought of as the practice of copying. Before the

digital era, in which differences between a copy and its original are becoming less

significant, copying implied the smuggling in of something slightly different from

the original. Anthropological theory of mimesis pays attention to that smuggling

in, not as a means of preserving similarity, but as a means of inducing social

change.4 Drawing these definitions together through the story of juvenile

hormone, this paper offers the reader a novel interpretation of how the environ-

ment of the laboratory unpredictably produces biological and social change

through the relationship-transforming use of mimicry.

Taussig, an anthropologist, argues that mimesis is ‘the nature culture uses to

create second nature’ (Taussig, 1993, p. xiii). Second nature is a concept used

to describe the industrial landscapes, environments and organisms produced by

human selection and activity (Cronon, 1991).5 Cronon analyzes these environ-

ments as second nature because they would not exist without human intervention

and yet once produced are treated as second nature, something that becomes so

commonplace that it seems innate. Did Wigglesworth, the scientist who first

Hormone Mimics and their Promise of Significant Otherness 51

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identified juvenile hormone, use mimesis to create second natures? While the

biological definition of mimesis focuses on the mechanism of copying, which

might seem to generate similarity, Michael Taussig, in Mimesis and Alterity,

argues that the process of mimesis is, in fact, a mechanism of producing social

change. That change is brought about by a process he describes as othering,

whereby an individual engages in mimicry and transforms itself into someone

other than it was previously. Taussig argues that mimesis requires the mime to

become other and that this opens a space in which the mime’s sense of self can

be undermined and transformed in surprising ways. Alternatively, for the dupe,

the party taken in by someone or something’s successful act of mimicry, their

social and biological relationship with the mime can be transformed. The

mime’s unstable sense of self and relationship to the dupe, can unleash what is

called the ‘spirit of mischief’ (Taussig, 1993, p. 43). This spirit of mischief describes

surprising transformations of both the mime and dupe that can be produced by

mimicry. As we will see, the mimicry engaged in by insect physiologists, both to

get organisms into the laboratory and in their resultant efforts to deploy their

insect hormone mimics outside the laboratory, resulted in much mischief!

Walter Benjamin’s and Theodore Adorno’s work on mimesis stresses that

mimesis is a way in which humans interact with the world not through domination

but through self-transforming imitation (Adorno, 1981–1982; Benjamin, 1986).

Mimesis is, in fact, a means of constructing new relationships with and new under-

standings of various environments through humans imagining themselves, rather

than the world around them, to be other, or different than they are at present.

According to Benjamin, children are particularly in touch with the mimetic

faculty. Through mimesis, the ‘child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or

teacher but also a windmill and a train’ (Benjamin, 1986, p. 333). This sense of

mimesis, as a means of drawing researchers closer to their object of study, is dis-

cussed by anthropologist of science Myers in her study of how protein modelers

mimic their computer models of proteins in order to physically embody the struc-

ture of their proteins (Myers, 2006). These theoretical arguments highlight

mimesis as a human faculty that allows humans to imagine being different and

inhabit the world differently, not as an observer in object–subject relationships

but as part of a larger environment. Mimesis, research in the social sciences

shows, is a means for humans to develop transformative relationships. Donna

Haraway, historian and philosopher of science, argues that we should focus on

relationships, saying that there is ‘one fundamental thing about the world—

relationality’ and moreover that ‘. . . embedded in relationality is the prophylaxis

for both relativism and transcendence’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 37). What kinds of

relationships do laboratories and scientists produce when they employ mimesis?

The human characters in this story of juvenile hormone mimics are V.B.

Wigglesworth, a pioneer of insect physiology, and his protege Carroll Williams.

They both employ mimesis to habituate their insect research subjects to the

laboratory and they use mimesis to manipulate insect time within and without

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the laboratory. The mastery they achieved over insect metamorphosis in the

laboratory was misinterpreted as implying that they could achieve mastery over

our insect others in the field by mimicking their hormones. The failure of juvenile

hormones to be either irresistible to insects or species-specific reveals why

mimicry, the tool which I argue they used to gain mastery over insects, can

unexpectedly undermine that control. Furthermore, this failure exposed a disturb-

ing biological homology between humans, insects and plants and produced a

surprising change in human perceptions of our interspecies relationships.

Thinking about the laboratory and its products as mimetic in the social science

sense, i.e. as social and biological change agents, lends a partial answer to thinking

through how the social sciences and the sciences might work together to under-

stand not the role of ‘the environment’, which is currently being pared down to

biochemical changes to the genome or its transcription and translation, but the

role of environments, like the laboratory, in shaping biological development

and our scientific grasp of it. In essence this paper builds upon the insight made

in science studies that the laboratory is not a space exception but rather exists

in an ecosystem related to the many other kinds of ecosystems humans co-

produce by offering a study of how mimesis has been used as a tool to build

relationships between the laboratory and other environments.

From Colony to the Laboratory: Embodying Juvenile Hormone in theInsect

Juvenile hormone was first hypothesized in the 1930s by Sir. Vincent

B. Wigglesworth, an English scientist, at the London School of Hygiene and

Tropical Medicine. A pioneer of insect physiology, Wigglesworth transformed

the study of insects, in large part by turning insects, in particular the human

parasite, Rhodnius prolixus, into laboratory tools for physiological research

(Locke, 1996). His work revealed that insects not only have hormones, but also

neuroendocrine hormones (Edwards, 1998).

In 1926, Wigglesworth was hired as a lecturer in entomology at the London

School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was asked by the professor who

hired him ‘to create order in the field, and to develop insect physiology as the

basis for the control of harmful insects’ (Locke, 1996). In pursuit of this goal

‘He used all that he could obtain: cockroaches, mosquitoes, tsetse flies, fleas,

bed-bugs, bird-lice, human lice, mealworms and, above all, the bug Rhodnius

prolixus’ (Locke, 1996, p. 543). Rhodnius prolixus is a beetle native to South

America, and the vector for Chagas Disease (Chagas, 1909). Wigglesworth

enticed Rhodnius into their new laboratory home at the London School by

rolling up his sleeve and feeding them on his own blood (Locke, 1996, p. 546).

He performed a series of controlled experiments feeding Rhodnius on his

fingers, hand, forearm and elbow. His notes from this period track the progress

of the bites’ swelling and itchiness (Wigglesworth, 1927). In becoming the

Hormone Mimics and their Promise of Significant Otherness 53

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beetles’ victim, Wigglesworth duped Rhodnius into accepting an entirely new

environment. He soon realized the parasitic relationship between Rhodnius and

humans could, in the laboratory, be used to make Rhodnius an ideal tool for study-

ing insect metamorphosis.

Rhodnius is a hemipteran insect, and does not undergo a full metamorphosis,

but instead gains adulthood via a series of nymphal stages. Transition from one

nymphal stage to another requires a blood meal, whose availability previously

synchronized the timing of Rhodnius development to the presence of its prey.

By offering himself as food, rather than being an unwitting victim, Wigglesworth

gained control of Rhodnius’s developmental on/off switch.

Rhodnius’s predictable, meal-dependent life cycle allowed Wigglesworth to

predict and control their entrance into each phase of growth. He divided their

development into five larval stages, each distinguished by recognizable markings

on the cuticle (Wigglesworth, 1970, p. 2) (see Figure 1).

The Royal Society’s tribute to Wigglesworth and his ability to control the

development of Rhodnius celebrates his transformation of the beetle into almost

a ‘reagent’, which ‘can be kept on the shelf . . . surviving weeks or months of

starvation’ (Locke, 1996, p. 546).

In 1932 Wigglesworth decapitated Rhodnius immediately after feeding them.

He was surprised to find that, rather than molting into the next nymphal stage,

the insects jumped ahead in biological time and metamorphosed into tiny adult

Rhodnius. He reasoned that something released from the head, which he called

inhibitory factor, must have been actively preventing metamorphosis (Wigglesworth,

1934). Wigglesworth then showed that inhibitory factor is produced by the brain.

When a decapitated but freshly fed fifth-stage nymph is connected to an intact

fourth-stage nymph, the beheaded fifth-stage nymph, under the influence of the

fourth stage nymph’s brain, presumably via inhibitory factor, did not metamorphose

into an adult insect, but rather into an unheard of sixth juvenile form (Wigglesworth,

1970) (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. Stages of Rhodnius development. Credit: T. Heger, ‘Rhodnius prolixus (nymphs andadult)’ [online]. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triatominae (accessed 14 May 2010).Permission to use this image is granted under its Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Unported license.

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Such a finding was noteworthy, as insects were not believed to possess

hormones, let alone neurologically produced hormones. Indeed, at this time

there had been only one demonstration of neuroendocrine cells in any organism:

in 1917 a Polish researcher, Stefan Kopec, showed that, if ligated around the

thorax, a gypsy moth caterpillar’s anterior end pupated, while the posterior end

remained a caterpillar (Kopec, 1922; Edwards, 1998, p. 472). Kopec’s research

inspired Wigglesworth’s work decapitating Rhodnius.

Wigglesworth’s final proof of the existence of inhibitory factor was accom-

plished by inscribing his initials on the back of an adult beetle with the neuro-

logical secretions of a nymph’s corpora allata, two small organs attached to the

base of the insect brain (see Figure 3). This induced the adult cuticle to revert

back to the nymphal form (Locke, 1996, p. 547).

Figure 2. Two beheaded Rhodnius nymphs joined in parabiosis (Wigglesworth, 1959, p. 78). Credit:Reprinted from Vincent B. Wigglesworth, The Control of Growth and Form, # 1959 by CornellUniversity; renewed # 1987 by Vincent B. Wigglesworth. Used by permission of the publisher,

Cornell University Press.

Figure 3. Juvenile hormone causes the adult cuticle to change back to juvenile cuticle. Credit:Reprinted from Vincent B. Wigglesworth, The Control of Growth and Form, # 1959 by CornellUniversity; renewed # 1987 by Vincent B. Wigglesworth. Used by permission of the publisher,

Cornell University Press.

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The ability of inhibitory factor to reverse metamorphosis (rather than simply

prevent it) led to its rechristening as juvenile hormone (Wigglesworth, 1970,

p. 47). With this signature, Wigglesworth expressed his mastery of, indeed own-

ership and control of, Rhodnius’s very biological time. Wigglesworth’s primary

goal in mastering Rhodnius was not to address it as a vector of Chagas Disease,

but to render it an experimental medium in which to discover and demonstrate

the principles of insect development. In 1939, he published and later edited

eight subsequent editions of The Principles of Insect Physiology, which was

dedicated to revealing the principles of insect biology and is now considered to

be the foundational text of the field. The first edition begins: ‘Insects provide an

ideal medium in which to study all the problems of physiology’ (Wigglesworth,

1939).

Previously Rhodnius’s relationship to humans had been only as a parasite and

vector of a crippling tropical disease. In the laboratory, however, as a ‘reagent’

in the study of development, it was Wigglesworth and insect physiologists that

became parasites. Making their livings at the expense of, but without wiping

out, Rhodnius, they fit both the biological and social definitions of a parasite.6

An ungentlemanly reversal has taken place.

In this new relationship, Wigglesworth generated forms of Rhodnius only

possible in a laboratory such as tiny premature adults, nymphs joined in

parabiosis and adult beetles with juvenile cuticles. Second natures abound in

Wigglesworth’s laboratory: they are second nature not only because they

become possible only in the lab, but also because, once realized in the lab,

they become second nature, the commonplace explanation for insect physiology

in the world beyond the lab. Wigglesworth’s manufacture of these previously

nonexistent forms of Rhodnius illustrates how mimesis can be used to transform

not only the relationship between the mime and dupe but also the mime and

the dupe themselves. Wigglesworth formed a new relationship between

humans and Rhodnius in his laboratory by convincing the insect that it was an

environment like any other. To dislodge Rhodnius from its tropical home

where it parasitized unwilling South Americans, and habituate it to his laboratory

in London, Wigglesworth had to understand their historical relationship of para-

site and host. He played the part of host. However he changed that relationship

in one very significant way: he chose to be a host. Indeed he studied the side-

effects of hosting Rhodnius on his own body. In order to convincingly act the

part and change their relationship, he literally had to change himself and

become like Rhodnius’s prey.

Taussig argues that Cuna shaman become other and control spirits through

chanting stories that generate an environment which shows their knowledge of

the spirits’ habits, for instance, by covering their bodies with scents attractive to

the spirits. This enactment by shaman creates a seductive mirror of the spirit

reality that draws the spirits in and directs their power (Taussig, 1993, p. 106).

Wigglesworth created such an environment for Rhodnius, a mirror of its

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prior environment where it had humans to feed on. However, like the shaman,

Wigglesworth was consciously creating this environment to habituate Rhodnius,

in order to take control over the beetle. Ironically, for this mimetic trick to

gain control over the beetle’s very development demanded that Wigglesworth

at least temporarily lose control of himself: he literally had to become the

victim and put himself at biological risk. Wigglesworth’s last step, the moment

of contact when Rhodnius bit him, created a physical interlinkage between

host and prey. Given that Rhodnius is a vector of Chagas Disease, such an

action entailed serious risk for Wigglesworth. The possibility of such a

biological interconnection where the insect and human bodies are physically inter-

connected, suggests a deep biological similarity, an ability to literally become

for a moment one entity. Wigglesworth was thus in three places at once: he was

a victim; he was physically connected to Rhodnius; and, in some manner,

he was outside it all, observing the scene as he orchestrated it and willingly

participated in it.

In analyzing how a Cuna shaman mimics an environment attractive to powerful

spirits so that the spirits will be duped into ceremonial practices, Taussig argues

the shaman is in a ‘strange position, inside and outside’, which as Taussig

points out ‘. . . is not to be confused with liminality because it is both positions

at one and the same time’ (Taussig, 1993, p. 111). Wigglesworth can also be

seen to occupy this strange position. Through mimesis, a spatial relationship of

being part of and separate from each other develops between the self and the

other. For a mimetic trick to work, this position of simultaneous self and other

must be maintained. The act of miming however, risks the very separation

between self and other on which mimesis is predicated. In this moment of

contact, the mime Wigglesworth became a victim and risked Chagas Disease and

the dupe Rhodnius unwittingly accepted a wholly new environment, the laboratory,

in which Wigglesworth could take control of its biological development.

Wigglesworth’s transformation of the Rhodnius–human relationship allows the

production of second natures within the laboratory, from those that accept his arm

as prey to those responding to the hormone he painted on their backs. Though it

may seem that these mimetic tricks make a parasite pliable, the questions made

possible by this development, the questions this experimental system poses to

Wigglesworth about insect development and metamorphosis, are not accidental.

They emerge from the historical relationship between parasite and host which

controls the timing of Rhodnius’s development. It was easy, in Wigglesworth’s

moment of mastery, to forget that this relationship is predicated on similarity

and the unstable possibility of becoming other. This mime and dupe share

biological and social relationships that Rhodnius, by dining on Wigglesworth’s

arm and reverting to childhood at his brushstroke, could not forget. Humans

would be later reminded of these relationships when juvenile hormone, distilled

and deployed to infiltrate enemy lines and disrupt their biological time, disobeyed

human direction.

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From Laboratory to Laboratory and Insect to Insect: Williams Copies aMaster to Master a Copy

Wigglesworth never managed to isolate enough inhibitory factor to determine its

chemical structure, nor did he conceive of a clear use beyond the laboratory for

his ability to manipulate insect biological time. Such knowledge came out of

Carroll Williams’s experiments at Harvard University on metamorphosis in

Hyalophora Cecropia, the giant American silkmoth (Tefler, 1992; Pappenheimer,

1996; Kafatos et al., 1997). In this different social and biological context,

Williams found not only a ‘cache’ of juvenile hormone but also a clear use for

this ‘insect invention’ beyond the laboratory (Williams, 1958, p. 72; 1967, p. 16).

Williams, like Wigglesworth, first took control of the moth’s developmental

cycle by exploiting its need as a pupa (a developmental stage entered following

four cycles of growth as a caterpillar) to experience a cooling period of two to

three weeks with temperatures between 3 and 58C in order to metamorphose into

a moth. Without this cooling period, the Cecropia remains a pupa. Although Cecro-

pia’s development was not controlled by the presence of food, like Rhodnius, it was

linked to particular environmental conditions conducive to its survival, in this case

the passage of winter. By mimicking cold conditions in the laboratory, Williams

tricked Cecropia into entering developmental cycles divergent from those possible

outside the laboratory. His analogous mastery of insect metamorphosis was

featured on an April 1950 cover of Scientific American (see Figure 4). The cover,

like Wigglesworth’s earlier work on Rhodnius, shows that the hormones controlling

metamorphosis originate in neuroendocrine glands and travel down the body.

The jar has fallen over. Out of it emerges a mature Cecropia moth. Illuminated by

the burning flame of an alcohol lamp, it encounters a living hall of mirrors in its

spatially and temporally dislocated kin whose disjointed bodies reflect the process

of its own metamorphosis. First, we see a temporal-chimera, whose body, though

whole, moves in three biological times. By virtue of strings constricting the passage

from head to thorax and thorax to abdomen, its head, abdomen and thorax are in

three different biological stages: advanced pupa, pupa and caterpillar. In the fore-

ground, a pupa rests, this one bisected and reconnected by a plastic tube. Though

physically separated because of the fragile tissue bridge that has grown down the

tube, the two halves of this pupa move toward metamorphosis in synchrony. The

Scientific American cover depicts living demonstrations ‘that the substance control-

ling metamorphosis originates in the thorax’ and travels down the body. With this

scientific still life, the reader is offered a window into the laboratory of Williams.

Through careful cutting and pasting with sterilized, surgical tools, the Williams

laboratory, this picture shows, brought the process of metamorphosis out of the jar

and into view. While the moth confronts the twisted and, from an anthropomor-

phized perspective, terrifying reflections of itself, a human inspecting the cover

is given the sense of peeling back the cocoon of the Williams laboratory to

marvel at the transformations taking place inside. Analogically, this picture

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establishes the laboratory as a cocoon-like environment in which metamorphosis

is itself transformed from a process hidden to the human eye to one illustrated by

these living demonstrations.

Figure 4. The April 1950 cover of Scientific American by Stanley Meltzoff. Credit: Reproduced withpermission, # 1950 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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From the Insect to the Oil: Williams Bottles Dreams of Mastery Beyond theLaboratory

Combining surgical techniques with Cecropia’s on/off switch allowed Williams

to distill useable quantities of juvenile hormone (Williams, 1958, p. 72). Interested

in the differences between hormonal expression in pupal and adult silkworms,

Williams joined a headless adult moth and a chilled pupa in parabiosis. To his sur-

prise, when a headless male moth was attached to a pupa ready to metamorphose,

the pupa failed to undergo metamorphosis: ‘. . . the pupa behaved as if it had

received a rich dose of juvenile hormone’ (William, 1958, p. 72). Figure 5

Figure 5. This image is Figure 1 from C. William (1963) Biological Bulletin, 124, pp. 355–367.Credit: Reprinted with permission from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA.

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shows the experiments leading to the discovery of this surprising source of juven-

ile hormone (Williams, 1963, p. 358).

In the upper left corner, a headless male moth is attached to the body of a

chilled, and therefore ready to metamorphose, pupa. However, as shown in the

lower left photo, three weeks later the pupa has molted its cuticle and entered

another pupal stage showing only traces of adult characteristics—the slightly

raised primordial wings, for instance. The remaining photos show that the same

effect can be achieved with only the abdomens of male moths. By grinding

these up, Williams recovered what he called ‘caches’ of juvenile hormone

(Williams, 1963, p. 355). Purification of this hormone from moth abdomens

meant that the insects no longer had to be used as experimental ‘living factories’

for the hormone—the power to intervene in insect biological time could be bottled

and kept on the shelf (Williams, 1958, p. 68).

It is 1958 and the picture shown in Figure 6, like the times, has changed. Instead

of the clutter of the Williams lab on the 1950 cover of Scientific American, we see

neatly arranged ‘symbols’ of the study of juvenile hormone against a sanitized,

white background. In this picture, the moth is neither active nor inquisitive: it is

displayed as an object, visually equated with an orderly row of mutants and

three new items, two glass vials and one long syringe. As a parallel to the isolation

of each object, this picture conveys an important advance in the study of juvenile

hormone: its extraction and purification. The two glass vials, one larger and darker

than the other, represent a crude extract of the hormone and a purified, lighter

form. The syringe bisecting the drawing is full; at its tip a small drop bulges.

Using such syringes, ‘test animals’ have been produced to attest to the power of

the hormonal extract. One insect, treated with the extract as a caterpillar, grew

to an unusually large size and metamorphosed late into a mega-moth. In contrast

the miniscule moth to its right, with its corpora allata, the source of juvenile

hormone, removed as a caterpillar, has metamorphosed prematurely into a

midget. Above the syringe, three other ‘test animals’ are represented: the insect

on the far right, treated with an ‘inactive’ extract, has metamorphosed into a

moth (its wings furled); the hybrid in the middle, treated with a small dose,

bears both pupal and adult characteristics; and the subject receiving the largest

dose, on the left, has been stripped of half of its cuticle to reveal a nascent

second pupa (Williams, 1958, p. 4). In form and content, this picture expresses

the fact that organization has been achieved; cause and effect established. The

cause—juvenile hormone—has come under the control of human beings

through its extraction.

This easily accessible extract made possible the achievement of another emer-

ging mimetic desire, which Williams expressed in his brief letter to Nature:

Therefore in addition to the theoretical interest of the juvenile hormone, it

seems likely that the hormone, when identified and synthesized, will prove

to be an effective insecticide. This prospect is worthy of attention because

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Figure 6. The February 1958 cover of Scientific American painted by John Langley Howard.Credit: Reproduced with permission, # 1958 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.

All rights reserved.

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insects can scarcely evolve a resistance to their own hormone (Williams,

1956, p. 213).

In the context of the evolving agricultural and industrial battle with pests, this

tactic was extremely appealing. Despite self-confident declarations by chemical

corporations that the war against pests was being won, by 1958 pests’ resistance

to DDT was fully fledged. In the 1958 issue of Scientific American alone,

American Cyanamid Co. and Shell both advertise the effectiveness of their new

pesticides, Malathion and Aldrin (American Cyanamid Co., 1958, unmarked;

Shell, 1958, p. 62). By 1952, DDT resistance ‘had been developed by important

pests of apples, cabbages, potatoes, tomatoes and grapes [as well as] the body

louse, the bedbug, two species of fleas and several species of mosquitoes’

(Brown, 1977, p. 22). Furthermore, resistance to the second round of synthetic

chemical pesticides, including Aldrin and Malathion, was also increasing.

Aldrin, part of the ‘cyclodiene group of organochlorines’, was introduced in

1948, and resistant pests were already emerging by 1955, three years before this

advertisement (Brown, 1977, p. 23). Meanwhile resistance to organophosphorus

pesticides like Malathion had been seen as early as 1949 (Brown, 1977, p. 24).

An arms race, in which a cycle of action and reaction between opponents pro-

duces an escalating spiral, was forming between humans and pests.7 In this

context, juvenile hormone offered a novel solution to the problem: Williams

believed that because he had isolated an ‘insect invention’, something crucial to

their very process of development, a mistimed signal from juvenile hormone

would be impossible for insects to resist (Williams, 1967, p. 16). It was imagined

to be perfect because it would not kill the adults, but would stop a whole gener-

ation from reaching reproductive maturity. This mistimed biological signal, it

was hoped, would derange insects’ sense of biological time, thus creating

leagues of juvenile adults incapable of reproducing.

In an irony typical of mimetic relationships, the humans who took this step

became strangely like insects, in that they invested in developing large quantities

of insect hormones. Such an acquisition of insectoid attributes aligns with literary

theorist Rene Girard’s insight about mimesis: Girard argues that desire for another

always begins with the recognition that something else desires an object. In this tri-

angle, both humans and insects desire plants as food. Attempts to attain the object

from the rival inevitably leads to a mimetic race between rivals, where one attempts

to attain the object by copying the other. Humans, in this case, begin producing

insect hormones and covering themselves and their crops with them in order to

forestall the insect others’ attempts to eat crops first (Girard, 1978).

Williams’s idea caught on and, by 1967, he reported in Scientific American that

a researcher from the University of Wisconsin, Herbert Roller, had described the

chemical structure of juvenile hormone. This article did not make the front page,

however, perhaps because the structural formula for juvenile hormone, while

intelligible and meaningful for experts, did not make an interesting picture for a

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less specialized audience. In the article, Williams called the concept of hormone-

mimicking insecticides ‘Third Generation pesticides’ and contrasted them to

‘Second Generation’, or chemical, pesticides, specifically on the basis of their

potential for biological mimicry.8 Juvenile hormone mimics, Williams supposed,

would not only be foolproof because they were ‘of’ the insect and therefore

impossible to resist, but also because they would be a more targeted means of

pest control (Williams, 1967, p. 13).

DDT, in Williams’s lineage of pest control, is the paradigmatic Second Gener-

ation pesticide; Williams calls it an ‘an avenging angel’ that, sweeping in from the

heavens, wipes out good and bad insects alike (Williams, 1967, p. 13). Reiterating

Rachel Carson’s arguments from Silent Spring, published in 1962, that synthetic

pesticides’ environmental persistence led to collateral damage in non-target popu-

lations, Williams adds that they were easily resisted because they were not proper

to the insects themselves. Not so of juvenile hormone—here was a chemical that

could be distilled from the very target insect. Continuing the Cold War metaphors

it was a perfect mole. In characterizing juvenile hormone as ‘of’ the insect,

Williams almost sounds as if he is claiming, that he had bottled the very source

of insect otherness. This bottled otherness could be wielded to separate us from

them. By covering the crops that both human and insects covet, humans would

trick insects, and only insects, into thinking they were encountering their own

hormone.

Historically, pests, particularly insects, are one set of organisms that industrial

societies have had no problem imagining as completely unlike or other than

humans. Indeed, industrial societies have generally regarded insects as completely

insignificant to humans, except when they invade human homes or eat human

crops. The war humans have fought with pests, particularly over the course of

industrialization, has been described by the environmental historian Edmund

Russell, and attests to the perception of absolute difference between insects and

humans (Russell, 2001). From lice to fleas to grasshoppers, insects have been

treated as interlopers, insignificant others whose utter difference justifies their

ruthless extermination.

The supposed endgame of that battle, the synthetic production of insect hor-

mones to disrupt pests’ reproductive processes, however, rests on the transform-

ation of insects, through mimesis, into what Haraway would call companion

species. Companion species are, for Haraway, organisms who share and shape

each others’ evolutionary trajectory. Wigglesworth’s and Williams’ companions,

Rhodnius and Cecropia, were shaped by and shaped the scientists’ research ques-

tions and goals. Companion species help determine the kinds of humans we can be

and the ways we approach the world. Just as dogs help humans to herd sheep and

to sleep soundly knowing they will be alerted to danger, companion laboratory

species determine both the kinds of research questions scientists can ask and

their research timetables. This process is adeptly described by Kohler in his

historical study of the scientific domestication of Drosophila, which helped

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produce the modern field of genetics (Kohler, 1994). Haraway argues that compa-

nion species have relationships founded on their significant otherness, which

means that it is precisely their species differences that make them important to

one another: that dogs have a more refined sense of smell and hearing makes

them a great ally to humans. Based on this Haraway advocates that we recognize

and encourage our companion species’ differences to flourish rather than anthro-

pomorphizing them (Haraway, 2003). As this story illustrates, humans have had

no problem refraining from anthropomorphizing insects. Indeed if insects have

been anthropomorphized (as occurred in American propaganda posters produced

during World War II which equated the Japanese to insects) it was generally to

dehumanize human enemies (Russell, 2001). However, by attuning themselves

to the responses of their insects to hormone mimics, Wigglesworth and Williams

were poised to learn more about themselves and their environments. They learned

that parasites can be companions who bear similarities as well as differences.

Mimicking insect hormones to master insects reveals that just as humans and

insects have always shared social spaces, so they also share biological homologies.

From Within the Oil into the Paper: Juvenile Hormone Slips Out of andInto Our Grasp

A series of unexpected events in the Williams laboratory revealed that juvenile

hormone is not only an insect invention and that humans are not alone in this

mimetic game. In 1964, Karel Slama, an entomologist from Prague, and his

model organism, Pyrrhocoris apterus, visited the Williams lab (McElheny,

1964, 1966). Much to their surprise, when Pyrrhocoris was ‘reared in the bio-

logical laboratories at Harvard’, all but one of the 1,215 founder insects entered

an unusual sixth larval stage (Slama and Williams, 1966a, p. 235). Rather than

metamorphose into adulthood these insects were developmentally stuck as giant

babies (see Figure 7, taken from Slama and Williams, 1965, p. 412).

In 10 years of raising Pyrrhocoris larva in Prague, Slama had never encountered

this effect. Thanks to Williams’s attunement to the influences of juvenile

hormone, they realized that ‘the bugs had access to some unknown source of

Juvenile Hormone’ (Slama and Williams, 1965, p. 412). An audit of their labora-

tory conditions revealed the source to be the most mundane of objects, the tissue

paper placed in the jars of the reared insects: ‘When the toweling was replaced by

Whatman’s filter paper, the entire phenomenon disappeared and all individuals

developed normally’ (Slama and Williams, 1965, p. 412). Williams and Slama

were shocked: ‘The above mentioned finding seemed incomprehensible’ (Slama

and Williams, 1966a, p. 237). How could a juvenile hormone mimic reside in

the toweling? Further research revealed that the juvenile hormone activity came

from the wood of Balsam Fir, the primary constituent of American paper pulp,

and was present in many American newspapers and journals, including The

New York Times, Science, and Scientific American. Journals made from European

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woodstock, such as Nature and The London Times, were inactive (Slama and

Williams, 1965, p. 412; 1966a, p. 239, 1966b).

Following their discovery, Williams and Slama (and readers of Williams’s 1967

Scientific American article) were disoriented. In the article, Williams proclaims

the infallibility of juvenile hormone mimics as insecticides and names them an

insect invention, as well as relating his remarkable discovery that plants can

also produce juvenile hormone mimics, one of which was embedded in the very

paper of the magazine (Williams, 1967, p. 16). Is juvenile hormone really just

an insect invention? It seems plants are also playing at this game of producing

insect hormones. Are we perhaps not masters of the game but merely participants

who have unwittingly spread the message of juvenile hormone with our massive

paper industry? Plants are also signaling to insects; they, like humans, are also

more than they appear.

Not unlike Williams’s insects, humans have been duped into believing that

paper is blank. Discovering otherwise is somewhat like stumbling across a

message that is not meant for you, in that it uncovers a whole sensory conversation

to which humans had not previously been privy, though they had clearly become

its unwitting instruments. Through mimetic laboratory engagements with their

companion species, Williams and Slama entered humans consciously into the con-

versation. This discovery is notable as one of the first examples of plants mimick-

ing insect hormones as a defensive strategy and is recognized as important to the

foundation of the field of Chemical Ecology, which began to emerge from 1960 to

Figure 7. Slama and Williams’ figure showing the abnormal development of Pyrrhocoris when theyare exposed to paper extract. Note: The second larva moulted into an abnormal 6th stage larva ratherthan a normal adult, like the third Pyrhocris shown, when it was exposed to the paper extract. Thefinal Pyrhocris is a more abnormal 7th larval stage which was produced by exposing the abnormal6th stage larva again to the paper extract (Slama and Williams, 1965, p. 412). Credit: Permission to

reprint this image was granted by the author Karel Slama.

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1980 (Rosenthal and Janzen, 1979; Slama, 1999, p. 11). Both Slama and Williams

further investigated the signaling relationships between plants and animals;

Williams made discoveries regarding signals released by oak leaves, while

Slama explored the production of estrogens by plants, most famously the sterility

induced in New Zealand sheep after exposure to an estrogen mimic-producing

clover (Williams and Riddiford, 1967a, 1967b; Slama, 1979, 1980, 1999,

p. 11). By pretending to be something they were not, the historical home for

these insects, Williams and Slama unwittingly made a receiver for the paper’s

hidden message. This illustrates the first lesson about mimesis: everyone/thing

could be miming. If even a blank page can hold messages unreadable to

humans until a set of unpredictable agents align in an unpredictable fashion,

how can we know or trust even the most mundane objects at a molecular level?

This lesson helps us understand the next shock to Williams and his colleagues:

juvenile hormone-mimicking insecticides once on the market appeared to misbe-

have. Despite the resistance of one of Slama’s insects to the paper’s instruction not

to metamorphose and Cecropia’s own evident decision to ignore the memo,

Williams still believed himself to be in possession of an unbeatable mimetic

weapon. A company named Zoecon (life control) produced the first, intentionally

hormone-mimicking pesticide, Methoprene, registered for use in 1975 (Henrick

et al., 1973; Henrick, 1990, p. 14). Incorporated on 30 August 1968 in Delaware,

Zoecon was spun off from Syntex Corporation, a small Mexican company, made

famous through the synthesis of the first birth control pill by their director of

research, Carl Djerassi.9 Djerassi, in fact, saw reproductive control of humans

and insects as analogous problems (Djerassi et al., 1974). The fact that synthetic

hormones produced by the birth control pill are now found in waterways

interfering with fish development provides another example where an attempt to

gain biological control through mimesis produced unexpected results (Kolpin

et al., 2002; Timms et al., 2005; Kidd et al., 2007; Barnes et al., 2008).

Methoprene, the first biorational pesticide (a term coined by researchers at

Zoecon) was approved by the FDA for use against floodwater mosquitoes under

the trademarked name, Altosid Insect Growth Regulator (FDA, 1975, cited in

Henrick, 1990, p. 14). Sprayed onto waterways, fed to cattle and squeezed onto

pets’ backs, Methoprene has become a common signal in our environment. It is

the active ingredient in FrontlineTM, the flea control ointment, and it is added to

cattle feed to forestall the development of biting flies in their excrement.10 It has

also been successfully developed for combating whitefly infestations of cotton

(Ellsworth et al., 1996; Palumbo, 1998; Agnew et al., 2000). Despite these suc-

cesses, Methoprene’s message has largely been ignored, resisted or misunderstood.

First, Williams’s conviction that insects would not be able to develop resistance

to mimics of their own hormones has proved false. By 1977, after merely two

years on the market, ‘cross tolerance’ to Methoprene was found in the housefly,

the flour beetle and the tobacco budworm and, by 1998, resistance to Methoprene

was even reported in two species it was developed to combat against, mosquitoes

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and whiteflies (Brown, 1997, p. 31; Ashok et al., 1998). The ability of insects to

evolve resistance to mimics of their own hormones illustrates the second lesson

revealed through mimesis: that insects are inessential. Even their very processes

of reproduction and development can change over time. This suggests that organ-

isms are determined by their relationships and, like those relationships, change

over time. There are important ramifications in this lesson for other organisms.

For example, could or should human and other animals’ processes of reproduction

and development also be considered as biologically inessential? Such a question is

vital to ask today, given the current concerns that environmental exposure to estro-

gen and testosterone-mimicking chemicals will produce intersex animals that are

incapable of reproduction.

Finally, Williams’s conviction that juvenile hormones are insect inventions that

rarely occur in ‘higher organisms’ also proved false. By 1959 Williams himself

reported in Nature that ‘most, and perhaps all, mammalian tissues contain demon-

strable amounts of a substance the biological activity of which in the insect assay

is indistinguishable from that of juvenile hormone’ (Williams et al., 1959, p. 405).

In 1973, juvenile hormone analogues were found to inhibit oxidases in rat livers

(Mayer et al., 1973). Methoprene has been implicated in the die-off of lobster

populations on the east coast of the United States (Walker et al., 2005; Zulkosky

et al., 2005). Finally, Methoprene and juvenile hormone mimics have been

recognized as analogs of retinoids, molecules that ‘play essential roles in many

aspects of metabolism, development and reproduction in vertebrates’ and which

can ‘activate mammalian retinoid-response pathways’ by binding to retinoid

receptors (Harmon et al., 1995, p. 6157). It has also been hypothesized that the

retinoid-mimicking property of Methoprene explains its teratogenic effects,

which include limb deformities, at high doses in mice (Harmon et al., 1995,

p. 6160). Thus Methoprene is a potential culprit causing frog limb deformities

in regions of agricultural production, although studies also suggest the involve-

ment of parasites (Blaustein and Johnson, 2003).

This illustrates a third lesson of mimesis: it is a two-way street. Because

mimesis is based on relationships of similarity, we are all potentially, as

Taussig terms it, spacing out, becoming similar to other organisms, such that

the boundaries between self and other are indiscernible—mimesis can always

backfire. While the man-made Methoprene signal was duping non-target organ-

isms, the plant-created signal of juvenile hormone was rediscovered in the

run-off of paper pulp factories and implicated in the sex reversal of fish

(Mahmood-Khan and Hal, 2003). The relationship between natural and man-

made endocrine disruptors is a source of much debate between industrial and

environmental advocacy groups as they battle over the definition of slippery

terms: safety, natural and synthetic. As has been shown, however, the line

between natural and synthetic juvenile hormone is impossible to draw unilaterally.

According to Slama, by 1999 over 4,000 chemical mimics of juvenile hormone

had been synthesized or discovered. This proliferation of mimics, the diversity

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of their chemical structures and the higher potency of man-made versus insect or

plant derived compounds, all lead him to argue that the true juvenile hormone for

insects had still not been discovered (Slama, 1999). I would argue however, that it

is impossible to come to rest on a true or singular juvenile hormone in this maze of

mimics. Rather, the activity and meaning of a juvenile hormone is determined

within the context of an organism and by its relationships.

From the paper you are holding, to the meat we eat and the pets on which we

lavish love, juvenile hormone mimics have been embedded in our daily lives

socially and biologically. First realized in the bodies of Chagas Disease-carrying

human parasites, juvenile hormone was transformed into a written symbol on the

page, only to be betrayed by the matter of the page itself. In weaponizing juvenile

hormone as a chemical mimic and forgetting the two-way relationship of mimesis

on which it is based, we have reached the endgame in the arms race between pests

and humans: implosion into a paranoid whole in which the self can no longer be

extricated from the other. This implosion is illustrated by the contemporary crisis

over endocrine disruption, in which it is being recognized that many pesticides are

also biologically active as human hormone mimics. Returning to the first 1950

Scientific American cover, which establishes a relationship of readership

between the audience and the laboratory, we are invited to glimpse inside. We dis-

cover, however, that we are no longer simply readers of the story but participants

in it. If all human tissues have receptors responsive to juvenile hormone, we too

have become part of the story, though we may have been unaware of it consciously

until now. Coming to grips with the matter of the page itself, we find ourselves to

be other—not reader but protagonist! Looking through this window onto the

Williams laboratory we realize that we are participating as experimental objects

in the story. Displaced from the position of mere reader, we are part of the lab,

like the moths confronted with the process of our own transformation.

Conclusion

This story is unique perhaps in the physical linkage between the paper, its reader

and juvenile hormone, but it is not unique as a tale of how we are now physically

related, both socially and biologically changed, by the products of synthetic

chemistry. Many of the twentieth century’s synthetic chemicals were introduced

as mimics: synthetic dyes produced the same colors as plant-derived dyes,

nylons appeared like silk stockings, and plastics like glass. In our attempts at

mimicry, however, much that is different is smuggled in, and those differences

are important. For instance, the substitution of synthetic alternatives to dyes,

nylons and glass has transformed environments the world over, replacing colonial

agricultural industries with factories dependent on fossil fuels (Travis, 1993).

Nowhere has synthetic chemistry been more influential than in the effort to

control pests, and control our environment. In these efforts, it appears we have

transformed ourselves biologically. Studies of human body fat now indicate that

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humans born today are host to hundreds of synthetic chemicals (CDC, 2009;

EWG, 2009). As the historian and science studies scholar Michelle Murphy

argues, endocrine disruptors link us to our environments and our non-human

others; our bodies’ burden of synthetic chemicals shows where we have been

and what we have been exposed to, like an environmental history (Murphy,

2006, p. 696). Many of those chemicals are hormone mimics, and, just as we

attempted to forestall insect metamorphosis by providing mistimed hormonal

signals, so too human development and biology is being transformed by exposure

to such errant signals. Recent studies link exposure to endocrine disruptors to

decreased sperm counts, increased infertility, obesity and autism (Colborn,

2004; vom Saal et al., 2007; Newbold et al., 2008; Crain et al., 2009).

To answer the first question laid out in the Introduction, mimesis was employed

by Wigglesworth and Williams as a social and biological tool to produce second-

natures so that we now find ourselves in kinship relationships with the significant

others that Wigglesworth and Williams produced on their benches (Haraway,

2003). This mimetic spirit of mischief reveals that we have always had, and

will always have, companion species relationships to these organisms that have

previously been regarded as insignificant others. Indeed, understanding these

biological similarities and their significance to humans changed the perspectives

of the researchers described in this story, in Taussig’s rather than Haraway’s

use of the term, it made them significantly other.

Understanding this potential of mimesis to produce change calls for renewed

attention to the species around us as companion species, with whom we share his-

torical relationships and biological sensibilities and whose transformation equally

involves our own unpredictable transformations. To answer the second question

of how social science can inform epigenetic research, analyzing the mishaps pro-

duced by juvenile hormone mimics reveals what social scientists have foretold

about mimicry—that it operates through the human capacity to imagine ourselves

as other and that, in imagining ourselves so, we may be transformed. The laboratory

regarded as a mimetic space offers us a warning for how we should regard its

products. The story of juvenile hormone mimics shows the laboratory is not a

place of exception where we can step outside our biological and social histories;

it is, rather, one environment among many in which we may transform relationships;

but such transformations are not possible without simultaneously and unpredictably

transforming ourselves. Thus, one caution this social scientist offers the sciences

as we endeavor to understand the relationship between the genome and its environ-

ment is to return to a view of science that regards laboratory and field sciences as

different but equal: a view that cautions against regarding laboratory studies as

more certain and more valuable than correlations found by field sciences and the

results of ethnographic and historical inquiry. We require a renewed awareness of

the limitations of laboratory studies and fine-grained attention to any product

with mimetic aspirations. There is, nevertheless, also promise in this story—the

promise that we may yet imagine ourselves and our relationships to be other.

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Notes

1 For an excellent review of the policy and scientific controversies in regulating endocrine dis-

rupters see the special issue of Environmental History edited by Roberts and Langston entitled:

‘Toxic Bodies/Toxic Environments: An Interdisciplinary Forum’ (2008). In particular the

articles by Linda Nash, Barbara Allan, Sarah Vogel, Frederick Rowe Davis and Arthur

Daemmrich speak to the regulatory and scientific issues related to endocrine disruption. For

more in history of science on the field of endocrine disruption see Krimsky (2000) and Langston

(2003, 2010). For a general introduction into the study of endocrine disrupters see Colborn

et al. (1997). For a general review and history of science perspective on the development

and regulation of BPA see Vogel (2008).2 Landecker, unpublished manuscript.3 Other important works in social studies of field sciences are those by Kohler (2002), Allen

(2003) and Mitman et al. (2004).4 See ‘mimesis, n.’, OED Online, June 2004, Oxford University Press [online] (10 December

2004). For general overviews of theories of mimesis see: Spariosu (1984) and Kelly (1998).5 Stefan Helmreich makes a similar argument about the use of mimesis in order to create second

nature in artificial life communities (Helmreich, 1998, pp. 132–134, 242–244). There is a long

academic history to the use of the term ‘second nature’; for a review see Helmreich (1998,

pp. 11–12).6 See ‘parasite, n.’, OED Online, June 2005, Oxford University Press [online] (10 December

2004). Available at: http://dictionary.oed.com.libproxy.mit.edu/cgi/entry/50171334.7 For more on the relationship between the human war on pests and inter-human warfare see

Jansen (2000), Rasmussen (2001) and Russell (2001).8 For more on the industrialization of agriculture see: Cronon (1991), Fitzgerald (2003) and

Schrepfer and Philips (2004). For further reading on the relationship between entomology and

agribusiness, see: Hightower (1978), Busch and Lacy (1983), Pallodino (1986), Kloppenburg

(1988), Sawyer (1996) and Pollen (2001).9 The company name ‘life control’ connects the story to the larger theme of life control present

in the twentieth century’s turn toward experimentally based biological research. For more on

this see: Pauly (1987), Maienschein (1991), Oudshoorn (1994) and Clarke (1998).10 Altosid Feed Through System, http://www.altosidigr.com/hf_life_cycle_b.html (accessed 30

May 2006).

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