How and Why to Make Oil into Food: A Tale of Soviet Biotechnology and Human-Microbe Relations
Douglas Rogers, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, will give a talk titled: “How and Why to Make Oil into Food: A Tale of Soviet Biotechnology and Human-Microbe Relations.”
This talk focuses on a curious chapter in the history of Soviet science: the massive effort, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, to transform oil into food through industrial scale fermentation--that is, to use oil as a feedstock on which to grow and harvest protein-rich strains of yeast that could then serve as animal fodder or, perhaps, human food. The history of the Soviet oil-into-food program sheds light on a range of important topics in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, among them the nature of energy, life, and labor in late socialist societies; international science competition in a Cold War context; and a nostalgia for Soviet science that accompanies recent calls to revive these programs in the present day.
Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director of the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Yale University. His archival and ethnographic research in Russia since the 1990s has led to two award-winning books: The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals and The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture After Socialism. His current research concerns the history of hydrocarbon biotechnology, or, in other words, the global story of how microbes that eat oil and gas have featured prominently in different political, economic, and cultural orders since the 1950s.
