Dissertation Grant: Antibiotic Resistance, Planetary Crisis, and Bacteriophage Futures in the 21st Century

该奖项支持博士论文研究，重点关注抗生素耐药病原体（也称为“超级细菌”）的关键社会技术方面。它将研究抗生素耐药感染实体对21世纪人类社会的科学、经济、技术和生态影响。在此过程中，它将揭示导致抗生素在20世纪感染控制中占主导地位的文化价值观、政治经验和历史偶然事件。然后，它将专注于使用噬菌体技术作为后抗生素世界中有前途的前沿的替代方法。这项研究的结果将有助于建立公民意识，促进公众参与新兴生命科学的研究、设计和议程。它还将有助于政策制定者、监管机构和科学家制定以社会为基础的战略，在地方、国家和全球范围内应对抗生素耐药性。本研究项目考察了抗生素功效递减的历史和社会技术层面。它将概述危机，原因，以及抗生素失败的灾难性可能性；这反过来又将成为检验科学知识生产中的政治和伦理利害关系的中心，以及在部署噬菌体等复兴技术以确保人类福祉方面面临的持续挑战的中心。该项目的结果将进一步加深我们对现有工业实践、有毒生态和与全球抗生素耐药性发展有关的顽固性生物之间的联系的理解，这被概念化为20世纪大规模部署合成抗菌剂的当代遗产；噬菌体在后抗生素时代提供了一个有希望的前沿，有可能解开这种联系。该项目还将揭示科学认识论、技术材料、政治历史、文化实践和地球未来之间的网状关系；它将对人类-细菌-动物-病毒纠缠及其复杂性的生态学产生更广泛的概念。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award supports doctoral dissertation research that focuses on critical socio-technical facets of antibiotic resistant pathogens (also known as "superbugs"). It will examine the scientific, economic, technological, and ecological impacts of antibiotic-resistant infectious entities on human society in the 21st century. In doing so, it will uncover the cultural values, political experiences, and historical contingencies that lead to the dominance of antibiotics for infection-control in 20th century. It will then focus on an alternative approach that uses bacteriophage technologies as a promising frontier in a post-antibiotic world. The results of this research will serve to create civic awareness and to promote informed public participation in research, design, and agendas of emerging life-sciences. It will also be useful to policymakers, regulators and scientists in developing of socially-grounded strategies for confronting antibiotic resistance at local, national, and global scales.This research project examines historical and socio-technical dimensions of the diminishing efficacy of antibiotics. It will outline the crisis, the causes, and the catastrophic potentials of antibiotic failure; that will in turn serve as a locus of an examination of the political and ethical stakes in the production of scientific knowledge, and of the ongoing challenges in deployments of resurgent technologies like bacteriophages to secure human wellbeing. The results of this project will further our understanding of the nexus of extant industrial practices, toxic ecologies, and recalcitrant organisms implicated in the development of planetary antibiotic resistance, conceptualized as the contemporary legacy of the 20th century mass-deployment of synthetic antimicrobial agents; bacteriophages provide a promising frontier in a post-antibiotic, having the potential to unbind that nexus. This project will also reveal reticulated relationships between scientific epistemologies, technological materials, political histories, cultural practices, and planetary futures; it will generate wider conceptions of the ecology of human-bacterial-animal-viral entanglements and their complexity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.