The sequencing of anthrax samples from the 2016 outbreak took place in the context of ancient pathogen genomics. In the past decade in particular, geneticists have sought to identify and sequence pathogens discovered in archaeological and paleontological sites and in environmental samples, producing ancient sequences of pathogens behind, for example, salmonella, cholera, and louse-borne relapsing fever.44 Central to ancient pathogen genomics is the geneticization and digitization of material differences between pathogens retrieved at different sites and representing different points in time. The resulting reconstructed evolutionary histories of pathogen strains are then employed to investigate how diseases have spread across regions over centuries.
A paper published in the science journal PLoS ONE in 2019 demonstrates how aDNA operated as a mode of knowledge production in the case of old anthrax strains.45 In the paper, microbiologist Vitalii Timofeev and colleagues compared anthrax samples from the Yamal Peninsula linked to the 2016 outbreak and three samples retrieved from permafrost in Yakutia, about 2,000 kilometers east of the Yamal region. In the Yakutia case, a mining-related excavation had led to an unexpected discovery of frozen cave lion remains, and soil samples collected from the discovery site were in a 2016 analysis shown to contain anthrax. However, the anthrax was not connected to the animal remains but was of younger, unknown origin. Three different anthrax strains were identified at the depth of 2, 3, and 4 meters in Yakutia. The genetic sequencing placed the oldest of the Yakutia samples (at the depth of 4 meters) in the same anthrax lineage—the B clade—as the Yamal samples, while indicating that the other two Yakutia samples (discovered closer to the surface) represented two different branches of another lineage—the A clade. Drawing on genetic differences between the samples, the authors suggest that “the third and most recent introduction [of anthrax in Yakutia], detected at minus two meters, occurred as a side effect of Russian conquests and development of agriculture after the 17th–18th century,” while “the second introduction detected at minus 2 and minus 3 meters, would be the byproduct of Yakut’s population migration from Lake Baikal area after the 14th–15th century.”46 Regarding the oldest of the Yakutia strains, discovered at the depth of 4 meters, the authors propose that “the location in the permafrost and its genetic proximity with the strain independently found in the Yamal peninsula may indicate that it is not more than a few centuries older than the second introduction.”47 Such a comparison of sequenced anthrax samples paints a picture of anthrax as multiple and mutable rather than single and fixed.
This kind of genetically derived knowledge is oriented toward the past in the sense that the sequenced strains were used to understand the coevolution of humans and pathogens. In this, it stands in contrast to the idea of past pathogens as lively entities threatening the future that characterized media responses to the 2016 outbreak. Yet, the boundary between a spontaneous outbreak caused by a past pathogen and the analysis of soil samples from an excavation site for genetic information is not clear-cut. The article by Timofeev and colleagues notes that the anthrax strains from the Yakutia excavation turned out to be virulent when tested on mice.48 At the same time, the sequencing of the old anthrax strains makes visible that the material and digital are fundamentally entangled. The digitization of anthrax’s evolutionary trajectories is enabled through the material differences between strains and samples. Approaching past pathogens within a genetic framework relies, in other words, on vibrant materiality that engendered the differences in the first place. At the same time, the sequencing provides evidence of the material mutability of anthrax as a pathogen, which, instead of being an end point to a history, presumably constitutes a midpoint from where further microbial mutations may arise.
Finally, the comparison of sequences from the outbreak and an excavation site makes visible that the question of cryopreserved and potentially vibrant past pathogens not only is a matter of unexpected processes of thawing but also underlies archaeological and paleontological projects in regions characterized by permafrost. Archaeological or paleontological study of the past in melting ground, the case suggests, could potentially turn into an event that shapes health in the present and the future. Yet, as the rest of this chapter will show, the sequencing of the old anthrax strains differs from the sequencing of the 1918 pandemic virus. In the latter case, the sequence becomes part of a technoscientific project of recreating the past pathogen as a lively, material entity with the hope of proactively preventing death and disease in the future.
Reconstructing the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus
The reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus illustrates what happens when the past pathogen is not alive but embodies a theoretical potentiality—that is, it cannot spontaneously cause disease but can still be manipulated to produce a live pathogen. Unlike the remarkably durable anthrax spores preserved in permafrost, influenza viruses require a host organism. The case also sheds light on the complex technoscientific apparatuses that are needed to translate a genetic sequence to vibrant biological matter.
The story of the discovery and reconstruction of the “Spanish Flu” pandemic influenza virus that killed some fifty million people in several waves in 1918–1919 is often portrayed as epitomizing how science may use knowledge about past epidemics to prevent future disease.49 In 1951, Johan Hultin, then a PhD student at the University of Iowa, had an idea for his doctoral work: to search for a sample of the 1918 virus in a permafrost grave. He chose Brevig Mission, an Inuit community in Alaska, where seventy-two of the village’s eighty adult inhabitants had died within only five days in November 1918. After gaining permission from the village community, excavation started, but the gathered samples did not contain retrievable and analyzable viral material. Over forty years later, in 1997, virologist Jeffery Taubenberger’s team at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC, published an analysis of the 1918 virus collected from old lung samples from a US army hospital. As the genetic analysis still had significant gaps, Hultin again traveled to Brevig Mission for another attempt. He and the local team managed to retrieve viral material from the lungs of the frozen body of an Inuit woman. Permafrost had preserved the virus sufficiently to enable genetic sequencing by Jeffery Taubenberger, Ann Reid and their colleagues.50
Permafrost as nature’s “freezer” operated quite differently in the 1918 pandemic case than in the 2016 anthrax incident. The viral genetic material did not threaten health directly (although researchers, of course, protected themselves to minimize that possibility). Instead, the “resurrection of the 1918 pandemic virus,” as it was framed in journalistic discourse, required extensive technoscientific work.51 First, Taubenberger and colleagues used RNA—ribonucleic acid, the genetic material present in viruses—from stored samples along with the naturally cryopreserved lung samples that Hultin had brought back from Alaska. This combination of different biological materials made it possible to sequence the full viral genome.52 Second, microbiologist Peter Palese’s lab in the Mount Sinai School in New York produced plasmids that contained the genetic components of the virus necessary for the reconstruction of the virus as a material, virulent entity. The plasmids were inserted into human kidney cells to generate the production of the virus by microbiologist Terrence Tumpey at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.53
The connection between genetic sequence, the materiality of the virus, and the ability of the virus to cause disease is, however, complicated. In a discussion of the reconstructed 1918 pandemic influenza virus, anthropologist Frédérick Keck notes that genetic knowledge does not translate directly to “life” in the sequencing of naturally cryopreserved past viruses.54 That is, although DNA is commonly portrayed as the code of life, it cannot generate biological processes—new life, an infection—alone. Furthermore, while the recreated pandemic influenza virus turned out to be highly infectious in animal and tissue tests, it could not be assumed that infectiousness would translate directly to deadliness among humans. Tests designed to identify possible mechanisms behind the mortality of the 1918 pandemic suggested that multiple material features of the recreated virus shaped its virulence.55 In an ethnographic study of pandemic preparedness, anthropologist Carlo Caduff documents Peter Palese’s skepticism about the direct line drawn by politicians and the public between reconstructed sequences and lively pathogens.56 Caduff observes that information about a sequence of a past pathogen has become seen as dangerous—a question of biothreat, even bioterrorism—although highly skilled craft work is needed to reassemble viruses as material, lively entities, and liveliness does not necessarily mean lethality. In fact, pandemic threat often emerges through mutations on a previously harmless virus. Caduff also notes that there is no such thing as the 1918 pandemic virus, as viruses are always present in multiple forms.57 This question of representativeness of the sample is also at the heart of public debates about aDNA research more generally, as samples and datasets from past decades and centuries are always limited in scope.
The reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus as a material entity relied on reverse genetics. In reverse genetics, a genetic sequence is used to produce a lively entity through a range of advanced techniques. The sequence may be manipulated to test the effects of mutations on cells or organisms. In the case of the 1918 pandemic virus, reverse genetics generated an entity that had, at least in theory, the potential to threaten human life, had the engineered virus escaped the high-security lab. At the same time, this entity had the capacity, through its recreated vibrancy and ability to cause disease, to show materially how the pandemic virus operated, for example, in live lung tissue, a main concern in deadly cases of the 1918 pandemic influenza.
Crucially, the use of reverse genetics to recreate the influenza virus was commonly justified through a link to the prevention of future pandemics: gaining knowledge that would presumably help in responding to new viral strains in the future. For instance, Jeffery Taubenberger and colleagues noted in 2007 that “revealing the biology of a pandemic that occurred nearly 90 years ago is not just a historical exercise,” but something that “may well help us prepare for, and even prevent, the emergence of new pandemics in the 21st century and beyond.”58 A popular article published in the American History magazine and included on the HistoryNet website echoes this culturally appealing rationale: “Deciphering how a particular virus operates opens up insights into other viral strains and reveals how they grow, mutate, jump from animal to animal, and attack their hosts.… Ideally, someday scientists will build on Hultin and Taubenberger’s work to uncover a genetic Achilles heel in one strain that makes it possible to wipe out all of them.”59 These quotations point to the affectively charged nature of reconstructed pathogens as cultural objects poised between the past and the future. Their technologically recreated vibrant materiality is portrayed as a threat to futurity as well as a key to securing future health.
Indigenous Samples at the Crossroads of Pasts and Futures
As in the anthrax case, cultural discourses around the reconstruction of the pandemic virus drew on associations between permafrost, cold, and indigeneity. Many scientific and popular accounts carefully mention that Hultin received permission from the Inuit community in Brevig Mission for the excavations and the removal of biological samples.60 Yet, the use of Inuit human remains places the case within the larger cultural politics and technoscientific histories in which Indigenous biological samples—blood, tissue, genetic sequences—become the sources of knowledge for what is viewed by many research institutions and policy makers as the “common good,” the future health of humanity, a framing reflected, for example, in a media portrayal of the reconstruction of the 1918 virus as “a vital service to global public health.”61 What the benefits of the use of Indigenous samples might be for the local community is often unclear, as many scholars have shown.62
In their retrospective account of the excavations, Taubenberger, Hultin, and David Morens provide a striking description of the specific materialities that the case relied on. According to them, the fact that the Inuit woman buried in permafrost was obese provided the preconditions for the survival of viral material, as this likely “had preserved the internal organs from decomposition during occasional short periods of thawing within the permafrost. Her lungs displayed the gross appearance of those seen in acute viral pneumonitis, expanded and dark red in colour.”63 Several news stories highlighted Hultin’s reconstructed moment of realization that the body in question was not only preserved by the cold but had also become a freezer for the virus.64 The remains thus emerged as carrying unique physical characteristics as well as being embedded in communal practices such as preservation of land from construction projects. The annual melting patterns of permafrost, the interactions between a unique body and temperature, and the burial practices of the Inuit community enabled the retrieval and sequencing of the virus. This shows that the potential liveliness of past pathogens preserved in permafrost is neither an outcome of some general pattern of thawing nor the result of technoscientific study of generic biological matter.
At the same time, Brevig Mission, and the Inuit woman’s unexpectedly preserved body, were embedded in broader cultural ideas of indigeneity, time, and temperature. Whereas the nomadic herders in Yamal were portrayed by some as threatening the proper separation of the past and the future through their herding practices, the perceived embeddedness of the Brevig Mission Inuit community in the past as well as in the cold emerged in popular discourse as a source of both potential future health and as a risk to the future. Such a cultural framing adds intensity to hopes, concerns, and wonder around the potentialities of past pathogens.
While indigeneity is part of the complex relations that led to the retrieval of viral samples in Brevig Mission, these material conditions largely disappear from view when the retrieved lung samples are taken to the genetics lab, sequenced, compared with genetic material from other sources, and used as part of a reconstructed virus. In this chain of technoscientific events, the distance between indigeneity and the virus that once killed so many in Brevig Mission grows step by step. When the origins of the sequence are mentioned, it is often present only in the technical name of the strain from the Brevig sample: the influenza A/Brevig Mission/1/18 (H1N1) virus.65 Yet, despite this relative invisibility, indigeneity and the temporalities and cold temperature associated with indigeneity in cultural discourse manifest around the case as a sense that the recovered and reconstructed viral material embodies temporal, spatial, and cultural difference. The virus, like the Indigenous human remains in the grave, is portrayed as being “frozen in time.”66 As in the anthrax case, what that difference is remains vague, but it carries associations with the perceived insularity of communal practices and the popular assumption that indigeneity is past-oriented.
Conclusion
This chapter has traced the role of past pathogens and permafrost in contemporary society through two pathogens known to have caused life-threating illness in the past: anthrax and the 1918 pandemic influenza virus. There are crucial differences between them as material entities: while anthrax is a microbe preserved in spores, the pandemic influenza virus is known for its fast mutation rate and dependence on a host organism. These differences demonstrate how different types of pathogens, when emerging or retrieved from permafrost, may open up different trajectories between the past and the future. The perceived durability of anthrax spores through centuries posits it as an uncanny stranger that lies in wait in the frozen ground on which society, facing climate change, relies. The reconstructed pandemic influenza virus, in turn, raises cultural concerns about futures through images of biothreat as well as hopes of preventing future outbreaks through technoscientific manipulation. This ambivalence ties past pathogens affectively with both hopes and concerns about the future of society and the continuity of life as we know it. How past pathogens are framed as potentially viable and unpredictable entities and as sources of genetic information and engineering shapes what kinds of expectations become attached to the search for aDNA in melting ice. At the same time, the ways in which the two cases draw on slightly different constellations of permafrost, indigeneity, and space emphasizes that the potentially lively materiality of past pathogens is always historically and politically situated. These constellations also contribute to affective intensities in how past pathogens are perceived as unknown or knowable.
I opened the chapter by asking how old pathogens emerging or retrieved from permafrost complicate the popular understanding of aDNA as a straightforward link between the past and the present. The chapter has highlighted that at stake in aDNA discoveries is not just our relationship to the past but also the very parameters—narratives, discourses, concepts—through which futures can be imagined. Past pathogens such as anthrax and the 1918 influenza virus unsettle the culturally cherished separation of the past, present, and future, and make visible that this separation is an illusion. The cases also demonstrate that the connections between the past and the future invoked through aDNA are ultimately ambivalent, as the potential liveliness of old pathogens, cryopreserved in permafrost, can materialize as both a threat to and a promise of futurity. In the case of the pandemic influenza virus, these potentialities coexist, intensifying the affective stakes of aDNA as a cultural object. In both cases, affective intensities focus on the unpredictability of the future that may arise from the potential vitality of pathogens, whether that of a spontaneously thawing pathogen (anthrax) or a technoscientifically created entity (pandemic influenza). Critical explorations of this foundational ambivalence as to how the past and future are entangled will help broaden and complicate the ongoing discussion about the cultural role of aDNA.
Notes
1. Prominent examples of this framing of aDNA as a gateway to the past include geneticist David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and geneticist Adam Rutherford’s book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold through Our Genes (New York: The Experiment, 2017).
2. Some genetic ancestry testing companies advertise an option for tracing the customer’s relationship to early hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans (e.g., 23andMe and ADNTRO). For an analysis of how ideas of historical populations are invoked and incorporated into contemporary identity discourse, see, for example, Marc Scully, Steven D. Brown, and Turi King, “Becoming a Viking: DNA Testing, Genetic Ancestry and Placeholder Identity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 2 (2016): 162–180.
3. For the relationship between aDNA research and the media and society, see, for example, Elizabeth D. Jones and Elsbeth Bösl, “Ancient Human DNA: A History of Hype (Then and Now),” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021): 236–255.
4. Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2016); Venla Oikkonen, Population Genetics and Belonging: A Cultural Analysis of Genetic Ancestry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Anna Källén et al., “Introduction: Transcending the aDNA Revolution,” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021): 149–156.
5. See, for example, Daniel Strand and Anna Källén, “I Am a Viking! DNA, Popular Culture and the Construction of Geneticized Identity,” New Genetics and Society 40, no. 4 (2021): 520–540.
6. Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Venla Oikkonen, “Entanglements of Time, Temperature, Technology, and Place in Ancient DNA Research: The Case of the Denisovan Hominin,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 45, no. 6 (2020): 1119–1141. See also in this volume Marianne Sommer and Ruth Amstutz, chapter 2.
7. See Venla Oikkonen, “Conceptualizing Histories of Multispecies Entanglements: Ancient Pathogen Genomics and the Case of Borrelia Recurrentis,” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021).
8. Venla Oikkonen, “Belonging: Population Genetics, National Imaginaries, and the Making of European Genes,” in Bringing the Nation Back In: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Struggle to Define a New Politics, ed. Mark Luccarelli, Rosario Forlenza, and Steven Colatrella (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), 89–106; David Turnbull, “Out of the Glacier into the Freezer: Ötzi the Iceman’s Disruptive Timings, Spacings, and Mobilities,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 157–178.
9. Morten Rasmussen et al., “Ancient Human Genome Sequence of an Extinct Palaeo-Eskimo,” Nature 463 no. 7282 (2010): 757–762.
10. Amr El-Sayed and Mohamed Kamel, “Future Threat from the Past,” Environmental Science and Pollution Research International 28, no. 2 (2021): 1287–1291; Matthieu Legendre et al., “In-Depth Study of Mollivirus sibericum, a New 30,000-y-old Giant Virus Infecting Acanthamoeba,” PNAS 112, no. 38 (2015): 5327–5335.
11. El-Sayed and Kamel, “Future Threat from the Past.”
12. See, for example, Kimberley R. Miner et al., “Emergent Biogeochemical Risks from Arctic Permafrost Degradation,” Nature Climate Change 11 (2021): 809–819.
13. Jasmin Fox-Skelly, “There Are Diseases Hidden in Ice, and They Are Waking Up,” BBC, May 4, 2017, https://sustyvibes.org/uncategorized/diseases-hidden-ice-waking.
14. Kimberley R. Miner, Arwyn Edwards, and Charles Miller, “Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up,” Scientific American, November 20, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deep-frozen-arctic-microbes-are-waking-up/.
15. Michael Bravo and Gareth Rees, “Cryo-Politics: Environmental Security and the Future of Arctic Navigation,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 13, no. 1 (2006): 205–215.
16. Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin, “Indigenous Biospecimen Collections and the Cryopolitics of Frozen Life,” Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (2015): 63–80; Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, “Introduction: The Politics of Low Temperature,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Radin and Kowal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 3–26.
17. Radin and Kowal, “Introduction,” 8.
18. Radin and Kowal, “Introduction,” 8–9.
19. Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Bronwyn Parry, “Technologies of Immortality: The Brain on Ice,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35, no. 2 (2004): 391–413; Joanna Radin, Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Lucy Van de Wiel, Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Ageing (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Risa Cromer, “Saving Embryos in Stem Cell Science and Embryo Adoption,” New Genetics and Society 37, no. 4 (2018): 362–386; Rodney Harrison, “Freezing Seeds and Making Futures: Endangerment, Hope, Security, and Time in Agrobiodiversity Conservation Practices,” Culture, Agriculture, Food and the Environment 39, no. 2 (2017): 80–89; Sara Peres, “Seed Banking as Cryopower: A Cryopolitical Account of the Work of the International Board of Plant Genetic Resources, 1973–1984,” Culture, Agriculture, Food and the Environment 41, no. 2 (2019): 76–86.
20. Jennifer A. Hamilton, “Reindeer and Woolly Mammoths: The Imperial Transit of Frozen Meat from the North American Arctic,” in Meat! A Transnational Analysis, ed. Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 61–95.
