This talk focuses on the emergence of the term microbiome in the early 21st century, a rhetorical phenomenon that helped to legitimize the nascent field of human-microbial genomics as scientists advocated for the development of the multi-year, multi-site, $115 million Human Microbiome Project. The term had long been in use by microbial ecologists to describe a self-contained microbiological community. Yet when it emerged in 2001, referring instead to a collection of microbial genomes, scientists declared it a neologism, entirely overlooking its earlier usage.
My presentation surveys a range of scientific publications from the late 1990s and early 2000s, showing how scientists began to attribute the microbiome concept – through a series of misquotations and erroneous citations – to Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg. I argue that this narrative served both to represent the novelty of microbiomics as a discipline and to claim a rhetorical stamp of approval from an elder statesman. In borrowing Lederberg’s authority, alongside similar borrowings from Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek, and other central figures, scientists re-narrated scientific history to establish microbiomics as both new and as prophesied by revered figureheads.
I conclude with a brief discussion of scientific pushback against this origin story in the wake of the media frenzy that followed the release of the HMP’s first publications in 2012. Taking on the roles of amateur historians and literary scholars, a number of scientists have turned to historical scientific documents to contest Lederberg’s visionary status, critically interrogating science’s discursive practices in an effort to tell a more measured story.
