An account of the relationships between biology (as education, research, institutions etc.) and capital (in such forms as research grants, industries & corporations).
While presented as a contiguous work, the book is formed of different essays that have been dissected, recomposed with artificial connective tissue. The result lies somewhere between the rhizomatic continuity of a Body-without-Organs, and the disjointed assemblage of roadkill; either way, the question of where to even begin remains the same.
These essays each grow out of a particular resentment that developed through years of experience as a working-student of biology, but the task of the book was to transform this into something productive, something that sticks granular propositions into Biology like acupuncture needles. Inherent sexism within Biological research is, after all, not entirely disconnected to Pharmaceutical giants flooding the streets with opiates—and it is simply a writer's hope that some well positioned words can remind enough people of how its all connected.
In what could be perceived as a philosophical turn, the importance of talking about science, as much as doing it, is re-entering the popular scientific consciousness, and it is high time, too. What was already getting bad under Biden, became catastrophic under Trump, and the infiltration into public research by private institutions and capitalist enterprises, which this book highlights, is proving dire. The capitalisation of all things bio, whether -yoghurt, -metric data or -logical institutions, is necrotic—MeltdownYourBooks didn't flinch, they just grabbed the scalpel, dowsed the flesh in ethanol, and asked the question we all forget needs answering: where first, Doc?
In this book, we don't do biology, or fund it, or research it, or practice it; in this book, we are biology.
3rd edition.
Meltdown Your Books (MYB) is the pen name of an evolutionary biologist and philosopher based in the United States. Their work bridges the gaps between cultural criticism, philosophy, and the biological sciences, with a focus on the evolutionary emergence of host-microbiome relationships, and the sociological determinants of biological research. The name was created to bridge the gap between the nihilistic implosion of politics in the early 1970s with the final detonation of meaning and humanism at the onset of the digital age. It is a political and philosophical project without a face, without the certainty of a subject.
