Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter by Natasha Myers (review)

Natasha Myers's Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter is at once a detailed account of the everyday practices of protein modellers in academic research labs and classrooms and an innovative exploration of the normative framings of biological object visualisation and the scientific pedagogies within which protein modellers learn and work. In the opening pages, anthropologist and science studies scholar Natasha Myers contextualises protein modelling, and structural biology in general, within the broader context of the life sciences and, in particular, the emphasis on genetics throughout the 1980s and 1990s. She writes that in the current post-genomic era, "life scientists can be seen turning from matters of code to matters of substance – that is, from spelling out linear gene sequences to inquiring after the multidimensional materiality of the protein molecules that give body to cells" (10).

The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the United States between the years 2003 and 2008, during which Myers interviewed structural biologists and biological engineers at various stages in their careers; undertook observations in labs, classrooms and scientific meetings; and did archival and public sphere research. Protein crystallography, a practice aimed at providing "visual access to the unseen dimensions of cellular life" (36), is central to both the sites of fieldwork and Myers's theoretical positioning. Myers writes: "There is no material or optical contiguity between the diffraction pattern generated by a protein crystal and the three-dimensional model that rotates on a modeler's computer screen. The resulting model is in this sense a fabrication" (19). This disconnect – the indirect access and diffracted modalities of visualisation and modelling potential – is key to her analysis of the affective and kinesthetic practices of the science of protein modelling. Rendering Life Molecular makes several key interventions within the disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields comprising science studies. I focus here specifically on the book's contribution to work around vision and visualisation, pedagogies, and animation.

There is a long history of the study of visual renderings of science and "scientific objects" in the public sphere, both figuratively and literally. Rendering Life Molecular is instead more clearly situated as kin to the genre of laboratory studies and focuses primarily on the worlds and practices of visualisation through modelling within the sites of academic research laboratories, science classrooms and scientific conferences. Myers emphasises the history and everydayness of scientific and pedagogical practices, in which "seeing" and "representing" is undertaken within a framework of collaborative, and also competitive, research relations. Protein models are understood to facilitate knowledge about function and potential. Publication in a reputable scientific journal and submission to the Protein Data Bank, an online repository of protein structures, are considered to be key steps in the making of scientists within this field. In an era of emphasis on the translational potential of scientific knowledge, rendering a model of a particular protein could be a critical career springboard. In her analyses, Myers attends closely to the interface of vision and visualisation in processes of modelling. She notes that crystallographers were among the first life scientists to make use of computers; yet, among those with whom she conducted her research, she found that the available computer graphics and the intangibility of that which is depicted on the screen posed strong limitations to practices of (thinking and knowing through) modelling. These limitations were often compensated for/surpassed through what Myers identifies as kinesthetic and affective sensibilities acquired/learned through interactions with mentors and peers in the field. Her engagements with The Inner Life of the Cell, a computer animation developed as a pedagogical tool and posted online in 2007, the now annual "Dance Your PhD" contest launched in 2008, in which graduate students and recent graduates interpret and communicate the results of their science-related dissertations through dance, and Naturally Obsessed, a 2009 documentary about the experiences of graduate students in a protein modelling laboratory, offer contrasting analyses of representations of the field that might be generated for, or come to assume, a more...