A new open source paper in the Palgrave Communications series Anti-biosis? – Social and Cultural Inquiries into Human-Microbe Relations looks at the ways in which ‘economic principles, formulae, and discourse infiltrate biological research’ on AMR. Nik Brown and Sarah Nettleton, of the University of York, UK, take us beyond the idea that economic imaginaries shape the reception of knowledge about resistance (i.e. that policy makers and the general public rethink questions of resistance, defence and safety by merging expert understandings of AMR with market-driven theories of political economy) to examine how principles of economy have come to shape biological explanations of AMR.

Their subtle argument is both historical and genealogical; it shows how ‘versions of immunity are specific to their context and times, naturalising political agendas and underpinned by changing distributions of agency and sometimes blame, guilt and responsibility’, and it traces the ways in which principles drawn from economic theory have come to seem increasingly natural as descriptors of problems in allocation, selection, and competition, shaping both the exploratory and explanatory dynamics – what we look for, and how we explain it – of the genetics of immunity in human social and biotic spaces.

For Brown and Nettleton, the specific and fundamentally cultural inflections of crisis around AMR percolate through the research agenda, every bit as much as they do through the ways in which we frame and perceive risk, and through the environment in which funding and results circulate. They call for us to be alert and attentive to the ways in which dominant modes of modelling the economy and of explicating the politics of the moment (with a hat tip to Brexit) can determine the horizons of scientific activity, and the uses to which science is put.