online event: Ticks, Viruses, and Soviet Medical Biology

online event: Ticks, Viruses, and Soviet Medical Biology: Revisiting the Narrative, May 21, 16:00 CET / 10:00 EDT, 

Presenter: Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Foundation and the University of Munich)

Discussant: Ann Kelly (King's College London; Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study)

Organizer & chair: Anastasia Fedotova (Institute for the History of Science and Technology, St. Petersburg)

Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cNNAvSsEnNfo2eVSAlTrmwwQfA0G75I56jywK8Mgvng/viewform .

The presentation focuses on the history of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), a potentially deadly infection of the brain endemic in non-tropical Eurasian forests. The disease, the virus and the vector were first identified in 1937 in the Soviet Far East by the expedition of Lev Zilber. As TBE was the first big discovery of Soviet virology and the first major viral tick-borne infection to be identified globally, it attracted huge state and international attention and resources to that still relatively new discipline; it propelled the careers of many scientists and laid the paths for international cooperation that would shape the field for decades to come. At the same time, largely on the basis of TBE research, parasitologist Evgeny Pavlovsky developed his famous natural nidality theory of infectious disease that became an important framework of Soviet public health and today is viewed as one of the precursors of the One Health agenda, which integrates the study of human and animal health and the environment.

The story of the Soviet TBE expeditions is well known but, as I will show in my presentation, that story was in fact misrepresented in the scientific literature and obscured by Soviet (self-)censorship. I will argue that understanding the early history of TBE is impossible without acknowledging the distinct socio-political circumstances of the Stalinist colonization of the Far East, based on the involuntary resettlement and forced labor, and the specific disease ecologies they produced—the factors that had not only historical and ethical relevance but also empirical and theoretical implications. In my talk, I will discuss how those expeditions fit into the broader Soviet scientific, environmental, and socio-political context and what it means for the interpretation of Soviet research and the history of TBE.

Anna Mazanik is a research fellow at the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe and an academic coordinator of the research project “Russia’s North Pacific” at the Max Weber Foundation and the University of Munich. She is a medical and environmental historian of Russia. Her first book studied public health and environment in imperial Moscow. At the moment she is working on the new book “Nature’s Infections: Disease, Environment and Soviet Medicine in the Pacific Borderlands” which studies tick-borne encephalitis and Japanese encephalitis in the Soviet Far East, Manchuria and North Korea.

Ann H. Kelly is Professor of Anthropology and Global Health at King's College London. Her ethnographic work focuses on the socio-material conditions that structure the production of global health knowledge, and the local ecologies of labour that circumscribe its circulation and use. She explores these themes in a forthcoming book with Duke University Press on pasts and futures of mosquito control, with Javier Lezaun. She serves as a member of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) for Ebola Vaccines and Vaccination and as currently a Fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study for the year.