Exciting news! Daniel Liu has been awarded the 2020 Mendelsohn Prize

It is our very great pleasure to share some excellent news! BEC member Daniel Liu has just been awarded the 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize for his article 'The Cell and Protoplasm as Container, Object, and Substance, 1835-1861'. You can read more about the prize announcement here. 

We were able to get hold of Daniel and asked him in what ways this particular paper might be of interest to the BEC crowd. He writes:

​My goal in this paper and in subsequent work has been to unpack what we (scientists, historians, sociologists, etc.) mean when we talk about “material composition,” or “structure,” “material basis,” or even “stuff,” etc. I wrote the first drafts of this paper soon after I discovered the then-growing (and now-ageing) literature on “New Materialism,” and I wanted to find ways of historicizing materialism and matter theories without being bound to the kinds of metaphysical strictures and over-generalizations that critical theorists get bogged down in. I still find Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980/2003) explication of what they call “ontological metaphors”—ontology as being partially divisible into container concepts, object/entity concepts, and substance concepts—indispensable in my work. An easy example of how quickly and easily this framework can be applied: when we talk about a jellyfish gene as being just made of nucleotides (a substance-based conceptualization) vs. the specificity of that gene (an object) as having come from or having been copied out of a jellyfish (“from/out of a jellyfish” is to speak of jellyfish as a container-object), we can observe how ontology/ontology-speak is working at different, overlapping registers. I hope my article provides one more set of tools for thinking about bioengineering, and for my part I’m still working on ways of improving my vocabulary for describing how we conceive of and work with “living matter.”

Very many thanks to Dan for taking the time to write to us, and our hearty congratulations to him for such a well deserved award!