Hannah Landecker holds a joint appointment in the life and social sciences at UCLA, where she is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics. The Institute for Society and Genetics is an interdisciplinary unit at UCLA committed to cultivating research and pedagogy at the interface of the life and human sciences, and houses the Human Biology and Society undergraduate major. She also recently helped found the UCLA EpiCenter for interdisciplinary study of the intersection of reproduction, epigenetics, and society, and is its co-director; she is a senior editor of the journal BioSocieties. Landecker, a historian and sociologist of science, studied cell and developmental biology before going on to receive her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from MIT. She is the author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard UP, 2007), as well as many research articles spanning topics from the development of time-lapse microcinematography to the environmental politics of reproduction. Her current research interests have turned toward the history and social study of metabolism and epigenetics, and this talk is drawn from her current book project, American Metabolism.