Aliens, Plagues, One Health, and the Medical Posthumanities

In the 1960s, Calvin Schwabe, a veterinarian and parasitologist, advocated that human and nonhuman physicians join forces under the term “One Medicine”;and in 2004, the Wildlife Conservation Society published the twelve Manhattan Principles, which formed the basis of the One Health, One World paradigm, including its international, interdisciplinary approach to preventing disease.5 Today, embraced by both the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control, One Health is less an organization than a transdisciplinary, multinational, and multispecies approach to global health. Underwriting this approach is this set of fundamental assumptions: human health is closely and increasingly connected to that of other animals and the environment;as human populations expand, more people are living in close contact with other animals, wild and domestic;as people, animals, and animal products move around the world, diseases spread more quickly;as trade and growing human populations contribute to climate change, they further degrade habitats;and habitat disruptions create even more opportunities for cross-species disease. In 2008, the American Veterinary Association’s One Health Initiative summary emphasized that we are facing “demanding, profound, and unprecedented challenges” associated with a rising demand for dietary animal protein, a loss of biodiversity, and the 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases that are zoonotic.6 In what follows, working in the spirit of One Health, I use an iconic science fiction story—John W. Campbell’s 1938 “Who Goes There?”—to consider what is at stake in cultivating anti-anthropocentrism during pandemic times.7 Published under the name Don A. Stuart, “Who Goes There?” may be familiar to most of you through its multiple film adaptations bearing the title The Thing. 9 Their position relies less on their knowledge of biology or their confidence that the alien is dead than it does on a collective faith in species difference. Because “Who Goes There?” is science fiction, they, of course, quickly turn out to be wrong: the thing comes to life.