ABSTRACT
It may seem oxymoronic to speak of ‘ghosts in the body’, since scientific explanations of physical phenomena long ago displaced belief in the supernatural agency of disease. Given the advances in contemporary microbiology and genomics, few people would argue for the ‘otherworldly’ origins of infections. Yet ‘ghosts’ continue to haunt bioscience. These spectres are not the residue of former dogmas that persist in the present; nor are they simply figures of speech, as when biologists speak of red blood cells in which only the outer membrane persist as ‘ghosts’, or describe the ‘ghost effect’ of bacteria. They are not, for that matter, the ‘weird life’ that some scientists have begun to conjecture as they consider the possibility of a ‘shadow biosphere’ on the planet; that is, microbial life-forms, as yet unidentified, whose biochemistry may differ wholly from the ‘standard life’ we recognise (Davies 2011: 42-65). The phantoms explored in this chapter are of another variety: they are born of the uncertainties that science is revealing as it dismantles the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the individual and the collective, the biological and the environmental, the distant past and the present.
