My book project, Testing Rules: Regulating Toxic Chemicals in International Trade, examines why governments have failed to regulate chemicals widely considered to be harmful. Since 1900, millions of synthetic chemicals have entered commerce in plastics, foods, pesticides, and other everyday products, yet regulatory action has generally been weak and slow. I trace the historical development of the standards by which regulators judge evidence of toxicity, focusing on Good Laboratory Practices and the testing protocols adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1981. These frameworks have privileged standardized studies—generally performed and funded by industry—over non-standardized but peer-reviewed research, restricting the evidence available for regulatory decision-making. I argue that a question seemingly belonging to science—“how do we determine if this chemical is safe?”—has in fact been adjudicated as a matter of economic policy and international governance, producing a regulatory epistemology that privileges corporate knowledge claims while limiting the protection of public health and the environment. The project focuses on the development and implementation of these testing standards at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency and uses archival sources, government documents including records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and original oral history interviews.

Contemporary legal debates often assume that policymakers who drafted the Clean Air Act in 1970 possessed little understanding of the climatic consequences of CO₂. My collaborative research with colleagues at Harvard and Duke demonstrates instead that legislators and government officials possessed a far richer understanding than has been recognized in contemporary legal and historical accounts. Our research shows that government officials understood the risks of global climate change in the 1960s and that legislators viewed CO₂ as pollution akin to radioactive fallout and smog. Ultimately, we argue that the authors of the Clean Air Act intended the law to encompass CO₂ and its potential climate effects. As a whole, this project recovers a body of climate knowledge that has largely disappeared from contemporary legal and political memory.

In a project tentatively titled “Do It Yourself: Chronic Illness, Patient Activism, and Diabetes Technology,” I bring together history of medicine, science and technology studies, and feminist disability studies to historicize Do-It-Yourself (DIY) medical technology, demonstrating how the embodied experience and expertise of those living with disease and disability has always shaped standards of care. Suspicious of commercial interests, doubtful of the ability of regulators, and anxious about their physiological futures, recently thousands of people who live with type 1 diabetes have hacked medical devices and software to build “closed loop” automated insulin delivery systems. This community has not only refused a passive patient role, but also introduced embodied and experiential expertise to the design, practice, and regulation of biomedicine. Based on historical and ethnographic research, including my own experience living with type 1 diabetes and using a DIY system, this project explores the simultaneous antagonisms toward and trust in regulatory authorities and their practices.