Houseflies and Fungi: The Septic Fringe and the Emergence of an Edwardian Biotechnology

Despite a surge of recent scholarship on the long and broad history of biotechnology, the Edwardian era does not immediately spring to mind when considering the engineering of life. Yet the early twentieth century saw an ambitious attempt to artificially cultivate and disseminate the parasitic Empusa muscae fungus to destroy the housefly (Musca domestica). This paper argues that the development of Edwardian biotechnology and its modern legacy, or lack thereof, can be explained with reference to the septic fringe: a zone at the periphery of human settlements associated with waste, vermin and disease vectors. During the late nineteenth century, bacteriological techniques established that the housefly spread disease, indelibly linking it, along with the microorganisms it carried, to the septic fringe. Yet in 1912 Edgar Hesse successfully cultivated Empusa muscae at the Working Men's College in London. His ambition to use the fungi to exterminate the housefly was short lived, thwarted by technical difficulties and the realisation that the fungus also carried harmful pathogens. Although Empusa muscae was ultimately relegated to the septic fringe, its counterfactual history offers us a glimpse at a little-known, yet surprisingly familiar, world of biotechnological aspiration and controversy.