ABSTRACT:

Infrastructure usually becomes noticeable when it breaks down and when people have to creatively fill infrastructural gaps. Contributing to anthropological and STS conversations on infrastructure and toxicity, this paper complicates a scholarly romance of improvisation by drawing attention to infrastructural shortfalls that expose researchers to hazardous chemicals in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. Ugandan biologists often chose to stand in with their bodies, which molecularly connect to unequal scientific infrastructures, in order to meet project deadlines, to make a career and to participate in transnational collaborative projects. I think of the substances and ideas that seep through the infrastructural cracks and bind laboring bodies in Uganda to scientific processes in the global north as “toxic remains.” Toxic remains capture some of the predicaments of postcolonial science—bodily sacrifices that scientists in places like Uganda may have to make and that are invisible for international partners on the one hand, and infrastructures that obfuscate responsibility for such unequal burdens of north-south scientific collaboration on the other.