SNSF Ambizione Project 2020 – Swiss History
Researcher : Alexandre Elsig
Research Institution: EPFL College of Humanities
Main Discipline: Swiss History
Start/End 01.09.2020 – 31.08.2024
Following Paracelsus, the toxicological paradigm is that the dose makes the poison. But then, who makes the dose? Who decides on the threshold limit values and according to what factors? How is negotiated the balance between different economic, scientific and political issues?
This project wants to investigate these bargains by studying the production, regulation and social effects of industrial contaminations, how this toxic legacy from the past continues to contaminate the present and what role historians could play in this regard.
The project will focus on three polluting substances emblematic of a second industrialization that has shaped the secondary sector in Switzerland: a heavy metal, mercury, a chemical element, fluorine, and a persistent organic pollutant, PCBs.
It will do so on a local and national scale, focusing on the chlor-alkali and petrochemical industries, the aluminum industry and the electrotechnical industry, but also on a global scale, where the evaluation of these substances is discussed, mainly within the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Exploring a large body of unpublished archives, the analysis will seek to capture the governments’ attempts to influence the international agenda, but also the implementation of transnational recommendations at the national and local levels.
This study will question the position of the mobilized scientific experts, the weight of industrial lobbies and their capacity to produce doubt and the pressure abilities of social movements and their lay and militant approach.
