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Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
How did cells make the journey, one we take so much for granted, from their origin in living bodies to something that can be grown and manipulated on artificial media in the laboratory, a substantial biomass living outside a human body, plant, or animal? This is the question at the heart of Hannah Landecker's book. She shows how cell culture changed the way we think about such central questions of the human condition as individuality, hybridity, and even immortality and asks what it means that we can remove cells from the spatial and temporal constraints of the body and "harness them to human intention." Rather than focus on single discrete biotechnologies and their stories--embryonic stem cells, transgenic animals--Landecker documents and explores the wider genre of technique behind artificial forms of cellular life. She traces the lab culture common to all those stories, asking where it came from and what it means to our understanding of life, technology, and the increasingly blurry boundary between them. The technical culture of cells has transformed the meaning of the term "biological," as life becomes disembodied, distributed widely in space and time. Once we have a more specific grasp on how altering biology changes what it is to be biological, Landecker argues, we may be more prepared to answer the social questions that biotechnology is raising.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2007
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January 26, 2024
A student of Michelle Murphy put me onto Hannah Landecker, because I sort of love the analytic of metabolism, and I’m a little obsessed with Landecker’s work now. Her key metabolism writings are not in this book, but largely journal papers. However, I suspect a lot of this work on metabolism will be synthesized in her forthcoming monograph “American Metabolism,� which I eagerly await.
I still think one of the core preoccupations about this book on 20th century cellular life and cell culture laboratory studies speaks to a central debate within Marxist metabolic rift discourse, namely how tenable it is to think of humans (or society) and nature as distinct entities between which material and energy flows/exchanges occur, or is the semantic counter (against what it pejoratively calls ‘dualist�) and the insistence that humans are a part of nature (and society is only ever in nature) more plausible? It’s the sort of question that problematizes common presumptions about the boundary of the human, which Judith Butler did when they asked at what point fecal matter is or isn’t a part of the human body. Landecker asks what are we to think of the human cell, removed from the body, and cultured in a laboratory, preserved and reproduced endlessly. Does this in any way extend or modify our notion of the human body’s boundaries, and when these cells become technologies, the questions only turn more nebulous. Landecker situates the book’s starting point at a historical shift from 19th century 'in vivo' experiments on the bodies of whole animals, to the 20th century 'in vitro' experiments on separated pieces of the body maintained in artificial environments.
Chapter 1 is about “Autonomy� (or disembodiment) and the work of an American embryologist named Ross Harrison who showed in 1907 how fragments of tissue could live in vitro for weeks at a time, and more generally how these experiments showed the unexpected autonomy cells had in relation to the human body. This led to the practice of tissue culture, and the emerging possibility of observing internal bodily functions completely external to the body itself.
Chapter 2 is about “Immortality� (or continuity) and the work of French biologist and surgeon Alexis Carrel, and the emerging understanding of cells that could potentially be immortal if maintained in the proper conditions, famously demonstrated with embryonic chicken heart cells. This “biological modernism� was about shaping living matter in a sort of laboratory form that never really surfaced “in nature� (you see another way the same metabolic rift debate emerges at this point here too.)
Chapter 3 is about “Mass Reproduction� of these laboratory cultured cells, which only could become widely distributed after they became cultured on a massive scale in the 1940s. The standardized process of reproducing disembodied living human cells, became vital for other medical breakthroughs like the development of the polio vaccine. Human tissue culture, became the main means by which to grow viruses. The work of John Enders, an American virologist and biomedical scientist is the focus of this chapter, and his efforts to produce large quantities of virus particles for lab tests.
Chapter 4 is about the “HeLa� (Henrietta Lacks) human cell line, which was established in 1951 by the American cell biologists George and Margaret Gey. At focus is the distributed nature of this continuous form of life (the HeLa cell line), especially with freezing and cloning techniques that could maintain cells in long-term suspended stasis while they were shipped long distances and preserved for long durations of time. As in Chapter 2, this section revisits not only the spatial, but also the temporal boundaries of the individual body in its specificity, namely that of Henrietta Lacks, and the implications of this new form of “alienation from body and lifespan.�
Chapter 5, finally, is about “Hybridity� and the emerging techniques of cell recombination and cell fusion in the 1960s, including the fusion of cultured somatic cells across species lines, and the way this problematized earlier held notions of species integrity (arrived at by older observations of infertility and rejected transplants). Hybrid cells that synthesized cells across species lines on the other hand, were in many cases fully functional and could reproduce in culture, at times indefinitely. The cell at this point became a new space of laboratory experimentation. Landecker ends her text in the 1970s at what she deems a point of realization about the artifice, plasticity, and technology that characterized human relationships with living matter (as expressed by Wells and Loeb), and an increased subjection of life to the laboratory. The cell, with its membrane as boundary, operated autonomously, could reproduce in laboratories (new bodies) without their original human bodies, and could also be fused with cells of more-than-human species.
Landecker’s epilogue briefly discusses the genealogy of plasticity and temporality in what Landecker considers to be (like Wide Sargasso Sea) a retelling of the story of cloning through the infrastructural role that cell cultures played. In conclusion, I’ll just include a few excerpts of interest to myself that I marked down (with minimal or no comments).
Mentions of metabolism:
“Francois Jacob phrases this formulation of the sustenance of life through maintenance of a milieu intérieur as the idea that “higher animals literally live within themselves.� With the cultivation of tissues, all the processes of that inner life, of growth, division, metabolism, movement, senescence, and infection, happened outside the confines of the body. In other words, animals apparently could also live without themselves, and this came as a surprise.� (p.63-64)
“Tissue culture made physiological duration visible: “Physiological duration . . . appears as soon as a portion of space containing metabolizing things becomes relatively isolated from the surrounding world.”� For these cells, physiological duration was composed of metabolic processes that created products that changed the cellular medium. The buildup of metabolic byproducts equaled the buildup of duration.� (p. 89)
“These nutrients had to be added to the medium around a single cell, but large populations of cells provided these nutrients for each other. These products of cellular metabolism, such as carbon dioxide, certain amino acids, and pyruvate, serve as “substrates for biosynthetic and metabolic reactions that are essential for cellular multiplication, which stops whenever their intracellular levels fall below critical threshold values.�'? Such an idea—that the body was composed of highly specific sets of internal conditions essential to the steady existence of its component tissues and organs—had been present in biological science at least since Claude Bernard’s formulation of the importance of the milieu intérieur;� (p.151)
“Human cells were described as the saviors of the human publics watching them, whether for defeating polio or cancer. After this initial interest, there is little writing about HeLa between 1954 and 1967 that does not take the form of a scientific paper. There are thousands of these: publications about the biochemistry, morphology, behavior, maintenance, chromosomes, metabolism, responses to radiation, cycles, and so on of the HeLa cell.� (p.165)
“The key piece of evidence in this study was the profile for a particular enzyme called G6PD (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase), which is a factor in red blood cell metabolism. Gartler stood up in front of an audience of tissue culturists and said:
The G6PD variants that concern us are the A (fast) and B (slow) types. The A type has been found only in Negroes. . . The results of our G6PD analyses of these supposedly 18 independently derived human cell lines are that all have the A band .. . [have not been able to ascertain the supposed racial origin of all 18 lines; it is known, however, that at least some of these are from Caucasians, and that at least one, HeLa, is from a Negro.�
“The terminology of cell culture was already dense with the connotations of lineage, culture, proliferation, population, contamination, and, most recently, malignancy.� (p.168-169)
It was one thing to observe the manifest ability of the cells to continue working—metabolizing, going through the internal rearrangements of cell division. It was another to have some sense of why the genomes of different species could be co-expressed and yet not generate biological chaos, which usually equaled rapid death. These findings were quickly followed by a rush of similar examples of both co-expression and a change in expression of a protein; these results indicated that something present in one genome was able to regulate the expression of something in the other genome once they were thrust together into the same cellular space.� (p.202)
Mention of OncoMouse:
“The phenomenon of the public life of biological celebrities has become more prominent in recent years with the high profile of biotechnology and its various poster animals, including OncoMouse, Dolly, and CopyCat. Analysis of the HeLa stories and their relationship to fundamental shifts in scientific practice in the life sciences may help us understand the role these characters play in accounts we tell one another� (p. 160)
Mentions of J.B.S. Haldane:
“In addition, according to geneticists who had worked with plants and animals, bacterial systems were to be looked at as models for the appropriate length of experiment—that is, hours, not lifetimes. J. B. S. Haldane commented concerning bacterial genetics: “[T]o an old-style geneticist the most striking feature of this work is that recombination can be studied in an experiment lasting about three hours, as compared with three weeks with Drosophila melanogaster, two years with an annual plant, and fifty years for human beings if such experiments with them were possible.�* The generation time of a human cell in culture was one day, whereas the generation time of a human organism was years long.� (p.186)
“The decade of the 1950s saw the discovery and elaboration of what J. B. S. Haldane called “alternatives to sex”—modes of genetic recombination and segregation that happened outside the “usual� mode of genetic exchange. Classic genetic analysis in plants and animals, as writers in the late 1950s repeatedly pointed out, had depended on the “triad of mutation, of fertilization, and of segregation and recombination at meiosis.”� That is, analysis had depended on the random reassortment of chromosomes that happens when chromosome pairs are split up into the germ cells formed by meiosis and the ensuing recombination when sperm and egg from different individuals fuse at fertilization. The result is progeny with different identifiable characteristics or traits inherited from the parents that can be used to track genetic factors.� (p.186-187)
“J. B. S. Haldane, commenting in The New Biology on Lederberg and Pontecorvo’s work, also singled out tissue culture as the next logical step in doing experiments that would not take lifetimes and did not pass through the channels of sexual reproduction:
“Recombination can occur in the absence of a sexual process. This observation may be the key to human genetics. The genes for the Rh antigens and that for elliptical blood corpuscles are carried on the same chromosome. If we could arrange for a man heterozygous at both loci to have 500 children, we could determine their linkage with considerable accuracy. We cannot do this, but we might be able to study his bone marrow cells in tissue culture, to find that they sometimes gave rise to circular blood corpuscles, and to find what antigens these carried. By such techniques it may be possible to map the human chromosomes.�
This sort of commentary was accelerated in large part by Theodore Puck’s development of cloning techniques…� (p.188-189)
I still think one of the core preoccupations about this book on 20th century cellular life and cell culture laboratory studies speaks to a central debate within Marxist metabolic rift discourse, namely how tenable it is to think of humans (or society) and nature as distinct entities between which material and energy flows/exchanges occur, or is the semantic counter (against what it pejoratively calls ‘dualist�) and the insistence that humans are a part of nature (and society is only ever in nature) more plausible? It’s the sort of question that problematizes common presumptions about the boundary of the human, which Judith Butler did when they asked at what point fecal matter is or isn’t a part of the human body. Landecker asks what are we to think of the human cell, removed from the body, and cultured in a laboratory, preserved and reproduced endlessly. Does this in any way extend or modify our notion of the human body’s boundaries, and when these cells become technologies, the questions only turn more nebulous. Landecker situates the book’s starting point at a historical shift from 19th century 'in vivo' experiments on the bodies of whole animals, to the 20th century 'in vitro' experiments on separated pieces of the body maintained in artificial environments.
Chapter 1 is about “Autonomy� (or disembodiment) and the work of an American embryologist named Ross Harrison who showed in 1907 how fragments of tissue could live in vitro for weeks at a time, and more generally how these experiments showed the unexpected autonomy cells had in relation to the human body. This led to the practice of tissue culture, and the emerging possibility of observing internal bodily functions completely external to the body itself.
Chapter 2 is about “Immortality� (or continuity) and the work of French biologist and surgeon Alexis Carrel, and the emerging understanding of cells that could potentially be immortal if maintained in the proper conditions, famously demonstrated with embryonic chicken heart cells. This “biological modernism� was about shaping living matter in a sort of laboratory form that never really surfaced “in nature� (you see another way the same metabolic rift debate emerges at this point here too.)
Chapter 3 is about “Mass Reproduction� of these laboratory cultured cells, which only could become widely distributed after they became cultured on a massive scale in the 1940s. The standardized process of reproducing disembodied living human cells, became vital for other medical breakthroughs like the development of the polio vaccine. Human tissue culture, became the main means by which to grow viruses. The work of John Enders, an American virologist and biomedical scientist is the focus of this chapter, and his efforts to produce large quantities of virus particles for lab tests.
Chapter 4 is about the “HeLa� (Henrietta Lacks) human cell line, which was established in 1951 by the American cell biologists George and Margaret Gey. At focus is the distributed nature of this continuous form of life (the HeLa cell line), especially with freezing and cloning techniques that could maintain cells in long-term suspended stasis while they were shipped long distances and preserved for long durations of time. As in Chapter 2, this section revisits not only the spatial, but also the temporal boundaries of the individual body in its specificity, namely that of Henrietta Lacks, and the implications of this new form of “alienation from body and lifespan.�
Chapter 5, finally, is about “Hybridity� and the emerging techniques of cell recombination and cell fusion in the 1960s, including the fusion of cultured somatic cells across species lines, and the way this problematized earlier held notions of species integrity (arrived at by older observations of infertility and rejected transplants). Hybrid cells that synthesized cells across species lines on the other hand, were in many cases fully functional and could reproduce in culture, at times indefinitely. The cell at this point became a new space of laboratory experimentation. Landecker ends her text in the 1970s at what she deems a point of realization about the artifice, plasticity, and technology that characterized human relationships with living matter (as expressed by Wells and Loeb), and an increased subjection of life to the laboratory. The cell, with its membrane as boundary, operated autonomously, could reproduce in laboratories (new bodies) without their original human bodies, and could also be fused with cells of more-than-human species.
Landecker’s epilogue briefly discusses the genealogy of plasticity and temporality in what Landecker considers to be (like Wide Sargasso Sea) a retelling of the story of cloning through the infrastructural role that cell cultures played. In conclusion, I’ll just include a few excerpts of interest to myself that I marked down (with minimal or no comments).
Mentions of metabolism:
“Francois Jacob phrases this formulation of the sustenance of life through maintenance of a milieu intérieur as the idea that “higher animals literally live within themselves.� With the cultivation of tissues, all the processes of that inner life, of growth, division, metabolism, movement, senescence, and infection, happened outside the confines of the body. In other words, animals apparently could also live without themselves, and this came as a surprise.� (p.63-64)
“Tissue culture made physiological duration visible: “Physiological duration . . . appears as soon as a portion of space containing metabolizing things becomes relatively isolated from the surrounding world.”� For these cells, physiological duration was composed of metabolic processes that created products that changed the cellular medium. The buildup of metabolic byproducts equaled the buildup of duration.� (p. 89)
“These nutrients had to be added to the medium around a single cell, but large populations of cells provided these nutrients for each other. These products of cellular metabolism, such as carbon dioxide, certain amino acids, and pyruvate, serve as “substrates for biosynthetic and metabolic reactions that are essential for cellular multiplication, which stops whenever their intracellular levels fall below critical threshold values.�'? Such an idea—that the body was composed of highly specific sets of internal conditions essential to the steady existence of its component tissues and organs—had been present in biological science at least since Claude Bernard’s formulation of the importance of the milieu intérieur;� (p.151)
“Human cells were described as the saviors of the human publics watching them, whether for defeating polio or cancer. After this initial interest, there is little writing about HeLa between 1954 and 1967 that does not take the form of a scientific paper. There are thousands of these: publications about the biochemistry, morphology, behavior, maintenance, chromosomes, metabolism, responses to radiation, cycles, and so on of the HeLa cell.� (p.165)
“The key piece of evidence in this study was the profile for a particular enzyme called G6PD (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase), which is a factor in red blood cell metabolism. Gartler stood up in front of an audience of tissue culturists and said:
The G6PD variants that concern us are the A (fast) and B (slow) types. The A type has been found only in Negroes. . . The results of our G6PD analyses of these supposedly 18 independently derived human cell lines are that all have the A band .. . [have not been able to ascertain the supposed racial origin of all 18 lines; it is known, however, that at least some of these are from Caucasians, and that at least one, HeLa, is from a Negro.�
“The terminology of cell culture was already dense with the connotations of lineage, culture, proliferation, population, contamination, and, most recently, malignancy.� (p.168-169)
It was one thing to observe the manifest ability of the cells to continue working—metabolizing, going through the internal rearrangements of cell division. It was another to have some sense of why the genomes of different species could be co-expressed and yet not generate biological chaos, which usually equaled rapid death. These findings were quickly followed by a rush of similar examples of both co-expression and a change in expression of a protein; these results indicated that something present in one genome was able to regulate the expression of something in the other genome once they were thrust together into the same cellular space.� (p.202)
Mention of OncoMouse:
“The phenomenon of the public life of biological celebrities has become more prominent in recent years with the high profile of biotechnology and its various poster animals, including OncoMouse, Dolly, and CopyCat. Analysis of the HeLa stories and their relationship to fundamental shifts in scientific practice in the life sciences may help us understand the role these characters play in accounts we tell one another� (p. 160)
Mentions of J.B.S. Haldane:
“In addition, according to geneticists who had worked with plants and animals, bacterial systems were to be looked at as models for the appropriate length of experiment—that is, hours, not lifetimes. J. B. S. Haldane commented concerning bacterial genetics: “[T]o an old-style geneticist the most striking feature of this work is that recombination can be studied in an experiment lasting about three hours, as compared with three weeks with Drosophila melanogaster, two years with an annual plant, and fifty years for human beings if such experiments with them were possible.�* The generation time of a human cell in culture was one day, whereas the generation time of a human organism was years long.� (p.186)
“The decade of the 1950s saw the discovery and elaboration of what J. B. S. Haldane called “alternatives to sex”—modes of genetic recombination and segregation that happened outside the “usual� mode of genetic exchange. Classic genetic analysis in plants and animals, as writers in the late 1950s repeatedly pointed out, had depended on the “triad of mutation, of fertilization, and of segregation and recombination at meiosis.”� That is, analysis had depended on the random reassortment of chromosomes that happens when chromosome pairs are split up into the germ cells formed by meiosis and the ensuing recombination when sperm and egg from different individuals fuse at fertilization. The result is progeny with different identifiable characteristics or traits inherited from the parents that can be used to track genetic factors.� (p.186-187)
“J. B. S. Haldane, commenting in The New Biology on Lederberg and Pontecorvo’s work, also singled out tissue culture as the next logical step in doing experiments that would not take lifetimes and did not pass through the channels of sexual reproduction:
“Recombination can occur in the absence of a sexual process. This observation may be the key to human genetics. The genes for the Rh antigens and that for elliptical blood corpuscles are carried on the same chromosome. If we could arrange for a man heterozygous at both loci to have 500 children, we could determine their linkage with considerable accuracy. We cannot do this, but we might be able to study his bone marrow cells in tissue culture, to find that they sometimes gave rise to circular blood corpuscles, and to find what antigens these carried. By such techniques it may be possible to map the human chromosomes.�
This sort of commentary was accelerated in large part by Theodore Puck’s development of cloning techniques…� (p.188-189)
April 21, 2009
My first and perhaps my biggest problem with the book is the research, or lack thereof. Landecker tries to establish some kind of new paradigm in which the only research she has to do is look at the methods section of articles published by famous people in big journals: "How does one go about detailing the constitution of cells as technologies, the material process of their separation and alienation? The short answer is to consult the materials and methods sections of decades of research papers" (21). I have no problem with this. But she says that this is basically ALL she has to do, despite "the assumption...that interviews and archives are somehow closer to reality than published papers." Her answer is NOT that this assumption is wrong but merely that it is impossible to do: "the scale of twentieth-century and contemporary scientific publishing presents a challenge to anthropologists and historians that escapes traditional ethnographic and archival methodologies" (22). In other words, there's too much stuff. But there is only too much stuff because her topic is too big. On the next page, she says "I did not want to do a case study and then generalize; I wanted to do highly specific empirical work on the general. That might sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is what led me to this reversal in which I felt that the literature was the primary source..." (23). Well, yes, it does sound like a contradiction in terms, because so far as I can tell "specific empirical work on the general" IS a contradiction in terms. Her topic is unmanageably big so she focuses only on superficial sources.
This is ludicrous! It would be like me proposing to write a 235 page history of the United States since 1776, but because there's just SO MUCH STUFF I'm only going to use the headlines and first paragraphs on the front page of the New York Times. You have surely had the experience of going to a professor and saying that you'd like to write on such a topic, and your professor responds "that's too big! You have to narrow your topic." Obviously nobody told this to Landecker.
Even so, focusing only on the methods sections of published papers didn't need to result in as shoddy a book as this. Most of the book, I found, was paraphrases of what the scientists were doing—or, rather, SAID they were doing, a distinction Landecker's "research" "methodology" doesn't allow—without following the basic instruction of all elementary writing classes, namely, "tie this into your thesis!" Occasionally she did; almost always she didn't. Moreover when she decided to cite things and when she didn't seems to be completely arbitrary, and a lot of the book is simply asserted.
In the first chapter she says (again and again, in much the same words) that the fact that these cells could grow outside the body and be kept alive indefinitely challenged the assumptions that...the cells could NOT grow outside the body, and could NOT be kept alive indefinitely. I didn't need a book to tell me this. But I don't actually think she makes much of an argument that such things WERE assumed before—if she did, I can't find it. Moreover, her citations of "popular culture" seem to come very close to what I jokingly referred to a few paragraphs up—headlines and articles in newspapers. Historical context is roughly summarized (in about a page) and then dismissed (57). “Making connections and discovering precursors does nothing to explain why tissue culture appeared to Harrison’s contemporaries as something startlingly new, perhaps even unbelievable,� she writes (58). But actually, no, it DOES help. Or might have if she'd looked for it.
Moreover, who are these contemporaries? There is a telling endnote (no. 39, pg. 268): “It is difficult to say, actually, whether the experiment was tried somewhere and failed...Experiments that do not work do not distinguish between inadequate technique and biological impossibility and are rarely published or otherwise publicized.� Well, that is the job of the scholar! Characterizations about the meaning of findings are taken from the conclusions of the papers in which they were published. Landecker writes of the “debate� over Harrison/Carrel’s findings (but it’s not clear quite over what) but basically the questioners are cast as simply missing its significance and anyway there aren’t very many of them. Maybe she just wants to tell the story of how we got to where we are; but in that case why go to the trouble of justifying her footnote-chasing? You or I can do this in an hour with Google Scholar.
Now I'm going to heap my scorn on the HeLa stuff, which I actually thought was very much the weakest part of a (very weak) book.
Here is HeLa's story, roughly: A hospital drew cancer cells from the cervix of an Afro-American woman in Baltimore in the mid-fifties. But we are supposed to believe that the cells spread around the country until 1967 when all of a sudden a scientist stood up at a meeting, said that HeLa was from a black person, and nothing was the same again (her book is full of scientists standing up at meetings and making announcements after which nothing is the same again). And we are asked to accept passively that nobody cared about the origin of these cells--not that they were from a black person, not that they were from cancer cells--until AFTER the Civil Rights movement? The hospital that drew them didn’t care? Researchers didn’t care? Weren’t there laws in Maryland that had to do with blood? She mentions the one-drop rule--but it's as if she discovers it; she makes no mention of the fact that the one-drop rule was the law of the land until the 1960s (or even today).
Then there is the stuff on which she is flatly WRONG: Landecker claims that the relationship between hospitals and patients (as experimental subjects and as care-seekers), especially poor patients, changed as a result of the demand for human cells in the 1950s. The first thing to note is that this was NOT a change. For two hundred years doctors and hospitals had eyed patients, especially poor ones, as donors of research and teaching material first. The second thing is that her statement that the relationship of the Tuskegee Institute to its patients being “tainted� by its infamously racist relationship is simply INCORRECT. She mis-dates the Tuskegee syphilis experiment by two decades—it wasn't revealed until the 1970s—but like most everything in the book, that isn’t cited. It's on page 137 if you want to see for yourself. I should also mention that a recurring problem with the book is her failure to identify the dates of events she mentions, which is the least we could expect from a book that paraphrases articles wholesale.
Landecker's obsessed with the idea that the weight of all the HeLa cells was itself an obsession of the popular and scientific press (which she claims to be unable to distinguish). Yet she can only find--or at least only bothers to cite--a SINGLE instance of the usage of such rhetoric. Nonetheless she asks why the world is so fascinated by it and basically tries to structure her whole chapter around it. Meanwhile, she herself raises the issue half a dozen times. Seriously, don't believe me? Look it up. "Why this repeated return to physical weight?" she asks on page 179—but there is actually only one place this is mentioned in the sources. It's footnotes number 48 and 60 for that chapter. I don't know why she was so obsessed with it. But it's really, pardon my French, shitty research, if not downright deceptive.
I mentioned obvious questions were that weren't asked—let alone answered. A lot of them have to do with replicability of experiment in different locations, which seems to me a giant elephant in the room if you're talking about what it means to have the "same" cell in different places. (She might have found this if she had looked beyond the positive results reported in journals, as I say above.) Here are some questions:
Was it not problematic that one woman's cells were taken as normal?
That cancer cells (HeLa) were taken as normal?
She says that all human cells are basically alike. Was this established? Wasn't this contested? Isn't this contested NOW?
More importantly, there's a huge paradox to the HeLa storyif ANY human cell was representative of humanity, WHY WERE THE HELA CELLS IMPORTANT? Why couldn't scientists use ANY cells—their own, their postdocs', their own patients'?
And if the HeLa cells were special in some way, HOW and WHY were they taken as representative of the rest of the human race?!
As a final insult, there's no bibliography, and the index is terrible. DNA is nowhere in it.
I haven't even gotten to the terrible writing and editing: there are missing verbs all over the place, garbled sentences, lone quotation marks.
This is ludicrous! It would be like me proposing to write a 235 page history of the United States since 1776, but because there's just SO MUCH STUFF I'm only going to use the headlines and first paragraphs on the front page of the New York Times. You have surely had the experience of going to a professor and saying that you'd like to write on such a topic, and your professor responds "that's too big! You have to narrow your topic." Obviously nobody told this to Landecker.
Even so, focusing only on the methods sections of published papers didn't need to result in as shoddy a book as this. Most of the book, I found, was paraphrases of what the scientists were doing—or, rather, SAID they were doing, a distinction Landecker's "research" "methodology" doesn't allow—without following the basic instruction of all elementary writing classes, namely, "tie this into your thesis!" Occasionally she did; almost always she didn't. Moreover when she decided to cite things and when she didn't seems to be completely arbitrary, and a lot of the book is simply asserted.
In the first chapter she says (again and again, in much the same words) that the fact that these cells could grow outside the body and be kept alive indefinitely challenged the assumptions that...the cells could NOT grow outside the body, and could NOT be kept alive indefinitely. I didn't need a book to tell me this. But I don't actually think she makes much of an argument that such things WERE assumed before—if she did, I can't find it. Moreover, her citations of "popular culture" seem to come very close to what I jokingly referred to a few paragraphs up—headlines and articles in newspapers. Historical context is roughly summarized (in about a page) and then dismissed (57). “Making connections and discovering precursors does nothing to explain why tissue culture appeared to Harrison’s contemporaries as something startlingly new, perhaps even unbelievable,� she writes (58). But actually, no, it DOES help. Or might have if she'd looked for it.
Moreover, who are these contemporaries? There is a telling endnote (no. 39, pg. 268): “It is difficult to say, actually, whether the experiment was tried somewhere and failed...Experiments that do not work do not distinguish between inadequate technique and biological impossibility and are rarely published or otherwise publicized.� Well, that is the job of the scholar! Characterizations about the meaning of findings are taken from the conclusions of the papers in which they were published. Landecker writes of the “debate� over Harrison/Carrel’s findings (but it’s not clear quite over what) but basically the questioners are cast as simply missing its significance and anyway there aren’t very many of them. Maybe she just wants to tell the story of how we got to where we are; but in that case why go to the trouble of justifying her footnote-chasing? You or I can do this in an hour with Google Scholar.
Now I'm going to heap my scorn on the HeLa stuff, which I actually thought was very much the weakest part of a (very weak) book.
Here is HeLa's story, roughly: A hospital drew cancer cells from the cervix of an Afro-American woman in Baltimore in the mid-fifties. But we are supposed to believe that the cells spread around the country until 1967 when all of a sudden a scientist stood up at a meeting, said that HeLa was from a black person, and nothing was the same again (her book is full of scientists standing up at meetings and making announcements after which nothing is the same again). And we are asked to accept passively that nobody cared about the origin of these cells--not that they were from a black person, not that they were from cancer cells--until AFTER the Civil Rights movement? The hospital that drew them didn’t care? Researchers didn’t care? Weren’t there laws in Maryland that had to do with blood? She mentions the one-drop rule--but it's as if she discovers it; she makes no mention of the fact that the one-drop rule was the law of the land until the 1960s (or even today).
Then there is the stuff on which she is flatly WRONG: Landecker claims that the relationship between hospitals and patients (as experimental subjects and as care-seekers), especially poor patients, changed as a result of the demand for human cells in the 1950s. The first thing to note is that this was NOT a change. For two hundred years doctors and hospitals had eyed patients, especially poor ones, as donors of research and teaching material first. The second thing is that her statement that the relationship of the Tuskegee Institute to its patients being “tainted� by its infamously racist relationship is simply INCORRECT. She mis-dates the Tuskegee syphilis experiment by two decades—it wasn't revealed until the 1970s—but like most everything in the book, that isn’t cited. It's on page 137 if you want to see for yourself. I should also mention that a recurring problem with the book is her failure to identify the dates of events she mentions, which is the least we could expect from a book that paraphrases articles wholesale.
Landecker's obsessed with the idea that the weight of all the HeLa cells was itself an obsession of the popular and scientific press (which she claims to be unable to distinguish). Yet she can only find--or at least only bothers to cite--a SINGLE instance of the usage of such rhetoric. Nonetheless she asks why the world is so fascinated by it and basically tries to structure her whole chapter around it. Meanwhile, she herself raises the issue half a dozen times. Seriously, don't believe me? Look it up. "Why this repeated return to physical weight?" she asks on page 179—but there is actually only one place this is mentioned in the sources. It's footnotes number 48 and 60 for that chapter. I don't know why she was so obsessed with it. But it's really, pardon my French, shitty research, if not downright deceptive.
I mentioned obvious questions were that weren't asked—let alone answered. A lot of them have to do with replicability of experiment in different locations, which seems to me a giant elephant in the room if you're talking about what it means to have the "same" cell in different places. (She might have found this if she had looked beyond the positive results reported in journals, as I say above.) Here are some questions:
Was it not problematic that one woman's cells were taken as normal?
That cancer cells (HeLa) were taken as normal?
She says that all human cells are basically alike. Was this established? Wasn't this contested? Isn't this contested NOW?
More importantly, there's a huge paradox to the HeLa storyif ANY human cell was representative of humanity, WHY WERE THE HELA CELLS IMPORTANT? Why couldn't scientists use ANY cells—their own, their postdocs', their own patients'?
And if the HeLa cells were special in some way, HOW and WHY were they taken as representative of the rest of the human race?!
As a final insult, there's no bibliography, and the index is terrible. DNA is nowhere in it.
I haven't even gotten to the terrible writing and editing: there are missing verbs all over the place, garbled sentences, lone quotation marks.
December 12, 2017
First things first: I read this book a while ago (~ 2009-2010 or so) but I still think it was one of the most mind-bending books I read of lately. Even thus far back I can recollect distinctly why it left such an impression on me.
Yes there has been a lot of new research in between, and the book somehow stop in the midst of and before the 1980 PCR gentech revolution, detailed by Paul Rabinow in his seminal Making PCR. A Story of Biotechnology (1996). Yes this was before the Human Genome Project, and in between a lot of new research in cell tissue culture, genetics, molecular biology was still to come. Not to mention the Human Microbiome Project and the holobiont (Lynn Margulis 1991) or the hologenome theory of evolution. Not to mention the post-2005 CRISPR gene editing boom out of the new understanding of base sequence repeats in archaea/bacteria as an adaptive bacterial immunity system evolved in response to phages. One can easily asssess the daunting task of analyzing(even for specialists) even in passing the vastly increased scientific literature at hand.
But the conceptual and performative lab practices and tools that allowed all that were well at hand before those times.
With great attention to detail H. Landecker follow the rise, history and particularities of growing life ex vivo, out of the body, separated form the cellular mass and confines of the bodily self. Pay heed: it is NOT a book about the bioethics of sampling, the pros and cons of experimentation with or isolating cells out of individual bodies. Indeed, this has already happened many times without their prior acknowledgment of donors and via exploitative means and ensuing commercial Pharma interests as in the Henrietta Lacks case. Still in order to insure those very foundation of ethics, one needs to look into the grim and messy details of a contiguous and even nefarious plasticity of lab-grown biomass, swelling blob-like and falsifying all life science commonplaces including what it is to be an organism as a unity, a clearly defined, functional whole. Hannah Landecker's "substantial biomass" adheres to that sort of gothic weird materiality that Ben Woodward investigated as Slime Dynamics (Zero Books, 2012), slowly oozing out of the labs to somehow endow us with a biophilosophy devoid of anthropocentrist comforting shapes and contours. Culturing life outside of the body allowed for the strange, unexpected beginnings of a technique that would be later called tissue culture. Tissue culture exemplified the possibility (what was deemed not only blasphemous, even theoretically impossible) to make observations and to track life on the outside. It went beyond the 19th c techniques of actually killing while staining tissues and of recording and noticing internal body events outside of the body itself.
One of the keys to the understanding of the impact and role of tissue culturing in life sciences is the entwining of utter limits of plasticity (the assumed limits of cellular autonomy and bodily integrity)with what was considered fixed biological temporality. Tissue culturing involved modes (in vitro) of "operationalizing biological time"(H. Landecker), freed from the limits of the body and also manipulating the time of the medium in which cells live. Alexis Carrel(1873-1944) used microcinematography as a foundation of biological time as distinct from its clock or solar times (one can recognize here the influence of Bergson's "duration"). His films revealed the dimension of time as being part and body of the very constitution of cells and tissues. This literal, applied interpretation of Bergson's theory allowed for a "new science of duration complete with its own glassware, instrumentation, choreography, outfits, lighting, and atmosphere."(H. Landecker p 87). Recording how time was literally inscribed in physiological matter necessitated a long laboratory practice in fluid replacement and of starting, stopping and redirecting of the flow of blood.
This was already prepared by the importance accorded to the cellular medium as 'milieu interieur' coined by great French physiologist Claude Bernard in the 19 c that speculated about artificially maintaining or supplying (or arresting) that milieu. This orientation towards event, of accelerating or speeding down processes by intervention, of making them slower or faster also allowed the establishing of a continuity in clonal lineages of descent that would otherwise be impossible.
Potentialities and impossibilities are also constantly being explored & enabled outside of the bodies & inside the laboratories via technique and careful experiments. Such a marvelous and graphic experiment is done initially by Ross Harrison, an American embryologist. Harrison, as carefully noted by H. Landecker manages to operate a profound and radical brake with previous methods of histological convention - also at the level of the type of object that histology was able to represent till then. What is here - for the first time become apparent - is the evanescent nature of such structures, the fact that they bordered on the invisible, the graspable and actually beyond/behind perception (instances of aperception?). Curiously eyes play an important role - as the hanging-drop technique demonstrates - a way to culture cells in the suspended eyes of dead cows.
This is the early example that makes use of fresh cow eyes as a milieu for cellular growth. Recording or describing these living processes is illustrated by a series of incredible drawing republished in this book from the 1910 camera lucida experimenting showing how a single nerve cell in culture is constantly changing BEFORE "the outline of it can be traced". In this experiment one could superimpose via mirrors and prisms the separate images of the specimen, superimposing it on a paper during the drawing. This illusory effect of seeing the specimen move and alive on the blank paper - allowed the description and drawing of living cells almost like an animation movie with the pencil moving along the outline of the specimen. A new biological scientific - cartoon ensued. Microcinematography was also not far ahead (H. Landecker did also some interesting research on the molecular vitalism of such new microcinematographic techniques of filming and bio- marking living cells).
Nevertheless these attempts to show the temporal changes were extremely difficult and at odds with the practice of static drawings.
During the whole length of the book, written in a pleasurable and exciting style (in spite of the immense plethora of examples and researchers names and laboratory techniques presented) she constantly shows how unexpected and I'm sure yucky (for many) aspects of the new biology arising out of these experiments & laboratory setups. Prior to tissue culturing, limits of what was differentiated, inseparable, no-removable and non-hybridize clashed with the sheer novelty of growing a tumour (for example) outside of the body of a mouse. Both artificiality and performativity outside of the bounds of the possible mark tissue culture of cells as complete novelty in the history of life sciences. Explanted cells living in vivo seemed to viciously jumble up cherished notions around them, to make even these forerunners skeptic about its success and durability.
Maybe more familiar readers with the bio-philosophical stakes and the history of biology will deem these regular mainstays of life science. But, for me confronted with the formulations such as Francois Jacob's, of the idea that "higher animals literally live within themselves" had a strong resonance. There an entire horrifying account of the whole (be warned) process of unsavory laboratory practices of experimental embryology and of grafting, sewing tumor transplants as you might expect. Parabiosis puts even movies like Taxidermia at shame - it involved the sewing together of 2 or 3 animals that were opened and the the open edges sewn together. After a period of time (death most probably of the animals), they were sectioned again to see what happened inside. But mostly the animal and its time had to be stopped (killed) in order to be observed. Before tissue culturing, published experiments always involved this freezing up in order to record culturing observations.
Another super interesting aspect in the non-conventional coloring used in one of laboratories playing an important role in the book: Alexis Carrel's lab at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. It was not white as - as we are used for conventional medical clothes to be white or blue or everything happening in a white cube. To increase the visibility of the translucent pieces of tissue they worked with, they painted the walls gray and all technicians and scientists were dressed in full-length BLACK gowns.
Yes there has been a lot of new research in between, and the book somehow stop in the midst of and before the 1980 PCR gentech revolution, detailed by Paul Rabinow in his seminal Making PCR. A Story of Biotechnology (1996). Yes this was before the Human Genome Project, and in between a lot of new research in cell tissue culture, genetics, molecular biology was still to come. Not to mention the Human Microbiome Project and the holobiont (Lynn Margulis 1991) or the hologenome theory of evolution. Not to mention the post-2005 CRISPR gene editing boom out of the new understanding of base sequence repeats in archaea/bacteria as an adaptive bacterial immunity system evolved in response to phages. One can easily asssess the daunting task of analyzing(even for specialists) even in passing the vastly increased scientific literature at hand.
But the conceptual and performative lab practices and tools that allowed all that were well at hand before those times.
With great attention to detail H. Landecker follow the rise, history and particularities of growing life ex vivo, out of the body, separated form the cellular mass and confines of the bodily self. Pay heed: it is NOT a book about the bioethics of sampling, the pros and cons of experimentation with or isolating cells out of individual bodies. Indeed, this has already happened many times without their prior acknowledgment of donors and via exploitative means and ensuing commercial Pharma interests as in the Henrietta Lacks case. Still in order to insure those very foundation of ethics, one needs to look into the grim and messy details of a contiguous and even nefarious plasticity of lab-grown biomass, swelling blob-like and falsifying all life science commonplaces including what it is to be an organism as a unity, a clearly defined, functional whole. Hannah Landecker's "substantial biomass" adheres to that sort of gothic weird materiality that Ben Woodward investigated as Slime Dynamics (Zero Books, 2012), slowly oozing out of the labs to somehow endow us with a biophilosophy devoid of anthropocentrist comforting shapes and contours. Culturing life outside of the body allowed for the strange, unexpected beginnings of a technique that would be later called tissue culture. Tissue culture exemplified the possibility (what was deemed not only blasphemous, even theoretically impossible) to make observations and to track life on the outside. It went beyond the 19th c techniques of actually killing while staining tissues and of recording and noticing internal body events outside of the body itself.
One of the keys to the understanding of the impact and role of tissue culturing in life sciences is the entwining of utter limits of plasticity (the assumed limits of cellular autonomy and bodily integrity)with what was considered fixed biological temporality. Tissue culturing involved modes (in vitro) of "operationalizing biological time"(H. Landecker), freed from the limits of the body and also manipulating the time of the medium in which cells live. Alexis Carrel(1873-1944) used microcinematography as a foundation of biological time as distinct from its clock or solar times (one can recognize here the influence of Bergson's "duration"). His films revealed the dimension of time as being part and body of the very constitution of cells and tissues. This literal, applied interpretation of Bergson's theory allowed for a "new science of duration complete with its own glassware, instrumentation, choreography, outfits, lighting, and atmosphere."(H. Landecker p 87). Recording how time was literally inscribed in physiological matter necessitated a long laboratory practice in fluid replacement and of starting, stopping and redirecting of the flow of blood.
This was already prepared by the importance accorded to the cellular medium as 'milieu interieur' coined by great French physiologist Claude Bernard in the 19 c that speculated about artificially maintaining or supplying (or arresting) that milieu. This orientation towards event, of accelerating or speeding down processes by intervention, of making them slower or faster also allowed the establishing of a continuity in clonal lineages of descent that would otherwise be impossible.
Potentialities and impossibilities are also constantly being explored & enabled outside of the bodies & inside the laboratories via technique and careful experiments. Such a marvelous and graphic experiment is done initially by Ross Harrison, an American embryologist. Harrison, as carefully noted by H. Landecker manages to operate a profound and radical brake with previous methods of histological convention - also at the level of the type of object that histology was able to represent till then. What is here - for the first time become apparent - is the evanescent nature of such structures, the fact that they bordered on the invisible, the graspable and actually beyond/behind perception (instances of aperception?). Curiously eyes play an important role - as the hanging-drop technique demonstrates - a way to culture cells in the suspended eyes of dead cows.
This is the early example that makes use of fresh cow eyes as a milieu for cellular growth. Recording or describing these living processes is illustrated by a series of incredible drawing republished in this book from the 1910 camera lucida experimenting showing how a single nerve cell in culture is constantly changing BEFORE "the outline of it can be traced". In this experiment one could superimpose via mirrors and prisms the separate images of the specimen, superimposing it on a paper during the drawing. This illusory effect of seeing the specimen move and alive on the blank paper - allowed the description and drawing of living cells almost like an animation movie with the pencil moving along the outline of the specimen. A new biological scientific - cartoon ensued. Microcinematography was also not far ahead (H. Landecker did also some interesting research on the molecular vitalism of such new microcinematographic techniques of filming and bio- marking living cells).
Nevertheless these attempts to show the temporal changes were extremely difficult and at odds with the practice of static drawings.
During the whole length of the book, written in a pleasurable and exciting style (in spite of the immense plethora of examples and researchers names and laboratory techniques presented) she constantly shows how unexpected and I'm sure yucky (for many) aspects of the new biology arising out of these experiments & laboratory setups. Prior to tissue culturing, limits of what was differentiated, inseparable, no-removable and non-hybridize clashed with the sheer novelty of growing a tumour (for example) outside of the body of a mouse. Both artificiality and performativity outside of the bounds of the possible mark tissue culture of cells as complete novelty in the history of life sciences. Explanted cells living in vivo seemed to viciously jumble up cherished notions around them, to make even these forerunners skeptic about its success and durability.
Maybe more familiar readers with the bio-philosophical stakes and the history of biology will deem these regular mainstays of life science. But, for me confronted with the formulations such as Francois Jacob's, of the idea that "higher animals literally live within themselves" had a strong resonance. There an entire horrifying account of the whole (be warned) process of unsavory laboratory practices of experimental embryology and of grafting, sewing tumor transplants as you might expect. Parabiosis puts even movies like Taxidermia at shame - it involved the sewing together of 2 or 3 animals that were opened and the the open edges sewn together. After a period of time (death most probably of the animals), they were sectioned again to see what happened inside. But mostly the animal and its time had to be stopped (killed) in order to be observed. Before tissue culturing, published experiments always involved this freezing up in order to record culturing observations.
Another super interesting aspect in the non-conventional coloring used in one of laboratories playing an important role in the book: Alexis Carrel's lab at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. It was not white as - as we are used for conventional medical clothes to be white or blue or everything happening in a white cube. To increase the visibility of the translucent pieces of tissue they worked with, they painted the walls gray and all technicians and scientists were dressed in full-length BLACK gowns.
February 8, 2025
[4.5 stars]
A really nice example of the importance of centering technique in the history of science. Landecker has a great eye for identifying unexpected origins and does a great job describing how gradual changes can lead to huge shifts in how techniques are understood. Cell culture is so important for human therapeutics and translational research today but I never would have guessed that it derived from old bacteriological procedures!
A really nice example of the importance of centering technique in the history of science. Landecker has a great eye for identifying unexpected origins and does a great job describing how gradual changes can lead to huge shifts in how techniques are understood. Cell culture is so important for human therapeutics and translational research today but I never would have guessed that it derived from old bacteriological procedures!
June 17, 2011
Over the past few decades biotechnology has been gaining an increasing hold on public imagination. Biological research has also become the most prominent part of all scientific research, in terms of both the number of research projects and the total amount of funding that biological research gains from grant-giving agencies. This predominance can be gleaned from the percentage of articles that are dedicated to biology in the most prominent research journals such as "Nature" and "Science." And yet, this current revolution in biological research has a history that is at least a century old. It has its origins in the discovery in the early years of the twentieth century that complex biological tissues can survive and even thrive in the non-biological environment of the petri dish. The discovery and the early history of the development of this important laboratory technique is the subject of "Culturing Life," an incredible and immensely readable book by Hannah Landecker.
Today very little attention is given to the remarkable fact that living tissue can be grown, practically indefinitely, in what looks like a very hostile environment of laboratory glassware. And yet, when this was first discovered, most practicing biologists firmly believed that there is something particular about the environment of a body as a whole that was a necessary requirement for the growth and development of living cells. This discovery has been justifiably compared to the discovery of laboratory synthesis of complex organic compounds. It had an equivalent impact on what does it mean for matter to be biological, and it stretched the imagination of both the biologists and the public at large. In the subsequent chapter the book traces the further development of this new way of growing living tissue, and spends some time on the most famous examples of it - the so-called "immortal chicken heart" and the HeLa human cell culture. Many of these tissues and cultures would probably not pass the careful scrutiny of their purity that we have today, but at the time when they were used they were veritable new scientific achievements.
The book aims to stress the purely scientific significance of what it means to grow living tissue in laboratory environment, beyond its technological and therapeutic value. This laboratory technique is the crowning example of malleability and adaptability of life in general. It pushes the boundary of what we mean by the very term "life."
Hannah Landecker is an excellent writer and much of the writing in this book has almost a literally quality to it. She doesn't shy away from philosophical considerations, but does so in a non-abstract way that can have a lot of appeal even to non-academic audience. Even though the subject matter of this book is very technical, the reader is not subjected to impenetrable and arcane scientific jargon. The book is a thoughtful exploration of one of the most important laboratory techniques in the use today, and whether you are interested in history of science, biotechnology, bioethics, or are just curious about experimental biology, this book will provide you with very valuable and interesting information.
Today very little attention is given to the remarkable fact that living tissue can be grown, practically indefinitely, in what looks like a very hostile environment of laboratory glassware. And yet, when this was first discovered, most practicing biologists firmly believed that there is something particular about the environment of a body as a whole that was a necessary requirement for the growth and development of living cells. This discovery has been justifiably compared to the discovery of laboratory synthesis of complex organic compounds. It had an equivalent impact on what does it mean for matter to be biological, and it stretched the imagination of both the biologists and the public at large. In the subsequent chapter the book traces the further development of this new way of growing living tissue, and spends some time on the most famous examples of it - the so-called "immortal chicken heart" and the HeLa human cell culture. Many of these tissues and cultures would probably not pass the careful scrutiny of their purity that we have today, but at the time when they were used they were veritable new scientific achievements.
The book aims to stress the purely scientific significance of what it means to grow living tissue in laboratory environment, beyond its technological and therapeutic value. This laboratory technique is the crowning example of malleability and adaptability of life in general. It pushes the boundary of what we mean by the very term "life."
Hannah Landecker is an excellent writer and much of the writing in this book has almost a literally quality to it. She doesn't shy away from philosophical considerations, but does so in a non-abstract way that can have a lot of appeal even to non-academic audience. Even though the subject matter of this book is very technical, the reader is not subjected to impenetrable and arcane scientific jargon. The book is a thoughtful exploration of one of the most important laboratory techniques in the use today, and whether you are interested in history of science, biotechnology, bioethics, or are just curious about experimental biology, this book will provide you with very valuable and interesting information.
January 6, 2013
Evolution does not have humans in mind. 'Survival' may mean species extinction. Fantastic
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