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Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

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Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies culturing life culturing life How Cells Became Technologies hannah landecker Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2007 Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Landecker, Hannah. Culturing life : how cells became technologies / Hannah Landecker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical refrences (p. ). ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02328-4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-674-02328-5 (alk. paper) 1. Cell culture. 2. Tissue culture. 3. Biotechnology. I. Title. QH585.2.L36 2006 571.6Ј38—dc22 2006049019 To my parents, Elizabeth A. Landecker and Thomas L. Landecker contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction: Technologies of Living Substance 1 1 Autonomy 28 2 Immortality 68 3 Mass Reproduction 107 4 HeLa 140 5 Hybridity 180 Epilogue: Cells Then and Now 219 Notes 239 Index 272 acknowledgments It is with great pleasure that I set out to recognize those who have aided, encouraged, shaped, and financed work on this book. Joseph Dumit, Michael M. J. Fischer, Evelynn Hammonds, and Evelyn Fox Keller read and engaged the first version of this work, and to them I extend my warmest thanks. Michael Fischer has been an extraor- dinary mentor and friend. I would like to thank Leo Marx for years of discussions on literature and writing and many walks across the Longfellow Bridge. Hugh W. Brock taught me to love biology— both the living things and the science—and his teaching has stayed with me well beyond my year in his laboratory. I had the good fortune to be part of rich intellectual communi- ties in Boston and Berlin, at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Colleagues in these places, and in the net- works of history and anthropology of science, have in conver- sations, comments, and their own work contributed to the final shape of this book. Sarah Franklin, Sarah Jansen, Janina Wellmann, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Nick Hopwood, Michelle Murphy, Matt Price, Nick King, Aslihan Sanal, Stefan Helmreich, Stephen Pemberton, Adriana Petryna, Debbie Weinstein, Susann Wilkinson, Michael Kyba, Rebecca Herzig, Dan Harris, Barbara Harris, Fabrizia Giuliani, and Roberta Bivins have acknowledgments all contributed, one welcome way or another, to my writing and thinking. More recently, I have enjoyed the welcome of the faculty and graduate students of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University; thanks particularly to Jim Faubion and Michael Powell for their comments on the manuscript. George Marcus, Kirsten Ostherr, Scott McGill, Sarah Ellenzweig, and Jennifer Hamilton have made Rice a wonderful place to work over the last few years. Rich Doyle is a constant creative presence from afar. Tracy St. Claire, Cynthia Bohan, Sandra Chalmers, and Angela Ashton have been there from the beginning. A fellowship from the Center for Medical Humanities at the Uni- versity of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston allowed me invalu- able peaceful time working in the UTMB library among the sleep- ing medical students. The hospitality of the History of Science Department at Harvard and the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT in hosting me as a visiting scholar in 2005 was essential to finishing the book. A fellowship from the National En- dowment for the Humanities supported research and writing for Chapter 2 (but any views, findings, conclusions, or recommenda- tions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the NEH). In ad- dition, I would like to thank Mazyar Lotfalian and Melissa Cefkin, in whose apartment Chapter 3 was drafted. Portions of Chapter 1 are revised from their original publication in “New Times for Biology: Nerve Cultures and the Advent of Cel- lular Life in Vitro,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33:667–694. Chapter 2 includes revised pas- sages first published in “Building ‘A new type of body in which to grow a cell’: Tissue Culture at the Rockefeller Institute, 1910– 1914,” in Creating a Tradition of Biomedical Research: Contributions to the History of Rockefeller University, edited by Darwin Stapleton (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 2004), 151–174. Chapter 4 contains revised passages from “Immortality, In Vitro: A History of ix acknowledgments the HeLa Cell Line,” in Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, edited by Paul Brodwin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 53–72. My grandfather Patrick DeBurgh would have been a part of Chapter 3, but for an accident of history. I would like to thank him for sharing his memories of midcentury bacteriology. Tom and Elizabeth Landecker, Jim Landecker, Kath Becker, and Ted and Anne Kelty have been constantly supportive through years of re- ports on what must have seemed like an endless project. Chris Kelty read and discussed every word and idea, for years on end, and remained interested. He gets more than thanks; he gets all the love there is. And Ida, who was born as this book was near completion, provided the best deadline anyone could ever work toward. x There is in science, and perhaps even more so in history, some sanc- tion for the belief that a living thing might be taken in hand and so molded and modified that at best it would retain scarcely anything of its inherent form and disposition; that the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental superstructure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new variety of being. —H. G. Wells A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. Its functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as a part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history. —Alexis Carrel introduction: technologies of living substance This book presents a history of tissue culture, the practice of grow- ing living cells outside the body in the laboratory. At the same time, it tells the larger story of twentieth-century ideas and practices of plasticity and temporality of living things: Living things may be radically altered in the way they live in space and time and thus may be harnessed to human intention. This history highlights our human relationship to living matter as one structured by the con- cept of life as technology. Examining five central developments in the use of cultured cells over the twentieth century, I illustrate how novel biotechnical objects such as endlessly proliferating cell lines affect concepts of individuality, immortality, and hybridity. In 1890, the biologist Jacques Loeb wrote to physicist Ernst Mach that “the idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as creator, even in living nature, forming it eventually ac- cording to his will. Man can at least succeed in a technology of liv- ing substance.”1 Although there are many bio-words, from the orig- inal biology to biomedicine to bioscience to biotechnology, I have written a history of tissue culture that is particularly relevant to understanding “technologies of living substance,” a phrase more culturing life inclusive and thus more useful than the contemporary term “bio- technology.” The word’s present connotations point to biotech- nology as an economic and scientific phenomenon that began in the 1970s with the power of recombinant DNA and its industrial applications2 and the restructuring of the economic and legal con- ditions of the life sciences, which brought an influx of private cap- ital into academic biology.3 I invoke Loeb’s phrase here to indicate the realm of biological technologies that existed well before the 1970s but outside the etymology of the word “biotechnology” it- self, which traces back to earlier visions of organisms such as bacte- ria and pigs as factories for the production of valuable substances.4 This is an effort not to redefine or define biotechnology but to pose the broader question of how humans have come to regard and in- teract with living matter through the framework of life as tech- nology. This assumption of living matter as technological matter is con- stitutive of life today, in terms of both how it is lived and how it is concretely approached, handled, and manipulated. Living cultured cells are today used widely in research programs of all kinds and also serve as productive sources of biological molecules for phar- maceutical research and therapeutics, the food industry, and bio- medical research. Cells may be cultured short term as proxy diag- nostic bodies for the patients from which they have been extracted; or they may be cultured long term, as so-called cell lines or perma- nent in vitro populations of self-replicating somatic cells. Cells from all manner of organisms, from plants to insects to animals to hu- mans, constitute a substantial biomass present in the laboratories of the world, a living material base for contemporary life science.5 The science, technology, and economic productivity of living mat- ter depends on the productive and reproductive capacity of cells to continually make more of themselves while also generating large 2 introduction volumes of the biological materials of research—enzymes, anti- bodies, DNA, RNA, viruses. Thus the contemporary cell is also an important economic entity, patentable and productive. Anthropologists of science and technology have noted the living cell as scientific and technical object in ethnographies of Western biomedical and biotechnical settings. From amniocentesis to the es- tablishment of cell lines, the substance of the human body is now routinely maintained alive outside the body.6 These disembodied, productive, replicating cells that are derived from human bodies but live in laboratories are new but also newly normal.
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