Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship
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Biological Relatives ExpErimEntal FuturEs: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit SARAH FRANKLIN Biological Relatives IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship Duke University Press Durham and London 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper ♾ Cover designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Interior by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Whitman and Din by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Franklin, Sarah, 1960– Biological relatives : ivF, stem cells, and the future of kinship / Sarah Franklin. pages cm—(Experimental futures) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0- 8223- 5485- 7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0- 8223- 5499- 4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Fertilization in vitro, Human—Social aspects. 2. Kinship—Philosophy. 3. Feminist anthropology. i. Title. ii. Series: Experimental futures. rg135.F74 2013 618.1′780599—dc23 2013018962 To Pat Spallone, who stayed with the rouble, and has always found the words. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix introduction Relatively Biological 1 1 Miracle Babies 31 2 Living Tools 68 3 Embryo Pioneers 102 4 Reproductive Technologies 150 5 Living ivF 185 6 ivF Live 221 7 Frontier Culture 258 8 After ivF 297 aFtErword 311 Notes 313 References 333 Index 351 AcKNOWLEDGMENTS Funding for the research conducted in the book was generously provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (Stem Cell Initiative) and the Wellcome Trust (Medical Humanities). Without the long- standing support and encouragement of Professor Peter Braude, none of the fieldwork for this project could have been undertaken in the new labs at Guy’s Hospital in Lon- don. Dr. Dusko Ilic, the current head of the iPS cell core facility at Guy’s, and Dr. Emma Stephenson, who is responsible for the design, setup, and running of the stem cell laboratory at Guy’s, were both generous with their time and patient with their explanations of the work they do. Glenda Cornwell, Dr. Ya- coub Khalef, Dr. Alison Lashwood, and Dr. Victoria Wood have been unfail- ingly helpful over many years as my research migrated from pgd to stem cells. In particular I would like to thank the artist Gina Glover for not only provid- ing a thoughtful and inspiring account of her installation project, The Art of A.R.T., in the Guy’s Assisted Conception Unit, but also for allowing the images to be reproduced in this volume, courtesy of both www.ginaglover.com and www.artinhospitals. I am indebted to the many individuals who read parts of this manuscript, including Karin Lesnik- Oberstein, Nick Hopwood, Christina Brandt, Donna Haraway, Stevienna De Saille, Barbara Orland, and Zeynep Gurtin, and to all of the audiences who heard parts of it presented, in places too numerous to list. In addition to the three external reviewers who read the manuscript in its entirety, and gave detailed and helpful feedback, I am espe- cially grateful to Sara Ahmed and Marilyn Strathern, who read the complete manuscript- in- progress and offered essential encouragement as well as con- structive advice for revision at critical points in the development of Biological Relatives. Thanks to Emily Martin, Mary Poovey, and Troy Duster, who hosted me in the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge during my research leave in 2008–2009 at nyu. Throughout the writing of this manu- script I have had the benefit of working closely with Professor Martin Johnson and Dr. Nick Hopwood of Cambridge University on our project concerning the history of mammalian developmental biology in the U.K., in partnership with the Generation to Reproduction project at Cambridge. Having moved to Cambridge myself during the completion of Biological Relatives, I have been able to benefit from the unique concentration of “reproductive studies” there in more ways than would be possible to describe adequately here, and it is my hope that this book will strengthen the contribution from social science to this richly interdisciplinary endeavor. Like all major writing projects, this one had many ups and downs, and I am deeply indebted to my partner Sara Ahmed for her support, encouragement, and advice. As ever, the Duke team has been unfailingly professional, friendly, enthusiastic, and rigorous in their stewardship of the manuscript into print. Special thanks to Ken Wissoker, Jade Brooks, Liz Smith, and Amy Buchanan for always being responsive and never letting the reins slip. It is both a pleasure and privilege to be part of the Duke list, and this book could not have found a better home. Finally, I would like to thank my very dear friend Pat Spallone, who has been with me on the journey this book describes since the beginning. x acknowlEdgmEnts INTRODUCTION Relatively Biological Thirty- five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertiliza- tion (ivF) confronts us with a paradoxical legacy. Since its controversial clini- cal debut in 1978, ivF has rapidly become more routine and familiar, while at the same time also becoming, as Alice might have said, “curiouser and curiouser.” Conception in vitro is now a normal fact of life, yet having passed through the looking glass of ivF, neither human reproduction nor reproduc- tive biology look quite the same. Among other things, human conception can now be looked at—and not only through the microscope. The moment of conception can be viewed on the Internet; it is depicted in films and adver- tisements, and shown on the evening news. It can be downloaded in 3d from YouTube. This technologization of reproduction is both ordinary and curious. These images reflect the desire to know and understand that is conveyed in the normal meaning of “curious,” but it is equally curious in the sense of sur- prising and unusual, that such images are ordinary at all. What does it mean that ivF has become a looking glass through which we see ourselves? What kind of view is on offer in the technological reproduction of human concep- tion as a public spectacle? What species of technology is ivF? After all, it is not just a means of looking, or a spectacle—the point of ivF is to produce a new human being. In reflecting upon the meaning of life after ivF, we must also consider the life of ivF—a technology that has had a complex evolution out of the study of natural history and the life sciences into clinical practice, and which is now intimately interrelated with the horizon industries of regenerative medicine and stem cell science. From an experimental research technique used in em- bryology, ivF has evolved into a global technological platform, used for a wide variety of applications, from genetic diagnosis and livestock breeding to clon- ing and stem cell research. One way to view the history of ivF is as a basic technique that has circulated through science, medicine, and agriculture as part of an increasingly complex tool kit for the control of mammalian repro- duction. From this point of view, the history of ivF is that of a stem technology that has become ever more thickly imbricated in the remaking of the biologi- cal that so distinctly characterized the twentieth century—a model technique for remaking life. As such, ivF is also a lens or window onto the history of the process Evelyn Fox Keller (2002) describes as “making sense of life”—a process that, like ivF, has also become “curiouser and curiouser” over time. As Jane Maien- schein (2003) argues, ivF has changed scientific understandings of what life is—a question that never had a particularly clear answer to begin with. Some of the earliest attempts to induce fertilization in glass, such as those carried out in the late nineteenth century by Jacques Loeb in sea urchins, were pre- cisely designed not only to control life, but to redefine it. Loeb’s discovery that eggs could be experimentally activated without sperm, by chemically induc- ing development in vitro, was explicitly intended to confirm a new definition of life as mechanical, and thus reengineerable. As Maienschein points out, for Loeb, his manipulations were life, and thus “called into question what we mean by a life” (2003: 79). And as Evelyn Fox Keller similarly observes, this process has continued to dissolve its object precisely through the attempt to clarify its particularity, to define its principles, and to characterize its speci- ficity. As Keller notes, the effort to define what life is began only two cen- turies ago with Jean- Baptiste Lamarck’s call for a “true definition of life” that did not rely upon classifying things that are alive, but could determine what life is, or its “essence.” As Keller notes, “By far the most interesting feature of the quest for the defining essence of life, and surely its greatest peculiarity, is that even while focussing attention on the boundary between living and non- living, emphasizing both the clarity and importance of that divide, this quest for life’s essence simultaneously works toward its dissolution” (2002: 292). As Keller argues further, the “peculiar” process of defining life in the twenty-firs t century has cycled right back around to its pre-L amarckian, late eighteenth- century form in the context of projects such as synthetic biology, which are aimed to demonstrate that the border between life and nonlife is entirely porous—and that life can be built from scratch from inorganic compounds. In a sense, this has already occurred in the form of synthetic chemistry, also known as organic synthesis, through which organic compounds are manufac- tured out of inorganic components.