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- Convenors:
-
Sara Lafuente-Funes
(Goethe Universität Frankfurt)
Ruzana Liburkina (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Veit Braun (University Frankfurt)
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- Discussant:
-
Thomas Lemke
(Goethe Universität)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Over the last century, cells have become tools and technologies for shaping, manipulating and managing life in contemporary biosciences and beyond. This panel aims to understand, map and theorize the isolation and circulation of cells, and its role in governing other living beings.
Long Abstract:
Over the last century, cells have become tools and technologies for shaping, manipulating and managing life in contemporary biosciences – and beyond. From stem cells to bacteria, they are used as vectors for genetic transformation, as experimental systems for basic research, as frozen germs of future life. Few of the biomedical innovations, therapies and industries that shape our lives today can be conceived without the cell. However, whereas the societal impact of DNA markers, predictive genomics, large-scale population genetics and other molecular technologies has received extensive attention from STS and other fields, cells as instruments of biopolitics have, with a few exceptions (Landecker 2007; Franklin 2013; Kent et al. 2006; Braun et al. 2023), largely remained unexamined.
STS scholars have highlighted the transition of cells from epistemic to technological objects: the scope and depth of intervention into cellular life has deepened over time, resulting in cells that are increasingly malleable and instrumental. Although cells are isolated, produced and formed in the delineated spaces of the lab or the clinic, they travel and have impact far beyond the walls of these facilities, aided by cryopreservation technologies. Insulin, food additives, IVF-eggs or vaccines at one point were or passed through cells. This panel aims to map, understand and theorize the circulation of cells and its role in governing living beings – such as bodies, populations, lineages or species.
Possible topics for submissions include:
• The inscription of biopolitical objectives into cells
• Logistics of scaling up and distributing cells: cell culture, cryopreservation, biobanking, iPSCs
• The biopolitics and governance of unruly cellular life
• The particularities of cells as lively objects – agency, immortality, mutability, resistance to violent treatments
• Cells as models for organisms, societies, and other forms of life
• Theorizing the role of cells for public and private life
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ingrid Tsang (University of Copenhagen) Louise Whiteley (University of Copenhagen)
Short abstract:
This interview study explores how leading stem cell scientists define ‘stem cell’ and ‘stemness’, and thus the particularities assigned to cell(s) in this process. We also investigate how meaning-making and perceptions of its utility shapes resulting research practice.
Long abstract:
Stem cells are often enrolled into highly promissory hopes of challenging the ‘degenerative-ity’ or ‘incurability’ of debilitating diseases. However, what a stem cell is has been a particular point of contention amongst scientists themselves (Tajbakhsh 2009; Clevers and Watt 2018), shaping the field and playing a central role in public and commercial engagement with its promises.
This paper explores how 16 leading stem cell scientists articulate the foundational concepts within their field of research – namely ‘stem cells’ and ‘stemness’. In particular, we attend to how each participant orientate these ideas around their conceptual utility, such as whether stem cells are more useful thought of as individuals or populations and what manner of characteristic(s) they should be defined by. Beyond mapping current schools of thoughts on the particularities of ‘stem cells’, we also interrogate how these personal conceptions are consciously negotiated against each other as well as their subsequent effects on research practices. Lastly, we explore the kinds of definitions and consensus that are sought after and/or idealized.
This study benefits from having an interviewer (IT) who is themself a ‘wet lab’ stem cell researcher conducting a multidisciplinary PhD, allowing a nuanced discussion of experimental practices to be held with each scientist-participant. The resulting perspective from our insider/expert “what is a stem cell?” interview study has important implications for the STS field on how utility governs meaning-making processes (Gilbert and Mulkay 1974; Kurzman 2008) in a biomedical context, and thus how practices with and through cells are shaped.
Naveen Thayyil (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) Allison Fish (University of Queensland)
Short abstract:
How have the computational and quantum turns shaped our understanding of the domain of biology, and in turn contributed to the claim that modern rule has turned molecular.
Long abstract:
Our understanding of life, including both our place in and relationship to the natural world, is profoundly shaped by contemporary bio-scientific epistemologies and technological capacities - factors that shift and evolve over time. In the past few decades new and emerging science and technologies have radically changed - allowing us to observe, measure and manipulate biological phenomena and processes in unprecedented ways and scales. In this talk, we will explore how two of these novel trajectories of this century- the computational turn in biology and quantum-enabled biotech - have emerged and are reshaping our understanding of biology and our place in the world. In doing so, we anticipate focusing on the following issues - the role of new technologies in shaping bioscience, the emergence of new interdisciplinary and disciplinary collaborations in science, and the political economic consequences of these significant shifts. We question whether the application of these new emerging technologies to the study of biology represent a radical turn or merely a shift in scale and, if so, what might be the implications of such a shift.
Veit Braun (University Frankfurt) Ruzana Liburkina (Goethe University Frankfurt) Sara Lafuente-Funes (Goethe Universität Frankfurt)
Short abstract:
Cells are technologies of making life: isolated, manipulated and frozen in the lab, they are eventually re-embedded in custom-tailored environments. Based on ethnographic research on cell cryopreservation, this paper draws explores the management and maintenance of cells and milieus as biopolitics.
Long abstract:
Cells do not exist as separate and discernable entities, unless they are isolated and maintained as such in the laboratory. In this artificial environment, cells are manipulated in ways that enact them as technologies through purification, modification and reprogramming (Landecker 2007). Ultimately, these activities aim at releasing cells back into society to remake other forms and relations of life: by scaling back up to tissues and organisms, by merging with and transforming bodies. The success of this reintroduction relies on particular environments, custom-tailored to accommodate and integrate the cell. These contexts substitute for the bodies, microbiomes, and fluids the cells originated from; they resemble but are not identical to them. In this paper, we draw attention to the life cycles of cells from extraction, isolation and manipulation to cryopreservation, release and reintegration. In particular, we want to draw attention to the environments that are supposed to re-embed cells after thawing. To stabilize cellular life, they must constantly absorb, supplement and balance it. Hence, we argue that the ability of governing life through cells relies on the ongoing management, maintenance, and readjustment of hosting milieus just as much as it does depend on biotechnologies and laboratories. Drawing from ethnographic research on cell cryopreservation, we point out how governing life through cells requires a double movement: the isolation and reduction of cells for and through freezing, and the preparation of environments in which this transformation is undone. From this empirical vantage point, we reassess the contemporary significance and limits of cellular biopower.