Bronwyn Parry

Contested bodies: Property models and the commodification of human biological artefacts

Over the past decade collections of archived human body parts have undergone a series of transformations. One of the most significant, but under-researched of these is the transformation that has occurred in the material condition, state or form of these collections. While the impulse to preserve human organs and tissues for pedagogical, diagnostic and research purposes has been central to medical practice for two and a half centuries, new technologies and practices are now revolutionizing the ways in which these organs and tissues may be stored and made available for use. Existing collections of whole archived organs are being continually reworked in response to changing scientific and medical demands. Many are being progressively commuted into a series of new biotechnological artefacts: cryogenically stored tissue samples, cell lines, isolated sequences of DNA, scans, digital images and technoscientific ‘tools’ such as genetic test kits. The emergence of these new biotechnological artefacts has created some unexpected regulatory and ethical dilemmas. These difficulties are arising, in large part, because of the ontological indeterminacy that surrounds their status as objects. This is problematic because formal relations to such objects are governed by their ontological status. What a ‘thing’ is—the nature of a ‘thing’—or at least what that is determined to be—profoundly affects how that thing may subsequently be used—economically, socially, lawfully and ethically. These new artefacts are not, however, easily classified. Some, such as cryogenically stored tissues, retain a degree of corporeality, others, such as digital scans and DNA sequences, offer more purely informational renderings of the human form. Genetically modified human cell-lines and diagnostic test kits prove even more difficult to characterize. While initially derived from (and fully reliant upon) donated human tissues, they also owe their existence as highly engineered artefacts to the constituencies responsible for bringing them into the world, as such. These new artefacts are simultaneously corporeal and Science as Culture Vol. 15, No. 2, 139–158, June 2006

Cultures of Knowledge: Investigating Intellectual Property Rights and Relations in the Pacific

Although often presented as inherently normative, Euro-American systems of intellectual property rights (IPRs) law are, like earlier systems of biological classification, best understood as particular, culturally defined systems for codifying knowledge employed to discipline objects, phenomena and social relations. Despite their partiality, such systems have successfully colonised new domains, recently underpinning a new uniform global regime for the protection of IPRs (GATT/WTO TRIPs). In this paper I reveal the central role that global institutions now play in accelerating the universalisation of specific “cultures of regulation”: acting as powerful vectors for the transmission of particular types of knowledge and arbiters of the “normative” bases of global regulatory regimes. Recent empirical evidence from the Pacific illustrates how the TRIPs regime facilitates the commodification and appropriation of intellectual, cultural and biological resources in that region and highlights the development of alternative sui generis systems of IPR protection that challenge the normativity and hegemony of this regime. The article serves as an entry point for further research into the geography of knowledge systems—the way in which the colonisation of certain regulatory systems and forms facilitates the pursuit of particular interests or sustains relations of domination.

Narratives of neoliberalism: 'clinical labour' in context.

Cross-border reproductive care has been thrust under the international spotlight by a series of recent scandals. These have prompted calls to develop more robust means of assessing the exploitative potential of such practices and the need for overarching and normative forms of national and international regulation. Allied theorisations of the emergence of forms of clinical labour have cast the outsourcing of reproductive services such as gamete donation and gestational surrogacy as artefacts of a wider neoliberalisation of service provision. These accounts share with many other narratives of neoliberalism a number of key assertions that relate to the presumed organisation of labour relations within this paradigm. This article critically engages with four assumptions implicit in these accounts: that clinical labourers constitute a largely homogeneous underclass of workers; that reproductive labour has been contractualised in ways that disembed it from wider social and communal relations; that contractualisation can provide protection for clinical labour lessening the need for formal regulatory oversight; and that the transnationalisation of reproductive service labour is largely unidirectional and characterised by a dynamic of provision in which ‘the rest’ services ‘the West’. Drawing on the first findings of a large-scale ethnographic research project into assisted reproduction in India I provide evidence to refute these assertions. In so doing the article demonstrates that while the outsourcing and contractualisation of reproductive labour may be embedded in a wider neoliberal paradigm these practices cannot be understood nor their impacts be fully assessed in isolation from their social and cultural contexts.

The Flesh Made Word: Banking the Body in the Age of Information

The John Moore case in the United States and the Alder Hey scandal in Britain raised many urgent questions about the legal and ethical status of human tissue collections. This article intervenes in the current debates by posing an ontological question about tissue banking. The present discussions of the regulation of tissue archiving often rely upon a crisp, yet ill-defined, distinction between bodily ‘material’ and medical ‘information’, each bringing with it different legal and ethical considerations. Arguing that the distinction is actually difficult to draw and in urgent need of clarification, we propose that the term ‘information’ is too broad and vague to do the necessary work and suggest replacing it with a carefully theorized account of the precise ontological differences between material and textual resources. In the second half of the article we explore one particular case of the extraction of information from human tissues—the DNA sequence. We conclude by deploying the definitions reached in the first section in an effort to clarify some of the legal and ethical concerns about ‘genetic information’.

Introduction: The gendered geographies of ‘bodies across borders’

This paper introduces the articles that comprise the themed section ‘bodies across borders’ which investigates how the social and spatial dynamics of healthcare provision are being transformed by both neo-liberalization and globalization. The articles demonstrate how the central tenets of neoliberalism: the promotion of individual autonomy as realized through the instrument of consumer choice, the privatization, outsourcing and off-shoring of core competencies and service provision, the production of highly ‘flexible’ labour are at work in re-shaping access to, and delivery of, services in the domains of reproductive health, organ donation and globalized healthcare. In paying special attention to the ways in which these practices are cut across by class, gender and ethnicity, these accounts will hopefully encourage us to reject totalizing and homogeneous narratives of medical travel in favour of those that offer more nuanced understandings of the positionality of the individuals at the heart of them.

Surrogate labour: exceptional for whom?

Abstract The desire for genetically related children is driving an exponential rise in assisted reproductive service provision worldwide, including the Global South. In India, the number of ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) clinics has more than doubled over the past three years. This expansion has been accompanied by a similarly explosive growth in populist narratives that assert that one of the services offered by such clinics, commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS), is a form of labour that is so exceptional(ly) exploitative it should be banned. Provocative headlines proclaiming that surrogates are ‘Renting their wombs’ and ‘Pimping their pregnancies’ fuel such assertions, suggesting that surrogates become reduced to mere wombs, vessels for carrying the offspring of entitled and wealthy foreigners. Although superficially compelling, such arguments fail to withstand detailed interrogation. Utilizing insights from anthropology, the history of science and law and bringing to bear the findings of extended fieldwork in Mumbai, Jaipur and Delhi, I critically analyse three assertions made in relation to surrogacy: that it is (i) a particularly intimate or invasive form of bodily exploitation; (ii) a uniquely sacralized form of affective labour and (iii) a uniquely generative form of labour. In arguing against exceptionalism, I contend that such practices cannot be adjudged through application of universal ethical principles and norms, but rather must take account of the complexity of the lived experience of all the participants, placed in their sociological and geographical contexts.

The Social Life of ‘Scaffolds’: Examining human rights in regenerative medicine

Technologies for enhancement of the human body historically have taken the form of an apparatus: a technological device inserted in, or appended to, the human body. The margins of these devices were clearly discernible and materially circumscribed, allowing the distinction between the corporeality of the human body and the “machine” to remain both ontologically and materially secure. This dualism has performed some important work for human rights theorists, regulators, and policy makers, enabling each to imagine they can establish where the human ends and the other begins. New regenerative products such as Infuse™ and Amplify™ subsist, as animal-derived scaffolds seeded with growth hormone implanted within a prosthetic device. They are much more materially complex, and their identities thus remain open to contestation. Following Lochlann Jain’s 2006 work, I thus attend closely to their social lives, particularly the stories that are told about them and how these are employed to construct understandings of what kind of a phenomenon they are: systemic drug, biologic, or combinatorial medical device. The significance of this classificatory project is revealed in the final section of this paper, which explores how these stories shape understandings of “product failure,” liability, and causation when such products overflow their material and ontological categorization and their recipients become disturbingly “more than human.”

Regulation of surrogacy in India: whenceforth now?

Commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS) is unique among assisted reproductive services in its ability to attract disapprobation. Allied practices such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), oocyte and sperm donation also enable infertile couples to reproduce through assistive technological and third-party interventions, yet they rarely attract sustained condemnation. Censure arises from concerns that CGS involves the routine exploitation of vulnerable, impoverished women of colour who are commissioned by wealthy white Westerners to perform a labour they would otherwise decline. Rationales for undertaking CGS are, however, multiple and complex.1 CGS is, moreover, increasingly used by citizens of the global south (often relatively impoverished ones) to address forms of structural infertility brought about by diseases such as genital tuberculosis.2 This intra-South demand, combined with the displacement of the fertility industry to emergent southern economies such as Thailand, Mexico and India, should serve to make the regulation of CGS a key concern for global reproductive health. The legalisation of CGS in India in 20023 led to increased demand from individuals, such as women with serious reproductive abnormalities and small numbers of male homosexual couples who are unable to biologically gestate their own children, and the market grew consequentially. However, in 2015 the Indian state, stung by critiques that CGS was inherently imperialist and oppressive, elected to ban all foreigners from accessing these services.4 Responding to further adverse publicity surrounding high-profile international cases of abandonment of surrogate children,5 a Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill was abruptly introduced in August 2016 that banned CGS altogether.6 Believing the key problem to lie in the ‘commercial’ element of the process, the Indian state determined to make surrogacy permissible only if performed altruistically. This, according to the Bill, would ‘prohibit the potential exploitation of surrogate mothers.’7 The problem, it would seem, was solved … or …

Knowing Mycellf™: Personalized Medicine and the Economization of Prospective Knowledge about Bodily Fate

The author explores the emergence of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing as a means of economizing information or knowledge about “bodily fate.” She begins by examining the parallels and incommensurabilities between the kinds of bodily information that have been produced historically and those now generated by the application of advanced genome sequencing technologies. She then explores how contemporary understandings of disease are coproduced by individuals identified as potential constituents of disease communities by these forms of testing. The chapter concludes with a review of the implications that this involvement in the coproduction of understanding of disease has for the global regulation of DTC genetic testing.