Carrie Friese

Realizing Potential in Translational Medicine: the Uncanny Emergence of Care as Science

This paper examines how a laboratory has responded to the problematics of translational medicine by creating an experimental system that links care for model animals with care for future patients. These scientists explicitly integrate caring practices into their scientific research on the basis that better, more translatable findings will result. Here, the potential of translational medicine to create human therapeutics is viewed as linked with the plasticity of model organisms. This is because poor care for animals is believed to result in inadequate scientific findings. However, emphasizing the constitutive role of care in conditioning both model organisms and experimental systems provokes an uneasiness regarding the standardizability of animal models, which I characterize with reference to Freud’s notion of “the uncanny.” In experimental science, care is something that has always been known but repressed. By making the constitutive power of care and the plasticity of model organisms explicit, these scientists trouble key ideas about standardization in laboratory contexts and address new kinds of scientific uncertainty. Based on this case study, I argue that care is a potentializing practice and, in turn, a site of politics. By attending to care, we can better understand how living beings are being potentialized as well as how they are not.

Transposing bodies of knowledge and technique: animal models at work in reproductive sciences

A prominent feature of biological and biomedical research and therapeutics over the past century is the entanglement of human and other animal bodies in the making and remaking of knowledge, techniques and products. In this paper, we explore how animal models work in two different but interrelated situations: early/mid 20th-century reproductive sciences focused on human biomedicine; and early 21st-century assisted reproduction of endangered animals in zoos. We use the concept of ‘transposition’ to describe and compare how findings about different species, the infrastructures supporting different species and the body parts of different animal species have been mobilized at these sites. We show how such mobilizations create dynamic relationships in organizational, discursive and embodied ways. The two case studies illuminate the changing practices of modelling within the reproductive sciences, and the changing kinds of work animal models have done in those fields.

Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals

The natural world is marked by an ever-increasing loss of varied habitats, a growing number of species extinctions, and a full range of new kinds of dilemmas posed by global warming. At the same time, humans are also working to actively shape this natural world through contemporary bioscience and biotechnology. In Cloning Wild Life, Carrie Friese posits that cloned endangered animals in zoos sit at the apex of these two trends, as humans seek a scientific solution to environmental crisis. Often fraught with controversy, cloning technologies, Friese argues, significantly affect our conceptualizations of and engagements with wildlife and nature. By studying animals at different locations, Friese explores the human practices surrounding the cloning of endangered animals. She visits zoos—the San Diego Zoological Park, the Audubon Center in New Orleans, and the Zoological Society of London—to see cloning and related practices in action, as well as attending academic and medical conferences and interviewing scientists, conservationists, and zookeepers involved in cloning. Ultimately, she concludes that the act of recalibrating nature through science is what most disturbs us about cloning animals in captivity, revealing that debates over cloning become, in the end, a site of political struggle between different human groups. Moreover, Friese explores the implications of the social role that animals at the zoo play in the first place—how they are viewed, consumed, and used by humans for our own needs. A unique study uniting sociology and the study of science and technology, Cloning Wild Life demonstrates just how much bioscience reproduces and changes our ideas about the meaning of life itself.

Models of Cloning, Models for the Zoo: Rethinking the Sociological Significance of Cloned Animals

Cloned animals are often understood as ‘models’ whose embodiments demonstrate the viability of somatic cell nuclear transfer and its applicability to a species body. In conceptualizing models through the trope of technoscience, Evelyn Fox Keller has argued that scientific models are not simply cognitive representations of something else, but are also embodiments of action and practice that constitute the kinds of scientific questions that can be asked and how those questions can be answered. Drawing on Kellers language, I would say that, while we understand cloned animals as ‘models of’ somatic cell nuclear transfer, little empirical scholarship has explored what these animals are ‘models for’. This article asks what practices cloned animals embody, focusing on endeavours to clone endangered wildlife in the United States. Based on a multi-sited, ethnographic study, I show that these animals are models for conducting science in zoological parks, which entails questions regarding the kinds of knowledge practices that should be used to reproduce zoos and, in turn, meaningfully reconstitute wildlife. Based on this analysis, I contend that cloned animals not only model technique and scientific practices, but also new assemblages in the reproduction of zoos and, in turn, nature.

Developing a Collaborative Agenda for Humanities and Social Scientific Research on Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the ‘3Rs’), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, ‘cultures of care’, harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.

Making de-extinction mundane?

Previous debates on cloning endangered animals provide useful lessons for how de-extinction could incorporate concerns from various, focusing less on spectacular science and more on daily practices.

Posthumanist critique and human health: how nonhumans (could) figure in public health research

Abstract This paper uses bibliometric analysis and critical discourse analysis to explore the rise in research involving nonhumans in public health, and the potential contribution of posthumanist social theory to this growing body of public health scholarship. There has been a sudden and rather marked increase in research and writing on animals, zoonoses and/or the ‘One-health’ paradigm within public health journals since 2006. Indeed ‘One-health’ rather than ‘posthumanism’ holds together research involving nonhumans of various kinds – from viruses to animals – within the discipline. Advocates of the ‘One-health’ paradigm argue that human and animal health must be integrated through joining the research, training and care practices of human and animal medicine. By mapping the terrain of public health research involving non-human species, we consider how and where posthumanist theory could be productively drawn upon to contribute to both critical and applied research involving nonhumans within public health. We specifically ask how the posthumanist insight to ‘follow the nonhumans’ would raise new questions and analytics for this research area.

From the Principles to the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act. A commentary on how and why the 3Rs became central to laboratory animal governance in the UK

This special issue commemorates the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Russell and Burch’s Principles of Humane Experimental Technique (1959), where the concept of the 3Rs––replace, reduce and refine animals from life science research––was first introduced. As this special issue makes clear, the evolving impact of this book has not been at all straightforward. There have been clear breaks and ruptures between the commissioning of the book by the Universities

Genetics, Disease, and Reproduction

This entry overviews the literature on genetics, disease, and reproduction, with a focus on what genetic diseases mean for people within their reproductive lives. The focus will be on the different technologies used to both assess and ameliorate these disorders at different stages of reproduction; the ways a genetic disease is understood and acted upon are thus shaped by biological time. For example, preimplantation genetic diagnosis is generally used to avoid giving birth to a child with a heritable disorder that will result in death within the first couple years of the child’s life. Meanwhile, newborn screening is used to assess for the presence of a heritable disorder that can be ameliorated if treated early. As such, different social, ethical, and legal issues are raised within the varying reproductive contexts within which heritable diseases are both detected and treated. But in addition, the meaning of these techniques varies across different national and regional contexts.