Cathy Gere

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

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’.

A Brief History of Brain Archiving

This paper narrates the history of the conservation of the human brain, tracking techniques of brain archiving from the first experiments in the preservation of soft tissue in spirits of alcohol to the latest refinements in cryogenic technology. It traces the changing social and legal conditions that permitted the collection of post mortem human tissue, as well as the increasingly sophisticated technologies that allowed for the preservation and storage of this material. This preliminary survey of brain archiving uses examples of specific collections in order to discuss changes in the techniques, goals and achievements of neural tissue collecting from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.

Inscribing nature: Archaeological metaphors and the formation of new sciences

This paper examines how new sciences legitimate themselves through the deployment of archaeological metaphors. It begins by considering one of the earliest examples of this deployment, exploring why metaphorical archaeology has been so useful in launching new readings of nature. The second section traces the subsequent fortunes of the archaeological metaphor, examining how it was exploited in the context of the museum sciences of the early 19th century, and concluding with an examination of a reciprocal movement, as the archaeological metaphors for geology rebounded into the stratigraphical interpretation of archaeological finds. Section three examines some of the consequences of the spread of the stratigraphical paradigm at the end of the 19th century, focusing on the archaeological psyche of Freudian psychoanalysis. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the use of archaeological metaphors in what is arguably the most important science of our day.