THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2015

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2008

The International journal of developmental biology, 1998

Stem cells did not become a proper research object until the 1960s. Yet the term and the basic mindset – namely the conception of single undifferentiated cells, be they embryonic or adult, as the basic units responsible for a directed process of development, differentiation and increasing specialisation – were already in place at the end of the nineteenth century and then transmitted on a non-linear path in the form of tropes and diagrams. Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann played a special role in this story. The first coined the term Stammzelle (stem cell), the second was the author of the first cellular stem-tree diagram. Still today, I shall argue, the understanding of stem cells, especially the popular perception, is to a good extent a Haeckelian-Weismannian one. After having demonstrated this, analysing the terminology, I will in this essay focus on the use of cytogenetic tree diagrams between 1892 and 1925 and on the tacit understanding of stem cells that they transmit.

Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences 21, 2019

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative affliction to which researchers have long striven to find a cure. The human embryo is a source of vital cells used in regenerative medicine, as well as a powerful symbol of life. Using foetal cells from aborted embryos for transplantation to the brains of Parkinson patients is an avenue that has been explored by neuroscientists on and off for the last thirty years. This ethnological compilation thesis follows a national branch of a foetal cell transplantation trial through successes as well as challenges in processing foetal material into an effective, transplantable cell suspension. The cell suspension is conceptualized as a bio-object, and explored as something that produces new knowledge, emotions and logistical and ethical negotiations. These products are beyond the scope of trial and biomedical research in general, but they do nonetheless interact with and affect society at large. New biomedical inventions and forms of therapies transgress the limits of life and death and the boundaries of individuals, as well as between species. Such cultural reordering challenges researchers, health care professionals as well patients on a daily basis. Exploring the intersection between instruction and practice, nature and culture as well as between science and ritual, this thesis contributes to a broader understanding of cultural and material conditions of knowledge production. It also offers a methodological elaboration of how a diffractive approach may be fruitful in ethnographic research, when trying to reconcile epistemological differences in cross-disciplinary endeavours.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2002

This article is about the beginnings of tissue culture-the culture of living, reproducing cells of complex organisms outside the body. It argues that Ross Harrison's experiments in nerve culture between 1907 and 1910 should be viewed as part of a larger shift in early twentieth-century laboratory practice from in vivo to in vitro experimentation. Via a focus on the temporality of experiment-contrasting the live object of Harrison's investigation with the static object of histological representations-this article details the production of a new and surprising form of life, cellular life in vitro. Tissue culture, developed from Harrison's experiments, was greeted with great surprise and disbelief, despite Harrison's protestations that he had merely juxtaposed extant techniques. An analysis of these initial reactions to tissue culture illuminates the extent to which cells living visibly outside of the body in glass broke with in vivo practices and assumptions of the hiddenness and interiority of certain processes of growth and change. 

Technology and Culture, 2002

Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2011

This paper elucidates the origins of scientific work on stem cells. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the notion of stem cells became customary in scientific communities of Imperial Germany. Adopting the term Stammzelle from Ernst Haeckel, Theodor Boveri was influential in introducing the concept in embryological studies and early genetics around 1900, describing a capacity of stem cells for self-renewal as well as differentiation. At the same time, blood stem cells were conceptualized by histologists such as Ernst Neumann and Artur Pappenheim in studies of physiological haematopoiesis and various forms of leukaemia. Furthermore, building on Julius Cohnheim's theory that tumours arise from 'embryonic remnants' in the adult body, pathologists aimed at identifying the cells of origin, particularly in the embryo-like teratomas. Embryonic stem cells thus assumed an ambiguous status, partly representing common heritage and normal development, and partly being seen as potential causes of cancer if they had been left behind or displaced during ontogeny. In the 1950s and 1960s experimental research on teratocarcinomas by Leroy Stevens and Barry Pierce in the USA brought together the strands of embryological and pathological work. Alongside the work of Ernest McCulloch and James Till at the Ontario Cancer Institute from the early 1960s on stem cells in haematopoiesis, this led into the beginnings of modern stem cell research.

Isis, 2013

Interest has been growing in the history of tissue and organ culture as experimental systems that have produced objects with contested public lives. Existing accounts, notably Hannah Landecker's Culturing Life (2007), have focused on the United States, exploring the making of techniques and practices as well as their life beyond the laboratory; Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), a gripping biography of HeLa, the human cell line derived from a woman's cervical tumour without her explicit consent, became a major non-fiction bestseller. Duncan Wilson's Tissue Culture in Science and Society is a welcome addition, not only because it tells the history of tissue culture in Britain, but also because it emphasizes the trajectories that propelled the technique through a variety of public arenas. From newspapers to science fiction to the courtroom, Wilson explores diverse receptions of life in vitro in the twentieth century. Cultured cells have been at the centre of several controversies in recent years, and this book responds to the debates surrounding stem cells, hybrid embryos and biobanks. Wilson sets out to undermine the assumption, implicit in the works of some sociologists, bioethicists and historians, that these have been matters of long and historically continuous conflict between scientific and social interests. By contrast, he shows convincingly that 'popular attitudes towards tissue culture were enormously varied and changed substantially over the twentieth century' as 'they reflected broader cultural concerns' (pp. 2-3). Throughout the book, Wilson shows that the boundaries between the 'scientific' and the 'public' have been permeable, and were repeatedly traversed. As the title implies, the research and its lay interpretations are treated in parallel. The first third of the book focuses on the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, the oldest centre for tissue culture in Britain. Wilson addresses the appropriations of the scientists' work by diverse media that placed them within debates over mass production, birth control and eugenics. Chapter 3, 'Could you love a chemical baby?', shows Wilson at his strongest, as he analyses discussions about organ and embryo cultures among diverse audiences, and shows another genealogy of the 'test-tube baby', a notion central to the debates that followed the birth of Louise Brown after a successful IVF procedure in 1978. Here, Wilson traces most clearly the connections between the scientists at Strangeways and the press, illuminating the two-way exchanges between them. Thus we see the role of the researchers in constructing and contributing to the sensationalist coverage, and learn that some junior scientists supplemented their income by writing popular articles. As Wilson puts it, 'public images often arise thanks to scientific practices and claims, and can interact with and shape science itself' (p. 53). Wilson goes on to discuss the species politics of cultured cells, and the retrieval of samples from humans, to show a shift towards a widespread use of human tissues after the Second World War. From his analysis of newspaper coverage it is clear that the issues of consent and ownership of tissue culture that have been so important recently were not at stake at mid-century. This work was almost universally hailed as an unproblematic breakthrough that could eliminate disease, for example through the polio vaccine. More troubling, especially in the 1970s, were cross-species cell hybrids and imagined human-animal hybrids. This fascinating topic has great historical and theoretical potential, but could not be explored in depth in the limited space of this book, so Wilson understandably focuses instead on the more pertinent issue of the promotion of cell culture as a possible substitute for animal experimentation. The final chapter raises the new property and consent issues that surrounded commercial uses of cultured tissue in the 1980s and 1990s, leading up to the 2004 Human Tissue Act. Here, Wilson foregrounds legal dimensions of 'public life' and the role of activist groups in constructing them. This chapter builds up to the conclusion, where he comments on contemporary debates that

History and philosophy of the life sciences, 2000