Life on Ice

A History of New Uses for Cold Blood

Joanna Radin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226448244
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Wissenschaft Allgemein

After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age led scientists to begin stockpiling and freezing hundreds of thousands of blood samples from indigenous communities around the world. These samples were believed to embody potentially invaluable biological information about genetic ancestry, evolution, microbes, and much more. Today, they persist in freezers as part of a global tissue-based infrastructure. In Life on Ice, Joanna Radin examines how and why these frozen bloodsamples shaped the practice known as biobanking.The Cold War projects Radin tracks were meant to form an enduring total archive of indigenous blood before it was altered by the polluting forces of modernity. Freezing allowed that blood to act as a time-traveling resource. Radin explores the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice and shows how these preserved blood samples served as the building blocks for biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age. In an era of vigorous ethical, legal, and cultural debates about genetic privacy and identity, Life on Ice reveals the larger picture—how we got here and the promises and problems involved with finding new uses for cold human blood samples.

Part I

The Technoscience of Life at Low Temperature

One

Latent Life in Biomedicine’s Ice Age

Anything could be taking place inside the gray brick building behind a strip mall in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. A fourteen-foot-high tank of liquid nitrogen—permanently parked in one of a dozen spots that also serve an office machine supply depot and a carpentry center—provides the only clue that inside are nearly five million frozen human tissue samples. Since 1977 this building, known as the Biomedical Research Institute (which today goes by its acronym, BRI), has served as a low-temperature warehouse with, in its own words, “capabilities to store and distribute precious biomaterials [to] help speed research and hasten the discovery of cures and treatments.”1 This looks like 174 freezer chests set at −80°C and 45 large liquid nitrogen tanks at −196°C, each of which help to maintain human blood samples associated with private and government research projects, including clinical trials related to HIV/AIDS.

A quarter mile down the road is the official headquarters of this repository: a red brick building that contains a suite of laboratories that have come to be devoted to research on schistosomiasis, an infectious agent also known as bilharzia, or snail fever. (In addition to its human specimens, BRI also maintains hundreds of thousands of schistosomes at various stages of their life cycles.)2 In the lobby, the realism of a life-sized mural of a family knee-deep in the murky waters of the global South is punctuated by a biology-textbook-style illustration of the transmission and complex life cycle of the schistosome, which radically changes form as it develops. A set of doors, painted to look like they lead into a thatched hut, open instead into a suite of offices and gleaming laboratories.

Together these two buildings comprise the American Foundation for Biomedical Research and Biomedical Research Institute, known only as BRI, a not-for-profit organization that currently describes itself as “committed to improving global health research.”3 Nothing about the activities of the BRI is especially unique. It is by no means the only site of research on infectious disease in Bethesda. Nor does it maintain the largest low-temperature biospecimen repository in the state. That honor belongs to the National Institutes of Health, located down the road.4

BRI is, however, the one of the first low-temperature biomedical research and storage facilities in the world, dating back to its founding in Wisconsin in the late 1940s as the American Foundation for Genetic Research. It is one node in a vast and distributed frozen infrastructure that serves a range of knowledge projects connected to understanding life and its limits. It is both singular and mundane, remarkable in the scope of its mission and typical in the materiality of its functioning. BRI is a place where bits of bodies are held in crystalline stillness. Sometimes they are removed from the freezer to continue the investigations for which they were initially preserved. In other instances, they are thawed to reveal previously concealed or cryptic life forms such as microorganisms. Both of these possibilities contribute to the biomedical value of maintaining frozen tissues, despite the energy required to use cold storage technologies in the service of suspending or slowing animation and decay.

Before there was an industry based around the preservation of frozen human tissues, there was cryobiology, the study of icy or frosty life. Cryobiology was a mid-twentieth-century instantiation of the much older question of whether or not life could be stopped and restarted at will. In 1958 a biologist named David Keilin, then at the Motelno Institute for Research in Parasitology at the University of Cambridge, England, addressed the Fellows of the Royal Society. In his talk, titled “The Problem of Anabiosis or Latent Life,” Keilin explained how the emergence of new technologies—including both mechanical freezers and liquid gases—was advancing research on the “state of an organism when its metabolic activity is at its lowest ebb,” but not too low to be subsequently restored.5

Keilin reviewed the long history of experimental inquiry into this biological state, which had appeared to some early modern Christian observers to involve a form of resurrection. The Catholic priest Lazzaro Spallanzani wrote in the eighteenth century of the phenomenon Keilin referred to as latency: “It confounds the most accepted ideas of animality; it creates new ideas, and becomes an object no less interesting to the researches of the naturalist than to the speculation of the profound metaphysician.”6 The question of “whether life under certain conditions may be a discontinuous process” was, Keilin argued, one of the oldest questions, “reflected in almost all religions, in some legends and even in fairy stories.” Latency, in providing a way of figuring life beyond limits, oriented cryobiology towards secular answers to questions about immortality that had previously been dealt with in the realm of religion.7

In terms that were both more spectacular but also more commonplace than Keilin’s, a lyrical essay published in 1922 in the Scientific Monthly had attempted to translate the significance of “latent life.” Describing the phenomenon as a “halfway house” between active life and death, the writer elaborated with a string of metaphors that, when rattled off in succession, strove to evoke a sense of the limitless potential contained within life itself:

In living matter, the molecular whirl is at its intensest [sic]; in latent life the molecular whirl is for a time arrested; in death the molecular whirl has been stopped forever. In life the dancers are in the mazes of an elaborate figure; in latent life each individual is standing stock still; in death every dancer has fallen over. In latent life the weights of the protoplasmic clock have been seized by a mysterious hand; in death they have descended to their full extent and cannot be wound up again, for the cord is broken. In latent life there is only a stoppage, in death the end has been reached. In life, “the sands of time” are running out rapidly; in latent life the stream has stopped; in death the sand is all in the lower globe.8

Keilin, in his 1958 talk, revisited and refined the many different kinds of experimental approaches around the mysterious nature of latent life by proposing his own term, “cryptobiosis.”9 When an organism was in cryptobiosis, an observer would be unable to judge whether or not restoring it to life would be possible—unless, of course, the observer had intimate knowledge as to whether the form or structures that supported metabolic activity had been maintained. In Keilin’s view, which looked forward to the potential of the emerging science of cryobiology, understanding the biophysical properties of life—its internal form or structure—could demystify the seemingly spectral ability of its function to be restored when it emerged from the crypt of the freezer.

The ability to access and harness low temperature, in addition to contributing to the elucidation of the fundamental nature of life, had already begun to enable researchers to displace and disperse biological matter through space and time. Cryopreservation, as this practice came to be known, made it possible to experience vitality as containing more and different forms of potential than were immediately apparent. The realization that some life forms could conceal still other life forms—a kind of cryptozoology—added to freezing’s potential to generate new forms of knowledge, value, and life itself.10 Both of these properties of latency—icy stillness and the secret or concealed, which I examine in terms of the cryo and the crypto—gave form to biomedicine’s ice age.

Cryobiology is an exemplary kind of technoscience—a mode of knowledge production that exceeds and subverts distinctions between science and technology, between nature and culture, and between matter and spirit.11 In the twenty-first century, the freezer filled with biospecimens has emerged as a secular reliquary of latent life, an organic machine that produces biological and social innovations and, perhaps, even revelations through its abilities to preserve and reorient biological matter through time.12 Life as an object of inquiry becomes most tangible when it subverts the boundaries of knowledge to become useful to science.13

In Search of Lost Time

The single most interesting detail about BRI might be that its founder was a biophysicist and Catholic priest. Basile Luyet, who was known within the worldwide order of Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales and to many of his students as Father Luyet, has often been remembered, also, as a father of cryobiology.14 Luyet’s career, which involved the creation of institutional formations including laboratories, journals, and international networks for the circulation of knowledge about latent life, culminated in the creation of the blood-based storage facility to exploit its potential, BRI. Tracing the arc of his career makes visible the historical coordinates of the frozen infrastructure of biomedicine and life science.

Luyet began his interests in cryobiology looking not to play God but to make sense of the mysteries of the universe created by God. For Luyet, cryobiology could provide a means of situating the mutability of life as intrinsic to its sanctity. Even before he became associated with BRI in 1956, when it was still known as the American Foundation for Genetic Research, and several years before the term cryobiology was coined, Luyet was an evangelist for a secular cosmology that would account for the history of life and its potential in terms of low temperature. There is no evidence that he ever commented explicitly on how his religious commitments informed his scientific ones, yet his repeated efforts to reinforce the boundary between the two belie their entanglement.

2 Basile Luyet. Reprinted with permission of Florimont Archives.

Luyet’s ideas about cold were indebted to the insights of nineteenth-century thermodynamic theorists who had reached the conclusion, as he put it, “that what gives our senses the impression of cold or warm is merely the velocity of motion of the molecules” and that, therefore, there is a lower limit of temperature at which the molecules stop moving: absolute zero.15 By the 1960s Luyet had broadened his appreciation of thermodynamic theory to acknowledge that it had also yielded innovations that transformed industrial production. He observed and accepted that cryobiology as a nascent discipline was characterized by similar patterns, including “the intensification and organization of the research and the accumulation of data on the multiple aspects of preservation at low temperature.”16

Born in Saviese, Switzerland, in 1897, Luyet demonstrated early on the qualities that would characterize him as an inveterate experimenter and institution builder. In his youth he was an amateur ethnologist who established the journal Cahiers de valaisans de folklore, dedicated to salvaging the traditions and culture of his beloved alpine homeland. At the age of twenty-four he joined the order of St. Francis de Sales. Soon after, he enrolled at the university in Geneva, where he was its first Catholic priest to be granted a doctorate. Technically, he was granted two doctorates: one in “natural sciences” and the other in physics.17 This work, which involved applying theories of material structure to living beings, earned him Yale’s Seesel biology prize in 1928. The prize supported him for a year of postgraduate work at Yale in 1929, where he became interested in the biological definition of life.

His path into this morass was to start by asking what biological life was not. He reasoned that since death was the destruction of life, he would approach the matter from the purview of the end or near-end of life. At Yale, he worked in the laboratory of Ross Granville Harrison, where he conducted experiments on the ability of ultraviolet light to induce genetic mutations in fungi spores.18 These interests soon brought him to the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where as a visiting fellow he became acquainted with the famous physician and experimentalist Alexis Carrel.

Carrel’s first experiments with such precarious forms of life—which he referred to as “latent”—involved freezing, thawing, and transplanting pieces of dog artery.19 In a 1910 article, Carrel explained that “a tissue is in latent life when its metabolism becomes so slight that it cannot be detected, and also when its metabolism is completely suspended. Latent life means, therefore, two different conditions, unmanifested actual life and potential life.”20 The former, “a normal stage in the evolution of all organisms as they progress towards death,” was in Carrel’s view a temporary and inevitable phenomenon, analogous to ideas then being articulated in studies of sexual development in the human sciences; its telos, or temporal goal, was determined but not yet actualized.21 The latter condition consisted of a “suspension of all actual vital proces...