Contested Categories

Life Sciences in Society

Ayo Wahlberg, Susanne Bauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138276901
• eBook ISBN: 9781317160410
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume's chapters reveals the elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology and the life sciences.

1 Human and Object, Subject and Thing: The Troublesome Nature of Human Biological Material (HBM)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315573977-2

Cecily Palmer

This chapter takes as its subject the collected organs, tissues, fluids and fragments of the human body that have been, and continue to be collected and retained as part of scientific and medical practice in the UK. It presents and explores the dual categorization of these entities as both scientific-artefact-objects, and as personified-human-entities using empirical examples of contestation work that has made the duality of these entities visible. Material taken from the human body exists in collections all over the UK. My focus will be on collections that have been amassed and retained in order to function as resources for the production of knowledge in bio-scientific and medical practice. These collections take a variety of forms; from those comprising the iconic glass jars containing recognisable parts of the human body, to those holding small pieces of deep frozen, or paraffin set human tissue, to those in which the human material is fractionated, separated and stored in ever smaller constituent parts.

Collections vary not only in terms of the types of biological material they comprise, but also in terms of the use-value of the materials within. For some it is current as they are used on a day-to-day basis, where as the value of other collections is projected onto the future, the material carefully stored and maintained in readiness for diverse (potential) uses to which they may be put. In some cases historical collections have been revisited with new techno-analytical techniques and thus made to ‘reveal themselves’ in new ways, contributing to new understanding via the genetic, biochemical or environmental traces left in the biological material within. Collections holding human biological material vary greatly in form and design, but they share an origin and a vision. Firstly, every specimen, sample or fragment has been sourced from a human body at some point in time, and secondly, each of the collections exists because of the usefulness, the instrumental utility, or the potential productivity of human biological material as a material resource for the generation of scientific knowledge. However, materials collected from the human body have not only been defined in terms of instrumental or scientific value. These entities have at times retained an aura of humanness, and have been understood as socially and culturally significant entities associated with individual and collective identities and values. Whilst operating as resources for scientific work, materials removed from the human body may also signify humanness and personhood. This analysis explores the emergence and implication of the ‘human’ category as a dominant lens through which these entities are understood and interpreted at UK collections of human biological material, and reflects on the possible consequences of ‘humanness’ as the key defining quality of these entities.

Elements of this analysis have been greatly facilitated by the exploration of ‘biotechnological artefacts’ developed by Bronwyn Parry and Catherine Gere, who use the term to reflect on ‘reworked’ preserved and archived human tissues and organs, and their conversion into novel biotechnological forms:

these artefacts do not suddenly arrive in the world as discreet, fully formed objects, rather they are negotiated into being. Their identities are not fixed, but made and re-made in response to new technologies, new scientific enterprise, public consultation, funding crises, institutional expansion and reform. This engagement alters the constitution of the artefacts themselves, their status and the conditions of their use (2006: 141).

This analysis is particularly pertinent in relation to collections of materials sourced from the human body because it locates these entities within wider institutional, intellectual and cultural networks. It also draws attention to the constitution of these entities, their identities, as dependent on the negotiations that bring them into existence. Further underscoring this analysis are some ideas adopted from Star and Griesemer’s paper on cooperation in scientific work in which they develop the analytical concept of the boundary object. A boundary object, most simplistically, is ‘an object which lives in multiple social worlds, and which has different identities in each’ (1987: 409). This concept was developed to understand cooperation between different social worlds sharing the same territory. ‘Social worlds’ are defined as collectives of persons with particular audiences and tasks, with differing visions regarding the territory in which they are engaged (1987: 338, 396). In adopting this concept however, I focus not on the facilitation of cooperation attributed to boundary objects as was key to Star and Griesemer’s formulation, but rather concentrate instead on the possibility for contestation. Human materials can be ‘unruly’ entities following removal from the human body, precisely because they exhibit multiple meanings and alternate between classificatory schemes. In so doing they challenge and dispute endeavours to use and manage them. For as Parry and Gere state: ‘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’ (2006: 139). These scholars pave the way for an understanding of material taken from the human body as ontologically multiple, at times ambiguous entities, negotiated, experienced and manifested differently across contexts and social worlds.

This analysis will use interview data gathered at a number of UK-based collections comprising human biological material in order to consider these collected biological materials firstly as ‘scientific objects’; material resources used for scientific work, and secondly as ‘human objects’; material entities associated with personhood with associated moral duties and ethical obligations relating to them. At collection sites I conducted interviews with senior scientists, curators, and managers responsible for the establishment, management, care and use of the collections. The following analysis emerged from this empirical material using an iterative thematic approach, which entailed repeated immersion in the data to facilitate the emergence of themes, alongside the use of some a priori sensitizing concepts. I explore and reflect on the meanings and values invested in collected human biological material, concluding that material taken from the human body is a useful, valuable, troubling, contentious, and ultimately ontologically volatile entity.

Human materials as scientific objects

At anatomy and pathology collections human specimens are primarily utilized for the teaching and educational use of those in medical training and other heath-care professions, and in some cases the lay-public. Consider the following extract taken from an interview with the senior curator at a non-public teaching collection used by medical and allied health professionals. This informant reflects on the system of classification employed for the pathological human specimens within:

I have colour coded the specimens in this museum…anything with a red label is a very good example of a common or important condition, blue…is slightly more unusual and is aimed slightly more at clinical medical year students – senior medical students and yellow is the sort of esoteric things we always get stuck with in museums.

This museum was open to medical professionals and other healthcare workers to facilitate their knowledge and understanding of the diseased topography of the body. The pathology collection demonstrates how disease and disorder manifest themselves in or on the human body; through specimens presented as exemplary of already classified and ‘known’ diseases and afflictions. Within these collections a certain duality of exhibition occurs. The human body exhibits a pathology – that is, some feature, symptom, or quality that is unusual compared to the canvas of the healthy body. This feature is in turn removed from the body and exhibited on the shelves of the pathology museum in order to be seen, and by implication understood, by those learning to work in healthcare or medicine. This curator went on to talk about the relevance of the museum within a global context of disease:

I’ve got malaria as a red label, now you don’t see malaria in [England] but globally it’s killing one person every second, it’s a common and an important condition.

Geographer Bronwyn Parry offers an understanding of museums as ‘scaled down version[s] of the world that could be surveyed panoptically. By these “extraordinary means” it became possible for collectors to “see” distant places, events and cultures without actually experiencing them firsthand’ (2004: 20). In the case of the pathology museum, the collection and display of specimens has been presented as a means to allow users not only to ‘see’ the effects of disease within the recesses of the body, but also to ‘see’ the diseases specific to distant locales and cultures at a remove from the persons and the cultures themselves. Although in the talk of the above informant this means of knowing was not an end in itself, but a precursor to dealing with these conditions ‘in the flesh’, across a potentially diverse range of ‘fields’.

At a public history of surgery museum located in the North of the UK the collection manager gave an example of how the specimens could be used in informative and enlightening ways by lay-persons as well as those operating within a clinical-medical pedagogy:

A woman came round…she said ‘could you show me what a cancer looks like?’ I said ‘yeah of course’ – breast cancer. I said ‘well can you see the grey circle there? That’s the tumour’. She said ‘that’s great…I’m cured, I’m in remission now, I’ve been through all the process, I’ve seen the X-rays, not until you showed me that I actually knew what it was.’

In this particular case of a woman in remission from breast cancer, the specimen exhibiting cancer allows her to ‘know’ her own illness in a way that other representations or images (such as X-rays) have not. The cancer exhibited by the biological specimen is transposed onto the female viewer’s own previously cancerous body – thus enabling her to visualize her own cancer, and in her words to ‘know’ it. Museum ethnographer Dirk Vom Lehm refers to this construction of understanding as ‘reflexive co-realization’ (2006: 243), an interpretation that posits an alternating interaction between living body and specimen whereby both bodies are understood by reference to the other.

Human specimens in museum collections are presented and displayed as scientific objects; they are used and interacted with for the education and learning of others. They are informative, providing the opportunity to ‘see’ and by assumed implication to ‘know’ the body and its interior and external surfaces and its normal and diseased states. In the case of the above-mentioned specimens, museum collections can be seen as repositories of pathological and anatomical reference. Through their embodiment of already identified and classified disease and disorders, they function to disseminate information and play a role in the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of disease and the body in those who interact with them.

‘Making and remaking' human biological material

Utilizing the value of human material as scientific objects is not however as simple as cracking a nut. In fact, in order for collected human biological material to be useful, informational or productive, the material needs to be configured in certain ways. In order for biological material to function in the generation and dissemination of knowledge and information they must first undergo any number of material reconfigurations. The next section of this chapter will therefore explore the labour that goes into this configuration, and offer some reflections on the nature of the ‘value’ embodied by human biological materials as useful resources.

During a tour at one of the collection sites at which empirical material was generated a technical scientist described the practical aspects of collecting tissue for research purposes while showing me around the laboratory and tissue storage areas. This informant described the material practice involved in making brain tissue into scientifically useful objects. Consider the labour involved in transforming a bodily material into a format in which it may be beneficially used – in this case tissue blocks and slides: following removal from the human body the brain is fixed in formalin to make it firmer, and therefore easier to work with. The brain is then cut into sections, which are placed into plastic cassettes and put into a tissue processor, which sets the tissue in paraffin wax and makes a tissue block. The tissue block is inserted into a microtome, a small machine that shaves very thin slices off the wax block, which are then placed onto a glass slide. The thin wax sections are stained with coloured pigment in order to make particular features of the tissue visible. This is a part description of one variation of a host of procedures which alter the chemical and material composition of human biological material, and which transform the material to an informational resource, via scientific work and established techniques, and the intervention of materials and technologies. The histological techniques described in the above extract are contemporaneously considered something of an archaic technology (Landecker 2002), which while beneficial for deriving information regarding the cellular and structural features of the material in question, do not however facilitate the informational quality of the material in other ways. This difference is articulated in the following extract:

If I want to study the DNA, the RNA, the proteins of this, as well as the cellular structure and architecture here, I need tissue preserved in a different format from that of the paraffin block, and that’s why we need to freeze tissue.

Freezing tissue is an alternative means of preserving biological material so that it can be utilized and drawn upon as and when it is required for research and experiment. Fresh-frozen samples of biological material are deemed to be potentially productive in ways that material in the form of blocks and slides are not, as this manner of preservation may facilitate the material to be informative in ways that other formats of preservation may not allow. These examples reveal the role of technological intervention and intellectual work in the constitution of the collected human material itself. In light of the two means of preservation outlined in the above extracts the material ‘making and remaking’ of material taken from the human body can be seen. Starting with the same material (the brain) the application of scientific work to preserve and derive the informational potential productivity alters the constitution, indeed produces the constitution of the collected biological material in a number of directions and ways. Thus by attention to the laborious interventions worked on collected human biological materials, their ‘negotiation into being’ (Parry and Gere 2006) as useful and valuable scientific objects also becomes clear.

Human materials, as they exist within the collection, are made to be useful, depending on the preservation technologies available, the scientific agenda of the day and maybe other factors. In light of the technical intervention and labour involved in the collection, preservation and use of human tissue, their artefactual quality becomes apparent. These materials are materially reconfigured and subjected to objectifying and abstracting processes in order to make them useful for the work of science and medicine. Scientific objects are produced from human materials, and these are far from static objects, they are dynamic in that they move and emerge afresh ‘with the times’. The instrumental and productive qualities of human materials are consequently variable and contingent, and may emerge in a variety of anticipated, and yet to be anticipated ways.

Indeed, the development and application of new genetic technologies and molecular biological methods to collected human material have made accessible genetic information or minute biological components previously ‘unknown’ to science, as Parry describes: ‘these new technologies … enabled components that had been previously unknown, inaccessible, or unstable to be efficiently maintained and utilized independently of the organisms in which they were originally produced. These biological derivatives have subsequently come to be constituted as “resources”…’ (2004: 48–49). The potential for latent and quiescent properties of collected human biological materials to emerge afresh even from old samples has been used to justify their collection and retention, and casts them not simply in terms of a current utility, but also as unrealized repositories of scientific potential.

Collected human biological material is made to be instrumentally valuable; it is made to produce information that is useful. Older anatomical and pathological collections play a role in the dissemination of established knowledge to professional and lay users, while contemporary research initiatives seek to produce knowledge and understanding regarding health, illness, and the human body; knowledge that is additional and novel, which contributes to and builds on what is already known. In this way they not only transfer knowledge, but generate new kno...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Gísli Pálsson
• Introduction: Categories of Life
• 1 Human and Object, Subject and Thing: The Troublesome Nature of Human Biological Material (HBM)
• 2 Substances of the Body: Blood, Genes, and Personhood
• 3 Governing Risk Through Informed Choice: Prenatal Testing in Welfarist Maternity Care
• 4 Visualizing and Calculating Life: Matters of Fact in the Context of Prenatal Risk Assessment
• 5 Serious Disease as Kinds of Living
• 6 From Society to Molecule and Back: The Contested Scale of Public Health Science
• 7 Life Beyond Information: Contesting Life and the Body in History and Molecular Biology
• 8 The Place and Space of Research Work: Studying Control in a Bioscience Laboratory
• 9 Almost Human: Scientific and Popular Strategies for Making Sense of ‘Missing Links’
• Index