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Theory, Culture & Society
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The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069230
2006 23: 167Theory Culture Society
Sarah Franklin
The Cyborg Embryo : Our Path to Transbiology
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The Cyborg Embryo
Our Path to Transbiology
Sarah Franklin
I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and
bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful
couplings. (Haraway, 1991: 150)
Part One: Old Words
A
S DONNA HARAWAY noted of the embryological models described in
her 1976 book on the metaphors of organicism that competed to
organize 20th-century developmental biology, entitled Crystals,
Fabrics, and Fields:
The traditional mechanist sees similarities between the organism and actual
machines such as the steam engine, hydraulic pump, or a system of levers
and pulleys. The neomechanist builds a similarity set from codes, the molecular
basis of genes, language, computers, and the organism. . . . The organicist
tends to see similarities in the structure of molecular populations, the
cell, the whole organisms, and the ecosystem. . . . Concrete analogies are
drawn from models, gestalt phenomena, fields, liquid crystals, and also
computers. These lists suggest that persons holding one of the three perspectives
would be inclined to work on different experimental problems and to
interpret the results in a different language. (1976: 205)
The scene Haraway describes is what has later come to be known as science
in action, laboratory life or sorting things out.1 Here too is Haraway’s first
cyborg – the cyborg embryo, not yet denominated as such, but as surely a
product of ‘worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’ (1991: 149), ‘couplings
between organism and machine’ (1991: 150) and a ‘condensed image of both
imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any
possibility of historical transformation’ (1991: 150) as the chip, fetus, gene,
seed, database, bomb, race, brain and ecosystem of her later work (1997).
I Theory, Culture & Society 2006 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 23(7–8): 167–187
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The love of irony that beats at the heart of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ may be
diffracted here, but the urgent sense of competing worldviews, and their
consequences, is fully sown.
Thirty years later Haraway’s analysis speaks cogently to the embryostrewn
world of the 21st century. The anxious attention so often directed at
‘the’ embryo, as in the perennial debate over ‘the moral status of the human
embryo’, forgets that human embryos are now a vast and diverse population,
imaged, imagined and archived in media as diverse as liquid nitrogen,
DVDs, virtual libraries, t-shirts, logos and brandnames.2 Never very precise,
the term ‘embryo’ is ever more a basket category, describing everything from
a conceptus, a zygote or a blastocyst to a reconstructed cell, a fertilized egg
or an embryoid body. We cannot map the complicated social, political,
scientific, medical or ethical lives of human embryos, with all of their
increasingly prominent civic and legal entanglements,3 without the kind of
material semiology, or grammar, of the biological that Haraway, uniquely,
provides.
As Haraway reminded us in the 1970s, scientific experiments with
embryos take place in laboratories, and the locatedness of knowledge
production matters: it is real, factual, material, hands-on and in your face.
It is also embodied: in the same way we are looking at biology when we see
an embryo through the microscope, we are also using our own biological
bodies to do this – to observe, to interpret, to move the focal plane up and
down, coordinating our eyes with our hands, our hands with our brains, our
brains with other people’s brains to work out what we are seeing. If we are
using a suction pipette to transfer the embryo, we may use our ability to
breathe to do this, just as we may have been using our voice to talk to
someone else in the lab about a problem with our equipment or what we
plan to have for lunch.4
Famously two different words that have the same form, biology has
always meant the thing itself and knowledge of what it is, and equally
notoriously, these two biologies have not always been identical, as
Haraway’s prescient analytic genealogy of embryology confirms. But the
extent to which biological knowledge, biotechniques and biology ‘itself’
reshape each other, and co-evolve, may never before have been made so
explicit as today, through the redesign of the biological in the context of
bioscience, biomedicine and biotechnology. The rebuilding of ‘life itself’
in the laboratory is redefining the future of the environment, food, wealth
and health, and is consequently crucial to definitions of progress, social
justice and power. This is not a context in which the social and the
biological can meaningfully be separated: it is rather one in which ‘we
are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and
organism’ (1991: 150).
Re-reading Haraway amidst the current chorus of complaint about ‘the
cultural turn’ and the rise of ‘textualism’, in which material reality is
allegedly subordinated to the deconstructionist ‘insistence’ that everything
is ‘merely discursive’, is to be reminded of the irony that postmodernist
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perspectives have become so demonized and misunderstood in a context
that needs them so desperately. What is the motivation for insisting that
there is, or must be, a real natural, material, factual or biological world that
exists entirely independent of human action, and has its own separate and
distinctive agencies and qualities, when the only conceivable means of
knowing what such an ‘external reality’ might consist of is by interacting
with it – which, by definition, means that the interaction must play a role
in the constitution of what we know? Is this not what Einstein realized when
he proposed the theory of relativity – now considered to be the closest
approximation modern science is capable of providing for the ‘real’ nature
of material reality?5 Is it not basic laboratory practice to list all of your
specific types of brand-named culture media in scientific publications,
because it is assumed that the socially constructed environment in which
we grow our own biological experiments cannot, in fact, be removed from
the biology that is our object of study?
The gene is a typical example of this ontological fort–da – the familiar
pantomime in which the really-real reappears as the no-there-there. When
the draft sequence of the human genome was published in 2001 it was an
event that quickly became a primer for a new era of post-molecular biology.
But the lesson was not about what the genome ‘told us’: it was, and has been
increasingly since, about what the genome didn’t reveal (Keller, 2002). The
silence of the genome has given way to the cacophony of the epigenetic –
a theme, it might be added, that emerged out of embryology in the period
immediately following that described in Haraway’s accounts of the earlier
part of the last century (R. Edwards, 1965, 2001, 2004, 2005; Graham,
2000; Horder et al., 1985; McLaren, 1981; Sapp, 1991; Willadsen, 1979,
1980).6
Thus, although the biotic and the informatic remain in the close
cybernetic embrace Haraway described in the early 1980s, the coding or
switching functions, the crossings-over and recombinant effects, have been
de-geneticized. Coding is now a multi-functionality involving processes
such as imprinting and entities such as the cytoplasm – famously dismissed
by T.H. Morgan as a component of the cell that ‘can be ignored genetically’
(quoted in Sapp, 1991: 231). Consider, for example, the images that are
combined in the model of ‘biological control’ derived from the context of
cellular reconstruction, cell nuclear replacement or ‘cloning’. Ian Wilmut’s
analogy of the egg cytoplasm as a powerful supercomputer which reprogrammes
DNA (Wilmut et al., 2000) is crucial to the language of de-, transand
re-differentiation that lie at the heart of the new field of embryonic stem
cell research and the so-called ‘Dolly technique’ of somatic cell nuclear
transfer. The reversal of the question ‘What is the genetic message?’ into its
opposite of ‘What is the DNA being told?’ now counts as the bottom line in
most biological discussions about the crucial pathways that determine one
kind of biological form or another. The problem of expressivity – that genes
can be given instructions – has now become an opportunity: the blueprint
can be redesigned.7
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In turn, this shift in perspective, toward what we might call the
functional polarity of genetic direction, confirms what many mid-to late-
20th-century embryologists, such as Anne McLaren (1981), had been
claiming about the reversible segregation of the germplasm and soma
throughout the 1970s: activation, de-activation and re-activation of germ
line segregation, such as that which characterizes the digital switching back
and forth of the X-chromosome, confirmed that an absolute distinction
between germ cells and soma was untenable, that germ cells are influenced
by their somatic context, and that DNA is thus a ‘two-way’, or reversible,
messaging system.
It is thus not only the experiments of Jamie Thomson and John
Gearhart with stem cells (Shamblott et al., 1998; Thomson et al., 1998), or
Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell’s unlocking of the secrets of the cell cycle
(Wilmut et al., 1997, 2000) which have brought us the great embryological
revolution before us today: many of its roots lie in the crucial post-war period
when the discipline enjoyed a flourishing climate of experimentation,
particularly in the UK (Graham, 2000). This, in turn, and in keeping with
Haraway’s appreciation of ‘the odd perspective’ provided by her own history
as a ‘an Irish Catholic girl [whose PhD] was made possible by Sputnik’s
impact on US national-scientific education policy’ (1991: 173), was the
result of the post-nuclear turn, in both the US and the UK, toward the life
sciences. Hence, the Medical Research Council’s heavy funding of mutation
research post-1945, in a kind of biological mea culpa for the atom bomb. It
was ‘radiation biology’ that helped produce the Jackson labs in Maine, as
well as the animal breeding experiments in Edinburgh and Cambridge, such
as Robert Edwards’ work on mouse ovulation (1965), and Steen Willadsen’s
manipulation of sheep blastocysts (1979, 1980), which, with fitting cyborg
irony, were two of the key developments later transferred into in vitro
fertilization (IVF), pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), somatic cell
nuclear transfer (SCNT) and the derivation and banking of human
embryonic cells.8
To understand the cyborg embryo, and its legacy of transbiology, we
need an anthropology of the embryos around us, who are and who are not
becoming part of our futures, and who are reshaping our understandings of
life, death, health, kin, progress, hope, sex, capital and cure (Strathern,
1992a, 1992b, 1999, 2005). The over-determined coupling between
embryonic bodies and technoscience, epitomized by the primal, and often
animated, scene of micro-injection, is reshaping ‘biological facts’ and ‘the
facts of life’ while also retelling us who we really are, much as genes did in
a previous era, and before that evolution, heliocentrism and gravity (Konrad,
2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b). If Haraway’s cyborg lived perversely, and
blasphemed ironically, what are today’s cyborg embryos doing? If they are,
as Charis Thompson suggests (2005), newly sacred and profane, what are
the borders that secure their identities, and what else are they telling us?
Building on Haraway’s concept of trans- to describe the shape-shifting
categories by which new hybrid entities, such as transgenic mice, ‘blast
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widely understood notions of natural limit’ or kind (1997: 56), I want to add
the trans-work of embryo transfer, and the translation of embryology into
stem cell derivation and redirection. I want to suggest that, in the same way
the cyborg was useful to learn to see an altered landscape of the biological,
the technical and the informatic, similarly Haraway’s ‘kinding’ semiotics of
trans can help identify features of the postgenomic turn in the biosciences
and biomedicine toward the idioms of immortalization, regeneration and
totipotency. However, by reversing Haraway’s introduction of trans- as the
exception or rogue element (as in the transuranic elements), I suggest that
transbiology – a biology that is not only born and bred, or born and made,
but made and born – is indeed today more the norm than the exception.
This observation, like other chimeras and hybrids, not only takes us back
in time to the shared origins of cloning, stem cell research and what we
might call the crucible of the genetics–embryology interface in post-war
mammalian developmental biology, but forward to where these techniques
are taking us, and the transbiology which is their means of reproduction.9
I want in addition to consider, as Haraway’s cyborg manifesto invited
us to do, what are the social contracts and exchanges, the handshakes and
the exclusions, the gifts and the footpaths, that are part of how biology is
literally being rebuilt today. Without being able to do justice – even in a
very broad sense – to the entire scope of changes affecting the contemporary
reorganization of living matter, and rather by taking a brief tour that is
in many respects a purely anecdotal journey, I will look specifically at the
role of assisted conception, or IVF, in the birth of the often startling
embryology that surrounds us today.10
Part Two: New Worlds
Recently I visited the first of five UK human embryonic stem cell (hES)
derivation laboratories to be built directly adjacent to an IVF surgery, or
assisted conception unit (ACU). These facilities have been funded by the
Medical Research Council (MRC) as part of the effort to move hES science
as quickly as possible from the lab into clinical and commercial applications.
These labs are where transbiology – regenerative medicine, stem cell
science, tissue engineering – may begin to come to fruition in the form of
new health and wealth products harnessing the pluripotent power of recombinant
regenerativity (Ganchoff, 2004; Landecker, 2000, 2006; Lebacqz,
2001; Lock, 2001; Parry, 2004; Resnik, 2002; Squier, 2004; Thompson,
2005; Waldby and Mitchell, 2006). This translation of as-yet-ill-defined
cellular potential into goods, markets and deliverables will, like agriculture,
require a new operating system to achieve a change of scale (Franklin and
Lock, 2003a, 2003b; Thompson, 2005; Tutton and Corrigan, 2004).
Although there is great uncertainty about many aspects of stem cell
science, one principle on which there is widespread agreement in Europe,
and to which the new UK facilities must be rigorously accountable, is that
its future must be quality controlled. Quality assurance, not just technical
assistance, is now the element that must be added to biology to make it as
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good as nature – as good as the real thing – so that new made-in-the-lab
biologicals, such as pancreatic islets, heart valves or skin, will function
normally. But quality control is not added to biology itself. Quality is about
taking away the dirt, the noise, the pollution, the pathology and the ‘junk’
that detract from the reliability of biological function. Therefore, quality
control, while not ‘in’ the biotic component, culture medium, embryonic
cell line, etc., is everywhere all around it – like a protective seal against
contamination. In sum, if biological control is the motor, quality control is
the car, the road system, the traffic lights, the map, the sign-posting and
the speed limit. Quality control covers everything from the petrol to the
bitumen.
In the language of quality control, Good Manufacturing Practice
(GMP), International Standards (ISO compliance), accreditation (by the
Medical Health and Research Authority – the MHRA) and graded air
(A, B, C or D), the new stem cell facilities involve annexing a ‘dirty room’
(an IVF surgery) to a ‘clean room’ (a derivation lab). Such an arrangement
has never been undertaken before and the new unit I am visiting has been
designed from scratch by a team headed by the senior embryologist. It has
cost £1.5 million.
In the tiny dressing chamber we all put on ‘bunny-suits’ for our tour.
These cover our clothes and we also need gloves and slippers. Everyone
leaves their shoes by the door, and looks peculiar in their bright white
hooded outfits. The grade of air where we are now is C – the third purest in
terms of number of particles per unit. We will need to pass through the
airlock to get into the B grade environment of the embryology laboratory,
which has a higher air pressure, ensuring that the air-flow is from the higher
grade into the lower grade area.
Inside the lab we are met by the roar of working stations known as
hoods – they are sucking air out of the lab into a room full of ductwork that
is larger than the one we are standing in. It’s hard to hear and everyone
agrees that one cost of quality control is ear strain. In theory, the quality of
air under the hoods, which can be sealed, is A: the purest grade of air and
the most quality controlled environment for manipulating cells.
All of the air is constantly being monitored. Tiny monitors on tripods
measure the air quality inside the hoods, while above my head an alarm the
size of a rolling pin offers three different levels of alert. Every piece of equipment
connects back to a single computer in the consumables room, where
it is backed up by reserve systems, with specific, approved and regularly
tested protocols for everything from a major catastrophe to ordinary forgetfulness.
All of these protocols and tests are documented and become part
of the elaborate paper trail required for validation and accreditation of the
facility.
At both ends of the lab, beside the hoods, small hatches are set into
the wall. This compromises the clean room procedures, as one of the most
elementary features of a clean room is that it is sealed. In fact this room
has been fitted with a special high-heat linoleum application devised
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specifically to seal clean rooms. The hatches are essential, however, because
embryos have to be transferred back and forth through them.
The hatch is the door to the crucial passage that connects the hES
laboratory to the IVF surgery, where women come to have their eggs aspirated
and prepared for fertilization, or their successfully fertilized embryos
returned through the door for embryo transfer. Normally, what would happen
would be that the eggs are passed through the hatch into the lab, checked
under the microscope, transferred to the Petri dishes, labelled, fertilized and
then, witnessed by two staff as required by law, and placed in the incubator.
After 24–36 hours the fertilized eggs are evaluated by the embryologists
and graded, and if they are considered suitable for transfer, the two ‘best
looking’ and highest-grade embryos are selected to be returned to the
surgery, where a physician will transfer them using a catheter into the uterus
of the woman patient. Any remaining embryos can be frozen for later clinical
use (which requires a consent form and a fee), donated to research (which
requires a consent form but no fee) or ‘left to perish’ (which means they are
in effect discarded).
This flow, or transit, of embryos in and out of the door between the
clean room and the dirty room thus traces the contours of a complex interface
between IVF and stem cell research that encapsulates some of the
features of ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow, 1992) with which we have become
familiar, while also posing new questions about what kinds of ‘biological
citizenship’ (Rapp and Ginsburg, 2002; Rose and Novas, 2005) are occurring
in the context of both IVF treatment and donation of embryos to embryo
or stem cell research.
Without assisted conception there would be no human embryonic stem
cell research. The supply of embryos for this prominent, competitive, global
and fast-paced field of scientific research depends entirely on surplus,
supernumerary, left-over, extra or spare embryos generated by assisted
conception techniques, and specifically super-ovulation. The rationale
behind this new facility, and indeed the UK programme of stem cell coordination
of which it is part, is to enable more efficient transfer of donated
embryos from IVF into stem cell research. This is the purpose of the hatch.
It is through the hatch that fresh eggs will be transferred from IVF into the
derivation process with minimal loss of quality: they will go directly into
graded air.
The new facility makes this research transfer of embryos more compatible
with the quality standards that are essential to the future viability of
‘bench to bedside’ and ‘bench to market’ models of the translation of hES
derivation into viable clinical and commercial applications. Any level of
successful product development, clinical validation, and market stabilization
will require GMP and ISO quality control, graded air and clean room
standards, as well as approved ethical protocols and full compliance with
both UK law and EC regulations.
Specially designed, bespoke clean room facilities such as these are
the natural home of the cyborg embryo that is as much a product of
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high-tech procedures, such as ovulation induction and cryopreservation, as
it is of hope for a child and the desire for technological assistance to
overcome infertility. In the same way, the in vitro embryo would not exist
without earlier versions of such facilities, so too the new facilities never
would have been imagined without the extracorporeal embryo: they are part
of the same ecosystem, they are co-evolved. Transbiology, the remaking of
biological functions, is the field of science most indebted to the cyborg
embryo. As such, transbiology is also the progeny of its own popularity and
success: it is the legitimate heir to the coupling of nature with the ‘helping
hands’ of technoscience in the context of IVF – a handshake which turns
out to have a return in the form of the vast population of stored human
embryos that forms an unanticipated biological reserve, or archive, offering
new possibilities of human repair (Mortimer, 2005).
Like Haraway’s cyborg, who wanted to remind us about the social
divisions engendered and reproduced in the ‘frozen moment’ (1991: 164) of
any encounter with technology, the clean room is a place where ‘tools embody
and enforce new social relations’ (1991: 164), and in the clean room these
are defined by the necessity of reaching a compromise between a workable
environment and quality control. In order to develop a viable system of
performing their duties and protecting the lab against contamination, the
embryology team carefully charted their footsteps and recorded their movements,
in a kind of auto-Taylorization of their working environment. Taking
their own dirty biologies into account, the team designed a strategic balance
between the clean room requirements of GMP/ISO compliance, and the dirty
work of transferring live, essentially contaminated, biological ingredients,
including themselves, to and fro. Intel never had to deal with these kinds of
‘live’ transfers. To clean their rooms they irradiate them.
The footprints of the embryologists, then, remind us of another definition
of trans-, the literal back and forth of the labour of creating new
biologicals. Embryology crosses the clinical–scientific divide and, on both
sides, is extremely laborious. Becoming a senior embryologist requires skills
in craftwork (it is not uncommon for embryologists to make their own
pipettes by hand, to their own specific preferences, with a Bunsen burner),
emotional labour (IVF is a highly stressful form of treatment that usually
fails), surgery (microsurgery on embryos requires immense skill and concentration),
teamwork (the ACU relies on very precise teamwork to function at
its optimum level) and managerial initiative (public sector hospitals and labs
are continually under-staffed and under-funded).
The embryologists at the IVF–stem cell interface have additional
duties of care because their work is unprecedented and consequently experimental,
while the stakes on both sides of the hatch are literally life and
death. Their duties require an intimate choreography, combining clinical
care with scientific research, and the stakes are amplified on both sides of
the very contiguity their facility has been designed to enable. Their own
footprints, the paths of their own labour, define a workable definition of their
space, in which they cohabit with lively and noisy machines, which breathe
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the same air they do, and constantly communicate in a shared network. The
blueprint of this facility reflects both professional scientific ambitions and
a commitment to medical care: above all the facility is a testament to the
hope that scientific progress will bring about new cures for chronic, terminal
and degenerative diseases for which there is no cure, such as diabetes,
Parkinson’s and a range of single-gene disorders. This version of human
improvement relies on an unusual exchange between reproductive hope and
scientific progress. On one side of the hatch are the women who seek to
benefit from IVF, while on the other are the scientists who hope to create
new life not only for them, but for others as well.
Donors who claim, as most do,11 that the desire to donate eggs and
embryos to stem cell research reflects an obligation they feel to ‘give something
back’ to scientific research in order to reciprocate the benefits they
feel they have received by having had the opportunity to undergo IVF –
itself a technique that required a pioneer generation of altruistic egg donors
– are describing a new kind of kinship exchange: in exchange for their own
personal reproductive hope to have a chance of being fulfilled (a shared
parental aspiration which binds a couple through reproductive desire and
intent) they will donate their own personal reproductive substance (the
embryo that biologically embodies their sexual union) to science. In this
complicated (but also simple) and potentially symbolic (but equally potentially
not) act of donation, couples therefore trans-substantiate their embryo
from being ‘their own’ to becoming an anonymous, publicly funded medicalscientific
human embryonic cell line that, rather than being a specific entity,
becomes part of a shared, collective commitment to scientific progress – a
value that is almost inextricable from hope.12
The transfer of eggs and embryos through the hatch is thus at once
literal, symbolic, political, practical, engineered, designed, controlled,
risky, uncertain, hopeful, responsible, accredited, strategic and ambivalent.
In terms of biological control it is semi-domesticated (most IVF and most
derivative attempts end in failure), and in terms of quality standards it is at
once compliant and non-compliant, compliant-near and compliant-far from
what counts as clean room GMP. Like the cyborg embryo, transbiology is a
mix of control and rogue, or trickster, elements. The hoods are noisy
breathers, the eggs are dirty, and the door is queer: it does not belong, and
the presence of so much biology in a clean room is matter out of place. The
door between IVF and stem cell research – the hatch to transbiology – is
beautifully simple but ethically complicated: it has lessons we can learn.
Part Three: Transbiology
When Haraway offered us her cyborg manifesto in the mid-1980s she sought
a language in which she could both engage with the agendas of a critical
biopolitics while resisting their purifying and puritanical tendencies, to
make what she described as ‘a slightly perverse shift’ in the direction of
thinking through some of the very conditions it might otherwise be imagined
feminists and socialists needed to resist – such as technoscience. An
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example on her mind was the Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratory at
Berkeley, where she described the Livermore Action Group as a kind of
cyborg society:
. . . dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely
embody and spill out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed
to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches,
engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough
to disarm the state. (1991: 154–5)
In her manifesto, it was affinity groups, such as her own local ‘Fission
Impossible’, which served as a new model of kinship-by-affiliation (‘Affinity:
related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical group for
another, avidity’, p. 155), and of resistance. What was important to her
analysis, too, was the sense that some of the most fruitful couplings, such
as that of her own PhD and Sputnik, might come from somewhat unexpected,
and even apparently unsuitable, unions.
The hole in the seal, the embryologists’ footsteps, the graded air, the
hand-made pipettes and the donated embryos create another kind of laboratory
affinity, oriented along the axis of a different kind of hope – or hope
exchange. This affinity, like that of the Livermore labs, has a specificity and
a politics that belongs to its time and place in the early 21st century. The
transbiological, in which biology is made in order that it be born, like Dolly,
whose viability was proof of the success of her making, is fully cyborg in its
polymorphic panoply of elements: machine, organism, code, message,
human, ovine, natural and re-engineered. Like the cyborg, transbiology is
also made up out of the complex intersection of the pure and the impure,
where quality and biological control are literally merged to create new kinds
of organisms, but this purity is hedged about by pathology of various kinds
(and see Latour, 1987, 1993). Like the cyborg, the transbiological is not just
about new mixtures, playful recombinations of parts or new assemblages: it
is fundamentally defined by the effort to differentiate these dirty descent
lines into functional, safe and marketable human biology (Cooper, 2006;
Landecker, 2006; Waldby and Mitchell, 2006). New parts made from regenerative
technologies must be standardized, regulated, ethically sourced and
validated before they can become part of our biology.
In sum, the domain of the transbiological, broadly including contemporary
tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, cloning and stem cell
science, is yet another heir to the legacies of agriculture, physics and reproductive
biomedicine. This term describes the post-molecular genetics world,
in which biology exists in multiple forms – digitally, virtually, synthetically,
mimetically, algorithmically and so forth – that are endlessly combined
(Parry, 2004; also, see Mol, 2003). It is a world of cyborgs, but also of
mixtures in which it is the symmetry of parts that allows translation, so that
the mouse, the sheep, the cow, the pig and the dog move together as animal
models susceptible to re-engineering and improvement.
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If the cyborg is the figurative offspring of corporate science in the age
of military-industrial command communication control systems bearing
the hallmarks of their Cold War designers, as Haraway claims, the turn to
the bespoke biological in the ‘age of biological control’ post Dolly and
immortalized stem cells has a closely related pedigree, but lives on a
different frontier. To the extent that transbiology comes to us via the cyborg
embryo, and in particular via assisted conception, it occupies a historically
different context than that described by Haraway for an earlier era, and its
ironic vocabulary remains particular to its time and place. For example, it
is one of the ironies of IVF that its introduction to enable greater conformity
to traditional family values has, in quite a short period of time, undermined
the very basis of normative ‘biological’ parenting by introducing a seemingly
endless, and inevitably somewhat parodic, sequelae of quasi-, semior
pseudo-biological forms of parenting (Cussins, 1996, 1998; Franklin and
McKinnon, 2001a, 2001b; Franklin and Ragone, 1998; Thompson, 2001,
2005). Also ironic is the way IVF emerges as a reproductive ‘bridge to a
new life’ deriving from an earlier ‘nuclear turn’ away from atomic energy,
and toward cellular totipotency in the post-war period. Importantly, then,
the defining hallmark of the transbiological is the queer lineage it shares
with IVF – which has proven not only a bridge to new life for desperately
desired human offspring, but much else besides. Like Dolly, the first ‘testtube
babies’ were miraculous because they were ‘impossible’, and especially
miraculous because they were normal. These precious and paradoxical
children had to be protected against the stigma and potential shame of their
technologically assisted origins. Now IVF itself is so normalized it accounts
for as much as 5 percent of the birthrate in some countries, with more than
3 million IVF babies having been born world-wide in less than 30 years.
It is the normality, even the ordinariness, of IVF that in turn gives us
the everyday cyborg embryo, which, previously having been perceived as
something of an oddity, now feels at home in the living room. The extracorporeal
zygote or blastocyst is no longer confined to the clinic or the
textbook but has been domesticated and is no longer strange. The embryo
that is now crucial to the development of successful transbiology has become
a familiar postmodern kinship entity – and, if anything, is becoming even
more established as a member of the family (Franklin, 1995, 1999b). Not
only a potential offspring whose existence is linked to us by ties of shared
reproductive substance brought into being through the union of reproductive
intent, bioscience and reproductive biology, the cyborg embryo is now
also the gift that can create yet another kind of intimate connection to a
technoscientifically enhanced future. As Marilyn Strathern has pointed out,
this system of ‘reproducing the future’ is self-perpetuating (1992b).
What is interesting about these new reproductive connections, then,
is the kinds of affinities, politics, ‘frozen moments’ and future possibilities
that provide the grammar, or kinship structure, of their working order today,
and thus their genealogical orientation in the future.13 What is also significant,
and cyborg-like, about post-Cold War reproductive and mammalian
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biology, with its odd turn away from nuclear power and towards nuclear
replacement via the nuclear family, is that IVF, which seemed to be ‘just
imitating’ the biological facts of sexual reproduction, has proven also to be
so radically disruptive to this equation that it is no longer possible to refer
to the so-called facts of life with anything like biological certainty at all any
more. Indeed, the opposite situation now exists in just the same obvious but
slightly counter-intuitive way that Haraway explicitly described for an
earlier period of historical transformation when ‘permanently partial identities
and contradictory standpoints’ (1997: 154) proved the most logical way
to think about the question of how to take responsibility for science and
technology.
Like many other chapters in the history of biological control,14 the
idiom of improvement – and specifically of merging nature with progress –
has been central to the increasingly prominent role the extracorporeal
embryo has played in the re-engineering of the facts of life. The cyborg
embryo, itself the offspring of a union between reproductive failure and
reproductive hope, has become, like ‘natural conception’ before it, something
that is seen to be in need of careful management in order for it to be
properly domesticated (Franklin, 1995, 1997a; Throsby, 2004). Couples who
pursue the assisted conception route can, in a complicated act of affinity
with scientific progress and potential communities of future beneficiaries,
now also donate their surplus embryos to research to make colonies of
immortalized, regenerative, anonymized and totipotent cells, which will be
banked in the aid of an improved human future. This biological reserve,
archive or master stock can be directed to transform into specific types of
cell and, in theory, is the literal seed-bed for a previously untapped source
of human repair. The improved biology of the future will be more reliable,
then, both because control of biology is being built in to the biological itself,
and because other forms of control are being introduced to stabilize the
cultivation of new, rebuilt, biologies – such as quality control, standardization,
accreditation, and risk management.15
Here, as with Haraway’s cyborg, without whom we could not make
sense of the cyborg embryo, its biological sequelae, its genealogy or its
descent pattern, we see that transbiology carries its own politics and they
are, as Haraway insisted so rightly, fundamentally sociological (Franklin,
2006a, 2006b). In writing of the turn-of-the-century embryo, Haraway
demonstrated that we cannot even look at the embryo – objectively, scientifically,
in the laboratory, under a microscope – without seeing it through
the lens of our own, pre-fabricated, culturally inherited, ubiquitous, constitutive,
real and inescapable frames of reference. Nor, as she demonstrated
in her later work on primatology (1989), is it possible for scientific understandings
to escape the interpretive devices, taxonomic conventions or
situated and historically specific understandings of how we know anything
at all. Transbiology is real, material, factual and consequential in all of the
senses that Latour articulated so vividly in his account of the birth of new
entities such as somatostatin, which become not only things, objects, stable
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functions, but part of a genealogy of other objects ‘sedimented’ through their
increasingly routine use to become the taken-for-granted conditions of the
world around us (1987: 88–93).
The idea that such a view is ‘merely discursive’, or that it represents
a retreat from the ‘real’, is especially problematic in the context of our own
biology being in the midst of a reconstruction it would be as irresponsible
to ignore as it would be to define as ‘textual’ in origin.
Today, the transbiological offers similar lessons, not only about how
socialized (and socializing) scientific understandings always are, but now,
and ever more visibly, how social values, systems and aspirations are being
engineered and constructed in such a manner that they too become part of
human biology. The biologization of human values is in some ways as old
as horticulture, when human preferences began to be nudged into seedlings,
and mutated corn began to be selected for its ears, but that does not mean
that transbiology does not have its own specificity. In showing us a new set
of implications of the bioinformatic implosion that enabled the gene to
become the master molecule and ultimate coding mechanism, Haraway also
pointed to the impurity of just such mixtures, and their potential insubordinations.
As we observe the rise of transbiology, in which it is a logic of
parts and wholes, or engineering and assemblage – indeed of construction
– that prevails, we are perhaps also observing a shift away from ‘the translation
of the world into a problem of coding’ (1991: 165) and toward a translation
of the problem of coding into one of context (a key point throughout
all of Haraway’s work, and one that could be described as thoroughly embryological).
Nonetheless, it will remain the case that ‘any objects or persons
can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly’ (1991:
162) and that there are ‘no “natural” architectures that constrain system
design’ (1991: 162) – which could easily be described as two of the core
modelling systems for transbiology, which in no small part consists of
reverse, and transverse, engineering.
One other thing also remains for certain, which is that whether
increased biological control comes to be fulfilled as a promise or as a false
hope in the context of transbiology is a question we will reckon better if we
know our cyborg history.
Notes
1. Latour’s Science in Action (1987), Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1986),
and Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out (2000) are but three of the many influential
monographs documenting both the way in which science must be understood
as material practice and why its conceptual legacies are never ‘just descriptive’.
2. See ‘Spheres of Life’ in Franklin et al. (2000: 19–43) for a discussion of contemporary
imagery of cells, embryos and fetuses in the context of globalization. See
also a review of the work of artist Helen Chadwick depicting human embryos in
Franklin (1999b). See Kitzinger et al. (2003) for an account of media representations
of the embryo and see Morgan (2003: 269) for an engaging analysis of how
‘embryos never speak for themselves’.
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3. As Charis Thompson says of the embryo in the United States:
The human embryo in the United States carries (in more legible form than
most entities) active and latent meanings that are considerably more widespread
and older than the technologies in question. The presence in the clinic
of ex vivo human embryos raises in especially acute form enduring tensions
between the sacred and the profane that characterize biomedicine. These
characteristics make the embryo a good spokesperson. (2005: 247)
For European debates over embryos see Gottweis (2002), Kitzinger et al. (2003),
Solter et al. (2003), Sperling (2004).
4. For an ethnographic account of learning to ‘see’ an embryo, see Franklin
(2003c). See also IVF and PGD patients’ accounts of learning to see embryos in
Franklin and Roberts (2006). For public debate of embryos see Banchoff (2004),
Becker (2000), J. Edwards (2000), Franklin (1995, 1997b, 1999a, 2003d), Kitzinger
et al. (2003), Mulkay (1997), Spallone (1996), Strathern (1992a, 1992b), Waldby
and Squier (2003) and note 3 above.
5. For a useful tour of critiques of ‘the cultural turn’, readers are directed to the
Wikipedia definition of this phrase. Einstein proposed his theory of relativity in
1905. The principle of relativity was so-named by Max Planck in 1908. It contradicted
Galileo’s principle of relativity, according to which the constant laws of the
universe must appear the same to any observer. Using electro-magnetism, Einstein
established this could not be the case, as the presence of matter itself ‘curves’ space
and time.
6. For useful accounts of the co-evolution of cloning, stem cells, IVF and PGD see
R. Edwards (2001, 2004, 2005) and Graham (2000). See also Michael West’s
account of the emergence of stem cell science historically and in the US (2003).
For overviews of stem cell research and cloning see Maienschein (2003), Parson
(2004) and Wilmut et al. (2000).
7. On Dolly as an example of the redesign of biological function, or what I am
calling here the transbiological, see Franklin (1997b, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c,
2003a, 2003b, 2005b, 2007, forthcoming).
8. In addition to providing a crucial link between nuclear physics and developmental
biology (‘radiation biology’), embryology provides important pathways
between agriculture and medicine. Indeed, the cyborg embryo exemplifies and
embodies linkages between the farm and the clinic, not only in the context of reproductive
biomedicine, but more recently in relation to stem cell science, tissue engineering,
cloning, and the field of regenerative medicine (Franklin, 2007,
forthcoming).
9. For a superb description of being born and bred, see J. Edwards (2000). For an
account of being born and made see Franklin and Roberts (2006), and for a fuller
description of being made in order to be born, see Franklin (2007).
10. Without having the space here to do justice either to the considerable literature
on reproductive biomedicine and stem cells, or what Squier (2000) calls the
‘tissue culture point of view’, I can only point the reader toward some of the many
recent sociological accounts of ‘the social life of stem cells’ (Banchoff, 2004;
Cooper, 2006; Ganchoff, 2004; Gottweis, 2002; Hogle, 2003; Landecker, 2000,
2003, 2006; Liddell and Wallace, 2005; Lock, 2001; Rapp, 2003; Resnik, 2002;
Sperling, 2004; Squier, 2004; Waldby and Squier, 2003), the geneticization of
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kinship (Konrad, 2005b; Nash, 2004) and some of the authors who have examined
how these phenomena can be culturally analysed (Konrad, 2005a; Rose, 2001,
2006; Strathern, 1992a, 1992b, 1999, 2005; Thompson, 2005).
11. Research on motivations of couples donating embryos to research in general,
and to stem cell research in particular, is somewhat sparse and often superficial.
However it would be accurate to claim that Britain has a comparatively high rate
of willingness to donate, more or less 70 percent (Franklin 2005a, 2006a, 2006b;
Franklin et al., 2005; MORI, 2003).
12. To the extent that all reproductive technologies can also be considered ‘hope
technologies’ (Franklin, 1997a), so they participate in what Mary-Jo and Byron
Good and their colleagues denominate as ‘the political economy of hope’ that structures
social relations within biomedicine (Good et al., 1990). The importance of
hope to scientific progress, and experimental medicine, is not only an expanding
field of cyborg politics, but also a significant source of new ‘trans’ relations – for
example through xenotransplantation, allografts, or what Nik Brown and Alison
Kraft denominate as ‘new “blood ties”’ and ‘new future-orientated parental duties
and responsibilities’ (2006: 313).
13. See Ahmed (2006) for a useful discussion of the ways in which the orientations
of objects determine their shape. This perspective can usefully be applied to
bioscience and biomedicine, for example in terms of the work of hope to define
desirable futures (Brown, 2003; Franklin 1997a, 2007; Thompson, 2005).
14. The term biological control is used in a variety of ways – from pest control, to
cellular redesign, to biosecurity. All of these have as their opposite, however,
biology out-of-control, which some theorists believe is as much a consequence of
attempts at biological control as its opposite – for example in the way cane toads,
introduced to control pests, became a problem in their own right, or the overprescription
of antibiotics produces resistance. For an evolutionary argument,
which maintains, similarly, that domestication of animals is not a one-way form of
biological control, but produces unanticipated effects, including on humans themselves,
see both Leach (2003) and Haraway (2003). This is one of the main arguments
of Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto (2003; see also Cassidy and
Mullin, forthcoming).
15. Significantly, and in a divergence from the scene painted by Haraway of the
informatics of domination that defined many versions of technological control in the
1980s, the idioms for stem cell propagation invoke the much older biological idioms
of gardening, horticulture, botany and cultivation. One might even say that, in
contrast to the clean, bright ‘sunshine’ fantasies of technological control in the
earlier period, the cultivation of transbiology relies more on an idea of soil.
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Sarah Franklin is Professor of the Social Study of Biomedicine in the
Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and Associate
Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine,
Biotechnology and Society. She is a social scientist with an interest in reproductive
technology, cloning, stem cells, and embryo research, and has
written and edited 15 books and over 75 articles on these and related topics.
Her forthcoming monograph from Duke is entitled Dolly Mixtures: The
Remaking of Genealogy.
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