Since over a decade and ever more often we observe a clash between specific “new”
living entities and the governance and regulation of (bio-)medical practices. These
are the entities we call “bio-objects.” As will become clearer in the following, these
bio-objects are indicators of a fundamental change between different systems of thought
and practice: this is in the case of medicine the change from reproduction and repair
to regeneration. This change in medicine is part of a broader cultural change.
Who is the actor in bio-objectification?
In an earlier article, this COST network described bio-objects as creatures that have
been made at the work benches of the life sciences, such as genetically-modified organisms
or transpecies animals, as well as entities that we are already familiar with but
which have been brought into new spaces, such as stem cells, which were removed from
the cord blood after delivery and stored in cord blood banks, or in vitro fertilization
(IVF) embryos that dwell in Petri dishes in laboratories (1).
What we should stress additionally is that an entity can only turn into a bio-object
if being an interrelated entity. Only in the interaction with its environment (eg,
IVF-patients, EU regulators, media discourse) can it turn out to be problematic –
meaning that it is a challenge to common ways of dealing with living entities. The
bio-object is not problematic in itself but in relation to our existing knowledge
and practices (2). This means that the entity is understood as bio-object together
with the challenged regulative body, and together with some observing entity, who
certifies that there lies a conflict in their interrelation and builds a bio-objectifying
apparatus through their interaction (3).
“Normal” objects (non bio-objects) are related to specific historic environment
As shown in the Figure 1, not all objects generated in laboratories or scientific
discourse turn into bio-objects. They only do so when they need to receive a new identity
(4) in order to fit current regulations (as the term “pre-embryo” in some countries
shows) or when there’s enough interest in changing regulations or in changing the
moral economy regarding the bio-object (as with preimplantation diagnosis, or the
different, newly emerging types of mothering by egg cell donation).
An excursion into the history of genetics might make this interdependency of history
and object more plausible. It was in the 1880s to 1890s that it became common sense
between a group of researchers that only the nucleus carried the substances of inheritance
and not the complete cell. The identification of the cell-nuclear substances (later
called desoxy-ribo-nuclein-acids, DNA) as the substance of inheritance is an idea
deeply entangled with the history of the foundation of the German nation (5). Naturalists
working in the German lands such as Oscar Hertwig, Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli, August
Weismann, and others conceptualized conception and heredity as processes governed
by rules identical to first drafts of the then new German Civil Law Code. They divided
a reproductive sphere (the “nutritive” plasma, similar to the private, non-economic
part of the civil household) from a productive sphere (the nucleus), where economic
riches were amassed for the future and managed correspondingly. Quite as the Civil
Law Code ordered for the civil household, the nutritive part of the cellular household
was perceived as female (stemming from the egg cell) and the productive part was perceived
as male. According to the law, the family father had the say over all family members’
economy. This concept of a division – between mere nutritive plasma on one hand and
managing and inheritance functions of the nucleus on the other – as adapted to the
cell was ridiculed and fought against by researchers in the United States. Still it
soon spread and during the 20th century became the dominant model framework for genetics.
Thus, the idea of a transmission of capital according to specific rules (of inheritance)
and of its management in the cell surfaced at a seldom historic moment: the moment
when not only natural scientists but simultaneously the rest of the German civil society
renegotiated rules for living together and for the transmission of property between
family members. This shows that the concept of this specific location of genetic substance
in the nucleus, later taken for granted, resulted from the stabilization of a highly
improbable constellation at one place at a specific historical moment: it was an improbable
constellation as two seldom developments became entangled and reinforced each other.
Bio-objectification is a destabilization of “highly improbable” historical constellations
The historical concept of reproduction meant sexual generation (ie, the meeting of
two unrelated entities conceptualized as very different from each other, resulting
in a third entity). In the past circa 130 years, this was understood as the most important
way to generate life, in contrast to what we see today with the rising acceptance
of the idea that (sexual) reproduction is only one way of many, and that the overwhelming
majority of cells including most organisms do some kind of off-budding (6-8). Simultaneously
new scientific models appear that integrate plasma and nucleus in inheritance. Medicine,
meanwhile, also experiences a turn from repair (a machinist concept) to regeneration.
The above example at the core of biology teaches us that we can understand bio-objectification
as a process in which these “highly improbable” objects are destabilized again. This
can happen when, for instance, through globalization they meet with concepts that
don’t pertain to the European enlightenment and modernity. The destabilization can
also take place when such a model reaches its explanatory limits: this happened when
the Human Genome Project did not render the expected knowledge and had to leave it
to epigenetics and (epi-) genomics to fit DNA into its cellular context.
Bio-objects indicate cultural change
As is often mentioned and again repeated in this article, bio-objects are not easy
to tackle. In contrast, it is a typical feature of bio-objects to cause uneasiness
in humans and to mess with definitions and laws. But why then and under what circumstances
do we allow bio-objects to behave this way?
Most entities that we call bio-objects are the result of some medico-scientific procedure
which often puts matter “out of place.” So, are bio-objects just the result of a technical
feasibility that we did not have earlier?
Examples of non-universality of bio-objects show that this is not the case. The same
entity can be a bio-object in one country but not in another. For example in countries
where cloning or any handling of human embryos is prohibited (as in Germany until
recently) and where (economic or moral) interest or need for cloning does not enter
any audible discourse, the bio-object “cloned embryo” would not come into existence.
Instead of just being the result of technological changes, the willingness to perceive
and allow the clash of specific entities with our conventional modern regulations
has risen.
We can make out at least two reasons for this change:
1. Discontent with modern binaries and interest in complexity. All of these bio-objects
that live today in the borderland between nature and culture, between human and animal,
between self and non-self had progenitors: they are not new. There were chimeras all
around, we are all composed of cells from different individuals (our mother’s and
bacteria, just to name a few); clones existed before as well as hermaphrodites and
if we had wanted, we could have known that genes are not static a long time ago. But
it is recently in the past decades that the discontent with modern binaries, which
often favored one type of modern subject and not the other, had risen and made the
inbetweens more visible and laudable. The rise of the bio-object indicates a crisis
of those dichotomies that were meant to help organize the world in the past centuries.
2. Profitability of the border-crossing. Even if the bio-object itself is not intrinsically
new, the ability to generate it and the willingness to request services and specific
products out of laboratory entities that challenge our common understanding of nature
and culture is rather recent. Next to the biotic entity itself and to the regulation/discourse
that it meets (Figure 1), it is this (economic) interest that helps the bio-object
to emerge. Therefore, the bio-object is always entangled with issues of justice –
when we think of insurance practices, distribution of medical resources, or ownership
of organic or bio-virtual material.
Figure 1
Bio-objectifying apparatus. The gray field symbolizes the bio-object.
To understand the hybridity of techniques involved even in these economic processes,
it is helpful to remember that the profitability of bio-objects recently took off
through the combination of genomics with reproductive sciences and techniques: the
decoding of DNA/RNA has often been called “reading” the genome. Correspondingly, when
technical engineering found out how to change DNA, this was called “writing.” A whole
“economy of hope” was built around these techniques. But it was not the ability to
re-write or “write” the DNA that opened up the new options for a regenerative medicine
on the horizon today, including stem cells therapy or cybrids. Instead the connection
between genetic/genomic knowledge with its complex environment in the cell, as well
as with techniques stemming from the reproductive (farm) practices/sciences, rendered
it a useful tool of research and, maybe once, for therapy. The social anthropologist
Sarah Franklin used the notion of the “embryo flap” to visualize this border crossing
from therapy to research and their respective economies: the embryo flap links the
IVF-surgery with the compound for stem cell research behind (9).
These conditions confront us with new problems. The interest in the inbetweens and
the recent distrust in easier to understand binaries seems to go hand in hand with
the higher levels of complexity reached in biomedical modeling these days (see reason
for cultural change number 1). On the other hand (see reason for cultural change number
2), research in social studies and philosophy of science seems to indicate that in
order for knowledge or product to reach “marketability” (such as publishing or patenting)
its complexity needs to be reduced (10,11).
This means that if we don’t want to allow the market-driven reduction of complexity
and if we want, instead, to follow a rising interest in complexity (combination of
number 1 and 2 above), we need measures to tackle the problem of the marketability
of complexity.