10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17219
application/pdf
2038-3460
17219
2
en
Mauro Turrini
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Niki Vermeulen, Sakari Tamminen and Andrew Webster (eds.), Bio-objects: Life in the Twenty-first Century, Ashgate, 2012
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2015-01-29
2023-06-14
2015-01-29
2023-07-27
111-113
TS
Mauro Turrini
2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17219
111
University of Paris 1
2038-3460
2
en
113
Niki Vermeulen, Sakari Tamminen and Andrew Webster (eds.), Bio-objects: Life in the Twenty-first Century, Ashgate, 2012
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17219/16098
5
Book Review                                                               111
    Niki Vermeulen, Sakari Tamminen and Andrew Web-
    ster (eds.)
Bio-objects: Life in the Twenty-first Century
Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 226

Mauro Turrini University of Paris 1

    Techno-scientific breakthroughs have generated a process of repre-
sentation of, and intervention on, life at molecular scale. The ability to
decompose and recompose, create and modify, stock and circulate living-
objects has dramatically increased. This has stimulated many academics
to write about an objectification of life, particularly evident in the case of
DNA codification.
    This book intends to contribute to this wide debate by providing the
analysis of contemporary reconfigurations of life with “a useful conceptu-
al device or heuristic” (p. 1), bio-objects (hence the title). The thirteen
case studies presented in this book span a wide range of subjects, includ-
ing patients, foetuses, embryos, gametes, stem cells, genes, transgenic an-
imals, genetically modified plants, artificial silicon cells and water. As im-
plied by this Borges-like list, the authors are not concerned with provid-
ing a complete catalogue of “life in 21st century”, as implicated by their
subtitle. Their aim, rather, is to introduce a new methodological ap-
proach, grounded on the dynamic processes of bio-objectification, which
is understood is marked by a fundamental ambivalence. On the one hand,
living-objects are controlled, processed, hybridized, collected and ex-
changed at a unprecedented rapid-pace. On the other, this reification
process is not wholly new, complete or definitive, in that it draws upon
the traditional processes of the domestication of life. While rendered
highly malleable, these living-objects are not rendered inert, not even
when codified in genetic sequences, or replaced by artificial in silicio
models.
    In a Foucaldian way, bio-objectification implies necessarily the crea-
tion of subjects. As highlighted by the oxymoronic relationship between
bios and thingness, the similarity to a living-object raises issues about the
moral status and the position of these new entities in a similar manner to
animal/human, organic/inorganic, subject/object dichotomises. Sketched
in a brief theoretical introduction, and then resumed and enriched in the
empirical analysis that follows, this fascinating conceptual backbone basi-
cally follows the trajectories of these “out-of-place entities” through mul-
tiple levels of analysis. In particular, they address the interplay between
the epistemic and the ontological dimensions of these entities, not only
their moral status, but also the regulation of their substance in terms of
traceability.
    The 13 case studies are organised in three different sections. In the
first section, “changing boundaries of human, nonhuman and society” are
112                                                           Tecnoscienza – 5 (2)

analysed through the discursive and concrete shaping of bio-objects in
relation to the attribution of life. Radically new forms of life, like trans-
genic mice, are represented through a contradictory process, in which
both the comparison with ordinary forms of life, and the demarcation of
their exceptional value, are aimed at silencing their sufferance (Tora
Holmberg and Malin Ideland). Likewise, pluripotency of embryonic stem
cells is depicted through an analogous strategic insistence on homogenei-
ty and heterogeneity, as compared to adult stem cells (Lena Eriksson).
Even more traditional subjects/objects are also included. Clinical research
patients are translated in interdisciplinary data assemblage by algorithms
(Conor M.W. Douglas), while water is excluded from the designation of
life in that it acts as an external vector for successful attribution of life
(Ragna Zeiss).
    The second section illustrates the way in which governance practices
affect, and are affected by, the configuration of these entities as a result of
their position in the living hierarchy or their proximity with the life itself.
In the United Kingdom, the reaction against transpecies or chimeric em-
bryos, leading to their prohibition in 2008, has created a discursive and
material process of purification. Paradoxically, the production of new
epistemological and material embryos, different from “true hybrids”, re-
inforces the boundary between human and animal (Nik Brown). In the
case of prenatal screening and diagnostic test, technologies have partici-
pated in the construction of a new bio-object, the foetus, which in turn
has shaped new moral responsibility regarding the normal/pathological
divide (Nete Schwennesen). The crucial role that the relationship be-
tween genetically modified crops and traditional ones has played in the
policy-making process is addressed (Janus Hansen). We also find the new
responsibilities and care protocols implemented by the genetic analysis of
susceptibility to pathologies (Aaro Tupasela).
    In the third section, the “generative relations” of bio-objects are ex-
plored, particularly in the field of reproduction. In Germany and in Italy
(studied respectively by Bettina Bock von Wülfingen and Ingrid Metzler),
the discursive and regulative processes that separate the embryo from
kinship and familial projects, which have justified the strict limitations on
assisted reproductive technologies, are then put into question through a
process of re-connection interpreted as a “fruit-of-love”. Even when the
paradigm of life-as-information is taken to its extremes, as in the case of
an in silicio model of a cell, the generative capacity of life has an influence
on the organisation of science (Niki Vermeulen). The last two studies
concern the potential for genes to assemble biosocial solidarities, such as
requests for non-discriminatory measures in insurance policies (Ina Van
Hoyweghen), and the implications of the frozen gametes market in the
significance and governance of suspended, cryopreserved life (Sakari
Tamminen).
    As stated in the introductory chapter, the concept of bio-object needs
further development. However, it seems very promising particularly con-
Book Review                                                               113
cerning methods. The strongest contribution that this book offers the
field is precisely the introduction of an effective tool for the study of this
epochal change, conceived within a conceptual framework that is clearly
inspired by Foucault. Here I am referring to the authors who developed
aspects of the “molecularization/geneticization thesis” (in particular Rab-
inow, Rose and Novas), but also materialist analysts of biomedicine (such
as Sunder Rajan and Cooper), or biopolitical philosophers (such as
Agamben and Esposito). According to this perspective, the present must
be read in the light of an epochal change displaying the intensification of
control over life. This search for belief and power systems (épistémé) is
useful for drawing connections between laws, epistemic apparatus, gov-
ernance, economic circuits, social relations, representations, and so forth.
Simultaneously, the willingness to find out the spirit of an epoch express-
es a tendency towards the whole and the structure. A willingness that is
complemented with a sensitivity, proper of Science and Technology Stud-
ies, toward objects, their agency, their ability to mediate, as well as their
discursive and material trajectories. The conceptual framework of bio-
objects is an analytical tool that is as malleable, flexible and generative as
the forms of life (or non-life) that it aims at studying. Above all, it is ca-
pable of combining a detailed analysis of case studies with a broader per-
spective on the transformation of life within and beyond biomedical re-
search.


                                      ***


    Sarah B. Franklin
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 376

Giulia Zanini University of Padova

    Thirty-five years after an In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) procedure has
for the first time lead to the birth of a living human being and five mil-
lions test-tube babies later, ethnographic accounts witnessing how IVF
has spread around the globe proliferate. In the meantime, a flourishing
reproductive transnational industry has emerged and the use of human
reproductive substance for regenerative medicine has become so much
desirable and legitimate as it is profitable for global pharmaceutical and
health services market.
    Among this collection of works, Sarah Franklin's Biological Relatives:
IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship surfaces to wisely refocus on the
very scope of ethnographic accounts in theorizing socio-biotechnological
dynamics and to make a point about the way in which the normalization
