Thirty-five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a routine procedure worldwide. In Biological Relatives, Sarah Franklin explores how the normalization of IVF has changed how both technology and biology are understood. Drawing on anthropology, feminist theory, and science studies, Franklin charts the evolution of IVF from an experimental research technique into a global technological platform used for a wide variety of applications, including genetic diagnosis, livestock breeding, cloning, and stem cell research. She contends that despite its ubiquity, IVF remains a highly paradoxical technology that confirms the relative and contingent nature of biology while creating new biological relatives. Using IVF as a lens, Franklin presents a bold and lucid thesis linking technologies of gender and sex to reproductive biomedicine, contemporary bioinnovation, and the future of kinship.
Thirty-five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a routine procedure worldwide. In Biological Relatives, Sarah Franklin explores how the normalization of IVF has changed how both technology and biology are understood. Drawing on anthropology, feminist theory, and science studies, Franklin charts the evolution of IVF from an experimental research technique into a global technological platform used for a wide variety of applications, including genetic diagnosis, livestock breeding, cloning, and stem cell research. She contends that despite its ubiquity, IVF remains a highly paradoxical technology that confirms the relative and contingent nature of biology while creating new biological relatives. Using IVF as a lens, Franklin presents a bold and lucid thesis linking technologies of gender and sex to reproductive biomedicine, contemporary bioinnovation, and the future of kinship.
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship
376
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship
376eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Thirty-five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a routine procedure worldwide. In Biological Relatives, Sarah Franklin explores how the normalization of IVF has changed how both technology and biology are understood. Drawing on anthropology, feminist theory, and science studies, Franklin charts the evolution of IVF from an experimental research technique into a global technological platform used for a wide variety of applications, including genetic diagnosis, livestock breeding, cloning, and stem cell research. She contends that despite its ubiquity, IVF remains a highly paradoxical technology that confirms the relative and contingent nature of biology while creating new biological relatives. Using IVF as a lens, Franklin presents a bold and lucid thesis linking technologies of gender and sex to reproductive biomedicine, contemporary bioinnovation, and the future of kinship.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Series: | Experimental Futures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Sarah Franklin holds the Professorship in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy and coeditor (with Susan McKinnon) of Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, both also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Biological Relatives
IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship
By SARAH FRANKLIN
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5485-7
CHAPTER 1
Miracle Babies
When I began my PhD research on IVF in 1986, I could not have imagined that a quarter of a century later I would still be writing about this technology, nor that I would be witnessing a whole-scale redefinition of biology as technology for which IVF provides one of the most well-known case studies. Yet the transformation expressed in the title of bioeconomics consultant Rob Carlson's (2010) book Biology Is Technology could be described as a direct translation of the logic of IVF and its role as a foundational model for the biosociety. Since the mid-1980s when I was a graduate student researching IVF in Birmingham—the second-largest city in Britain—the IVF procedure has rapidly evolved from what was then still known as the "test-tube baby" method into a major global platform for the health sector and emergent bio-industries. Now defined as a reproductive biotechnology, IVF was a pioneering technique inaugurating what Edward Yoxen calls "the change in our relation to nature that biotechnology embodies" (1986: 9) despite the fact that he, like many other early commentators on the late twentieth-century explosion of the biosciences, was largely concerned with the field of molecular genetics.
The crucial importance of reproductive technologies to an understanding of biology as technology, now defined as much through cellular as genetic models, is due not only to the fact that IVF has expanded dramatically in both its scale and scope, becoming a platform, or stem technology, for myriad human and animal applications, from fertility treatment and livestock improvement to genetic screening and the production of cloned cell lines. In vitro fertilization is distinctive because this technology, and the model of reproduction it relies upon, have become ubiquitous and commonsensical. Unlike the Human Genome Project, IVF did not derive its celebrity from high-profile molecular genetic innovations such as polymerase chain reaction or gene-sequencing robotics, but from the narratives and hopes of couples seeking children—indeed from a technology that quickly became a new norm of family life. In addition to establishing a new method of sexual reproduction, and a powerful new window into the mechanisms of biological development, IVF has played a leading role in the establishment of new technologies of remaking life as a normal, familiar, and even naturalized part of human reproduction. Indeed, IVF is arguably the preeminent example of how a living human tool—a cultured ex vivo embryo—has substantialized an ordinary and intimate understanding of biology as technology. We could simply say that after IVF we had a new kind of biological kinship with technology.
Ironically, what has disguised the more radical implications of IVF's rapid routinization is precisely the fact that it establishes a biological relation: IVF is a technology that substantializes scientific progress in the form of biological parenthood. Carlson's (2010) book does not mention IVF, or even reproduction. And yet the transformation from which he derives his title is rooted in the technologization of reproductive substance, and in particular the effort to take the regenerative and productive powers of reproduction "in hand." As noted earlier, reproduction has been almost entirely absent from the study of economics, technology, and political philosophy, so in some ways it is not surprising that it is also absent from many discussions of biotechnology. Even within sociology and anthropology, reproduction has largely been treated as a self-evident domain of natural fact—or, as Annette Weiner (1978) described it, "mere biology." Feminist scholars have done the most to analyze the social organization of biological reproduction, in particular as it is shaped through the division of labor and political economy. These are what can also be described as technologies of gender and sex.
Today, IVF is a kind of matrix uniting these different technologies, and transforming them, while also doing so in a context that is highly publicly celebrated and acclaimed. One reason it is no longer possible to envisage reproduction as "mere biology" is because if matters were so simple IVF would not be necessary. In vitro fertilization exists because mere biology is not enough: in the context of IVF the phrase becomes nonsensical. This is another way to describe the transformation in meanings and perceptions of the biological that IVF models as a "working up" of biological substance, and thus as both a tool-sign, and a "culture medium," manifest as a new technology of sex. In vitro fertilization is one of the most prominent and highly publicized examples of how biology has become increasingly technologized through two processes that are essentially interlinked. On the one hand, biological mechanisms have been broken down into cellular and biochemical components and replicated technologically in vitro—which is the process IVF performs, or stages. Indeed, clinical IVF confirms the viability of this synthetic trajectory "in man": it produces human offspring as its "proof" who embody its artifice. On the other hand, IVF also functions as a means of substantializing biology as technology—bringing into being a new human reproductive mechanism, which has since become established as a desirable and legitimate social norm. In vitro fertilization thus models what it means to claim that biology is technology not only by providing a working model, or model system, but through its rapid evolution into an established form of parenthood. The profoundly intimate artifice of IVF, now a standard medical procedure, confirms the viability of a new technological ground state, or norm, of human existence and renewal. After IVF, in the context of new reproductive technologies, reproduction has become a matter of technique, and mere biology has become an oxymoron.
This is not the argument being made by Robert Carlson (2010: 1) in Biology Is Technology, in which he claims that "biology is the oldest technology" and that even cells are essentially technological. Carlson's concern with the "explicit 'hands-on' molecular manipulation of genomes" and their implications for "the human condition" (4–5) makes no reference to human reproductive technologies at all. However, the importance of IVF as a template for the transformation Carlson describes has been noted by other, similarly minded biotechnology commentators such as the eco-futurist Stewart Brand. Indeed, for Brand (2010) it is assisted conception that most powerfully confirms the link between the old and new version of biology as technology precisely because IVF has grounded their union in family life. In vitro fertilization, Brand argues, has made the connection between new and old models of biology as technology more familiar, ordinary, and normal—indeed, "IVF is the big example" of this transformation, he claims. "I remember when [IVF] was an abomination in the face of God's will. As soon as people met a few of the children, they realised that they were just as good as the 'regular' ones" (quoted in Honigman 2010).
The implication of Brand's claim is that the reason IVF offspring are "just as good" as the so-called regular ones is because they are just like them. And of course, as anyone who has met an IVF child can easily testify, they are indeed just like the regular ones. But here again we reencounter the IVF paradox—since it is at once just like the real thing, and also not. In fact, IVF is not at all like regular conception—as anyone who has undergone it can confirm. This part of the condition of being after IVF—the way in which the expression "biology is technology" can be experienced as both familiar and strange—is also a ground state, or social norm, of being after IVF that remains to be fully characterized. In contrast to the analogies employed by Carlson (2010: 47) to equate basic cellular functionality with synthetic biology, and the "short DNA handles" used to redesign biological components with unassisted cellular signaling, the concept of "biological relativity" describes something else, namely what is not only similar, but also different, about biology that has been "handled." In vitro fertilization is the "big example" not only of how this transformation has become more "regular," but, equally important, how it has not. It is to the two sides of this process that "biological relativity" refers—a problematic for which I suggest IVF is indeed the big example, despite rarely being mentioned in the context of most debates about new biotechnologies, and for reasons that are somewhat different from those cited by Brand.
These two sides of IVF are the source of its ambivalence, and thus of its complexity. Within the expression "biology is technology" lie both a metaphoric equation and an assertion that this equation is beyond metaphoric. This is a double message that IVF repeats in its promise of delivering children who are "just like" other offspring, but through a process of mimicry that is not quite the same as the original process on which it based. This ambivalence of mimicry lies at the heart of the paradox IVF presents, and is the source of the biological relativity this technique substantializes as both norm and novelty, and thus as both a confirmation of the norms it relies upon and a disruption to their authority and authenticity.
When I was a PhD student in Birmingham researching IVF, I was not alone in failing to predict, or even to imagine, that within the space of a single human generation approximately five million miracle babies would be born worldwide from this technique, nor that IVF would be responsible for as much as 5 percent of the birthrate in some countries. I could not have known then that its own technological offspring would greatly amplify the historical importance of this technique's success "in man," while making its social or anthropological significance even harder to interpret. The transformations in understandings of heredity, development, and reproduction that have accompanied the rapid worldwide spread of IVF in the postwar period have become so taken for granted that it can be difficult even to point them out. This is why it is important to emphasize that this process of transformation is not only obvious, but also curious, and in ways that deserve much fuller exploration.
In order to examine how being after IVF has become both more regular and curiouser, this chapter considers the emergence of IVF in the double sense of "genealogical." It considers how we inherit the effects of routine IVF in direct, or proximate, historical time, while also analyzing how its logics have been regularized in the Foucauldian sense of tracking the sedimentation of new norms. From these two points of view, the emergence of IVF can be analyzed as a continuous but dialectical history of biotechnical innovation that derives from deliberate human intentions, and responds to specific desires and hopes, while simultaneously transforming the terms through which new aspirations are imagined, and changing the meaning of the biological connections such interventions are aimed to make, alter, or improve. This is the process the concept of biological relativity is designed to characterize by charting both the ambivalent genealogies of IVF and the normative paradox they continue to reproduce.
Revisiting IVF
The award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Robert Edwards in 2010 offered a very public occasion to revisit the recent present of IVF, and to reflect on its significance. According to the press release from the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the award recognized Edwards's contribution to the development of IVF for the treatment of infertility. As Dr. Ruth Edwards described the prize at the award ceremony that her husband was too unwell to attend: "The award was given for the successful development of techniques by which human oocytes were fertilized in vitro and then successfully returned to the mother's womb." And as Professor Martin Johnson, one of Edwards's first PhD students and his long-standing Cambridge colleague, noted in his Nobel lecture describing Edwards's achievements (Johnson 2010), the development of these techniques required an unusually interdisciplinary tool kit, reflecting both Edwards's wide-ranging scientific interests and his itinerant career path.
As Johnson relates in his lecture, Robert Edwards was born into a working-class family in Batley, Yorkshire, to parents who worked in traditional northern industrial occupations—his father on the Settle-to-Carlisle railway and his mother in a manufacturing mill (Johnson 2010, 2011). During the period Edwards received his secondary education, the family resided in his mother's home town of Manchester—famously the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, due to the rich crossbreeding between agriculture, engineering, mercantile innovation, and trade, served by a dense transportation infrastructure comprising roads, canals, shipping ports, and railways. These influences strongly shaped Edwards's own biography, spending summers as he did on Yorkshire farms in the Dales, near his father's engineering works, where he developed an early interest in the mechanics of animal reproduction. Following a period in the army during World War II, Edwards initially pursued agricultural studies at Bangor University in Wales, followed by a PhD from the Animal Genetics Institute in Edinburgh, where the director, Conrad Hal Waddington, had cultivated an exceptionally vibrant and creative research culture combining developmental biology with modern genetics.
It was from a background of basic research in mammalian reproductive systems (Edwards's model organism, like that of many of his British contemporaries, was the mouse), mixed with an unusual (for the early 1950s) amount of genetic science, that the basic problems of mammalian IVF were initially envisaged by Edwards midcentury. Human IVF was not his initial focus, although technical means of manipulating fertilized mammalian eggs in order to evaluate, and alter, their genetic capacities were the subject of Edwards's PhD dissertation. By his own account, the road to human IVF was "bumpy" (Edwards 2001)—and Edwards has written extensively, and often personally, on this history, including its ethical dimensions, in numerous publications throughout his career (Edwards 1989; and see Johnson 2011). From these accounts, and the work of many other scholars on the history of reproductive biomedicine, it is evident that the turn to human clinical IVF was neither straightforward in its aims nor simple in its origin. As with all successful scientific projects, the road to IVF was built using tools that had been developed over centuries, by generations of investigators, across a wide range of disciplines, and with disparate practical and theoretical goals in mind. Like other frontiers, the landscape in which human IVF was pioneered was shaped by broad historical forces, such as international concern about population growth, as well as distinctive local and regional circumstances, including the comparative freedom Patrick Steptoe enjoyed as a provincial consultant in a small northern hospital (Pfeffer 1993). Like other transformative technological innovations before it, the lengthy history of IVF tells us a great deal about what we can expect from its future.
The IVF Platform
Over the course of its development through invertebrates to amphibians, reptiles, fish, and eventually mammals, the IVF technique gradually evolved from an experimental scientific method into a variety of clinical and agricultural applications. In the 1960s mouse IVF was used to create new models of early mammalian development for research purposes, including mosaics, chimeras, and hybrids. In the 1970s it took its now-famous human turn into clinical applications. In the 1980s it produced a new generation of miracle babies and the embryo transfer industry in livestock, while in the 1990s it provided the basic platform for transgenesis, cell reprogramming, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. In the twenty-first century, IVF has provided the core techniques for the creation of savior siblings, admixed human chimeras, and new cellular tools, such as induced pluripotent stem cells. In sum, for more than a century IVF has been the crucible for new means of reconstructing reproduction, manipulating development, and retooling embryology (figure 1.1). Since its successful clinical translation in 1978, IVF has continued to undergo a rapid evolution as a technological platform, yielding newer mechanisms to facilitate human reproduction, such as aneuploidy screening, as well as new means of harnessing the regenerative properties of embryos, such as stem cell derivation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Biological Relatives by SARAH FRANKLIN. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Relatively Biological 1
1. Miracle Babies 31
2. Living Tools 68
3. Embryo Pioneers 102
4. Reproductive Technologies 150
5. Living IVF 185
6. IVF Live 221
7. Frontier Culture 258
8. After IVF 297
Afterword 311
Notes 313
References 333
Index 351