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| ISBN-13: | 9781478005568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 580 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Temporal Oocytes
Fertility and Deep Time
In popular culture, oocytes are biological clocks. Women in the postindustrial democracies are confronted again and again with the irreversible ticking away of their fertility, instructed in the women's health and lifestyle media to seize the day and conceive before the ticking falls silent. This finite clock time is the salient temporal experience of fertile time for women. The clock motif recurs again and again in the interviews conducted for this study, as an explanation for the various strategies these women used to manage the conundrum of their fertility. The biological clock expresses an important aspect of fertile time — its finite horizon, its movement toward a vanishing point midway through the lifetime of women in the global north. It conveys only a thin sense, however, of the dense temporal capacities invested in oocyte biology. It foregrounds the most familiar, everyday sense of time, linear, consecutive, regular, a predictable mechanism that moves forward, each discreet point in time superseding the last. The ubiquity of clock time in everyday life means that this sense of time is ready to hand. The ticking clock expresses a certain experience of time as constantly lost, wasted, dissipated, not to be regained. In this context, biological clock time implies a regular dissipation over the biological life course, a calculable diminution that extends to the time of the calendar, as each successive birthday subtracts another year of possible fertile time. Yet this quite particular organization of everyday time — into minute, regular, passing increments — is rarely adequate to the experience of the life course, with its dolors, renewals, endurable and unendurable stretches, unpredictable intensities, and abrupt reversals. Nor can it encompass the nature of biological time. As Adrian Mackenzie observes in his work on synthetic biology, clock time does not adequately describe the multiple stochastic temporalities of living process. Rather the aim of much contemporary biotechnology is to find ways to articulate the clock time of industrial infrastructures with the qualitative complexity and nonlinearity of cellular and genetic rates: "Growth, reactions, metabolism, signaling, cycles, mutation, catalysis, transcription, translation, recombination, folding, degradation and synthesis are just some of the rates that biology grapples with. Establishing mathematical and experimental control over rates lies at the heart of the engineering of biology" (Mackenzie 2013, 8).
The biological clock time attributed to oocytes is not a straightforward measure of their inherent temporal qualities but rather the outcome of various testing regimes used in fertility medicine to provide clients with a pragmatic indicator of their likely success rates if they undergo various procedures. So rather than treat biological clock time as descriptive, in what follows I want to unpack some of the complex temporal investments and capacities of the oocyte and begin to think about how these capacities shape women's experience of their location in fertile time. While the biological clock idiom has an expressive appeal for many of the women interviewed, it by no means exhausts their sense of the significance of their oocytes, or the ways in which they reach into the past and future. To better account for this significance, we need an understanding of the thick time (Neimanis 2014) invested in oocyte biology, a sense of time that includes and accounts for the deep past and indicates the deep future. The term "thick time" evokes the sense in which the entire genealogy of the species and ancestry is played out in the real time of lived life. The present always brings the past with it, so each living being summarizes its own inheritance. Astrida Neimanis writes that "thick time ... gathers all of the pasts and possible futures within itself. In terms of corporeal generosity, it retains a material memory of the bodies that world its matter in the present.... Time is not a path, stretching behind and beyond us. It is not something we are simply 'in,' or which we progress 'through.' We (in the most expansive sense possible) are space-times gathering our pasts and making multivalent futures possible" (Neimanis 2014, 118).
From this point of view, our bodies are archives that memorialize and accumulate their own histories. They prolong the past of the organism in the present and propel the present into the future. This sense of time is quite other to clock time, in that it is explicitly continuous and ramified, rather than successive and discrete. Temporal qualities coexist with one another; they are not jettisoned into the past. The oocyte creates thick time both in its profound conservation of the germ line and mitochondrial DNA, and in its totipotent generation of new organisms, new lifetimes. Since the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996, biologists can point toward an even more startling temporal capacity of the oocyte, its ability to reverse gene expression and take the genome of a somatic cell back to totipotency. When deployed in laboratory conditions, it can reanimate the embryonic potentials of differentiated, dedicated adult cells. These qualities and temporal possibilities coexist indivisibly within the vitality of oocytes, linking ancient microbial life to the white heat of contemporary biotechnology.
Oocytes and the germ line are only one among many other cell lineages that coincide temporarily in individual human bodies, concatenating and disassembling in gestation, birth, growth, and death. Each cell lineage leads in turn back into evolutionary time. They remind us that the life of subjective experience, of our sense of ourselves as singular, coherent, sensate, and conscious organisms, is built on a whole other substrate of inhuman and prehuman life — cellular, bacterial, ribonucleic, cytoplasmic — that is in a sense outside our experience, or at least the usual scale of what counts as experience. In this book I want to address how women experience their oocytes, how they live with them as elements of the self and make sense of them in a quotidian way. Yet I also want to explore the hinterland of biological, material life and deep time that constitute oocytes and consider how this impinges on what they can mean and how they can be lived with. This necessarily involves a consideration of evolutionary biology, and how living matter memorializes its own past and invents its own future through the conservation and elaboration of evolutionary experiments. As beings that necessarily live the scale of their lifetime as embodied time, we partake of the ways our biology continues us in time in singular, qualitatively irreducible ways.
While this temporal scale seems elusive, too inhuman and extensive to accommodate the time of lived life, I consider throughout the book how the women who participated in this study evoke what I term "generational time." This is a pivotal term that can account for how experienced time intersects with deep time. This term encompasses the succession of lifetimes and the possible ways in which generations are created and coexist. The women interviewed for this study often expressed a strong sense of indebtedness to the family that precedes them and to the family that they hope to create, to both past and future generations. While this sense is circumscribed by the immediate generations, the parents and grandparents at most, it was expressed often as the only possibility of both a happy proximate future, in the creation of a child, and of an extended legacy, a line of descent. The oocytes were considered essential elements in the ways the women could position themselves in the time of successive lifetimes.
Generational time also suggests the more intensive sense of generative time, the time of fertility, sexuality, conception, gestation, birth, of the biological relations of reproduction. As I explore in the following section, oocytes continue the germ line, the cell lineage with the most direct form of continuity through biological time, lived through the reproduction of each new generation. Notably, Henri Bergson, the great philosopher of time, singles out the germ line for its qualities of continuity, its particular memorization of the life of previous and future generations in its conserving and ontogenic capacities:
This current of life, traversing the bodies it has organized one after another, passing from generation to generation, has become divided amongst species and distributed amongst individuals without losing anything of its force, rather intensifying in proportion to its advance. It is well known that, on the theory of the "continuity of the germ-plasm," maintained by Weismann, the sexual elements of the generating organism pass on their properties directly to the sexual elements of the organism engendered.... Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism. It is as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavouring to continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live (Bergson and Mitchell 1911, 27; emphasis in the original).
In relation to human reproduction, men and women "ride" their fertile capacities in markedly different ways. For men, the life of their gametes tracks their life course more extensively, but for women in the developed world, their capacity to create a new generation is confined to the first half of life. When combined with the social asymmetries of mothering responsibility, this necessarily affects the way women experience their inclusion and agency in generational time, rendering it more acute as it accelerates toward its vanishing point. This constraint is more urgently felt because of the difficulty of reconciling it with the liberal sense of time as "the passage towards complete actualization" (Colebrook 2009, 11; Neimanis 2014), as an instrumental medium at the disposal of the entrepreneurial subject who maximizes the accumulation of human capital (Becker 1993). This is the time of career, with its (hopefully) upward ascent and aggrandizement. As Claire Colebrook suggests, this instrumental time is one of self-generation and liberal individualism, a time which is both implicitly masculine and unable to acknowledge the indebted, imbricated, and relational time involved in the reproductive transition from one generation to the next. She writes, "Man is that animal who has no nature, essence or being other than the form that he gives to himself, and history and generations are merely the matter through which man creates himself" (Colebrook 2009, 11). This irreconcilable quality, banalized as work-life balance, propels women into an expanding field of reproductive consumer services — contraception and ovulation management, egg and embryo freezing, sperm purchase, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the various techniques of ART — to manage the intersection of multiple temporalities in our bodies.
Mammalian Sex
The gametes — oocytes and sperm — are essential elements in the biological architecture of mammalian sexual reproduction. In the history of biology, human gametes have been persistently attributed with qualities derived from the social organization of gender — active sperm, passive egg, and so on — a practice that has been ably critiqued by feminists (e.g., Martin 1991; Keller 2000). The point of this critique is to demonstrate the teleological reasoning in biology that works backward from existing gender arrangements to their functional analog in living processes. In what follows, I do not want to further develop this kind of critique per se, but rather consider how we can understand the human gametes, and particularly the oocyte, as a cell lineage that materializes the deep time of microbial life and its innumerable contingencies.
That is, I want to first think about the temporality of the oocyte as a cellular temporality, with dynamics and qualities specific to this level of scale. Drawing primarily on the account of cytobiology developed by Lyn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, I want to consider to what extent the powers and constraints of oocyte biology are shaped by deep time. Gamete life and organism life coincide imperfectly, and gamete life is driven by constraints and possibilities often more proper to microbial life in general than to the interests of human life specifically. As Margulis and Sagan put it, "The private activities of early cells are involved even today in the courtship of human beings. The intimate behaviour of single cells has simply been elaborated to include animals and their behaviours and societies. Mammalian sex is a late and special variation on a far more general theme. ... Human sex is almost identical to that of some of the protistan microbes" (Margulis and Sagan 1986, 2).
Gametes are first of all cells. Cells are the minimum unit of life in Margulis and Sagan's terms, because all are autopoietic (they metabolize their environment) and all reproduce, in the sense that they replicate themselves. Nucleated cells (e.g., somatic cells in animals) are diploid, with two sets of chromosomes that reproduce themselves by splitting and doubling, or mitosis. The history of life on earth has been primarily one of mitotic self-replication, where reproduction involves an increase in the number of individual entities, without mixing the genetic contribution of two or more parents. Mitotic division is the form of reproduction characteristic of bacterial and amoebic life, in which very rapid increases in number (in for example the plasmodium microbe that causes malaria) can be generated from a single parent cell through replication of its DNA and division of nuclei and cytoplasm. Mitosis is also how multicellular organisms grow and develop into entities with differentiated types of tissues (e.g., contractile cardiomyocytes in the heart, hepatocytes in the liver), as cellular material replenishes itself through division. Mitosis is the mechanism of organism growth and development.
The gametes, however, involve a process that Margulis and Sagan term "meiotic sexuality," which implicates at least two parental entities. The gametes are haploid cells, with a single copy of chromosomes; they create the conditions for the process of meiosis, which involves fertilization, the recombination of chromosomes from each parent to reconstitute a complete, yet unique, genome for the resultant zygote. This process is a familiar account of how mammalian and human conception takes place, but Margulis and Sagan defamiliarize it by locating the processes in the dynamics and constraints of the earliest microbial life, demonstrating the ways in which fertilization and embryogenesis, in humans as in other multicellular species, is a response to the microbial ecologies that make up cellular life. Or to put it another way, "In some organisms [including humans] ... a certain kind of two-parent sex became intimately connected to reproduction because of events occurring in the ancestral phyla" (Margulis and Sagan 1986, 15).
In their account, meiosis was an innovation in the early history of microbial life (700 million years ago) that dramatically increased the rates and kinds of differentiation available to organisms, and hence their adaptability to changing environmental pressures. In its earliest form, it involved the differentiation of single-cell organisms which reproduce through mitosis (the prokaryotes) into two-cell organisms (the eukaryotes). In the two-cell eukaryotes, the ancestors of all multicellular life, one cell retains mitotic capacity and the second cell can only reproduce meiotically. This combination gives the various kinds of genetic material in the cell (mitochondria, chromosomes) far more scope to express as organism variation, and to transmit and conserve developments. It also solves the problem of species reproduction combined with differentiation and specialization of tissues, because the gametes retain a transmittable copy of the intact heterologous genome, whereas the nucleus in the somatic cells can modify or lose organelles in the process of differentiation. All contemporary animals retain this mutually exclusive organization of cells, so that unlike all other tissues in the body, the gametes cannot reproduce mitotically but must proceed through fertilization.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
1. Temporal Oocytes: Fertility and Deep Time 23
2. Twentieth-Century Oocytes: Experiment and Experience 41
3. Precious Oocytes: IVF and the Deficit Spiral 64
4. Global Oocytes: Medical Tourism and the Transaction of Fertility 88
5. Cold-Chain Oocytes: Vitrification and the Formation of Corporate Egg Banks 119
6. Private Oocytes: Personal Egg Banking and Generational Time 114
7. Innovation Oocytes: Therapeutic Cloning and Mitochondrial Donation 161
Conclusion 191
Appendix 199
Notes 205
References 211
Index 231
What People are Saying About This
“Catherine Waldby continues her meditation on tissue economies with this brilliant examination of women's reproductive cells. Beautifully written, this book will be of interest to anyone who cares about the politics of reproduction, and it is likely to become required reading for scholars of gender, medicine, and embodiment.”
“An exceptionally compelling account of the emergence of an economy that has fully disrupted the conventional mechanics of family formation and romantic narratives of singular mother-child relations. In this beautifully written and elegantly argued work, Catherine Waldby invites us to consider the oocyte as potent actuator of past and present identities and new, previously unimagined forms of distributed maternity and to explore the multiply constituted landscape of complex parental rights and obligations to which its use gives rise.”
“Drawing on extensive fieldwork and rich empirical material, The Oocyte Economy follows the manifold trajectories of women's reproductive cells, investigating how they intersect with matters of race, gender and class. Catherine Waldby's new book not only provides the best overview to date of how oocytes are mobilized in multiple forms of commercialization and capitalization, but significantly expands our understanding of contemporary reproductive biopolitics.”