IPP Institute of Public Goods and Policies

"Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951 at 31, but a cell line from her tissues is still alive and reproducing for scientific purposes. Her dramatic
biography and her fundamental (although unwitting) contribution to the development of scientific knowledge went unnoticed until Rebecca Skloot's "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks" [New York, Random House, 2010, 384 pp.] was published. The political, scientific, social and technological entanglement of Henrietta's account by Skloot is an original and vivid science narrative of clear relevance for Science and Technology Studies. Stemming from Henrietta's story and Skloot's book, Stefano Crabu, Mauro Turrini, Marialuisa Lavitrano and Sara Casati reflect and discuss on the relation between society and medical research, its ethical dilemmas, as well as on the way technoscientific processes can be accounted for."

Between anthropology and science studies, this paper investigates the ambivalences of the moral, political and economical sides of the manipulations and circulation of bios in late capitalism. Challenging the hypothesis of the commodification of the human body and its parts, it is focused on the increasing fuzziness of modern dichotomies such as commodity and person, property and commons, private and public, life and non-life. The implosion of capital and biotechnology, while discloses relevant epistemological shifts in the biological sciences, generates multiple strategies in order to appropriate and valorize life itself and new future visions of wealth and health.

Keywords: Science and technology studies, biocapital, tissue economies, ownership, biotechnology & health

In some circumstances, scientists of the same discipline visualize and view differently the same scientific object. The question of representational difference, which has usually been connected to scientific revolutions or controversies, is framed here using the concept of “style,” addressing the plurality of scientific traditions within a well-established scientific field. Using ethnomethodology we will examine the divergences of representational practices that, beyond the apparent consensus of a scientific community, are present throughout the procedure of chromosomes preparation. The ethnographic data was gathered through participant observation and in-depth interviews in several Italian clinical cytogenetic laboratories. The concept of style emerges through the examination of the two alternate, and sometimes conflicting, ways of configuring the complex texture of practice, instrumental mediation, epistemic virtues, and expertise involved in scientific representation of chromosomes. Resonating with the recent debate on objectivity, it tries to articulate the concept of “epistemic virtue” outside an internalised scientific self through an aesthetic, analytical, instrumental, and ontological preferences in the current manners to produce and see the same research object.

This conversation between Michael Lynch and Mauro Turrini gives a historical reconstruction of Lynch's career, from his ethnography of a cutting-edge science laboratory to his recent socio-historical analysis of the technological transfer of molecular genetic techniques to the realm of forensic sciences in the 1990s. The dialogue initially deals with Lynch's ethnomethodological education as one of Garfinkel's graduate students. This background sees him as an original voice of the STS community, especially for his criticism of constructionism, the most common approach of this research area. This critical attitude is the common thread of the interview, which deals with ethnographic method, with the ways in which empirical concepts are constructed, and with the interpretation of some of the major concepts of ethnography of science, such as scientific practice, tacit knowledge and closures. Lastly, the conversation focuses on the prominent role of history in Lynch's latest research on DNA fingerprinting and on the counter-political attitude of ethnomethodology. The ethnomethodological approach emerge as an important resource for rethinking and updating the STS research agenda now that the constructionist stress on the contingency and uncertainty inherent in technoscientific facts and artifacts has been widely acknowledged in law, culture, society and politics.

Il capitale, come fattore economico, ci ha abituato nel corso dei secoli a continue metamorfosi. Negli ultimi decenni si è molto parlato di capitale finanziario, umano, culturale. Oggi a emergere è un'ulteriore dimensione, quella del "biocapitale", legata al vertiginoso sviluppo delle biotecnologie e alla sempre maggiore rilevanza economica delle multinazionali del biotech. Ne discende un continuo cortocircuito fra ricerca scientifica e valorizzazione economica. È su questo nodo che insiste Biocapitale presentando i più autorevoli contributi che in questi anni si sono interrogati sulle conseguenze extra scientifiche di eventi scientifici come la mappatura del genoma umano o la creazione di nuovi mercati testimoniata dall'istituzione delle biobanche genetiche, dalla sperimentazione sulle cellule staminali, dal traffico di embrioni e dal proliferare di una complessa stratigrafia del lavoro clinico.
Se viviamo in un'era biopolitica, non è possibile ignorare l'esistenza del biocapitale. È reintegrando tale dimensione nell'analisi che molti dei dibattiti riguardanti la bioetica possono uscire dall'astrattezza che li caratterizza. A confrontarsi, infatti, non sono generici valori ma concreti interessi, lungo i quali si costituiscono le filiere che dal laboratorio conducono ai mercati in cui la "vita in sé", scissa e reintegrata negli organismi, trova la propria valorizzazione economica.

Il sangue costituisce per la medicina contemporanea un supporto indispensabile che, almeno all’interno dei confini dei Paesi a tecnologia avanzata, viene raccolto quasi esclusivamente su base volontaria e gratuita1. Resa possibile all’inizio del Novecento grazie a scoperte scientifiche e sospinta da esigenze sanitarie, la donazione di sangue si afferma storicamente a livello di massa anche grazie al suo profondo significato simbolico. Il “donare una parte di sé” attiva canali di comunicazione biologici e sociali, “irrorando” fisicamente e, al contempo, simbolicamente l’intero corpo sociale e rafforzandone così non solo la condizione generale di salute, ma anche la coesione morale e il senso di appartenenza. Negli anni ’20 e ’30 si costituiscono le prime organizzazioni di donatori volontari non retribuiti in molti Paesi, tra cui l’Italia, in cui nel 1927 viene fondata l’AVIS, Associazione Volontari Italiani Sangue. Il sistema di raccolta del sangue gratuito e volontario, tuttavia, convive a lungo con quello retribuito. Diffusosi in occasione e in seguito al secondo conflitto mondiale, quando “il dono del sangue viene associato ai valori della democrazia e dell’antifascismo” (Starr, 1998), tale pratica oblativa s’impone negli anni ’70 quale gold standard nella raccolta del sangue decretata con la risoluzione 28.72 dell’Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità del 1975. In particolare, nel Regno Unito la donazione volontaria e gratuita vede il maggiore sviluppo grazie a un’intensa riflessione sul suo significato sociale e a un determinante appoggio politico fin dagli ’30, quando in vari ospedali di Londra sono attive le prime banche del sangue che introducono il principio dell’anonimato nella gestione del sangue.

The increasing concern about visual representation in science has been usually converged on representations – photographs, diagrams, graphs, maps –, while instruments of visualization have been usually neglected, even because of the concrete difficulty to grasp their effects on visualization. In this regard, the questions and concepts formulated in the debate on digital visualization deserve here as a starting point to analyze the change in instrumental mediation triggered by the introduction of computer-assisted imaging technologies in those laboratories that traditionally have used and still use microscopes. Empirical materials gathered during an ethnographic investigation of Italian cytogenetics labs are here presented to show the visual spaces provided by microscopes and digital systems as activity fields, which are inhabited by and suggest in an either divergent or complementary way specific practices, materials, organizations, epistemological orientations and aesthetical preferences.

Contemporary work increasingly presents itself as an immeasurable endeavour. The social and subjective spaces in which it is practiced are no longer easily circumscribed, and the conceptual categories that traditionally described its relationship with value now appear practically unusable. In particular, workers in the ‘creative industries’ are paradigmatic subjects of the ‘work fragmentation’ process of the post-Fordist era. Cutting across divisions between life and work, employment and unemployment, the performing arts are in many ways a laboratory of job flexibility, where innovative contractual arrangements and professional trajectories have been developed.

In this article, we have mapped the multiple forms that work has taken in the last two decades in Italy. The empirical data is derived from a combined method that utilizes both quantitative surveys and in-depth interviews with artists, technicians and organizers working in the fields of theatre, music, dance and video making. A central feature of the new regulative conditions, and therefore the experiences of these professionals, is the new relationship with time and, more specifically, the ‘loss of measurability’ of hired labour. The aim is to provide a multilayered analysis of the interactions between the socio-economic conditions, career pathways and cultural aspects, i.e. the expectations, reputation, self-perception and social recognition of these jobs. Accordingly, these work patterns are studied as self-employment strategies based on the diversification of activities and expertise, and at the same time, attempts to devise new spatial and temporal configurations of labour, epitomized by the hybrid condition of the ‘salaried employer’.

In these cases, precariousness emerges as a generative terrain of ambivalent subjectivities. On the one hand, the workforce is spontaneously mobilized and autonomously organized by the realization of desires, expression and self-fulfilment, beyond mere economic rewards. On the other, the labour itself becomes increasingly intertwined with ones life, as well as becoming immeasurable. Time loses its function as a unit of measure for compensation (i.e. as in work for a flat rate). This situation frequently leads to the spread of labour into other spheres of life and the risk of self-exploitation. To conclude, the new experiences of union organization and social movements, manifesting in the occupations of theatres, are examined as spaces where differing, and even opposing, solidarity and ‘class composition’ practices within the new creative labour(s) are experimented.

How and why are new gene-array techniques, which have been successfully introduced in medical contexts such as “post-natal” genetics, marked by uncertainty and dispute when they change context and are used in prenatal medicine? The so-called “molecular turn” in prenatal diagnosishas created a controversy that still divides the genetic community worldwide.  The availability of an increased variety of high resolution-genetic data, including uncertain findings, divides the genetic community regarding production, treatment, and articulation with the older technologies, cytogenetics. Drawing on the methodological and conceptual framework of the “biomedical platform” (Keating and Cambrosio 2003), this paper intends to analyse these new biomedical molecular entities in the space where biology and medicine, science and technology, innovation and routine are intertwined. Empirical data from an ethnographic thick description of the intense debate that took place between Italian geneticists is used to analyze the different ways in which the material and immaterial elements of these platforms are organized. The different positions that emerge from the debate are traced back to two positions regarding the overlapping of biomedical work, technology transfer and research. This case study does not only reconstruct the fast-paced advancements of genetics in prenatal medicine, but also sheds light on the important questions at stake in structuring the expansive movement of molecular biomedicine.