Book Review

Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

N Engl J Med 2007; 357:425-426July 26, 2007

Article

Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
By Hannah Landecker. 276 pp., illustrated. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007. $35. ISBN: 978-0-674-02328-4

A flask or dish containing nutrient medium and living cells is such a usual sight in a biologic or medical laboratory that we hardly notice it. Hannah Landecker's fascinating, beautifully written account of the history of cell culture restores the sense of wonder felt by the first scientists who grew living cells apart from organisms and by the people who read about their achievements in scientific journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. But this book does much more than that; it sheds a unique light on the history of biology in the 20th century, the rise of biotechnology, and our understanding of what life is.

Landecker is interested in the discovery of the plasticity of life and the far-reaching consequences of this discovery. Culturing Life follows the transformation of living cells into techno-scientific objects between 1907 and 1970. She starts by describing the work of Ross Harrison, the American embryologist who was the first to successfully cultivate isolated cells outside the body. She then investigates the next steps in the transformation of cells in the laboratory — the establishment of the first cell lines, the development of methods of freezing and thawing living cells, the massive diffusion of cell lines in biology laboratories, and studies on the somatic hybridization of cells. She discusses in parallel the technological applications of cells — such as their use in the production of other living entities (viruses, for example) and of devices such as viral vaccines. Finally, Landecker's chapter on the HeLa cell line follows the rich cultural and symbolic meanings of a cell line made to stand for technological progress, contamination and insufficient quality control, ownership of body parts, patients' rights, race, and gender.

Landecker focuses on the various material techniques that made cell culture possible. An anthropologist of science, she is attuned to the multiple meanings of “culture” and “milieu,” but she does not use these terms as mere symbols or metaphors. She is interested instead in straightforward descriptions of technical devices, from the development of the mixtures of nutrients that made it possible for cells to survive in a test tube to the use of glycerol in the freezing and thawing of living cells. Landecker focuses on practical, material issues — what scientists do, what materials they use, and what the consequences of their activities are. The scientific activity at the center of the book is the transformation of cells into entities that are detachable from the body, can be kept in a frozen state, are able to multiply indefinitely in an identical or a quasi-identical form, and are circulated, exchanged, and appropriated by biologists.

Color-Enhanced Scanning Electron Micrograph of a Human Embryo at Day 3.

This is a book about biology, not medicine. Landecker concludes with an invitation to reflect on the ways in which the cultivation of cells apart from organisms has changed our understanding of living matter. Debates about stem cells or cloning tend to focus on a philosophical question: How do new biotechnologies change the ways we understand the meaning of being human? It may be useful, Landecker proposes, to start by thinking about how these technologies have changed what it means to be biologic. The discovery that the biologic is a fundamentally plastic entity indeed explains much of the real power of biotechnology in present-day culture. In her closing chapter, however, Landecker tells a different story — about the use of cells cultured from amniotic fluid in prenatal diagnosis. In a cytology laboratory, the capacity to grow cells apart from organisms may have far-reaching practical consequences. By reflecting on the catastrophic, artificial, and radically new variety of life that arises in the laboratory, Landecker opens new ways to articulate the ideas of the French philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem about the distinction between the normal and the pathologic. Cultured cells bring into question our understanding of the biologic, but their infinite plasticity, as Landecker eloquently shows, often unfolds in the normative space of medicine.

Ilana Löwy, Ph.D.
Centre de Recherche Médecine, Science, Santé et Société (CERMES), 94801 Villejuif, France
lowy@vjf.cnrs.fr