Plants, Patents and the Historian: (Re)membering in the Age of Genetic Engineering (review)

It is not a small feat to combine critical reflections on historiography, the history of plant genetic engineering and medical genetic engineering in one narrative. But that is exactly what Paolo Palladino, a senior lecturer in history at Lancaster University, has done. The result is a complex and fascinating book that has to be read at several equally important levels at a time.

For the reader who is mainly interested in the history of plant breeding and genetic engineering, there is the story of the institutionalization of plant research in the United Kingdom. The struggle between "applied" science in agricultural practice and "pure" scientific research in the laboratory has dominated the development of genetics, finally resulting in the privatization of the main institute for genetic research under the government of Margaret Thatcher. The sale of the Plant Breeding Institute for £66 million to Unilever and the resale for the staggering amount of ?320 million to Monsanto 10 years later can be understood in the light of that struggle. Ironically, nationalization of genetic research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries served the same fundamental goals of control as did privatization in the late 20th century. This is the first thread.

An equally strange development took place in the field of cancer research, where the search for proof of the role of genetics in familial adenomatous polyposis, a form of cancer of the rectum and the colon, can best be understood against the backdrop of the opposition between private practitioners and institutional players like the National Health Service and St. Mark's Hospital. This is the second thread.

Both stories have in common that the historical agents—the plants and patients of the title—appear to have all but disappeared in the process. "Wheat" has been transformed into "a F4 family of 20,000 [?] plants—not one . . . homozygous," and the patient is now a case of "FAP mutation of the APC locus on chromosome 5q21." Even the genetically identical laboratory mice have turned into "FI." Palladino originally set out to restore power to those agents, to give them the voice he thought they had the right to have, if only to be able to be heard over the decennia. In doing so, from a social constructivist perspective, he got entangled in the contradictions of his own position as an engineer of historical evidence. Also, he was struck by the analogies between the genome and the archive (meaning practically all written evidence of historical events) as a record of past developments and consequently by the analogy between the individual historian as an agent in the development of historiography as a science and the plants and patients he had been trying to restore to the scene. This is the third and final thread.

Understandably, the book has been written from a first-person perspective, probably following "Aramis, ou l'amour du technique" (Aramis, or the Love of the Technical), the famous example by Bruno Latour, and the critical, historiographical and personal levels are inextricably intertwined. This makes it difficult to follow for the reader who is not well versed in the controversies in the field of the history of science. On the other hand, it allows Palladino to write history with a message for the future or, after the dictum of Friedrich Nietszche, "history for life."