Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (review)

Biotechnology is a flexible category. The word's elision of biology and technology is so powerful and the evocation of potential so strong that rather than a word to be defined it may more appropriately be thought of as terrain to be fought over. The parties to the argument are heterogenous: governments promoting new industry and venture capitalists capitalizing on pharmaceuticals, large companies concerned with discovery processes and research laboratories with products, biochemists, engineers, doctors, and ethicists—all make the case for different usages. The balance of authority is determined by cultural anxiety: who catches best the critical problems at the boundaries of life and technology? With genetic engineering now a generation old, it may be the doctors dealing with bodies rather than the biochemists who engineer cells who are creating the greatest unease. In that case, Biotechnology and Culture may be heralding a new swing in the dynamic history of biotechnology.

Paul Brodwin is an anthropologist, and anthropologists bring their own conception of the battlefield. For an academic generation, the body has been a topic of cultural study. As Donna Haraway has shown, we are all cyborgs now. In this volume the conflation of the body and technology in cultural theory is elided with the conflation of biology with technology. The legitimacy of the result is not impugned by the observation that this is certainly an unusual take on biotechnology. Words like protein, cloning, GMOs are not mentioned at all in the text; human genome mapping and sequencing, patenting and DNA are hardly mentioned. Here the key words are reproduction and maternity, surrogacy and testing. In a sense, the positions of subtitle and main title might more informatively have been reversed.

The book derives from a conference held in 1997. As a result, it does not address topics—cloning, research based on embryo stem cells, and ICSI, to name some—that one would expect to find in a current work in this field. This reflects the differences in publishing speed between genetics and anthropology. It also suggests the way in which this book exists in a slightly isolated bubble, cut off not only from science but also from wider public debate. For a reviewer to point out what is missing from a book may be unfair, but such lacunae here indicate the slightly cloistered nature of the arguments. Abortion, for all its importance to debates on the perfect body, gets slight attention, and the implications of vehement debate are asserted rather than explored. Religion and contraception get no mention. If the unease of this reviewer stems from the different ways in which historians would cover this field, then perhaps it usefully highlights disciplinary distinctions.

As an address to biotechnology the volume is bemusing. Individual papers are valuable, however, and certain of the authors have made distinguished contributions to history. In a sensitive and imaginative essay, Laqueur reflects on the meaning of surrogacy and its complex implications for imagined relationships. Deborah Grayson also writes on surrogacy but takes as her topic black surrogate mothers and the law. In the case of Johnson v. Calvert, a black would-be surrogate mother changed her mind and refused to relinquish maternal rights after the child was born. What, then, made a mother, pregnancy or genes? The court ruled in favor of genes. As Grayson shows, such decisions are the stuff of culture, and in a society divided by race and class, these uncomfortable categories become part of the underlying debate over the question, "whose culture?"

This book is inevitably self-reflective. The question "whose culture?" can be addressed to scholars as well as to patients, and this must give anyone concerned with biotechnology occasion to reflect on their subject. In those terms the book is well titled.