The Thickness of Tissue Engineering: Biopolitics, Biotech, and the Regenerative Body

“Promoting tissue and organ development via growth factors is obviously a considerable step forward. But it pales in comparison to the ultimate goal of the tissue engineer: the creation from scratch of whole neo-organs. Science fiction’s conception of prefabricated ‘spare parts’ is slowly taking shape in the efforts to transplant cells directly to the body that will then develop into the proper bodily component.”

—David J. Mooney and Antonios G. Mikos ¹

“Health is life lived in the silence of the organs.”

—Réne Leriche ²

I. Skin Jobs

In May of 1998, the FDA approved a product called “Apligraf,” an organic, artificially-grown skin product developed by the biotech corporation Organogenesis. ³ Apligraf is the first, “off the shelf,” engineered body part to have been granted FDA approval, and is now being selectively implemented in medical centers for the treatment of leg ulcers and general skin burns. Such projects are based primarily in the field of cellular biochemistry and stem-cell research - those cells which contain the capacity to turn into and differentiate into particular cell types (blood cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells). Put simply, researchers are looking into ways in which the body’s cells can be coaxed into growing and developing again as they did during the first stages of embryonic development. By harvesting cell samples, cloning those cells, and inserting them onto lattice structures immersed in growth medium, researchers can “cook” the cells which will, potentially at least, yield a new patch of skin or a new organ. ⁴ Commonly known as “tissue engineering” (hereafter abbreviated “TE”), this field not only promises the ability to generate entire organs and even limbs, but, as projects framed by university, governmental, and corporate biotech organizations, also emphasizes the practical necessity of such research for transplantation, immunology, and medicine generally. Tissue engineering is not a field of speculation - it is a set of practices which is currently being applied in health care and medicine, as well as in a range of clinical trials and medical experiments.

As will be suggested in this essay, TE is not a liquidation or incorporation of the natural by the technological, if by “natural” we mean an essentialized, pre-discursive notion of “the body-itself.” Similarly, TE is also not about the devaluation of the body, whether regarded as mechanistic object different from self, or as the unpleasant conditionality of the “meat.” ⁵ TE is, however, very much about an engagement and re-negotiation of the “natural” as a historical and social concept with very real, material effects in its varied applications. It is in this sense that TE is involved in the medical, philosophical, and political production of what will be defined as a body by biomedical science. One of the basic issues with TE will be this re-negotiation of norms, the natural, and health, with respect to the biomedical body of the patient-subject. Another will be the implications for the traditional separation between the body and technology as separate and ontologically distinct categories. Norms, hybrids.

TE’s investment in this notion of a regenerative body is an instance of the modern investiture of power relationships in the articulation of the “biological” population, a process which Michel Foucault refers to as “biopolitics.” Tissue engineering instantiates, through its applications, research, articles, rhetoric, and relations with the biotech and medical communities, a process whereby it threads itself into the very practices, techniques, and (medical-health care) contexts whereby a normativity of the body is instantiated (broadly following Pfizer’s recent advertising campaign: “Making life better through technology”). On a similar level, TE also regulates the ways in which body parts are produced, culminating in a biopolitics focusing on the species-population: the discursive and non-discursive articulation and regulation of the population as collective and individualized bodies of subjects, most often through a set of organizational or governing bodies (here, the biotech industry, trans-national corporations, and various national health regulatory groups such as the NIH and FDA).

II. Regenerative Medicine

On the technical level, TE involves an integrative, multi-disciplinary array of techniques...