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  • Second NatureIn the Age of Biobanks
  • Thomas Lemke (bio)
    A first version of this text was translated from German to English by Ishbel Flett

Silently, we have entered a new era. Today, we live in the age of biobanks where life is collected, classified and stored. In these spaces the heritage of the past dovetails with the potential uses and applications of the future. Biobanks live a life of their own by rearranging, dispersing and exchanging the material components of organisms: tissues, cells and DNA. They not only gather together the physical substances of plants, animals and humans, but are far more than mere arsenals and archives: they generate forms of life and create bodies of their own.

Material Substances and Immaterial Data

Biobanks are, first, immense stores of substances of widely varied origin. The spectrum of biological collections ranges from plant to animal to human samples. Their material properties, too, can vary enormously. There are biobanks for cells, tissue, blood and DNA. Even the objectives of these biobanks are diverse. Many of them are for scientific research, while others pursue commercial interests. Some biobanks use their collections for diagnostic and (potentially) therapeutic purposes, others for solving and combatting crime, and still others for enhancing fertility in livestock breeding or to assist human couples who wish to have biological children.

The plurality and heterogeneity of these banks contrast a tendency towards increasing uniformity and homogenization. Biobanks tend to collect not so [End Page 188] much material as data, or to put it more precisely, the materiality of what they collect tends to take second place to its encipherment in readable form—the organism as text. The molecularization and digitalization of life allows bodies to be regarded more in terms of molecular software than physical substrates. Encoding life as text, with DNA as a universal code, blurs the boundaries between plants, animals and humans. Life forms are treated as information that can be read, stored and rewritten. From this perspective, the organism appears less as an integral and holistic natural entity than as a construct that can be endlessly re-connected and re-programmed—within a species or beyond the boundaries of a species (Haraway 1991; Franklin 2000).

The changing “substance” of life and its recoding as text alter the conditions and contexts that determine the government of life. Gilles Deleuze (1992) once diagnosed that societies of discipline were being replaced by societies of control. The crisis in and shift away from environments of enclosure, such as prisons or factories, led to a new form of control geared towards modulating life through its self-organizing forces. According to Deleuze, this is shifting the two poles of disciplinary societies that are elementary components of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (Foucault 1980)—namely, the individual and the mass—and replacing them with ‘dividuals’ and “samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.” (Deleuze 1992, p. 5; emphasis in orig.). Unequivocally delineated individual and collective bodies with clearly defined boundaries and internal hierarchies of function are being replaced by flexible codes and ciphers that enable or inhibit communication processes and access. Bodies thus appear to be the product of heterogeneous assemblies, and the result of hybrid aggregations. With the shift towards “dividuals” and “banks,” traditional dichotomies and opposites such as natural/artificial, organic/cybernetic, human/animal or human/machine lose significance. The body project “mixes” variable entities—without evoking any notion of the natural or the authentic.

Conserving and Transforming

The storage of “living texts” in biobanks requires the decomposition of temporal and spatial contexts. In temporal terms, the life forms collected in these banks elude natural life cycles; instead of coming into being and passing away, they can be stored and used in the (distant) future. Moreover, physical and sociocultural spaces are also changing. Plants from the tropical rainforests are being transferred to northern industrial countries by corporations and research institutions, removed from their original physical environment and transported to laboratories and coldstores in aluminium bags or preserving jars. The corporeal materials of humans and animals are extracted from their bodies and stored in collections of samples and on storage media. And lastly, the embedding of these samples...

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