Temporality and prudence: On stem cells as "phronesic things"

Configurations

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 373-394

  Goldsmiths, Mike Michael ^a   Walnwright, Teven P ^b   Williams, Clare ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 37749049715     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2007.0024     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
2. Methodological note: We draw on interviews with ten biomedical scientists who work in one leading beta cell/stem cell laboratory in England. These scientists can be seen as part of the global community of beta cell biologists; to preserve anonymity, we do not include their specific titles. Following ethics committee approval, interviews were conducted that lasted between one and two hours, took place within the laboratory offices, and (with permission) were taped and transcribed. Open-ended questions and an informal interview schedule were used, in order to encourage scientists to speak in their own words about their experiences. Transcripts were analyzed by content for emergent themes, which were then coded. The research team discussed the data and the analysis, which enabled different perspectives to be incorporated, and added to the richness and validity of the analysis, Two of the researchers (SW, CW) also observed and interacted with the scientists in meetings, in the laboratory, and at seminar and conference presentations. Informal conversations with scientists took place in all these settings. In addition, one of the researchers (SW) participated in nine laboratory workshops for postgraduate biomedical scientists, learning various laboratory techniques. While experience in these and other settings supports the present analysis, we are aware of the limitations of the present sample; in consequence, we treat the analysis as an exploratory route into the data that might, with luck, open up broader considerations around the temporality and politics of technoscience.
3. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
4. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (above, n. 1). Page numbers for subsequent quotations will be given parenthetically.
5. See Nik Brown and Mike Michael, "A Sociology of Expectations: Retrospecting Prospects and Prospecting Retrospects," Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 15 (2003): 3-18;
6. Harro van Lente, "Promising Technology: The Dynamics of Expectations in Technological Developments" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Twente, Enschede, 1993).
7. See Nik Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew Webster, eds., Contested Futures (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000);
8. Nik Brown, Connor Douglas, Lena Erikson, Eugenia Rodriguez, Steve Yearley, and Andrew Webster, "Researching Expectations in Medicine, Technology and Science: Theory and Method" (Paper presented at the Expectations Network Workshop, University of York, July 18-19, 2005).
9. Brown and Michael, "Sociology of Expectations" (above, n. 5).
10. Nik Brown and Alison Kraft, "Blood Ties: Banking the Stem Cell Promise," Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 18 (2006): 313-327.
11. Adam Hedgecoe, "Pharmacogenetics as Alien Science: Alzheimer's Disease, Core Sets and Expectations," Social Studies of Science 36 (2006): 723-752.
12. Brigitte Nerlich and Christopher Halliday, "Avian Flu: The Creation of Expectations in the Interplay between Science and the Media," Sociology of Health and Illness 29 (2007): 46-65.
13. Nadya Lumelsky, Olivier Blondel, Pascal Laeng, Ivan Valeslo, Rea Ravin, and Ron McKay, "Differentiation of Embryonic Stem Cells to Insulin-Secreting Structures Similar to Pancreatic Islets," Science 292 (2001): 1389-1394.
14. Jayaraj Rajagopal, William J. Anderson, Shoen Kume, Olga I. Martinez, and Douglas A. Melton, "Insulin Staining of ES Cell Progeny from Insulin Uptake," Science 299 (2003): 363.
15. The "experimenters' regress" refers to the observation that scientific controversies typically entail disagreements not only concerning the factuality or artefactuallty of scientific data, but also about the actual quality of other scientists' work and, indeed, their character. The upshot is that no experiment can serve to resolve the controversy, hence the regress where claim and counterclaim proliferate. For a classic statement of this phenomenon, see Harry M. Collins, Changing Order (London: Sage, 1985).
16. For a more detailed analysis of this episode, see Mike Michael, Steve Wainwright, Clare Williams, Bobbie Farsides, and Alan Cribb, "From Core Set to Assemblage: On the Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Failure to Derive Beta Cells from Embryonic Stem Cells," Science Studies (in press).
17. These terms are used with the circumspection they deserve, in that "global" and "local" are highly problematic and not altogether useful terms, not least given the way that one flips into the other. For subtle discussions of these spatial problematics, see, e.g., John Law, "And if the Global Were Small and Noncoherent? Method, Complexity, and the Baroque," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004), 13-26;
18. John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
19. United Kingdom Stem Cell Initiative, Report and Recommendations, 2005 (London: Department of Health. 2005), p. 5. This report can be found at: http://www.advisorybodies.doh.gov.uk/uksci/uksci-reportnov05.pdf (accessed 23 Aug 2007).
20. See Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). For an extension of MacKenzie's model, see Brown and Michael, "Sociology of Expectations" (above, n. 15).
21. Such a dual perspective on hESCs as potential technical objects and contemporary eplstemic things resonates with Knorr Cetina's critique of "technical objects" as overly objectified, not least in their ongoing practical problematization in the doings of experimental science (e.g., was such and such a "technically objectified" procedure properly followed?). In the present case, we note that such objectification has utility within the extended politics of hESC research, even as it is routinely unraveled. See Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
22. While we do not expand on this in the present paper, these accounts are spatlotemporal in the sense that they enact both a temporality (in relation to hope, or optimism, or, more broadly the future and expectations) and associated spatialities, in that certain futures are aligned with certain distances from the exigencies of the laboratory bench (or indeed, any setting where tacit skilfulness is bound up with dealing with uncertainty and contingency, settings that might also include the crafting of policy or the rendering of ethical judgment).
23. Inevitably, there are further heterogeneities to be taken into account. Needless to say, the present paper assumes the materlal-semiotic heterogeneity of the assemblages in which (human embryonic) stem cells are rendered, and that stem cells trace. What immediately interests us are certain social heterogeneities, specifically the ethical and the institutional. We focus on these partly because of their instantiation in the data, but also because they serve as a grounds for rethinking (some of) the enactments of stem cell politics.
24. In some ways this analysis resembles the formulation of the regime of "truth" and regime of "hope" put forward by Moreira and Palladino. Where the present paper diverges from their treatment is in regarding the distinction between hope and truth as rather more blurred (as evidenced in our expanded treatment of the notion of an "eplstemic thing"). That is to say, the truthful can be hopeful, and the hopeful can be dispiriting. See Tiago Moreira and Paulo Palladino, "Between Truth and Hope: On Parkinson's Disease, Neurotransplantation and the Production of the Self," History of the Human Sciences 18 (2005): 55-82.
25. Brian Salter, "Transnational Governance and Cultural Politics: The Case of Human Embryonic Stem Cells and the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme," Working Paper 1 of the ESRC Project "The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science" (2004), p. 15.
26. Ibid.
27. Select Committee on Science and Technology, Fifth Report 2005, "Conclusions and Recommendations," paragraph 4. This report can be found at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmsctech/7/ 712.htm (accessed 23 August, 2007).
28. See Mike Michael, "Between the Mundane and the Exotic: Time for a Different Sociotechnical Stuff," Time and Society 12 (2003): 127-143.
29. Salter, "Transnational Governance" (above, n. 22).
30. The term "envelopment" might have done just as well (not least in keeping up the alliteration with epistemics and ethics). However, envelopment has other connotations, notably Latour's use of it as a way of directing attention to the embeddedness of scientific facts in networks, and Michael and Birke's use, as a development of Collins's notion of the core set, to incorporate actors interested in a controversy in terms other than the technical or scientific (e.g., moral, economic, social). In the present case, "encompassment" is meant to connote the enactments by which one's own work encompasses, and is encompassed by, the work of others, specifically in relation to "translational research," and the (micro)political processes entailed in such enactments. Later, we move freely between the terms "encompassments," "institutional," and "politics" as a way of indicating, albeit tacitly, the way that such collaborations concern the mobilization of "institutional conditions" and the relations of power that pertain between various scientific and clinical specialisms. See Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999);
31. Mike Michael and Lynda Birke, "Animal Experimentation: Enrolling the Core Set," Social Studies of Science 24 (1994): 81-95.
32. In the U.K., the director of the MRC, Colin Blakemore, recently affirmed: "Over the coming years we intend to accelerate the rate at which MRC research is translated into new methods of diagnosis and treatment - a process that can take anything from a few years to decades... to bring our knowledge and discoveries into the healthcare system and so to patients" (Medical Research Council, Translating Research: Annual Review 2003/04 [London: MRC, 2004], p. 1).
33. There is also another crucial "epistemic" reason why collaboration fails to materialize - namely, the fact that it Is so difficult to direct the differentiation of stem cells into beta cells. See Steve Wainwright, Clare Williams, Mike Michael, Alan Cribb, and Bobbie Farsides, "From Bench to Bedside? Biomedical Scientists' Expectations of Stem Cell Science as a Future Therapy for Diabetes," Social Science and Medicine 63 (2006): 2052-2064.
34. Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Llttlefield, 1991).
35. See, e.g., Stephen Crook, Jan Pakulski, and Malcolm Waters, Postmodernization (London: Sage, 1992).
36. See, e.g., Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers in Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987);
37. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan. Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997).
38. See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
39. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 2004).
40. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975).
41. Ibid.
42. Lois Self, "Rhetoric and Phronesis: The Aristotelian Ideal," Philosophy and Rhetoric 12 (1979): 130-144.
43. Further, according to Schwarze, such bringing together might entail, contra the "middle way" of Aristotle, displays of beauty and excess. See Steve Schwarze, "Performing Phronesis: The Case of Isocrates' Helen," Philosophy and Rhetoric 32 (1999): 79-96.
44. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
45. Shaun Gallagher, "The Place of Phronesis in Postmodern Hermeneutics," Philosophy Today 37 (1993): 298-305.
46. Salter, "Transnational Governance" (above, n. 22).
47. One might say that, as "phronesic things," hESCs, in Whitehead's terms, "concresce" out of these disparate concerns, to be subsequently disaggregated or disambiguated in the talk of our respondent scientists. In the process of such enactments, scientists "make" both themselves and their audiences (most especially via the interviews). On the matter of concrescence, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929).
48. On the processes of enactment and making, see, e.g., Mike Michael, Technoscience and Everyday Life (Maidenhead, Berks.: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, 2006).
49. That notion of "phronesic thing" applies no less to the typology set out in the table presented above. The divisions we identify are emergent and immanent-the table is thus, in the context of this paper, presented as a thing. Yet, for other audiences, it can be presented as an object - as stabilized and transparent. Such an objectifying presentation nevertheless also enacts stem cells as phronesic things, in that its performative effects are themselves emergent and processual.
50. For a classic statement of actor-network theory, see Latour, Science in Action (above, n. 32).
51. A recent restatement is to be found in Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
52. See Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 42).
53. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarl, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
54. In more processual terms, and drawing on Whitehead once more, we might say that our scientists' accounts emerge out of the plasticity of the epistemic-ethical-institutional assemblage in which hESCs are embroiled, and are drawn into (prehended in) the concrescences of subsequent "actual occasions" of the assemblage. This is a sort of heterogeneous hermeneutics in which scientists' discourse is a material-semiotic prehension. On this score, we do not see stem cells as possessing particular qualities in themselves - these are always relational. Thus characterizations of stem cells as "immortal" are nonsensical: a nexus of relations needs to be in place. In other words, we need to be wary of falling into the trap of what Whitehead has called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and concretizing abstract characteristics like this, In vitro, in order for stem cells to be immortal, certain conditions and environments need also to be reproduced (hence the relationality entailed in stem cells); thus, to claim that in vitro stem cells are immortal would be to assume that, at minimum, petri dishes can reproduce themselves. See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (London: Free Association Books, 1926).