Partial+Perspectives


 * __Contents__**

Introduction (Sep 5)

Semiotics (Sep 6)

Haraway's Modest Witness (Sep 12)

Creepy Feelings (Sep 16)

Wetwares (Sep 19)

Lindsey (Sep 24)

Excess, Context, and What the Data Simply Shows (Oct 2)

The Technological Fix for Race (Oct 3)

Get in The Game (Oct 17)

Survival of the Different-est (Oct 26)

Conceptions of Health, and How to Figure Them Out (Oct 29)

Getting at the Outside (Dec 7)

Brain Death and Organ Donation - __Twice Dead__ by Margaret Lock (Dec 8)

September 5, 2007

Late to the party, not wiki-savvy, but I finally made it. Why partial perspectives? Because I feel like I am the embodiment of partial perspective.

I am a practicing engineer, traditionally trained, but I am also an STS-thinker who knows there is more to my knowledge domain and practice than we can see on the page.

I value the natural environment, but I design jet engines for a living. I also drive 90 miles each way to get to RPI every week. I'm not a big fan of the interstate highway system, but it sure comes in handy every Thursday. I'd buy a hybrid, but it's too expensive. And I know that for the driving I do, it wouldn't save much gas anyway. I'm keenly aware, though, of the numbers of people who have been convinced to buy a hybrid that isn't saving them much either. But it is furthering someone's agenda. I believe those agendas should be made explicit.

I believe in buying local, but I have a family to raise on limited resources; sometimes I go to Walmart (however much I'd rather not). I want my children to eat well. My wife and I work hard at developing their tastes, but I don't want them to fear the Frito. Fritos are tasty and satisfying. You gotta live.

I am ambivalent about today's biosciences, the objects and products of study. But I am grateful for the products of research in the treatment Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma that have had a very real, measurable, and positive effect in my life. I don't know exactly how we got [|Rituxan]; if I knew, I might not even approve of the methods that were used to develop it. But I'm glad we have it.

The older you get, the more trades you make and the more partial you become. Both here and in class, I'll almost always come down in the middle. It's a good place to be.

September 6, 2007

//“Semiotics is important because it can help us not to take 'reality' for granted as something having a purely objective existence which is independent of human interpretation… Studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of reality as a construction and of the roles played by ourselves and others in constructing it. It can help us to realize that information or meaning is not 'contained' in the world or in books, computers or audio-visual media. Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us - we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware… We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized. Through the study of semiotics we become aware that these signs and codes are normally transparent and disguise our task in 'reading' them. Living in a world of increasingly visual signs, we need to learn that even the most 'realistic' signs are not what they appear to be. By making more explicit the codes by which signs are interpreted we may perform the valuable semiotic function of 'denaturalizing' signs. In defining realities signs serve ideological functions. Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings which we inhabit.”//

Making explicit the unspoken, the assumed, the taken-for-granted, the naturalized, the cultural – this is the important work of semiotics. Peirce’s triadic model, for me, helps explain what we mean when we say that nature is constructed. It is not nature itself – the real, the thing out there – that is constructed. There is something out there (the Object), and it does have properties, and those properties do matter as we construct our reality (the Representamen, the sign). But we don’t know the Object itself, only our conception of it, the Representamen. The meaning of the Representamen is largely a function of its relationship (the Interpretant) to the network of meanings in which we operate: other signs, other assumptions, other ways of knowing, other politics, other social relationships, which form the space in which we situate and understand our Sign. The phenomena arising from our interactions with the Object do count, but they are interpreted using and mixed with so many other signs that, in the end, our Representamen cannot possibly be expected to reflect “reality.” Understanding the role of the Interpretant, and how it links our sign to the cultural world around us, is what helps us to reveal the power contained in what we know. That is the work of STS.

An aside: I heard this story on NPR yesterday. Maybe it's jumping ahead, but I just wanted to bookmark it at least for some future discussion:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14191423


 * //Scientists Hope to Create Human-Animal Embryo//**

//British regulators decided Wednesday to allow, at least in principle, the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for research into degenerative diseases. The move came despite fierce opposition from some church and ethics groups.//

//Two teams of British scientists had applied to Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) for permission to create what are known in Britain as cytoplastic hybrids, or cybrids, in order to overcome a shortage of donated human eggs.//

//The process involves injecting human DNA into an animal egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed...//

The listener is reassured by the investigators that the resulting embryo is “99.9% human.” It’s all in the DNA. Or almost all.

September 12, 2007

Early in my masters program in STS at the northern VA campus of Virginia Tech, I had the good fortune to take an introductory course in science policy with Daryl Chubin from NSF. Not long after, he left NSF for the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) in New York City. Chubin had become known for asking his STS students on the first day of every class, “What good is STS? What good are discussions of ‘the simultaneous construction of nature and culture’?” For a young STS enthusiast, it was shocking and perplexing to hear questions like those coming from such a strong practitioner of STS. But Chubin had become frustrated by a brand of STS that had – in his opinion and for several years by the point – languished in endless esoteric debate. While such debates were sometimes sources of great insight, they refused to make value judgments and therefore were not helpful to policy makers in addressing practical matters. He advocated – along with Sal Restivo – a practical, activists’ weak programme that brings STS to bear on real problems through the application of five principles:

1. the study of process //and// product 2. a contextual perspective 3. an evolutionary epistemology 4. a future orientation 5. an unremitting criticism, or ‘constructive examination, of **//values//** in policy making

What do we mean when we say that “nature is cultural constructed?” This collection of papers was helpful to me in answering that question. Our //epitemes// that we use to interpret and evaluate our world are culturally constructed, but “nature out there" is not.

Ironically, Haraway’s OncoMouse really is a natural/artificial entity constructed by humans. We have come to a place/time where humans really do construct “the real nature out there,” as authors in the medium of genetic programming. __Modest Witness__ uses the tools of semiotics to discover how we have managed to construct a “world of corporate biology, where the author of life is a writer of patentable (or copyrightable) code,” where "such authors and innovators might be naturally evolving organisms, or the scribblers and inventors might be the scientists who interact with critters to nudge their codes in more useful directions to (some) people.” (97) Haraway uses the term //implosion// to describe how nature and culture have been collapsed in upon each other in the formation of the bioscientific equivalent of Traweek’s “culture of no culture,” a “nature of no nature [that gives] back the certainty and legitimacy of the engineered, of design, of strategy, and intervention. The nature of no nature is the resource for //naturalizing// technoscience with its vast apparatuses for representing and intervening, or better, representing **//as//** intervening.” (103)

Haraway’s analysis exposes the dense and complex webs of meaning beneath the surface of technoscience (principally the biological sciences). For example, in the case of genetically engineered seed production, she lists a number of interconnected fields, theories, and assumptions that work together to support and sustain the New World Order of seed production:

“Like all technoscientific facts, laws, and objects, seeds only travel with their apparatus of production and sustenance. The apparatus includes genetic manipulations, biological theories, seed genome testing practices, credit systems, cultivation requirements, labor practices, marketing characteristics, legal networks of ownership, and much else. These apparatuses can be changed, but not easily. Seeds are brought into being by, and carry along with themselves wherever they go, specific ways of life…” (89)

From among the dense articulations of meanings that sustain this way of life, Haraway examines the signs transmitted via high school and college biology text books. For example, one college text included an equation “lovingly elaborated”:

biology //equals// molecular biology //equals// molecular genetics //equals// genetic engineering

This equation stands for much more than just a representation of the exciting field of bioscience. “This equation is much more than a ‘mere’ metaphor; it is a research practice, representational convention, epistemological conviction, health belief, and commercial enterprise.” (109)

The signs within the high school text book __Advances in Genetic Engineering__ include (106-108):

1. Nature is a genetic engineer. Genetic rearrangement occurs naturally; natural genetic rearrangement is one source of the variation that occurs in nature. The message: Human intervention in genetic code is just one more, natural method of achieving genetic rearrangement. (Interestingly, isn’t this conviction supported in large measure by Barbara McClintock’s work in the transmutation of DNA in corn, work that was for years marginalized by mainstream science, but now is at the core of the New World Order?) 2. The world is engineered, artifactual, the domain of design, strategy, choice, and intervention. 3. Ethics is important, but should be addressed as an add-on, in a separate chapter. Questions of equity, justice, safety, or the right of consumers (or farm laborers) to know should be addressed at the point of product testing and marketing, not at the point of research design or the point of recruitment and training of knowledge producers. (89)

Haraway’s goal is to make the dense articulations of the “nature of no nature” explicit, to show how this illusion of no boundary is merely one more exercise in boundary work. She offers alternative stories, like those of Dr. Martha Crouch or of Flower’s and Becker’s Science in the Liberal Arts Curriculum. Here is where STS intervenes to actively construct a new world of participatory democracy in science. Even Daryl Chubin might approve.

September 16, 2007


 * Creepy Feelings**

I’ve been giving some thought to the idea of citizen advisory panels, public participation in science, and public understandings of science since our class discussion on the human-animal embryo story. There were some pretty strong reactions to the opinions of the Catholic ethicist. That is understandable; the Catholic Church has a history of involvement in power/knowledge struggles that is long and troubled. But what if the ethicist wasn’t identified as a “Catholic ethicist?” What if she was instead just a regular citizen who said something like, “I don’t know. I just have a creepy feeling about this. Do we really need this?”

Sometimes we justify science on the basis of human curiosity: it is not so much an issue of what science can produce, as it is a matter of satisfying the human “need to know.” But this kind of justification can place two cultural values in opposition. Do we privilege the value of curiosity because it is the driver of a knowledge system that we also privilege? How much should “creepy feelings” count? What should the citizen expect from science? What should be the goal of involving the citizen in some sort of participatory, democratic science?

Among the aims of civic participation are aligning expectations and making visible the full web of connections that make up a given field of science. Take the recent excitement over global warming. More direct involvement can help citizens better understand the complexities and difficulties of the science, creating more realistic expectations of what science might contribute. It may also bring into the light political agendas hidden beneath the surface. Some politicians stand to benefit from the rising sense of panic by positioning themselves as special experts. They’ve done all the research. They are photographed for magazine articles in their studies, surrounded by piles of books and scientific journals. They can solve this problem by applying their scientific knowledge. If you don’t believe them, just ask all the Hollywood A-Listers who have studied the issue too.

But is global warming really a problem that science can solve? NASA administrator Michael Griffin recently came under severe criticism for what I think was a pretty honest answer: probably not.


 * [|NASA Chief Assailed for Climate Comments]**

He later recanted and apologized, saying that, yes, now that he’s given some more thought to it and listened more carefully to the climatologists and other experts within his organization, it really is a problem and we really do need to do something about it. That was disappointing to me; I wished he would have stuck to his guns and maintained his position that the central question is not whether climate change is a problem, but for whom? Whose way of life will be preserved, whose will be enhanced, whose will be destroyed?

A recent story on the History Channel dealt with events in the Middle East around 2000 B.C. The viewer was reminded that back then, the global climate was very different. It was much warmer and much wetter. As a result, the Fertile Crescent really was fertile, quite different than the desert climate we think of today. As global warming progresses, might not the globe once again become warmer and wetter? What if the Middle East and Central Africa were to become the breadbasket of the world, even as the farm lands of North America dry up? Would that be a problem? For whom?

Griffin’s original point was exactly that:

“I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

I think Griffin is right to suggest that even if we agree that the climate //should// somehow be regulated, it may well not be within the capability of humanity to do so. When we ask the kinds of questions Griffin is asking, we get the sense that global warming isn’t a problem to be solved; it is a process within which we live and in which we participate. Rather than searching for ways to control our climate, perhaps a better, more realistic, more fruitful approach would be to search for ways to improve our ability to respond and adapt as the inevitable change takes place.

Global warming is a cultural problem as much as it is technical one, and cultural problems are very difficult to solve. When we appreciate what our science can and cannot do, we understand that no politician can save us from global warming. And many other social problems deserve just as much attention. However critical or privileged global warming may appear to be, we should choose our government leaders also on the basis of their stances on health care, social security, education, social justice, and many other issues as well.

Maybe the problem of global warming is particularly intractable. What about other subjects of scientific inquiry, such as the biosciences? Isn’t a disease like Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma a specific problem that we can target and solve? During the first class, I described NHL as a “gray disease,” one that refuses to be easily categorized, let alone treated. Like global warming, NHL is a process in which my wife and I have become unwilling participants. We don’t use words like “cure” or “remission.” Rather, we speak of treatment as “managing the symptoms” and define success using terms like “no evidence of disease.” Approaching it this way prepares us for the possibility of disappointment or the need to change course as we learn new things about our disease. NHL is probably not unique; the same kinds of things can probably be said of the majority of the conditions we label as disease. They are intractable, resistant, and gray.

My stance here is not anti-scientific or in opposition to medical research. Of course I want to continue the search for new treatments and cures for NHL. But treatments come with side effects, sometimes very severe and damaging ones. They can cause heart, liver, and kidney damage and even other cancers. And so we must balance the risks associated with treatment against the risks posed by the disease itself. We must proceed, but with great caution.

All of our sciences come with side effects. The better we recognize the complexity of the issues we seek to address, the better and more helpful our science can be. Involving more citizens in the dialogue can both enhance non-scientists’ appreciation for the complexity of science - as Haraway suggested (Modest Witness, 115) - and enhance scientists’ appreciation for creepy feelings. At least it may place greater emphasis on caution and encourage us to proceed with greater care.

Today’s business climate encourages the rush to market; there is never enough time to assess or mitigate risk. It is a part of our culture that influences the pace of science as well. But I know from my own painful experience in engineering high-technology products that the risks we only dimly recognize early on are almost always realized in some form if we don’t give ourselves the time we need to address them deliberately. We still have to proceed; that is a business imperative. But the projects that proceed cautiously result in the best products. Likewise, science also must proceed. But taking many different perspectives into account, refusing to privilege either enthusiasm for knowing or creepy feelings, may likewise give us the best and most helpful science.

September 19, 2007


 * Wetwares**

In Wetwares, Richard Doyle explores the trend in contemporary biology to explain life not just in terms of DNA molecules, but in terms of an interaction of those molecules with the surrounding system. “In short, life is no longer confined to the operation of DNA but is instead linked to the informatic events associated with nucleic acids: operations of coding, replication, and mutation.” There has been “a shift from an understanding of organisms as localized agents to an articulation of living systems as distributed events.” (20)

His discussion seems to parallel Heisenberg’s concept of uncertainty: that we are not merely uncertain about what we are measuring because of the inadequacies and clumsiness of our instrumentation, but rather uncertainty arises because we can’t measure the real world at all. What we actually do measure are phenomena that are the result of interactions between our instruments and the objects we’re trying to learn something about. All we can really talk about is how those theoretical objects interact (or intra-act) with our senses and our instruments. Using our instruments, we therefore construct the only reality we can really know.

Likewise, biology has come to a place where we can’t define life as a single, autonomous organism. Life is the phenomenon that occurs “between locations” as we interact with things that appear lively. “DNA ‘information’ is necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of life; yet another translational actant is needed to transform the immortal syntax of nucleic acids into the somatic semantics of living systems.” (22)

As a concrete example, he describes the emergence of a life form we know as bacteria. The bacteria could not exist without engaging and developing a mutually reinforcing interaction with its host. “The capacity [of the host] to survive an inhabitation is just as important as the bacterial ‘tolerance for their predators’ that allowed select bacteria to live off the hospitality of the cell and avoid consumption.” The bacteria and the host have co-evolved. If they didn’t, the bacteria could not have emerged.

I once suggested to a friend that grass had adapted to use humans for its survival. Because it made itself beautiful to look at when cut, capable of surviving weekly cuttings, and soft and cool to lie in, grass ensured its survival over trees and other plants that die when chopped back to the root by lawnmower blades. Stop mowing the grass in NW CT, and you will have six foot thorn bushes within two years, a forest within ten. Grass needs people, so it made itself appealing in such a compelling way that we prioritize its care.

My friend was appalled at the idea, because it represents grass as a proactive agent that has managed to manipulate humans to become part of its network. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but the life of grass does seem to emerge only through its intra-action with humans. We are slaves to grass.

September 24, 2007


 * Lindsey**

By the time my second daughter, Lindsey, was due, my wife and I had fairly stable expectations for her appearance. Jackie and I both have blue eyes and blonde hair, darker in the winter and more golden in the summer. Our first daughter, Allyson, fell right in line with and reinforced those expectations. And then along came Lindsey.

[|Lindsey.JPG]

[|Family.jpg]

With red hair, green eyes, and pink-hued skin, she had the fiery Irish personality to match. When people ask – as the inevitably do – from where in the family the red hair comes, we often answer, “Cable Guy.” When pressed for a more serious answer, I say something like, “random genetic mutation.” There is no one that we know of on either side of the extended family for many generations who had these features. And yet she is our daughter. Of this I am as certain as I can be. I witnessed her emergence, watched the nurse and doctor attach her bracelet, accompanied her to the nursery, and picked out a green nit cap for her. That same baby, with that same bracelet and hat, was delivered to my wife’s room a few hours later. I cannot say that I directly witnessed the moment of her conception, but I believe my wife when she tells me that I was there.

But Lindsey's DNA, according to contemporary bioscience, is different. How much different? How far beyond the hair and the eyes does the random mutation go? And what if someone came along and declared, “There was a mix-up at the hospital. This is not your daughter.” Or what if our health insurance provider declared the same: “This is not your daughter. We will not cover her medical care.” What would DNA tests reveal? How close is close enough? On the basis of whose statistics and what techniques would the matter be decided? What/how would a jury decide?

Overstated, even absurd, we say. That could never happen. We understand life today to be so much more complex than just a strand of master code. Our biology is a product of interactions between DNA and the cell, between one cell and another, between our cells and our environment. Empirical studies reveal variations that can’t be explained by “DNA as master code” alone.

But as Derrida reminds us, the context of our knowledge is never stable, never saturated. New things are discovered, new connections are made, and the way that we understand genetics, heredity, and kinship will also change. It’s not even clear that we have reached any sort of temporarily stable, quasi-equilibrium today: take Marks’ geneticist friend who lost his patience for their discussion on metaphor in science and finally exclaimed, “But it //really is// a code!” (Marks, 233) We need a critical, deconstructive reading of the text of bioscience to ensure that those connections and relationships are always challenged, never left unquestioned.

//Deconstruction: Read the text for what it is doing, how it is performing, as much as for what it says.// - Mike Fortun, paraphrasing Derrida, September 20, 2007

This is the approach of Haraway in __Modest Witness__, to examine the texts of Biology for their performance, for the hidden meanings that stitch together power/knowledge. A paragraph buried deep on page 217 in Chapter 6 on race can really serve as an excellent summary of the standpoint from which she critically engages Biology throughout the book:

"Biology is not the body itself but a discourse on the body. “My biology,” a common expression in the daily life for members of the U.S. white middle class, is not the juicy mortal flesh itself but a linguistic sign for a complex structure of belief and practice through which I and many of my fellow citizens organize a great deal of life. Biology is also not a culture-free universal discourse, for all that it has considerable cultural, economic, and technical power to establish what will count as nature throughout the planet Earth. Biology is not everyone’s discourse about human, animal, and vegetable flesh, life and nature; indeed, //flesh//, //life//, and //nature// are no less rooted in specific histories, practices, languages, and peoples than //biology// itself. Biologists are not ventriloquists speaking for the Earth itself and all its inhabitants, reporting on what organic life really is in all its evolved diversity and DNA-soaked order. No natural object-world speaks its metaphor-free and story-free truth though the sober objectivity of culture-free and so universal science. Biology does not reach back into the mists of time, to Aristotle or beyond. It is, rather, a complex web of semiotic-material practices that emerged over the past 200 years or so, beginning “the West” and traveling globally. Biology emerged in the midst of major inventions and reworkings of categories of nation, family, type, civility, species, sex, humanity, nature, and, race. //[sic]// That biology – at every layer of the onion – is a discourse with contingent history does not mean that its accounts are matters of “opinion” or merely “stories.” It does mean that the material-semiotic tissues are inextricably intermeshed. Discourses are not just “words”; they are material-semiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted. Now a transnational discourse like the other natural sciences, biology is a knowledge-producing practice that I value; want to participate in and make better; and believe to be culturally, politically, and epistemologically important. It matters to contest for a livable biology as for a livable nature…"

Through her deconstructive reading of text books, advertisements, and maps, Haraway seeks to reveal other possible meanings embedded in the text. She reminds us that a seed is not just a seed, but “contains the specifications for labor systems, planting calendars, pest-control procedures, marketing, land holding, and beliefs about hunger and well-being.”

Haraway is particularly concerned about what the Human Genome, a complete map of the human DNA, could mean. What could be the effects of a reading of the DNA map as a clear non-tropic representation of reality? “The goal of the question is to ferret out how relations and practices get mistaken for nontropic things-in-themselves in ways that matter to the chances for liveliness of humans and nonhumans.” (141)

A map is not just a map, but a projection “that shape[s] worlds in particular ways for various purposes. Each projection produces and implies specific sorts of perspective.” (132) Quoting Harvey, Haraway points out that the Ptolemaic map “gave Europeans the critical means to see the world as a global unity… [It] ‘seemed as if space, though infinite, was conquerable and containable for purposes of human occupancy and action.’” The practices of mapping entwined with the elaboration of perspective techniques and the construction of individualism “constituted a major reworking of conceptions of space, time, and person. And all of these practices are in the family tree of genetic mapping, which once again is a local practice enabling certain sorts of power-charged global unity.” (163)

But even as Haraway registers her concern, she is careful not to scold. The biosciences should proceed, but with care and caution, and without giving in to fetishes that create a false sense of absolutism or authority. I don’t care what the DNA says. It is //this// daughter into whom Jackie and I have poured our souls. Forgive the mystical expression, but it is the only I way I know how to describe parenting done right. Yes, she belongs to us.

October 2, 2007


 * Excess, Context, and What the Data Simply Shows**

As we now know, there were many ways in which Pasteur’s experiments could, and should, have gone wrong. Our best guess must be that they did, but Pasteur knew what he ought to count as a result and what he ought to count as a mistake.

- Collins and Pinch, The Golem (90)

Every day we hear the heart-wrenching stories like the ones shared tonight by Miss McCarthy. She and other loving parents want and deserve answers about the cause of autism. Hopefully additional research will someday provide answers. **//The nation's foremost scientists agree//** that research done so far **//simply//** does not support an association between thimerosal in vaccines and autism.

- Center for Disease Control, in a statement released September 25, 2007

Last week, we touched on the question of excess: will scientists take offense at Mike’s characterization of “Genome Space” as “a vast landscape of excess – not just a lot of data, but an ‘avalanche’ of it.”? Some may: The term "excess" does appear 37 times in “Race in the Meantime,” painting for some a distressing landscape filled with “exploding databases,” and “excess data, excess interpretations, excess possibility.” But this paper can also be read as a compliment, an acknowledgement of the incredibly difficult job that scientists have – and always have had – to do.

Science has always had to contend with excess. Scientists are going places where no one has ever gone, investigating things that no one has ever investigated. At the outset, they cannot know for certain what information or data they will need to collect. Consequently, they are forced to collect too much and to decide later which sets of data ought to be employed.

Experimental sciences are, by definition, rife with error. As Collins and Pinch suggest above, even the famously successful Pasteur was known to stumble. When striking out into new territory, one can’t help but make mistakes. Data is collected, reviewed, interpreted – and sometimes thrown away. Interpretation and evaluation of the data in context are fundamental to scientific practice. If the data doesn’t fit, we are prompted to analyze not only our theory, but our protocols and methods as well. Sometimes we conclude that the way we performed our experiment was invalid: we failed to control for appropriate variables, allowed oxygen to leak into the system, or failed to provide our worms with proper care and feeding. Sometimes we just don’t know why the data came out the way it did. But through a process of review and negotiation, we collectively agree on what data should be included and what conclusions should be drawn.

Collins and Pinch offer several examples of this messy process in __The Golem__. They suggest that data selection, interpretation and negotiation enter into all sciences, with examples ranging from the neurology of worms to pivotal moments in the story of relativity. Fortun and Bernstein take it a step further. These practices don’t just enter into the sciences, for good or ill; they represent critically important skills without which science could not be productive:

“Millikan’s notebooks and writings at the time reveal that he was committed in advance to the theory of unitary electron charge, and so knew which experimental outcomes to throw away. If he hadn’t been so committed, he would have been awash in a sea of largely undifferentiated data… In the words of Peter Galison: ‘…By the strength of his convictions, he set aside some measurements not in accord with his atomistic hypothesis about electron charge… [He] was faced with a choice where dogmatic pronouncements on “experimental method” would not help: to ignore all expectations leads to chaos, yet to adamantly follow prior beliefs can blind the experimenter to novelty.’” (Muddling Through, 19)

So what is the difference between the sciences of Pasteur, Mickelson and Morley, Millikan, and “Genome Space” today? Perhaps the difference is context. In these stories from the history of science, we find a few key players – sometimes collaborators, sometimes rivals – producing, analyzing, and negotiating acceptance of data. They are present for the experiment, or can easily review and evaluate the methods of others. The context of the experiment is well known. This is probably an oversimplification, but by contrast to the “exploding databases” of Genome Space, may hold some water. In the interest of economy or efficiency, today’s genomists are challenged to make use of data they didn’t collect, generated in a space defined by unknown and unrecorded variables. The context is incomplete at best, which makes the process of data review, negotiation, and conclusion that much more problematic.

Bruno Latour’s account of Pasteur’s work on anthrax illustrates the importance of context; according to Latour, Pasteur’s ability to situate his laboratory in the context of the farmer’s field was vital to his success:

“At the time, diseases were local events that were to be studied with all possible attention by taking into account all the possible variables – the soil, the winds, the ether, the farming system, and even the individual fields, animals, and farmers. Veterinary doctors knew these idiosyncrasies, but it was a careful, variable, prudent, and uncertain knowledge. [Anthrax] was unpredictable, and recurred according to no clear pattern, reinforcing the idea that local idiosyncrasies had to be taken into account. This multifactorial approach make everyone extremely suspicious of any attempt to cut through the all these idiosyncrasies and to link the disease with any single cause, such as a microorganism.”

Through a process of translation, by moving his work from the laboratory into the field and back, Pasteur established a context in cooperation with a wide range of stakeholders. That context answered questions and linked meanings generated in the field to meanings generated in the petri dish. Pasteur practiced “Strong Objectivity.”

Strong Objectivity seeks to establish context by approaching scientific problems from multiple, partial perspectives in order to make visible the embedded cultural assumptions that limit choices of procedures, possible interpretations, and theories. It does not privilege “marginal lives,” but makes use of their differing vantage points to reveal places where our assumptions may be leaving gaps in understanding. As Sandra Harding explains:

“To start thought from marginal lives is not to take as incorrigible—as the irrefutable grounds for knowledge—what marginal people say or interpretations of their experiences. Listening carefully to what marginalized people say—with fairness, honesty, and detachment—and trying to understand their life worlds are crucial first steps in gaining less partial and distorted accounts of the entire social order; but these could not be the last step. Starting thought from marginal lives is not intended to provide an interpretation of those lives, but instead a causal, critical account of the regularities of the natural and social worlds and their underlying causal tendencies. Thus standpoint theory demands acknowledgment of the sociological relativism that is the fate of all human enterprises including knowledge claims, but rejects epistemological relativism.”

Thus, the observations of parents are crucial to establishing context in the study of autism. Parents’ standpoints are not the only ones to take, but failing to account for them would be analogous to Pasteur ignoring the farmer in the field; his descendents would still be trapped in the lab today. As we have seen, nothing in science is simple. Phrases like “the nation's foremost scientists agree that research done so far simply does not support an association” are boundary work. They are designed to establish science as a privileged domain, to keep outsiders out. In so doing, they deny researchers access to critical context.

To be fair, the CDC also has important public health policy objectives that they are trying to stress. Autism is a terrible disease; measles, mumps, and rubella are deadly. Refusing vaccination places individual children and the public health at significant and measurable risk. Our best science to date tells us we should continue to vaccinate our children. But the question clearly is not closed; we must continue to challenge our science from multiple perspectives, to refine the context we need to make the best possible use of the data.

October 3, 2007


 * The Technological Fix for Race**

I share Haraway's concerns about "hardening of the categories" and what mapping the human genome could mean for race. Could the medical use of genomic markers conflate genetics and race? (Rotimi, referenced by Fortun in "Race in the Meantime") If so, would such an association lead to greater social division or weaken our commitment to social justice?

But the concept of race, as we are accustomed to thinking of it, is a cultural problem. If, as I have suggested, we can't expect science to solve cultural problems like global warming, what can we possibly hope science can do about race? At the same time, we must remain aware of the connections and webs of meaning that can appropriate or oversimplify science in the interest of ideological aims. And scientists must always be mindful of the possibility that really good science can still lead to really bad social policy. (See Fortun and Bernstein's //Myths about Eugenics// in Muddling Through, 113) If science has a special responsibility, it is to always remind us of the limits of our knowledge, and to never allow the popular press or popular culture to carry the meanings of science too far. But in general, science is no more - and no less - responsible for the problem of race than is any other element of human society. What we do with race is up to us.

October 17, 2007


 * Get in The Game**


 * or**


 * Foucault’s answer to Ali’s question: Why settle for incremental change from within; why can’t we have revolution from without?**

There is a popular instructional game used by business consultants called “The Beer Game.” In this game, participants play the parts of beer retailer, wholesale distributor, and brew master. Their job is to keep the golden nectar flowing at the pace required to both satisfy consumer demand and make money. But their business communication is subject to strict rules that are designed to introduce crippling lag into the system. No matter who plays the game – shop floor workers and union leaders, dynamic business executives and their talented young progeny, highly trained engineers and human resource managers – it always ends the same way: in crushing defeat, with hundreds of cases of beer stacked in the aisles of the package store, thousands of pallets cramming the wholesalers’ warehouses, and a shuttered brewery with hundreds of workers laid off. (For a detailed description and analysis of The Beer Game, see __[|The Fifth Discipline]__ by Peter Senge.)

In the Beer Game, participants accept the rules of communication without question. Even as they sense the rising panic, they struggle to optimize their response to market fluctuation, but they never try to change the rules of the game. The rules are given; they are never questioned. Even if they were, the game master would vigorously enforce them to make his point: it is the system that fails, not the people.

We find the real world governed by similar rules with similar effects. But Michel Foucault suggests that these rules are not enforced by authority from above. Rather, they are nodes of power formed and reinforced by the confluence of a multiplicity of forces, connections, and relations.

“The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes… power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary these disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of law, in the various social hegemonies... [Power] must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which the secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable… power is not an institution, and not a structure.” (Foucault, __The History of Sexuality: An Introduction__; 92)

This is Foucault’s project. Whether applied to human sexuality, systems of discipline and punishment, or science and technology, Foucault suggests that we must discover and understand these complex and distributed webs of power if we hope to find alternative ways. His analyses begin with certain propositions (94):


 * Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian an mobile relations. Relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition and accompaniment; they have a directly productive role.


 * Power comes from below.


 * Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. There is no power that is exerted without aims or objective. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. The logic can be perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them.


 * Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power. There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy. (102)

If Foucault is right, revolution can very rarely succeed from the outside. Nodes in a field of force relations are built up from a host of disparate but somehow reinforcing relations: economic, technical, political, social, personal. There is no One to attack; nodes must be pushed and pulled a little at time, the effects measured and evaluated, the tweaking revised. This can only be done from within.

It’s why the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm became human in the end. The farmers were overthrown, but the system remained unchanged, the nodes of power relations still in operation. It’s why global warming won’t be solved by the election of a single politician, or the passing of even sweeping legislation. The nodes in the force field of our energy systems are built from a wide array of relations that can’t be remade overnight, and can't be challenged effectively from outside. That is not to say that we shouldn’t question or challenge the system, that we shouldn’t strive to identify existing nodes and work vigorously to make new ones. But in order to do so, we have to get in – to be in – The Game.

Discussion posting: I threw in a couple of thoughts after reading willil8's notes. I'm not sure how or whether it will show up for everyone to read, so I'll repost here:

willil8 wrote: "Repressive Hypotehsis."it sounds like Foucault is implying that there was some sort of conspiracy by the Catholic church

I read this discussion more as a description of prevailing modern interpretations of sexuality in Western societies. It seems to me that Foucault is disputing the hypothesis of other historians, sociologists, or philosophers of his day that sex is taboo and not to be spoken of in polite company (or anywhere else) and that it is somehow the subject of repression by particular actors in the political/social domain. Foucault argues that the contrary was true: talk of sex was everywhere, including inside the walls and procedures of the Catholic (and Protestant) churches. Sexuality was not repressed at all, but a critical tool for the achievement of regulation of the body and of population. Foucault sees the operation of power everywhere. He doesn't see it as emanating from some identifiable source or authority, not even the Catholic Church.

I don't have my book in front of me, so I can't point to the page. But I found his discussion in the section on rights to life and death interesting. He proposes that discourse on sexuality, among other loci of biopower, has become a tool that we accept without question as necessary to extend life in the face of death. We willingly give up certain freedoms because we are convinced by our discourse that our survival demands it. So it's not a decision by some one authority to allow or disallow sex; it is a node in the operations of power/knowledge where all sorts of different relations and meanings converge to convince us that some particular behavior is best.

October 26, 2007


 * Survival of the Different-est**

It may have been a minor point, but one I found very interesting and the reason I picked “difference” as my buzzword last week. Our traditional education on Darwin and evolution centers on the concept of “most fit.” Difference happens – things don’t stay together, it’s a fundamental property of our universe that we may never really be able to explain. Once it happens, nature operates on differences to narrow down the field and pick a winner.

But Elizabeth Grosz suggests that Darwin meant more than that. “Natural selection, also, leads to divergence of character: for more living beings can be supported on the same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution, of which we see proof by looking to the inhabitants of any small spot or to naturalised production.” (Darwin, quoted in Grosz, 21) Feminists, she argues, should get closer to Darwin. If they do, they will find he was just as much in favor – or rather, he found that //nature// is just as much in favor – of difference as in picking and justifying winners.

October 29, 2007


 * Conceptions of Health, and How to Figure Them Out**

A few weeks ago, I was running on the treadmill in our semi-finished basement while my two daughters played with Moon Sand on the craft table in the opposite corner of the room. I suppressed the parental urge to remind them to be careful not to spill; I reasoned that there is little at stake should they make a mess, and that they are reaching an age at which they are capable of recognizing the need for caution on their own. No more than five minutes passed before I was jarred from my drifting thoughts by a crashing sound. I looked over to find my daughters in the middle of the room, at least ten feet from the craft table, with an overturned pot of Moon Sand on the floor between them.

I suppressed another parental urge: the urge to scold. I asked them what they planned to do. They immediately assured me that everything would be all right; they could clean up the mess and all would be as it was before. They set themselves to the task. But they quickly realized that all would not be as it was before. The clumps of Moon Sand crumbled; the grains were scattered and smeared into the carpet. What a great learning experience, I thought. “You see now,” I said, “that cleaning up after a spill is not as good as preventing the spill in the first place. We’ll have to get the vacuum out, and some of your Moon Sand will be lost forever.” They got it, I think.

Our conceptions of health sometimes suffer from the same faulty logic. We have strong confidence is modern, Western medicine. It is just as good to live an unhealthy lifestyle and to patch us up with medicine as it is to take good care of our bodies in the first place. I recently had a conversation with a co-worker who was having trouble managing stress. He had become light-headed at work, and a visit to the doctor revealed that he had high blood pressure. Afterward, he told me with a sense of relief that the doctor had scheduled a follow-up appointment at which he would be happy to prescribe medication should the high blood pressure persist. This young engineer – no more than 25 years old – is about 40 pounds overweight and confessed that he just can’t find the time or muster up the energy to exercise. But there was no discussion with the doctor about diet, exercise, or lifestyle change. Pharmaceuticals were the first option.

I admit that my evidence is somewhat anecdotal; I may try to take on the question of just what our conceptions of health are and how they got to be that way as my sustainable project. But it seems we often hear it said that in the United States we have a system of “sick care” rather than “health care,” that we focus on treatment after the onset of illness rather than on prevention and healthy lifestyles. What are the discourses at work that form these particular nodes of belief?

Hannah Landecker may provide part of the answer in __Culturing Life__. At first, this book seems plodding and repetitive. It tells a thorough and complete story, but one without the frequent flashes of insight or the memorable phrases and paragraphs we get from Donna Haraway on almost every page. But through her discussion on Materials and Methods (21) and her epilogue, Landecker tells us that this is intentional. It is here, in our plodding and repetitive discourse, that we find the roots of what it means to be biological, to be human, to be in good health. Landecker’s approach is to leave the local and specific studies of great moments in the biological sciences to others. Instead, she complements these analyses with an “emphasis on infrastructure, technique, and approach [that] offers a way to organize historical and anthropological research questions that are not organized by novel technical objects in and of themselves…” (221)

Landecker extends her search for forces beyond those that operate directly in the domain of the human. “The problematization of human life by biotechnology is best studied by expanding the range of inquiry past the obviously relevant categories of things that impact human lives – objects that are themselves made of human bodies and things that are used therapeutically on human bodies. To limit analysis to these things is to miss much of the operation of biotechnology on the human.” (222) “There are less obvious ways in which manipulation of mouse or chicken matter becomes relevant to, or formative for, humans and human matter, such as genres of experiment and material infrastructures for exchanging and storing living matter. Sometimes the freezer matters more than the species, or the medium more than the type of cell cultured in it, in events that become important to how human life is thought about or acted upon.” (224)

Small messages, subtle contributions, minor enhancements to techniques; these are the things that form the power/knowledge field of what it means to be biological and what it means to be human. Landecker proposes that these forces combine to create an image of life and human health as plastic and malleable. “The very ability to grow cells outside of bodies in artificial environments or on scaffolds, to puncture eggs and inject foreign things into them, to cut and paste genetic material without killing the organism in question altogether, are… good examples of this plasticity.” (232) No matter how much violence – no matter how many insults – we visit upon the cell, it stubbornly continues to live, to reproduce, to thrive. We hear fascinating stories of biotechnological achievement in the news every day. By extension, perhaps, we begin to believe the same is true of the human body. No matter how poorly we care for ourselves, there will always be a fix. And once employed, surely all will be as well or better than before.

Great moments in the history of bioscience – like a single chicken heart cell beating alone in a culture dish or the cloning of a sheep – are especially powerful nodes in the field of what it means to be human and healthy. But Landecker reminds us that the power that really counts is at work everywhere and always in much more subtle ways. “Just as gene therapy and cloning have come and then diminished as high-profile scientific objects or processes, so will embryonic stem cells settle from their current prominence; but the conditions that produced all of these novel forms and objects will still be in operation, busily generating yet more new things and perturbing human biographical narratives.” (234)

In contrast to the big stories, these subtler forces are much harder to discern, much tougher to pull together into a coherent and convincing story. No one told Landecker, “It’s all about plasticity and temporality!” She drew those conclusions by paying attention to the messages and claims made in thousands of technical and scientific articles. It is an intimidating example for us young science studies scholars. We have to know our science as well as we know our science studies, to be as conversant in the techniques and operations of scientific research as we are in the projects of Foucault and Derrida. Stay close to your material. (Fortun, Oct 25, 2007) If we hope to make meaningful and lasting contributions, that is what we’ll have to do.

December 7, 2007


 * Getting at the Outside**

Now we’re talking about miracles; and where miracles are concerned, all bets are off.

- Prof. Joseph Levinger, Department of Physics, RPI, during a lecture in Introduction to Quantum Physics III, 1990

If you were a European astronomer in the 17th century, you didn’t see the Crab Nebula. And it wasn’t because you weren’t looking. You were looking, and **//you could not see it//**.

- Mike Fortun, Fall 2007

It was during the closing days of Introduction to Quantum Physics III in the spring of 1990 –quantum physics required three semesters of introduction in those days – that Prof. Joseph Levinger led his students to a place that physics could not explain. In Intro to Quantum I, we began with a simple system, a single electron. Over the course of three semesters, we had worked our way progressively downward, deeper and deeper into the nucleus of the atom, toward particles of higher energy states, stronger forces, and more complex wave forms, through protons and neutrons, to the theoretical particles from which they are understood to be formed and through which we say that they interact. We learned of neutrinos, bosons, leptons, and quarks, each with its various layered properties of mass, momentum, spin, and color.

As we turned the pages, our text book became increasingly prosaic, less analytical, with fewer equations and more text. Throughout our last semester with Prof. Levinger, we were also working our way backward in time. The students were asking tougher questions, digging deeper as they struggled to grasp increasingly vague and uncertain concepts. Then one day, a student recognized a contradiction somewhere in an explanation of events near the origin of the universe, “the Big Bang.” And that was when he did it: Prof. Levinger admitted that he didn’t know, that he probably never will know, that now we were among the stuff of miracles.

What did Prof. Levinger mean when he spoke of miracles? Was he talking about a material world simply beyond the reach of our science? Did he mean a creation story? Was it Kalunga, the sea of the dead? Each student would have to answer that in his own way. No one asked the professor; we were too surprised to ask. Regardless, though, of the type of story he might tell in answer to that question, his general meaning would be the same: there is an Outside, a something that is beyond our ability to fully know. Whether you describe it using theories of physics or metaphysics, a language of science or of spirituality, you have reached a place of faith.

Many social or cultural constructivists go much further: all knowledge is a construct of culture, a matter of faith. Elizabeth Grosz summarizes this view:

“We live in an era of constructionisms of various types. Culture is usually construed primarily as artifice, fabrication, an elaborate collective product of communities and their interests; the subject is also today nearly universally regarded as a construct elaborated or produced through the linguistic and sexualizing normative structures of the family and its oedipal or behavioral imperatives. Institutions, structures or technologies are understood as the means by which such constructions are produced, even while being seen themselves as cultural constructs... [T]his view of the fabricating, productive, form-giving structure of the social and the cultural, and of nature as what must be overcome, remade, superseded appears to be nearly ubiquitous.” (Grosz, 44-46)

But saying that our understanding – our knowledge – of the world is a matter of culture or of faith is not the same as saying that there is nothing there. There is something there, a real world, a nature that operates upon us and upon our culture. Our ways of knowing may be constrained by our language, but they are not merely the product of culture alone. Instead, Grosz argues that “the natural is not the inert, passive, unchanging element against which culture elaborates itself but the matter of the cultural, that which enables and actively facilitates cultural variation and change… We need to understand what is //outside// the cultural – indeed we need to understand, //contra// Derrida and following Deleuze, that culture and representation have an outside… For Deleuze, this outside is the force that induces thinking, that shapes life from automatism, that generates culture.” (Grosz, 47-49)

How do we use language to construct our knowledge and represent that which is outside? What approaches might help us to better understand the relationship between culture and nature, between the world around us and the language that constitutes our knowledge of that world? One way is to look away from our own culture, to study and describe another. Placing ourselves within a very different culture – one we must learn from scratch – may reveal patterns that we later recognize in our own but to which we are nearly blinded by our own discourse. In “Versions of the Dead,” Todd Ramon Ochoa does just that.

Ochoa immerses himself in the culture and practice of Palo, the Cuban-Kongo society of affliction and healing through interaction with the dead. Practitioners of Palo understand the world of the living to be saturated by and fully immersed in Kalunga, “the great, indifferent sea of the dead.” By opening herself up to the fleeting effects of this sea as it flows through and around us, Isidra – Ochoa’s guide through the world of Palo – gains insight into the afflictions of her patients and appropriate measures for their healing. It was difficult for Ochoa to suspend his disbelief – as it is for the rest of us – in order to grasp the lessons that the study of this culture has to offer us:

“In the course of fieldwork – the everydayness of meals shared, errands embarked on together, the interminable waiting for Havana’s buses, conversation all the time – it was vague versions of Kalunga that were more common. They were also the more difficult to grasp for their swift and inconsequential passing. These were moments when Klunga, the vast sea of the dead, the dead one, actualized in fluttering turns of the stomach, in goose bump behind my arms, and in barely perceptible sensations in my chest, my throat, and in the muscles around my eyes. Over time I was instructed to acknowledge these everyday events in terms provided by Kalunga, the dead one. Because of the ‘minor’ quality of these events, because they lack status as empirical measures in the human sciences, it took me many months of working with Isidra before I could bring myself to give them due place in my fieldwork, let alone my theoretical understanding of Palo.” (483)

But in building a language of Palo, Ochoa gains insight into our own. At the heart of Palo, he finds a repetitive discourse of affirmation. “In lingering through the repetition of the instant before the crank is turned on the engine of dialectics, I follow my teachers of Palo, but also Neitzsche and Deleuze, who would seek difference, which is to say the basic architecture of concepts – of forms – not in negation, but rather in affirming repetition, affirmed repetition, through a repetition that affirms.” Through affirming repetition and elaboration of infinitesimal sensations, Palo constructs a “privileged kind of knowing, as the sensual affirmation of Kalunga. Such a knowing is one wherein fleeting sensation is not negated, but rather felt as a play of forces that constitute a Cuban-Kongo life, a play of the dead that suffuses and make the person who lives Palo.” (488) Like Foucault and contrary to Hegel, Ochoa finds the discourse of Palo to be built upon and stabilized by affirmative, productive relations of power.

Our own discourses are just as powerful, building relations through repetitive affirmations. The assemblages of relations that constitute our knowledge do have an effect on how we perceive the world. As the quote above from Mike Fortun suggests, our discourses can be so powerful that they literally blind us to the signals coming from the outside. Astronomers in 17th century Europe could not see the Crab Nebula.

When my daughters are asked to clean up their rooms, they inevitably leave dozens of artifacts of their play strewn about. I ask them why they haven’t finished the job, and they stare at the floor but **//do not see//** the mess. I am convinced that they lack some critical elements and connections in their assemblages, without which they simply cannot see what I see. The Crab Nebula was there in the 17th century, just as surely as are the books, bits of paper, pencils and pens that my children leave behind.

Studies like Ochoa’s help illuminate for us the power of our discourses. Grosz challenges us to continuously remind ourselves that there really is something out there. We should repeatedly challenge our assumptions, break and remake the nodes and connections that form our assemblages, and look for new ways of seeing that permit a little more of the outside to come in.

Grosz, Elizabeth, __Time Travels__

Ochoa, Todd Ramon, "Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiatlity, and Ethnography," __Cultural Anthroplogy__, 22(4).

December 8, 2007


 * Brain Death and Organ Donation** - __Twice Dead__ by Margaret Lock

In lieu of another Grosz chapter, I got wrapped up in Lock's Twice Dead instead. Lock examines the question of brain death through a compariative analysis of the debates in North America and Japan. Like Landecker's Culturing Life, it is a story of a complex assemblage. I tried to capture some of the tangled web in the chart below.

Immunology and Immunosuppressants || Organs as independent, living organisms || The Body as incubator for living tissue ||
 * || **North America - Western Tradition** || **Japan** ||
 * **Technology and Medicine** ||||  ||
 * Transplant Techniques |||| Surgical Procedures, Surgeon's Skills ||
 * Intensive Care Technology |||| Ventillators, Feeding Tubes, EEG's, CAT Scans ||
 * Organ Quality |||| Organs from "living cadavers" vs. "dead cadavers" ||
 * The Immune System |||| Martin, __Flexible Bodies__
 * Definitions of Life |||| The Cell - Alexis Carrel - Landecker, __Culturing Life__
 * Culturing Life |||| The Cell as test tube and petri dish
 * **Culture** ||||  ||
 * Gifts || The Gift of Life || Reciprocity - The Tyranny of the Gift ||
 * Death || Biological Event || Social Process ||
 * Man and Machine || Machines as dehumanizing and demoralizing || Animism - Machine and Man working in partnership ||
 * Body || Independent, wholly owned by the person || Belonging to the family ||
 * Personhood || Residing in the brain - personality || Social relationships and family ||
 * Trust || Trust in modern science, medicine, and doctors || Doctors as money-mongers ||
 * Health Care System || Wasteful, expensive, searching for ways to economize (saving beds, life support as waste of resources) || Minimalist, lack of waste, less pressure to economize and free up beds ||
 * Legal System || Individual interest, property rights, protection of medical professionals from prosecution || Patients rights ||
 * Life Style and Transportation || Suburban living, high speed transit, highway deaths || Urban living, mass transit, low speed ||
 * Media || Unwilling to confront mortality || Platform for open debate ||
 * Heroism || Perseverence in the face of illness, Life of a patient is worth more than the life of a healthy person on the road. "We need more accidents." ||  ||