willil8+comments+week+9+Landecker+culturing+life+ch1and2

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. __Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means__. New York: Plume books 2003. Landecker, Hannah. __Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies__. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2007.

__**Culturing Life by Hannah Landecker Notes on through Chapter 2**__

P2 "The science, technology and economic productivity of living matter depends on the productive and reproductive capacity of cells to continually make more of themselves…" P3 "Cultured cells are characteristic of the present of the human condition, they function within well-established systems of labor and exchange, they are normalized in and by these systems; yet they also represent profound and recent change to a new state of being, as routine tools, alienable commodities, and sites of production. One does not have to be an anthropologist to see that a shift has occurred…" P5 "The cell has deposed the gene as the candidate for the role of 'life itself'." P8 //**interesting. In discussion of cell recurrence (which Landecker claims to have superseded "the gene" as synonymous with "life") Landecker uses the word "genealogy" twice…**// "A genealogy of plasticity…." "Recurrence is….as set of emphases with which to recognize a genealogy…" //**That is, well, extremely ironic.**// P11 "The ability of cells to grow without the body that they constituted was the first shock to assumed limits of cellular autonomy and bodily integrity; from then on, the entire history of the practice in the twentieth century could be generally described as a series of realizations of cells' abilities to withstand and live through a variety of rude manipulations, from extracting them from their bodily context to fusing them together artificially." P12 "Temporal reorganization of the organism as tissue cultures took the form of techniques directed toward the event, making processes happen faster or slower in the desired fashion, or establishing continuity through clonal lineages that otherwise would not have existed. Any genealogy of plasticity, then, is also one of temporality." P15-16 Ch 1 cell tissue culture/autonomy of individual cell/ Harrison Ch 2 immortality/Carrel/ lab culture P17 economy of scale virus production to find vaccine for polio in Chapter 3 P24 "Both life as humans live it in terms of bodies and health and the concepts and the objects that are at the center of our sciences of living things have been radically altered. How to fathom this transformation through historical research that respects the scale and multiplicity of modern scientific work is the challenge." P26 "In other words, the scientist does not have to think of it first, and act on the biological thing accordingly; change can arise from the objects and practices of experimentation themselves--how cells are kept, watched, representd, manipulated, and how they react and adapt to their technical milieu." P33 "The body was not replaced by the cell, nor reduced to it; rather, this technique substituted an artificial apparatus for the body and generated new views of the autonomy and activity of cellular life."
 * __Introduction__**
 * //Ummm…not in popular culture it hasn't. Maybe in laboratories, but even there I doubt it. If this book is going to be about that, I predict that I will be very bored.//**

P37 "Harrison argued that 'the evidence for and against the two theories…rested upon such minute histological details that a decision to which all would subscribe was impossible of attainment'. Thus the controversy left embryologists and neurologists at something of a loss, for there seemed to be no way to resolve the difference of interpretation with ever more refined histological techniques..." P38 "Harrison sought to break out of the deadlock of opposing interpretations of the same material by asking the same questions but changing the matierial. Hew sought to watch the live nerve fiber as it grew; he did not wish to be 'independent of time and place." P40 "Harrison's experiments on the origin of the nerve fiber had the nature of an event. He did not see or discover an object that had not been seen before; rather he made an event happen in which he claimed to witness what an object did." P49-50 //**Hmm, this relates back to self-org**// "Both conflicted over the level of interconnectedness versus autonomy of the different elements of the body, both reached a certain point of intransigence mired in the methodological difficulty of isolating the supposedly interconnected or supposedly autonomous elements from each other while still maintaining a living experimental subject." P50+ //**So it looks like Carrel and Burrows took Harrison's cell culture idea and tweaked it to work for: Culture media: blood v. lymph Tissue from: Warm-blooded(chicken, then human) v. cold-blooded (frog) and Adult v. embryo Time scale: Serial culture(s) v. single cultures Cell type: Heart, Cancer, etc. v. nerve cells Four papers/total of seven pages formed the new idea of "tissue culture"**// P56 "…the logic of surgeons was substitutive, that of the biologists provocative, directed toward testing the limits of an interpretation of nature and living matter." P57 "In sum, Harrison's work took place within an intellectual and practical landscape of widespread probing of the bounds of bodily individuality, partability, and plasticity." //**This also relates back to self-org, the book Linked where Barabasi relates the story of the child who took apart her toy, and could not figure out how to put it back together again and was dismayed. Landecker comments on the surprise of scientists and scholars in the field, and their protests that tissue culture was not a culture, but an extended tissue necrosis.**// P62 "Milieu interieur" The idea that the body's various histological components are like mini-factories with a lateral supply chain P64 "…reading bernard's elaboration of the milieu interieur helps illuminate the more and less explicit assumptions about interiority evidenced by the way experiments were done across Europe and America."
 * __Ch 1 Autonomy__**

P68 "By describing immortality as something that could be investigated empirically using a controlled system of cells growing in a nutrient medium and a glass vessel designed by the scientist, Carrel framed the concept as a tangible object of inquiry n the field of cell biology." P69-70 "Immortality or permanent life was not just an abstract idea imputed to cells. It was a set of specific technical interventions in physical mater that resulted in a material form for this concept of biological infinitude." P72 "Carrel and Burrows substituted adult tissues for Harrison's embryonic ones. They introduced continuous life to the culture by making new cultures out of old ones instead of out of organisms. An experiment was no longer bounded temporally by a finite survival period, an intact body was no longer the only source for living cells, and an organism was no longer the only location for the reproduction of cells to make tissues." Age of patient affects times for cell regeneration/regrowth (Carrel charted wounds during WWI in France) P85 "Cinematography was one tool, along with the glassware and the apparatuses for changing the fluids around the cultures, that helped materialize biological time as a thing that could be physically intervened in as part of experimentation with tissue culture." P85-86 "…the films could be shown to large numbers of people at once, and a single movement or a single film could be viewed repeatedly or backwards. P91 "Carrel's colleague Jacques Loeb greeted the result with an 'of course' response, taking it as evidence that death was contingent and therefore the thing to be explained, not ongoing life." P96 In discussing news articles on Carrel's work "the fact that the news editor put the words 'live' and 'death' in quotation marks signals that these were the concepts that were deranged by the context of laboratory and glass jar." P97 "The inclusion of inanimate materials in the making of this living thing led to its perception as an invention akin to other contemporary technological inventions." P100 //**If death is just an "operational concept" what would happen if it did not exists.**// Scientists mused, and "participated in expanding upon this imagination of fleshly volume" P102 "**'Automobile' here describes something that moves by means of mechanism and power within itself." //Cinematography gave agency to observations of tissue cultures!?! What is agency again?//**
 * __Ch 2 Immortality__**
 * //Mortality as "operational concept"//**

Agency considered in the philosophical sense is the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act. Moral agency addresses issues of these type. Pasted from 

[|**//http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_starter//**]
 * //This reminds me of the "starter" that is used in sourdough bread//** **//(thanks Gareth)//****//. Can one say that the "starter" (full of [|yeast]) has agency, because its nature suggests the capacity to create [|bread]?//**