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| Culturing Life. How Cells became Technologies | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | H. Landecker |
| Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
| ISBN: | 9780674023284 |
| Format: | hardback |
| 276pp | |
| Price: | £22.95, $35.00, €29.80 |
| Review Date: | 08 June 2007 |
| Review: | This is a history of tissue culture – the practice of growing cells outside the body. The book also reflects the fact that living things can now be radically altered in the way that they live in space and time, like technological matter, to be harnessed for human use. It is divided into five chapters, each centred on an episode when cell cultures were ‘events that progressively unfolded themselves’. Chapter 1 ‘Autonomy’ looks at the new autonomy for cells extracted from the confines and shapes of the animal body. Chapter 2 ‘Immortality’ takes continuity as its theme, examining the work of Alexis Carrel in establishing a ‘permanent life’ or potential immortality of cells in culture. Chapter 3 ‘Mass reproduction’ concerns the development of the human cell for large-scale production of viruses used in the search for a polio vaccine in the 1940s. Chapter 4 ‘HeLa’ examines the disembodied, distributed continuous form of life in the HeLa cell line. Finally, Chapter 5 ‘Hybridity’ discusses the subsequent recombination of cultured cells in experiments of cell fusion in the 1960s |