Synopses & Reviews
The implicit questions that inevitably underlie German bioethics are the same ones that have pervaded all of German public life for decades: How could the Holocaust have happened? And how can Germans make sure that it will never happen again? In Reasons of Conscience, Stefan Sperling considers the bioethical debates surrounding embryonic stem cell research in Germany at the turn of the twenty-first century, highlighting how the country’s ongoing struggle to come to terms with its past informs the decisions it makes today. Sperling brings the reader unmatched access to the offices of the German parliament to convey the role that morality and ethics play in contemporary Germany. He describes the separate and interactive workings of the two bodies assigned to shape German bioethics—the parliamentary Enquiry Commission on Law and Ethics in Modern Medicine and the executive branch’s National Ethics Council—tracing each institution’s genesis, projected image, and operations, and revealing that the content of bioethics cannot be separated from the workings of these institutions. Sperling then focuses his discussion around three core categories—transparency, conscience, and Germany itself—arguing that without fully considering these, we fail to understand German bioethics. He concludes with an assessment of German legislators and regulators’ attempts to incorporate criteria of ethical research into the German Stem Cell Law.
Review
In Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies, Landecker offers a history of the development of cell culture in biology that is sparkling with originality and insight. She has an anthropologist's eye for nodes of cultural significance even as her narrative arc is deeply historical. The book weaves a rich tapestry of biological, historical, and cultural connections. Angela N. H. Creager, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University
Review
Culturing Life is a beautifully written, lucid account of the history of tissue culture, a technology that permits the isolation of cells from bodies, their continuous reproduction, and global distribution as immortalized cell lines. Landecker draws us into a world where the limits of biological plasticity are continually tested, cell fusion and cloning are commonplace, and biological time is transcended--in short, technological manipulation has forever transformed what it is to be biological. This book will rapidly become indispensable reading in the field of science and technology studies. Margaret Lock, author of < i=""> Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death <>
Review
With her book Culturing Life, Hannah Landecker contributes an important chapter to the recent history of laboratory fractals. Her elegantly written and well-documented narrative demonstrates how, within 20th-century biological laboratories, a whole range of vessels and containers were used in order to store, breed, study, and manipulate cells and tissue outside the body of organic individuals: from hanging-drop preparations in the 1910s to tissue culture flasks in the 1930s and powerful freezers in the 1950s and 1960s....The great merit of this book is its demonstration that these spaces of knowledge also create and imply specific regimes of temporality. Ilana L & ouml;wy - New England Journal of Medicine
Review
In the flood of instant comment on cloning and stem cells, we need the longer and deeper views of cellular technologies that only history can provide. Historians of science have written much about the nineteenth-century advent of cell theory, but genes and molecules stole the limelight in the twentieth...Culturing Life by Hannah Landecker is a small book that does much to fill that large gap...[An] original book...[A] stimulating reconstruction of the cultures that gave us cultured cells. New Scientist
Review
In this thoughtful, often elegant book, Hannah Landecker bridges the histories of science, medicine, and technology as she explores how cells were domesticated to the laboratory...She argues persuasively that appreciating the subtleties of cell culture history enables us to think more clearly and more deeply about current biotechnology. Culturing Life, then, is a fine example of "translational" historical research. Kendall L. Knight - Nature Publishing Group Book Review
Review
In our age of cloning and stem cells, Landecker's challenging study does a real service as it locates the techniques and ideas, developed through time, which make these cell manipulations possible. Landecker charts the uncertain movement of cells from organisms (including humans) to the laboratory, moving beyond cell cultures to the expectations of biologists and to the philosophical and ethical issues that emerge as control over life becomes possible. Others have written histories of cell theory; here Landecker recovers the story of the cell practices that have transformed what we mean by life. Everett Mendelsohn, Harvard University
Review
Landecker hits exactly the right balance of interpretive analysis and presentation of substance. Her stories carry the more technical descriptions so that both are motivated and compelling. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and, moreover, I found it exciting. Jane Maienschein, Regents ' Professor and Parents Association Professor of Biology and Society
Review
A mere century ago, scientists didn't know how to culture cells in a medium and believed that cells couldn't live outside their parent organism. As Landecker reminds us, today we can hardly live without cell cultures, which are used for everything from routine medical tests to genetic engineering...She is a keen observer of scientific practice. Publishers Weekly
Review
The discovery that it was possible to grow cells in a lab dish transformed them from being the immutable building blocks of individual bodies into plastic, malleable resources with a life of their own. In Culturing Life, anthropologist Hannah Landecker skillfully interweaves the scientific, historical, and cultural aspects of this transformation, and examines how cell culture challenges humanity's notions of individuality and immortality...An insightful and thought-provoking perspective on how technology has changed scientists' and society's understanding of life. Claire Ainsworth
Review
Few laymen realize that scientists first fused cells from different species as far back as the 1960s, as Ms. Landecker describes...The level-headedness that can be gained from historical perspective is the value in reading Ms. Landecker's account. Nick Hopwood - Nature
Review
Hannah Landecker's fascinating, beautifully written account of the history of cell culture restores the sense of wonder felt by the first scientists who grew living cells apart from organisms and by the people who read about their achievements in scientific journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. But this book does much more than that; it sheds a unique light on the history of biology in the 20th century, the rise of biotechnology, and our understanding of what life is...By reflecting on the catastrophic, artificial, and radically new variety of life that arises in the laboratory, Landecker opens new ways to articulate the ideas of the French philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem about the distinction between the normal and the pathologic. Cultured cells bring into question our understanding of the biologic, but their infinite plasticity, as Landecker eloquently shows, often unfolds in the normative space of medicine. The Economist
Review
Hannah Landecker provides a wonderful assortment of descriptions of experimental design, 'eureka'-type moments in the lab and the scientists responsible for initiating this new technology during the early 1900s, along with its evolution to the present...Well-written historical accounts of scientific discovery allow the reader to appreciate the adversities confronting the scientists involved and the circumstances that drove their discoveries and to wonder what may happen next. Culturing Life is no exception. Henning Schmidgen - Project Muse Scholoary Journals Online
Review
Well-written historical accounts of scientific discovery allow the reader to appreciate the adversities confronting the scientists involved and the circumstances that drove their discoveries and to wonder what may happen next. Culturing Life is no exception. Nathaniel Comfort - Project Muse Scholoary Journals Online
Review
"Reasons of Conscience: The Bioethics Debate in Germany provides an extraordinary example of anthropologys capacity to not only document and critique social worlds but also to open up a space for political and philosophical mediations."
Review
“Stefan Sperlings
Reasons of Conscience is a highly illuminating account of the current state of consciousness about conscience in post-unification Germany. Concerned with the ethical relations between science and society, the book takes up an eclectic mix of evidence, including legal theories, concepts, metaphors, architectural design, the use of history and historiography, personal impressions, and public accounts of the prosecution of East German border guards and of debates about mandatory counseling for abortions. At its center is the work of a federal commission concerned with bioethics, specifically the regulation of embryonic stem cells. In distilling the specific way in which ethics gets defined in a democratic public sphere that prizes participation and transparency, it offers a fascinating journey through the reasoning about conscience in contemporary Germany.”
Review
“
Reasons of Conscience is a dazzling study of the intersection of science, political life, and historical memory in modern Germany. It traces the public debate surrounding the legal, moral, and ethical ramifications of stem cell research in a country acutely sensitized to avoiding the repetition of the industrialization and eugenic manipulation of life in its past. Stefan Sperling explores in stunning ethnographic detail how German political life interweaves matters of ethics, citizenship, and conscience, from the everyday practices and knowledge of ethics commissions, scientific research, and citizen conferences, to the complexities of public and parliamentary debate. Without a doubt, this is the finest ethnography of German political life and of the inner workings of the German state that I have read—it is brilliantly attentive both to the cultural and historical legacies that shape German politics as well as to the Realpolitik and complex alliances of its parliamentary statecraft.”
Synopsis
How did cells make the journey, one we take so much for granted, from their origin in living bodies to something that can be grown and manipulated on artificial media in the laboratory, a substantial biomass living outside a human body, plant, or animal? This is the question at the heart of Hannah Landecker's book. She shows how cell culture changed the way we think about such central questions of the human condition as individuality, hybridity, and even immortality and asks what it means that we can remove cells from the spatial and temporal constraints of the body and "harness them to human intention."
Rather than focus on single discrete biotechnologies and their stories--embryonic stem cells, transgenic animals--Landecker documents and explores the wider genre of technique behind artificial forms of cellular life. She traces the lab culture common to all those stories, asking where it came from and what it means to our understanding of life, technology, and the increasingly blurry boundary between them. The technical culture of cells has transformed the meaning of the term "biological," as life becomes disembodied, distributed widely in space and time. Once we have a more specific grasp on how altering biology changes what it is to be biological, Landecker argues, we may be more prepared to answer the social questions that biotechnology is raising.
Synopsis
How did cells make the journey from their origin in living bodies to something that can be grown and manipulated on artificial media in the laboratory? This is the question at the heart of Hannah Landecker's book. She shows how cell culture changed the way we think about such central questions of the human condition as individuality, hybridity, and even immortality and asks what it means that we can remove cells from the spatial constraints of the body and "harness them to human intention."
Synopsis
2008 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize, History of Science Society
About the Author
Stefan Sperling has taught at Harvard University, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Deep Springs College in California. He lives in Stanford, California.
Table of Contents
PretextBuilding, Bildung
The Visible Public Sphere
Creating Readers
Normativity—Look It Up!
Grappling with Bioethics
1 A Tale of Two Commissions
Two Ethical Visions
Building an Ethical Imperative—The Ethics Lag
Veilings and Unveilings
New Kanzler, New Kanzleramt
Parliamentary Ethics—The Enquete Kommission
New Ethics—The Nationaler Ethikrat
Looking Back—The Enquete Kommission in History
Looking Around—The EK and the NER
Can the Nationaler Ethikrat Be Ethical?
Ethics Commissions as Saalordner
“This Is Not Bioethics”—“Bioethics Is a Dirty Word”
The Bundestag Comes to Life—Sternstunde des Parlaments
Conclusions
2 Disciplining Disorder
Learning to See the Right Things
Becoming an Ethical Insider
The First Day
Ethics Made Transparent
First Impressions
A Place for Disability
Dienstweg
Du und Sie—More Ways of Creating Insider-ness
Writing Bioethics
Grammar of Democracy
“What Are the Ethical Aspects of Organ Transplantation?”
Translation—The Semi-Legitimate Outsider Attempts to Produce a Legitimate Text
Glossary—Marking Science, Unmarking Law
The Beginning of Life
Conflict of Objectivities
Paper Wars
A Visit to the Media
The Nationaler Ethikrat Goes Public
Karlsruhe—Merging Law and Art
The Last Day of the Commission
Rules, and Rules on Following Rules
Leaving the Field—An Outsider Again
3 Transparent Fictions
Toward an Ethnography of Transparency
Transparency Today
Crafting Citizens through Bildung
Democracy Made Transparent at the German Hygiene Museum
Place—A Pedagogical Training Ground
Participants—Who Are the Citizens?
Process—Education in Citizenship
The Citizens Speak, but Have Not Heard Clearly
Expert Reactions
Conclusions
4 Conscientious Objections
Constitutions of Glass—Transparent, or Merely Fragile?
Constituting Conscience
Kants Conscience
Native Theories of Conscience—Kant as Germanys Moral Gold Standard
Public and Private Reason
Beamte—Delegated Conscience Then and Now
Tortured Conscience
Conscience and Resistance
Conscientious Objectors
Conscientious Abortions
Constraints on Conscience
Conclusions
5 A Failed Experiment
Abwicklung und Aufarbeitung
One Volk, One History?—Writing History Together
Making East Germany Transparent—And Seeing an Unrechtsstaat
Obsessive Transparency
Transparency on Display—The Stasi in Museums
Learning to See Themselves as Victims
How German Was It?
Mauerschützen—Suspending the Rechtsstaat/Erasing East German Conscience
Abortion
East Germany in the Enquete Kommission Recht und Ethik
Bioethics and the East German Public Sphere
Coda—A Very Private Place
6 Stem Cells, Interrupted
Ethical Imports at Last
“No Embryo Shall Die for German Research”
Ethics Becomes Law
Converting Ethics into Reason
Reading the Law
The Cutoff Date—An Unenforceable Line
Prohibited yet Permitted
Ethical German Research
The ZES and the RKI Reconfigure Science and Ethics
Inside the ZES
Jürgen Hescheler
Wolfgang Franz
Conclusion
Reading Borges, Reading Germany
Transparency—Text and Context
Potentialities—Setting Limits as an Ethical Act
Taboo—Dammbruch
Law and Memory—Recht und Unrecht
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index