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The first French clinical trial using human embryonic stem cells for regenerative purposes was launched in 2014, using the I6 stem cell line that was imported from Israel. From Israel to France, national reproductive policies and practices inform how basic scientists produce, manage and circulate cells across countries. Building on an interdisciplinary co-production involving two social scientists and a life scientist, this article suggests that biobanks passage cells from in vitro fertilization to stem cell science and from country to country by modifying their reproductive meaning. Four passages are described: the absence of cells in 2005 when the research started in France; the presence of supernumerary embryos available for research in Israeli IVF biobanks; the production of the I6 stem cell bank in Israel; the importation and laboratory biobanking of the cells in France. Human embryonic stem cell lines can never be completely disentangled from reproduction.

Sélectionner des embryons humains ÉTUDES & ESSAIS 1. Sélection d'embryons dans le laboratoire indien Bangalore, 2013 (cl. Noémie Merleau-Ponty) 2. Sélection d'embryons dans le laboratoire français Région parisienne, 2012 (cl. Noémie Merleau-Ponty)

À travers l’ethnographie de la préparation des ovocytes et des spermatozoïdes dans deux laboratoires de biologie de la reproduction situés en Inde et en France, cet article montre comment ces cellules sont porteuses de qualités à la fois biologiques et substantielles. Ces qualités sont associées à une approche mécanistique de la vie cellulaire et à l’idée que le corps est porteur d’identité personnelle et de capacités relationnelles de parenté propres à chaque contexte local. À partir de l’analyse de choix institutionnels réalisés pour administrer les dons de sperme, il propose de relativiser le préfixe « bio » des « biotechnologies » reproductives et d’introduire la notion de « somatotechnique », ce qui permet de souligner la prise en charge biomédicale des corps de la parenté, non réductibles à ce qu’une science biologique globalement partagée peut en dire et en faire ici et là.

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Stem cell basic science has sparked a lot of attention because of its use of cells coming from 'destroyed' embryos. An ethnographic study conducted in two developmental biology laboratories located in India and France demonstrates that lab professionals do not see the use of these cells as controversial. What appears to be a major topic of reflection is the killing of mice. A hierarchy of deaths is delineated when biologists evoke the kind of lives at play in their science. A comparison between narrations of cell experimentations and mice sacrifices enriches a biological approach to the living through genetics, which is nonetheless performed in daily scientific practices. Laboratory workers enact other perceptions that point at being alive or having a life. They acknowledge, with personal convictions or expressions of intense affects, lives that are said to be embodied and experienced, while being hierarchised for the sake of science and dying patients. Laboratory workers' narratives of a hierarchy of deaths provide them with arguments to engage with discussions happening outside of their workplace about the handling of living materials in experimental settings.

Le travail de deuil n’est pas facile. Il faut le dire, il faut l’écrire, pour pouvoir le commencer. Je tourne autour de ce texte, je sens ma pensée et mes émotions fuir, nourrir la page blanche de mots fugitifs pour ne pas avoir à se confronter, encore, à la disparition. Enric Porqueres i Gené (1962-2018) enseigna l’anthropologie de la parenté à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) vingt-deux années durant. Je fis sa connaissance alors que j’étais étudiante en Master et m’inscrivis en thèse de doctorat sous sa direction en 2011...

Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au-delà (Truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other). This maxim from Pascal, a French philosopher and mathematician, cannot be more pertinent to contextualize Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies: The Case of France and Belgium. Like the Pyrenees in Pascal's aphorism, the border between France and Belgium delineates conflicting views of assisted reproductive technologies. France and Belgium are two neighboring countries that share many cultural traits but have distinctive ways of regulating and practicing assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). In this volume, scholars from France, Belgium, England, and the United States, representing anthropology, sociology, political science, philosophy, and law, contribute to the flourishing scholarship on ARTs. Their contributions offer a comparative and transnational portrait of a restrictive ART landscape in France and a liberal and pragmatic one in Belgium.