Ice cream, blood serum, and other sticky things

Abstract

Ice cream, blood serum, and other sticky things I n a time of DNA-centric-historization of biomedical science, Joanna Radin's Life on ice: a history of new uses for cold blood is a cool reminder of the sample behind the data, and of the treatment of samples that preceded (and in some cases, permitted) subsequent extraction of DNA. The book is as much a genealogy of ice cream vending machines and German patents as it is Cold War historiography of scientific diplomacy. Most compellingly, it is a tale of time travel through "freezing, as both a material practice and metaphorical perspective on the limits of life" (p.183). Radin's interconnected analysis of the blood prospecting efforts of John Paul in Alaska, Carleton Gajdusek in Melanesia, Francisco Salzano and James Neel in the Brazilian Amazon, and Albert Damon in the Solomon Islands shows that in making "biological matter mobile across space and time" (p.47), the subjects of these studies became unsuspecting time travelers. But Radin's analysis does not stop there: the moral cost and commercial value of this tremendous scientific feat do not go unexamined. The book's title is so packed with analytic references that it is worth explaining. Cold blood refers literally to the blood-filled vacutainers kept in cold storage for scientific use, but cold here also qualifies the societies that comprised the population samples from which the blood was extracted. The latter use of the term is an allusion to Claude Lévi-Strauss' depiction of the "primitive" and "geographically isolated" tribes of Mato Grosso, which he described in opposition to his own "hot" society towards the end of the 1960s. Radin takes up this thermodynamic metaphor and mobilizes it further: "As the 1970s began, scientists … would use the resources at their disposal to intensify efforts to salvage blood from members of 'cold' societies whose purported stability was being thawed-such that it could be preserved in artificially frozen environments" (p.117). We thus learn in this book that cryopreservation practices were set in motion to appease Cold War anxieties which derived from attitudes towards those latitudes where the war was hot. As the lives of these societies were put on ice, so too were the power relations and "colonial hierarchies