Selecting Human Embryos : Operational Relations within Laboratories of Reproductive Biology in India and France

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

2020

Self Cite

is a permanent researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Her research is concerned with biotechnologies of human reproduction and regeneration. In France, India and the UK, she looks at the making of social relations through the making of science, as well as at the intertwining of national contexts and global dynamics. Trained as a social anthropologist, she is also inspired by feminist science and technology studies. Although she primarily works ethnographically, she continues to develop interdisciplinary collaborations between the social and life sciences.

Section: Discussion: Epistemological Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Operational Relationmentioning

confidence: 99%

In-vitro gametogenesis on YouTube – epistemological performances from Strasbourg and Los Angeles

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

2020

Self Cite

“…Nonetheless, the absence of recognition to the fact that cells die when they are brought to the molecular bench does not mean that biologists do not care for their cells. Care and affect practices around cell cultures (Suzuki, 2015;Merleau-Ponty, 2018b) are not contradictory with their use as tools (Franklin, 2013;Meskus, 2018). And biologists can be devastated when their cells are contaminated, though, a hierarchy of deaths ease the tensions produced by the loss of cells.…”

Section: Hues: Immortal Without a Body And A Soulmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Hierarchy of Deaths: Stem Cells, Animals and Humans Understood by Developmental Biologists

2019

Science as Culture

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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.

“…Similarly, human embryos are defined in a lose way, which allows different actors to have different interpretations. In legal and bioethical texts, Raschini (2012, 58) analyzed the use of “categories of approximation” ( approximation catégorielle ) that leave spatial and temporal frontiers of meaning unlimited or open for transformation, such as the notion of “potential human person.” Indeed, in France, huES science is regulated through a legal, bioethical and public reproductive framework that views embryos as neither complete objects of science nor complete subjects of humanity (Merleau-Ponty 2018).…”

Section: The French Ivf/stem Cells Interface: No Cells To Passage In mentioning

confidence: 99%

“I6 passages: on the reproduction of a human embryonic stem cell line from Israel to France”

New Genetics and Society

Vertommen

Pucéat

2018

Self Cite

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.