Culturing Life - Review

This summer has been bad on the book-side. I've picked up so many books that looked promising yet in the end disappointed. Recently I just finished Culturing Life, How Cells Became Technologies by Hannah Landecker, a book dealing with the history of tissue culture. I was please that someone had written about a topic rarely mentioned by the current crop of science journalists. Strange, considering that Cell Biology is currently one of the most active scientific fields.

Back to the book.

What to say ... I admit that it was a worthwhile read. Landecker is an anthropologist and so much of the book is concerned with how the development of tissue culture radically changed the public's perception of "what is life". Before tissue culture, life was thought to be contained within the organism. But once individual cells were shown to live, multiply, and (in the case of muscle cells) rhythmically contract outside of the body, it was realized that the vital force (or as we like to say "life juice") was to be found inside of cells. In the book, we learn about the exploits of Alexi Carrel and John Enders, the origins of Hela cells, the generation of vaccines, and the development of hybridomas. In the process, Lanecker deconstructs how each of these events changed the way we viewed life ... less of a mystery and more as something manipulable (i.e. a source of biotechnology).

Unfortunately Landecker was extremely repetitious and a little too verbose for my taste. The book could have been condensed to about half of the length without sacrificing any of the main themes.

Now why hasn't anyone written about the origins of cell biology? Not biotechnology, but the exploits of those individuals who really wanted to figure out how cells crawl, divide and adapt to their environment. There was no mention in this book of George Palade, Shinya Inoue, Don Fawcett or good ole' Gunter. Landecker only makes a passing reference to Keith Porter, as in poor Keith found it hard to culture cells.

It was once believed that life (or life juice) had some strange property, the vital force, which magically gave rise to metabolism and all the other properties we ascribe to living organism. We are organic, and a rock, or a lawn chair, is inorganic. But what does that mean? With the advent of molecular biology, biochemistry, cell culture technology and microscopy the wonders of what happens within this life juice were starting to become known.

The discovery of the cell's architecture and its inner workings (work that is still going on today) is is a great story ... but one left untold.