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.
- Log in to post comments
Thanks for reading my book. It isn't true that no one is writing about the history of cell biology, it's just that academic work in the history of biology probably doesn't cross your particular radar screen until Harvard UP markets it to you...I recommend William Bechtel's Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell Biology (Cambridge UP 2005). Or wait, maybe I don't recommend it. You have to be willing to read academic prose, which conforms to the norms of its own discipline, just as I have to be willing to read biologists' prose to find out the things that I want to know. I don't read work in academic biology because of its arresting prose style. Scientific writing has its conventions and modes of argument, and so does academic writing in the humanities and social sciences. If it's journalism you want, then you're going to have to wait for the journalists to catch up with the really interesting parts of twentieth century cell biology.
Wow. Is this really a comment from Hannah Landecker? Or is this someone posing as her? It seems like a bad idea for an academic to insult a reader/reviewer so publicly in such an elitist manner. This book was absolutely repetitive! I suppose repetition is a convention of some academic prose--the bad stuff, that is.
Shocked: I don't think Landecker was insulting, just pointing out that there is a lot of academic crap to wade through to get to the good stuff. Stop being so pretentious.
Landecker: I thought the insights in this book were flooring. I'm also working on themes of biotechnology in an anthropology program, and found many of your insights extremely useful.