Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

  • Hannah Landecker
Harvard University Press: 2007. 276 pp. $35, £22.95, €32.30 0674023285 | ISBN: 0-674-02328-5

In the flood of instant comment on cloning and stem cells, we need the longer and deeper views of cellular technologies that only history can provide. Historians of science have written much about the nineteenth-century advent of cell theory, but genes and molecules stole the limelight in the twentieth. We have a first-hand account of the history of somatic-cell genetics (The Cells of the Body by Henry Harris; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1995), a rich study of the adoption of the electron microscope (Nicolas Rasmussen's Picture Control; Stanford University Press, 1997), and a philosophically driven interpretation of the rise of cell biology (Discovering Cell Mechanisms by William Bechtel; Cambridge University Press, 2006). But there has been no extended history of tissue culture — the technique, which underpins most biomedicine today, for growing vertebrate cells in the laboratory as if they were independent microorganisms. With five chapters tackling key episodes up to 1970, Culturing Life by Hannah Landecker is a small book that does much to fill that large gap.

Life in the lab: the ability to store and culture human cells led to the creation of the HeLa cell line. Credit: FIREFLY PRODUCTIONS/CORBIS

Landecker adopts a powerful approach from recent science studies: she takes routine practices of observation and manipulation very seriously indeed. This might sound dull, and not everyone would choose to spend years poring over methods sections and manuals. What converts base method into golden insight is the anthropologist's eye for the strangeness, and thus the historical significance, of techniques that practitioners soon took for granted. Landecker identifies fascinating novelties in the autonomy, plasticity and time relations of cultured cells. She shows how, long before Dolly was born, such mundane technologies as flasks, tubes, nutrient media, freezers and culture collections created radically new and challenging forms of life.

Tissue culture was pioneered in the early twentieth century by scientists frustrated with 'fix, slice and stain' histology and its obligatory detour via the cadaver. To solve difficult problems — the process of nerve outgrowth and the origin of the heartbeat — they learned from bacteriology how to culture living cells outside the body and so see them more directly. Observation was still highly mediated. Landecker reveals how time-lapse microcinematography made once-static entities move and change.

The drive to manipulate cells in vitro was about distinguishing inherent limits from technical obstacles that could be overcome. Yes, cells could divide, it was soon shown, but for how long? Between the world wars, the French-American surgeon Alexis Carrel sensationally claimed immortality. Wide audiences were told that, with enough food, his culture of chick embryo cells would grow larger than the Sun. He was believed, Landecker suggests, because his claim fit with a prevalent ideal of biological engineering. It would be interesting to go further and explore how, in the era of testicular transplants to restore the failing powers of rich old men, cellular immortality was bound up with the whole-organism biology of death, ageing and rejuvenation.

Carrel was plausible because experiments were restricted to a few laboratories with their own distinctive cultures, in every sense. After the Second World War, the campaign to mass-produce polio vaccine led to tissue culture being practised on a far larger scale and applied to the previously recalcitrant human cells. Techniques and reagents were standardized, and so, like other model organisms, were the cells. Freezing and clonal cultures promoted the distribution of established lines and liberated cells and researchers from the constraints of space and time. Life could now be started, stopped, stored, split and its different stages juxtaposed. With the finding that normal somatic cells can divide only a fixed number of times, Carrel's claim of cellular immortality was rejected, but some cells and some people still achieved immortality of a kind.

Landecker interprets the various stories about Henrietta Lacks — a black American who died of cervical cancer not knowing that her biopsy had been turned into the permanent HeLa cell line — as attempts to negotiate the paradoxes of personal identity in the biomedical age. Optimism in the 1950s about having a laboratory afterlife of service to science gave way in the late 1960s and 1970s to racially charged fears of contamination with these by then ubiquitous cells; now, bioethical tales of overdue recognition are dominant. Landecker brings out the Lacks stories' obsession with 'what she would weigh today' — the unsettling phenomenon that more living, reproducing matter has been generated from a body than it ever contained.

Lay readers will appreciate the effort that kept Landecker's scholarly and original book short and accessible. There is inevitably more for specialist historians to do. The epilogue, which interprets the cloning of adult mammals as dependent on freezing and synchronizing cells, whets the appetite for a fuller discussion of cell-cycle work. It also raises the larger question of how the histories of somatic cells and of gametes have intertwined. Answering it, and more generally gaining a sense of the place and status of cell culture in biology, would have taken the book beyond journal and newspaper articles to the realm of textbooks and other synthetic works. But these are suggestions for research that happily can now build on Landecker's stimulating reconstruction of the cultures that gave us cultured cells.