Hannah Landecker’s book, ostensibly a history of cell culture, is in fact less and much more than that. Indeed, I view this book as a little gem. In what follows I will try to explain why.

Cell culture, i.e., ‘the practice of growing living cells outside the body in the laboratory’ (p. 1), provides the material on which the book is based, and the episodes discussed in the book range from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Why, then, would one argue that the book is not quite a history of cell culture? In her insightful introduction to the book, Landecker is quite clear on this issue: while she did, for instance, archival work and looked at a variety of information sources, most of the material she uses comes from published sources. Thus, historians of biomedical science of the kind chastised by Roger Cooter (2007) in his critique of mainstream social history of medicine—those who suffer from archival fetishism and engage in the uncritical use of notions such as ‘the social’—will certainly argue that the book does not provide a thick description of historical events, one that could only be obtained by performing detailed case studies of specific settings, institutions and so on. Landecker’s pre-emptive reply to this kind of criticism is cutting and right to the point: ‘I did not want to do a case study and then generalize; I wanted to do highly specific empirical work on the general’ (p. 23, italics in the original).

Why, then, is the book more than a (traditional) history of cell culture? The definition of this practice, which opens the book and that I quoted at the beginning of the previous paragraph, sets the tone. Landecker could have given a more ‘neutral’ definition, such as ‘the process by which cells are grown under controlled conditions’, but she has chosen to insist on the fact that cells are living entities, and that they go on living outside the body. In other words, her analysis of cell culture techniques is framed as a decentering narrative, one that argues that life is no longer the prerogative of intact human (or animal) bodies: techno-science has created the possibility for life to become independent from the organic forms within which it originally deployed itself. As readers know, the classical decentering narrative posits that the idea of mankind occupying a privileged position suffered three successive, fatal blows: Copernicus showed that the earth is not at the center of the universe, Darwin demonstrated that humans share a common lineage with animals and, finally, Freud argued that we are ruled by unconscious drives rather than by conscious thinking and choices. This narrative has been variously amended, for instance by social scientists eager to include Marx’s claim that history obeys laws beyond the control of individuals and, more recently, by followers of Derrida pointing to the layers of meaning that characterize the production of language and that lie beyond a given author’s intentions. Keeping all due proportion, Landecker adds a new spin to the decentering narrative, one that not only moves it to a new ground (‘life itself’) but also grounds it in material practices rather than cosmological considerations.

One could be tempted, at this stage, to entertain skeptical thoughts: ‘Oh, I see, she did a study of a rather mundane, lackluster biological technique, cell culture, to which she subsequently added a fashionable theoretical varnish in an attempt to increase its intellectual market value.’ This is decidedly not the case. Rather, the very structure and substantive economy of Landecker’s text exemplifies a deep commitment to the methodological and topical issues that sustain her argument and that derive, in large part, from Michel Foucault’s work. To avoid any misunderstanding, we should add that hers is not one of those texts that pay lip service to Foucault while mistaking him for a critic of social control, a social constructivist or even a postmodernist. As noted by French historian Paul Veyne (2008), in a recent attempt to set the record straight with regards to these (alas!) all too usual caricatures, the key to Foucault’s distinctive approach lies elsewhere, namely in his search for singularities. Landecker zeroes in precisely on this issue, for cell culture presents us with a puzzle: while this technique is at the core of several key developments in modern biology, biomedicine and, more recently, biotechnology, its pervasiveness has made it almost invisible or, more exactly, turned it into something that, as previously mentioned, is perceived as devoid of critical interest when compared to Dolly the sheep, the OncoMouse and other similar developments that have made the tabloids’ headlines and caught the attention of many social scientists. And yet, cell culture techniques have not only established the conditions of possibilities for those events, by transforming, in a conceptual and material sense, biology’s representations of and interventions in life processes; they were also received with awe and astonishment when the first experiments were carried out and reported in the press.

‘Shocking and unbelievable a century ago’ (p. 30), cell culture now looks familiar, a technical appendix to more important things. Landecker wants to recapture this singularity, the unique combination of elements that led to the surprising emergence of cell culture as a technological form of life and that established a new frame for present-day conceptions of the limits and opportunities of biology and biomedicine: ‘How can life, once seated firmly in the interior of the body, be located in the laboratory, extracted from and stripped of the individual forms of animals and persons?’ (p. 30). For the present reviewer, Landecker’s argument is a lesson in humility. Several years ago, Peter Keating and I co-authored a book on the emergence and circulation of a Nobel Prize-winning technology for the unlimited production of a very specific kind of reagent known as monoclonal antibodies (Cambrosio and Keating, Reference Cambrosio and Keating1995). This technology is predicated upon the use of cell culture methods (in particular, cell hybridization discussed by Landecker in Chapter 5 of her book). While we examined items such as the part played by tacit knowledge in achieving successful cell cultures, and the role of cell banks and more informal repositories for ensuring the circulation of the cells, our analysis took cell culture itself for granted. Obviously, our goal was different—a sociology of innovation rather than an archeology of modern technologies of life. Still, our analysis failed to perceive that the reconfiguration of practices and entities that led to the development of monoclonal antibodies was a recent episode in a non-linear sequence of other re-assemblages that, as Landecker puts it quoting Paul Rabinow (2000), created new modes of existence, making things work in a different manner.

Landecker’s analysis avoids all the major pitfalls that characterize mainstream socio-historical narratives of techno-scientific practices. She does not try to ‘explain away’ the emergence and development of cell culture by reducing it to the effects of a set of pre-existing social-economic or cultural causes: she captures the radical novelty of cell culture, noting that ‘making connections and discovering precursors does nothing to explain why cell culture appeared […] as something startlingly new, perhaps even unbelievable’ (p. 58). She also does not indulge in the all too common denunciation of reductionism, in the present case the reduction of human or animal organisms to their now autonomous constitutive parts: ‘The body was not replaced by the cell, nor reduced to it; rather, the technique substituted an artificial apparatus for the body and generated new views of the autonomy and activity of cellular life’ (p. 33). There is an important corollary to this statement: anti-reductionist statements are often framed by a decidedly anthropocentric view—how often have bioethicists and other self-appointed moral entrepreneurs complained that biotechnology changes (the innuendo is: negatively) what it is to be human? Landecker’s decentering narrative replaces this statement with the following one: ‘biotechnology changes what it is to be biological’ (pp. 223–224). Anthropocentric assumptions and negative innuendos are gone.

The redoubtable efficacy of Landecker’s argu ment comes from her choice of focusing on practices and material infrastructures. This, of course, is nothing new for all of us who have been working in science and technology studies, but Landecker excels in applying this principle: ‘sometimes the freezer matters more than the species, or the medium more than the type of cells cultured in it’ (p. 224). Indeed, thanks to freezers and related equipment, biological life can be suspended, interrupted and stored, in short can be profoundly transformed: ‘Keeping an eye on practice, protocols, methods, technique, touch, or infrastructure provide access to the ways in which work on some life (nematodes, insects, yeast) reshapes human life by introducing systematic change into biological existence’ (p. 234). In short, instead of jumping directly to the headlines and establishing direct connections between such developments, socio-economic macro-formations (‘late-capitalism’, ‘postcolonialism’) and altered cosmologies, the author engages in a rigorous analysis of the several inter mediaries, no matter how mundane, that make up the evolving dispositif of cell culture (on the notion of dispositif see Foucault, Reference Foucault1994a: 299). The result of such a painstaking attention to laboratory technologies is a profoundly innovative account of how life has become plastic.

Landecker’s narrative consists of several episodes, one each chapter, examining the evolving apparatus of cell culture and the re-specified understanding of biological life that is embedded in and emerges from those infrastructural transformations. The episodes are captured by the following themes: autonomy, immortality, mass reproduction and hybridity (an additional chapter entitled HeLa, to which I will return below, follows a different rationale). The chapter on autonomy sets the stage for everything that follows: it corresponds to the moment, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when an ‘autonomous, external and dynamic’ (p. 67) form of cellular life became a possibility. The chapter dissects Ross Harrison’s work on nerve cell cultures around 1910, showing how he combined extant techniques to create a novel object that ‘disturbed and exposed assumptions about the interiority, limited accessibility and invisibility of certain bodily processes—assumptions that were embedded even within the very techniques that he drew upon’ (p. 60). ‘Cells’, of course, were not new objects, but ‘autonomous cells’ were: their new properties—for instance, they could now be easily inspected—changed their ontology. Landecker’s narrative skillfully displays the several components and facets of the specific configuration (the singularity) that she has located. I say skillfully because it is no easy task; she cannot point to any fundamental new phenomenon, for the ‘new has been assembled out of nothing new’ (p. 60). Open to inspection are ‘only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between those relations’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault1994b: 277, own translation).

The following chapters examine further shifts in reciprocal relations. Chapter 2 focuses on Alexis Carrel’s work and explores claims about permanent life. Having been freed from the spatial boundaries of an organism, cells could now break time boundaries and become ‘immortal’. Landecker, far from confining herself to the analysis of rhetorical claims about immortality, consistently looks at what people did—their ‘techniques, glassware and laboratory equipment’ (p. 71)—and at what these activities did to other things and organisms. She examines the technologies that were used to produce permanent cell lines and the semantic shifts (‘permanent’, ‘immortal’) that accompanied the deployment of those technologies in the publication continuum that ranges from laboratory reports to the popular press. She equates the technologies for producing permanent cell lines to an ‘operationalized philosophy of biological time’ (p. 71). The final section of the chapter, entitled ‘How immortal cultures end’ exemplifies once again the author’s concern for the materialities in which rhetorical statements are embedded.

Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Mass reproduction’ with an obvious pun on the idea of mass production. The pun is not a superficial one, for it echoes Canguilhem’s argument about living matter setting its own norms. Having become autonomous and permanent, cell lines could now also be ‘mass produced’ and circulate through laboratories around the world, creating a new standardized, living form of laboratory infrastructure that, in turn and under various disguises (e. g. ‘virus factories’), would affect other forms of (quasi)living matter. This mass production, however, was made possible by the cell lines’ aptitude at mass-reproducing themselves. An additional step, yet another boundary crossing in the manipulation of cell lines, is described in Chapter 5 (‘Hybridity’). Scientists managed to produce chimerical cell lines resulting from the fusion of cells from different species, but this ‘conjunction of difference in the same biological space’ (p. 216) was not in any sense a necessary development: Landecker explores closely ‘the material conditions that made [this kind of experiment] both doable and unthinkable until its manifest success made it obvious to others’ (p. 201, emphasis added). Cell culture at this stage became closely linked to several major shifts in modern biology. Classical definitions of genetics as encompassing only heredity (the transmission of characters from one generation to the other) had to be broadened to include somatic cell genetics, i.e. ‘the transmission of states of expression from one cell to another’ (p. 209). Cells could now be ‘reprogrammed’, they acquired ‘plasticity’ and, as analyzed by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2000), they were turned into the technical setting where experiments now take place.

Attentive readers will have noticed that I jumped from Chapter 3 to 5, leaving out Chapter 4. This is not an oversight: Chapter 4, entitled ‘HeLa’ from the name of a cell line derived from the cancer cells of a black patient (Henrietta Lacks), is an odd chapter that does not quite fit the book’s narrative (the chapter’s title itself departs from the naming principle of the other chapters). The author had already discussed HeLa cells in Chapter 3, for they epitomize the ‘mass reproduction’ topic in a very peculiar dual sense: not only because they have become one of the most widespread cell lines, used in hundreds of laboratories across the world, but also because HeLa cells became so thriving that they contaminated other established cell lines, crossing political boundaries between Western and then communist Eastern countries and casting doubts on the actual outcomes of many experiments. So, why devote an additional, separate chapter to the HeLa cell line? Because the author uses it as a sort of intermezzo to engage in the kind of rhetorical analysis so typical of much of ‘cultural studies’, for instance by pointing at how HeLa cells have been represented in the press as ‘black cells’ contaminating ‘white cells’, as proliferating aliens, and so on. I am not claiming that this kind of argument is inaccurate: simply that it implies a switch to a different style of arguing, one that I find markedly less interesting. I am reminded of a concert of avant-garde jazz I attended many years ago in a German town: most of the audience came from a nearby US military base and pretty soon the public began jeering more and more loudly. The dismayed players (the Art Ensemble of Chicago) had no choice but to leave in the middle of a piece, but they soon came back, skillfully executed a traditional piece that dragged most of the now cheering audience to their feet, and, when the public asked for more, they just left for good with an ironic smile at the audience. In short: ‘If this is what you expect, I will show you that I can also easily do that too … but I have, in fact, more interesting things to tell’, as, for instance, the subsequent chapter on hybridity indeed does.

Which brings me to my last remark, a criticism that in fact amounts to praise: the author is too modest! In the book’s epilogue, Landecker returns to the work of other authors, mostly anthropologists, who have extensively commented on flashy contemporary events such as cloning, in vitro reproduction and so on, presenting her own work as a complement to such studies. She does indeed make a strong case for how and why her analysis challenges those narratives, but I would argue that, rather than a complement, her analysis is an alternative to those narratives. It turns them, so to speak, upside down. Hannah Landecker’s book, ultimately, is not only a brilliant analysis of a further step in the decentering of mankind, it is also a plea for and a convincing illustration of how such a decentering approach can be reflexive when applied, methodologically and substantively, to the analysis of biomedical techno-science.