Joanna Radin’s Life on Ice is an exciting addition to the historiography of modern biology. It is an informative and meditative study of what happens, culturally and ethically, when enthusiastic scientists draw and freeze blood from people in communities far from the metropole, who are not principally their medical patients. The exigencies and opportunities of the Cold War, concerns about encroaching pollution, the risk of further nuclear war and an influential ideology of global health surveillance, embodied inter alia in the World Health Organization (WHO), focused these endeavours. More recently, the activism of descendants of the donors, most of whom the scientists held to be ‘primitive’ and hence literally embodying a time before modernity, has led to moves to repatriate the frozen samples. Radin demonstrates that the unique repositories carry meanings not only for science, but for the people whose recent forebears provided tens of thousands of samples.

The book’s research material is the scientific and industrial literature, alongside archival documents, interviews with scientists and Radin’s personal observations in research labs in the USA, where blood samples collected decades before are still under study. Superficially, Life on Ice could resemble a conventional history of science, in illustrating the energies of ‘pioneers’ who drove the science and technology of ‘latent life’. Notable figures, such as the Belgian priest, Basile Luyet (the ‘father of cryobiology’), and his collaborator, Sister Pierre Gehenio, Yale’s John Rodman Paul and his work on ‘serological epidemiology’, Albert Damon, Carleton Gajdusek and James Neel, and their respective nautical ventures in the Amazon and Melanesia, advanced the physical infrastructure needed to preserve blood in the ‘cold chain’, as well as carrying out a project of salvage in the face of perceived ‘new temporal horizons of risk’. These individuals established new institutions and projects, founded journals and sourced extensive funding from institutions, such as the US military, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. Their work involved extracting samples that ‘could and did serve as resources for producing knowledge about race, infectious diseases, drug resistance, and inherited patterns of susceptibility and resistance’ (p 70). For readers seeking such stories of scientific and technological innovation, Life on Ice captivates the imagination with a wealth of research into tales of idealism and ambition.

Yet Life on Ice does much more. Radin frames the book within two contemporary ethical issues: the preface refers to the now well-known history of the HeLa stem cell line, derived from the cells of a cancer patient, African American Henrietta Lacks, without her knowledge; and the book ends with reflections on the sensibilities of contemporaries descended from people, the majority of them from indigenous cultures, who provided their blood with consent, but were unaware it would be stored for decades, did not approve its multiple uses and were not invested in the research ends to which it was, and continues to be, put. In some cases, too, these contemporaries identify the risk of racial profiling and challenges to land claims. Many of these people now want the samples returned for disposal in culturally sanctioned ways, seeing the storage of their forebears’ blood as an ‘incomplete form of death’ (p 167). Radin underscores the centrality of ethical reflection for the book, then, as ‘a response to the ghosts who haunt the archives of human biology’ (p xii). She does not aim to pass judgment on past or present scientists, so much as to tell their stories as one of many narratives about the different meanings of the frozen blood to different people. As she observes,

The book’s narrative framing and interpretative dynamism are informed by two key theorists: Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour. A Foucauldian historiographic approach emphasises the importance of analogous discourses in epistemic moments. This challenges the historian to identify the sources of the will to power, to ask what triggers change. Radin succeeds in identifying not only analogous activities (for example, post-war ‘prospecting’ for blood and searches in similar locales for oil and uranium), but points to motivation, as in the commercial value cattle breeders saw in knowledge gained about freezer technology from the biomedical field.

It is understandable that a Latourian theory that foregrounds the socially constitutive role of objects should now and then see objects as the active subjects in sentences. Radin writes: ‘In the twenty-first century, the freezer filled with biospecimens has emerged as a secular reliquary of latent life, an organic machine that produces biological and social innovations and, perhaps, even revelations through its abilities to preserve and reorient biological matter through time’ (p. 20). The idea of objects as actors is a fruitful way of talking about the capacities of the material, non-human world to refract and reshape social conditions. And one could perhaps argue that the life or even will attributed to the blood samples themselves by the donors’ descendants is proof of the agency of entities that are neither wholly animate nor inanimate. I still wonder, though, if the idea of an object’s agency as generative, for example, of social innovations, is not best left to serve as a device to create narrative that accounts for the unique cultural properties of material objects over time, perhaps stopping short of seeming to attribute active will to objects.

Life on Ice works on several fronts: it seeks to honour the ‘ghosts’ of the scientists whose labours led, for good or ill, to the accumulation of human tissue with potentially life-enhancing properties understood in the Western medical sense, while honouring the donors and their descendants, who in some cases want to see the blood repatriated. As a work of history, it is underpinned by a constant reflection on the fabric of historical studies as a discipline, which is temporality itself; and it demonstrates that good historical narratives can be derived from the work of thinkers whose work is sometimes thinly emulated, rather than deeply imbibed, as it is here.

In its rich documentation and theoretical sophistication, Life on Ice recalls the work of scholars such as Susan Merrill Squier, Sarah Franklin and the late Lily E. Kay, as well as evoking the anthropological view of scientific practice of Latour and Woolgar in Laboratory Life. If you are yet to be persuaded that some of the most exciting academic writing and theoretically informed historical thinking to emerge in the past thirty years is that concerned with the modern biological sciences, then you need look no further than Joanna Radin’s marvellous study of the history of frozen human blood.