Joanna Radin | Yale University (original) (raw)

Books by Joanna Radin

As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growin... more As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growing scarcity. At the same time, energy-intensive cooling technologies are widely used as a means of preservation. Technologies of cryopreservation support global food chains, seed and blood banks, reproductive medicine, and even the preservation of cores of glacial ice used to study climate change. In many cases, these practices of freezing life are an attempt to cheat death. Cryopreservation has contributed to the transformation of markets, regimes of governance and ethics, and the very relationship between life and death. In Cryopolitics, experts from anthropology, history of science, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies make clear the political and cultural consequences of extending life and deferring death by technoscientific means. The contributors examine how and why low temperatures have been harnessed to defer individual death through freezing whole human bodies; to defer nonhuman species death by freezing tissue from endangered animals; to defer racial death by preserving biospecimens from indigenous people; and to defer large-scale human death through pandemic preparedness. The cryopolitical lens, emphasizing the roles of temperature and time, provokes new and important questions about living and dying in the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Warwick Anderson, Michael Bravo, Jonny Bunning, Matthew Chrulew, Soraya de Chadarevian, Alexander Friedrich, Klaus Hoeyer, Frédéric Keck, Eben Kirksey, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Deborah Bird Rose, Kim TallBear, Charis Thompson, David Turnbull, Thom van Dooren, Rebecca J. H. Woods

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After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age ... more After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age led scientists to begin stockpiling and freezing hundreds of thousands of blood samples from indigenous communities around the world. These samples were believed to embody potentially invaluable biological information about genetic ancestry, evolution, microbes, and much more. Today, they persist in freezers as part of a global tissue-based infrastructure. In Life on Ice, Joanna Radin examines how and why these frozen blood samples shaped the practice known as biobanking.

The Cold War projects Radin tracks were meant to form an enduring total archive of indigenous blood before it was altered by the polluting forces of modernity. Freezing allowed that blood to act as a time-traveling resource. Radin explores the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice and shows how these preserved blood samples served as the building blocks for biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age. In an era of vigorous ethical, legal, and cultural debates about genetic privacy and identity, Life on Ice reveals the larger picture—how we got here and the promises and problems involved with finding new uses for cold human blood samples.

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Papers by Joanna Radin

This case considers the politics of reuse in the realm of " Big Data. " It focuses on the history... more This case considers the politics of reuse in the realm of " Big Data. " It focuses on the history of a particular collection of data, extracted and digitized from patient records made in the course of a longitudinal epidemiological study involving Indigenous members of the Gila River Indian Community Reservation in the American Southwest. The creation and circulation of the Pima Indian Diabetes Dataset (PIDD) demonstrates the value of medical and Indigenous histories to the study of Big Data. By adapting the concept of the " digital native " itself for reuse, I argue that the history of the PIDD reveals how data becomes alienated from persons even as it reproduces complex social realities of the circumstances of its origin. In doing so, this history highlights otherwise obscured matters of ethics and politics that are relevant to communities who identify as Indigenous as well as those who do not.

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The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research has played a critical but little-understo... more The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research has played a critical but little-understood role in the development of the social and biological sciences since 1941. For anthropology particularly, its programs have often helped redefine scholarly priorities and research trajectories. Its grants to doctoral students have functioned as an important early sign of scholarly legitimacy, a mark of belonging to the profession. The foundation's history also reflects general transformations in scientific patronage as new landscapes of federal, military, and private funding re-configured opportunities in the social sciences. In this account we track the evolution of the foundation in tandem with the evolution of anthropology during a period of dramatic change after 1941, looking at the Second World War context from which the foundation emerged and the ideas and experiences of those who played a key role in this history. We examine the long-term influence of a philanthropic foundation on the postwar emergence of an internationally oriented anthropology from a tiny, almost clubby discipline with a few key institutions and leaders to a major academic and scientific enterprise with sometimes revolutionary ideas about evolution, human biology, race, culture, power, gender, and social order.

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Abstract 'Nanotechnology'is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, ... more Abstract 'Nanotechnology'is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, determining what nanotechnology means, whose research counts as nanotechnology, and who gets to speak on behalf of nanotechnology is a highly political process involving constant negotiation with significant implications for funding, legislation, and citizen support. In this paper, we deconstruct a high-profile moment of controversy about nanotechnology's possibilities: a debate between K.

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Blood samples collected from members of indigenous communities in the mid-20th century by scienti... more Blood samples collected from members of
indigenous communities in the mid-20th century by
scientists interested in human variation remain
frozen today in institutional repositories around the
world. This article focuses on two such
collections—one established and maintained in the
United States and the other in Australia. Through
historical and ethnographic analysis, we show how
scientific knowledge about the human species and
ethical knowledge about human experimentation are
coproduced differently in each national context over
time. Through a series of vignettes, we trace the
attempts of scientists and indigenous people to
assemble and reassemble blood samples, ethical
regimes, human biological knowledge, and
personhood. In including ourselves—a U.S.
historian of science and an Australian
anthropologist—in the narrative, we show how
humanistic and social scientific analysis contributes
to ongoing efforts to maintain indigenous samples.

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By the early 1980s, many life scientists had begun to maintain small collections of cryopreserved... more By the early 1980s, many life scientists had begun to maintain small collections of cryopreserved
tissues for their own specific research purposes. It became apparent that these materials could be
successfully reused as new techniques and research questions emerged. This realization led several
American leaders in the field of systematic taxonomy (the science of biological classification) and
conservation genetics to argue for the need to take stock of and coordinate these heterogeneous
collections. Their strategy, which they called ‘planned hindsight,’ was meant to organize the
present in a way that appeared to anticipate the needs of future scientists. In this paper I examine
how the seemingly paradoxical strategy of ‘planned hindsight’ has functioned as a strategy for
choreographing life, time, and value at two centralized biospecimen collections: The Frozen Zoo in
Escondido, CA, USA, and the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City. I conclude that, in practice, ‘planned hindsight’ not only contributes to the
endurance of frozen tissues but also preserves widely divergent speculative visions of the many
different individuals involved with their creation, maintenance, and re-use.

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In the decades after World War II, the World Health Organization (WHO) played an important role i... more In the decades after World War II, the World Health Organization (WHO) played an important role in managing the process of stabilizing collections of variable blood samples as a fundamentally unstable, protean, and unfolding biomedical resource. In this system, known and as yet unknown constituents of blood were positioned as relevant to the work of multiple constituencies including human population geneticists, physical anthropologists, and immunologists. To facilitate serving these and other constitu- encies, it was crucial to standardize practices of collecting and preserving samples of blood from globally distributed human populations. The WHO achieved this by linking its administrative infra- structuredcomprised of expert advisory groups and technical reportsdto key laboratories, which served as sites for demonstrating and also for disseminating standards for working with variable blood samples. The practices that were articulated in making blood samples into a flexible resource contributes to emerging histories of global health that highlight the centrality of new institutions, like the WHO, new forms of expertise, like population genetics and serological epidemiology, and new kinds of research materials, like frozen blood.

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Anthropological collectors have long engaged in “salvage”—the attempt to metaphorically freeze th... more Anthropological collectors have long engaged in “salvage”—the attempt to metaphorically freeze those artifacts, traditions, and languages in danger of disappearing. Beginning in the 1960s, in an effort to establish global baselines of biological variation, biological anthropologists and human geneticists emphasized the importance of salvaging blood samples from Indigenous peoples whose survival they considered to be endangered by the corrosive forces of modernity. This paper focuses on the collection practices of Jonathan Friedlaender, who was a Ph.D. student in biological anthropology at Harvard when he took his first blood samples in 1966. Eventually, Friedlaender began to salvage materials from his own career, assembling an archive that would ultimately be deposited at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The archive would become part of a “collection of anthropologists,” out of which current and future historians might seek to make sense of the collections they made of other people.

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Before the rise of DNA sequence analysis or the controversies over the Human Genome Diversity Pro... more Before the rise of DNA sequence analysis or the controversies over the Human Genome Diversity Project, there was the International Biological Program, which ran from 1964 to 1974. The Human Adaptability arm of the International Biological Program featured a complex encounter between human geneticists and biological anthropologists. These scientists were especially interested in what could be learned from the bodies of people they referred to as both primitive and in danger of going extinct. In this article, I address how new access to technologies of cold storage, which would allow blood to be transported from the field to the lab and be stored for subsequent reanalysis, gave shape to this episode in Cold War human biology and has ramified into our genomic age. This case study highlights the importance of cryopreservation to projects of genetic salvage as well as to the life sciences, more generally. I argue that ‘latency’, a technical term initially used by cryobiologists to describe life in a state of suspended animation, can be extended as a concept for science studies scholars interested in technoscientific efforts to manage the future.

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Biological samples collected from indigenous communities from the mid-20th century for scientific... more Biological samples collected from indigenous communities from the mid-20th century for scientific study and preserved in freezers of the Global North have been at the center of a number of controversies. This essay explores why the problem of indigenous biospecimens has returned to critical attention frequently over the past two decades, and why and how Science and Technology Studies should attend to this problem. We propose that mutation – the variously advantageous, deleterious, or neutral mechanism of biological change – can provide a conceptual and analogical resource for reckoning with unexpected problems created by the persistence of frozen indigenous biospecimens. Mutations transcend dichotomies of premodern/modern, pro-science/anti-science, and north/south, inviting us to focus on entanglements and interdependencies. Freezing biospecimens induces mutations in indigenous populations, in the scientists who collected and stored such specimens, and in the specimens themselves. The jumbling of timescales introduced by practices of freezing generates new ethical problems: problems that become ever more acute as the supposed immortality of frozen samples meets the mortality of the scientists who maintain them. More broadly, we propose that an ‘abductive’ approach to Science and Technology Studies theories of co-production can direct attention to the work of temporality in the ongoing alignment of social and technical orders. Attending to the unfolding and mutating vital legacies of indigenous body parts, collected in one time and place and reused in others, reveals the enduring colonial dimensions of scientific practice in our global age and demonstrates new openings for ethical action. Finally, we outline the articles in this special issue and their respective ‘mutations’ to postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, a field that, like genome science, is racked with ethical and temporal dilemmas of reckoning for the past in the present.

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In this interview, human biologist Noel Cameron reflects on his work on child growth and developm... more In this interview, human biologist Noel Cameron reflects on his work on child growth and development in post-apartheid South Africa. The conversation focuses in particular on Cameron’s involvement with a cohort study called Birth to Twenty, which sought to determine the health impacts of apartheid on black children born in the year Nelson Mandela became president. Cameron considers the extent to which human population biology can contribute to the creation of new and potentially improved health realities for marginalized communities in the Global South.

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Review of Angela Creager's *Life Atomic* (Chicago 2013)

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Indigenous genomics and race by Joanna Radin

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Genomics and Indigenous people by Joanna Radin

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In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of... more In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of purposes. This article considers the broader implications of scientific freezing for time and life by drawing on interviews with scientists associated with a large collection of samples collected from Indigenous Australians in the 1960s. We first review some key critiques of cryopreservation posed by Indigenous scholars and by science and technology studies. We then propose " cryopolitics " as a concept to express the various political, ethical and temporal conundrums presented by the practice of freezing. We frame cryopolitics as a mode of Michel Foucault's biopolitics. If biopolitical assemblages make live and let die, cryopolitical ones reveal the dramatic consequences of mundane efforts to make live and not let die. In our case study, we argue that frozen blood vacillates between two cryopolitical states, " latent life " and " incomplete death ". Samples seen as latent life contain infinite potential and cannot be destroyed; samples understood as incomplete death demand destruction.

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Review of Angela Creager's *Life Atomic* (Chicago 2013)

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