Recent books, articles and plays about the ‘immortal’ HeLa cell line have prompted renewed interest in the history of tissue culture methods that were first employed in 1907 and became common experimental tools during the twentieth century. Many of these sources claim tissue cultures like HeLa had a “troubled past” because medical researchers did not seek informed consent before using tissues in research, contravening a long held desire for self-determination on the part of patients and the public. In this article, (...) I argue these claims are unfair and misleading. No professional guidelines required informed consent for tissue culture during the early and mid twentieth century, and popular sources expressed no concern at the widespread use of human tissues in research. When calls for informed consent did emerge in the 1970s and 1980s, moreover, they reflected specific political changes and often emanated from medical researchers themselves. I conclude by arguing that more balanced histories of tissue culture can make a decisive contribution to public debates today: by refuting a false dichotomy between science and its publics, and showing how ethical concepts such as informed consent arise from a historically specific engagement between professional and social groups. (shrink)

A common account sees the human genome sequencing project of the 1990s as a “natural outgrowth” of the deciphering of the double helical structure of DNA in the 1950s. The essay aims to complicate this neat narrative by putting the spotlight on the field of human chromosome research that flourished at the same time as molecular biology. It suggests that we need to consider both endeavors – the human cytogeneticists who collected samples and looked down the microscope and the molecular (...) biologists who probed the molecular mechanisms of gene function – to understand the rise of the human genome sequencing project and the current genomic practices. In particular, it proposes that what has often been described as the “molecularization” of cytogenetics could equally well be viewed as the turn of molecular biologists to human and medical genetics – a field long occupied by cytogeneticists. These considerations also have implications for the archives that are constructed for future historians and policy makers. (shrink)

In the last decade, Systems Biology has emerged as a conceptual and explanatory alternative to reductionist-based approaches in molecular biology. However, the foundations of this new discipline need to be fleshed out more carefully. In this paper, we claim that a relational ontology is a necessary tool to ground both the conceptual and explanatory aspects of Systems Biology. A relational ontology holds that relations are prior—both conceptually and explanatory—to entities, and that in the biological realm entities are defined primarily by (...) the context they are embedded within—and hence by the web of relations they are part of. (shrink)