Museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power and natures into an ordered whole for centuries, practices that have extended through to contemporary museums and their genetic collecting programs. Focusing on negotiations at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History between 2014 and 2016 I examine the integration of biotechnology into museums, exploring how life is being “archived” and for what imagined futures. Engaging the practices of making and organizing genomic collections, I examine a specimen’s ontological instability as it is (...) created and circulated. Learning to pin beetles, take genetic samples and extract DNA, I contrast these processes with a debate over whether a genetic sample could serve as a voucher specimen – a permanently preserved physical reference. I argue that the capacities and limitations of materials are a vital part of understanding how cryo-collections are enacted into being through different practices and are framed by an orienting ethic of preservation in biodiversity biobanking. (shrink)

The conservation-management of living beings is not only an issue in medicine. Based on a collaboration between a sociologist and a geneticist, this paper aims to document the banking practices in the sector of forest genetic resources, which raises specific questions. Drawing on a fieldwork investigation we further explore the various possibilities that biobanking in forestry conceal in terms of diversity of banked entities and banking practices. We argue that there is a consistent heterogeneity of entities and practices, which reflects (...) the distribution of the agency conferred to the involved entities. This heterogeneity is related to the awareness of uncertainties, which change the relative importance of the different modes of agency in biobanking. Beyond seldom recognition of the diversity of modes of agency, we conclude by claiming for the need of a consistent agency policy. (shrink)

This paper charts the history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s participation in the collection and long-term preservation of genetic diversity in crop plants from the 1940s through the 1970s. In the decades following the launch of its agricultural program in Mexico in 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation figured prominently in the creation of world collections of key economic crops. Through the efforts of its administrators and staff, the foundation subsequently parlayed this experience into a leadership role in international efforts to conserve so-called (...) plant genetic resources. Previous accounts of the Rockefeller Foundation’s interventions in international agricultural development have focused on the outcomes prioritized by foundation staff and administrators as they launched assistance programs and especially their characterization of the peoples and “problems” they encountered abroad. This paper highlights instead how foundation administrators and staff responded to a newly emergent international agricultural concern—the loss of crop genetic diversity. Charting the foundation’s responses to this concern, which developed only after agricultural modernization had begun and was understood to be produced by the successes of the foundation’s own agricultural assistance programs, allows for greater interrogation of how the foundation understood and projected its central position in international agricultural research activities by the 1970s. (shrink)

Biobanks connected to In Vitro Fertilization hospitals do not merely function as repositories for biologicals. They also contribute to the restoration of reproductive substances to distinct social environments. Cases of commercial gamete donation in India often entail the infringement of social boundaries, as the socioeconomic backgrounds of gamete donors and recipients diverge. In a highly stratified society, biobanks perform “relational work” in order to nevertheless enable the transaction of substances. The selection of donors, the secluded laboratory, medical protocols, bureaucratic procedures, (...) policies of anonymity, and rhetorical devices all reconfigure intimate material provided by specific donors into standardized products and relatable entities, thereby augmenting their economic value. The fact that relational work is not only performed on substances but also on suppliers and biodata sheets invites more general reflections about notions of “the living” or “the biological” in biobanks around the world. (shrink)

ArgumentWe examine the criteria used to validate the use of nonhuman organisms in North-American alcohol addiction research from the 1950s to the present day. We argue that this field, where the similarities between behaviors in humans and non-humans are particularly difficult to assess, has addressed questions of model validity by transforming the situatedness of non-human organisms into an experimental tool. We demonstrate that model validity does not hinge on the standardization of one type of organism in isolation, as often the (...) case with genetic model organisms. Rather, organisms are viewed as necessarily situated: they cannot be understood as a model for human behavior in isolation from their environmental conditions. Hence the environment itself is standardized as part of the modeling process; and model validity is assessed with reference to the environmental conditions under which organisms are studied. (shrink)