Ontogeny, Ontology, and Phylogeny: Embryonic Life and Stem Cell Technologies

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Abstract
Configurations 11.1 (2003) 27-46 Biomedicine and biotechnology increasingly draw on marginal forms of living tissue as sources of therapeutic substances. More and more biomedical treatments rely on the collection, storage, transformation, and redistribution of tissues, the development of new kinds of "separable, exchangeable, and reincorporable body parts." 1 Some of these tissues—cancerous cells, placentas, DNA extracted from saliva—are considered marginal, or indeed dangerous, to the continuing life of the donor. As Robert Mitchell points out, these tissues are, generally speaking, collected and technically transformed with little social objection or controversy, precisely because of their status as waste. 2 As such, they are relatively open to forms of commodification and patent, and form the basis for an increasingly lucrative biotechnology industry: Other forms of therapeutic tissue are marginal in a slightly different sense: they can only be collected from bodies at the margins of life or death, bodies that are nearly dead or not-quite-alive. The most familiar of these is the donor cadaver. An ever-growing array of biotechnologies enable the vitalization of the legally dead body so that the cadaver can be utilized as a donor for organs, corneas, connective tissue, bone, heart valves, cells, and skin. 4 The definition of death as "brain death" has allowed the process of death to be instrumentalized in a number of productive ways in the United States and Europe, though in Japan this remains a contested medical category. The cadaver can be connected up to a complex system of ventilators, intravenous fluid pumps, biosensors, and thermosensor warmers that maintain vital function, so that the legally dead body can act as a source of organs and tissue for transplants, or for pharmaceutical or medical research. At the other margin, that of the recently alive, fetal tissue is utilized for the production of cell lines, vaccine development, tissue transplantation, and Human Genome research. 5 While tissues classified as waste can be collected with little public controversy, tissues collected from beings in marginal states of life or death are, generally speaking, in the context of the West, more subject to controversy and hence to contestation and governance. This is because entities like donor cadavers and fetuses have particularly problematic relationships to the human community and to the legal and ethical status of personhood. Conflicting notions of death—as a discrete point, or as a process—have produced different responses to transplant technology in Euro-America and Japan. 6 Even in the USA and Europe, where there is general acceptance of the notion of a punctual death, donor cadavers may be defined as "brain dead," while for grieving relatives and even casual onlookers they may appear alive, breathing and warm. They have only recently lost the qualities of personhood, and they may convey the possibility of recovery. [End Page 28] The margin of usable vitality created by the declaration of brain death creates an ambiguous status for the donor cadaver, where personhood seems not quite extinguished, leading to careful and complex procedures in the United States and Europe around the declaration of brain death and the securing of relatives' consent for the use of organs. 7 Recently, a new potential source of therapeutic tissues has been developed that confronts these questions of personhood with renewed force: stem cells. The term "stem cell" refers to any cell that can renew tissue in the body. The type most prominent in the media at present is "pluripotent" stem cells, undifferentiated cells that have the capacity to develop into almost all of the body's tissue types. It is thought that stem cells may be very useful in...

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