Books by Catherine Waldby
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Temporal Oocytes: Fertility and Dee... more Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Temporal Oocytes: Fertility and Deep time
Chapter Three: Twentieth Century Oöcytes: Experiment and Experience
Chapter Four: Precious Oocytes: IVF and the Deficit Spiral
Chapter Five: Global Oocytes: Medical Tourism and the Transaction of Fertility
Chapter Six: Cold Chain Oöcytes: Vitrification and the Formation of Corporate Egg Banks
Chapter Seven: Private Oocytes: Personal Egg Banking and Generational Time
Chapter Eight: Innovation Oocytes: Therapeutic Cloning and Mitochondrial Donation
Chapter Nine: Conclusion
coauthors: Reuschling, Felicita, and Schultz, Susanne, Translated by Max Henninger
Tra il pullulare di discorsi sul capitalismo avanzato spicca l’assenza di analisi sui corpi. Sono... more Tra il pullulare di discorsi sul capitalismo avanzato spicca l’assenza di analisi sui corpi. Sono in tanti a focalizzarsi sul capitalismo cognitivo, trascurando il versante della produzione materiale sul quale si fonda l’economia della vita. Melinda Cooper e Catherine Waldby con questo libro colmano tale lacuna, mostrando come la bioeconomia si sia sviluppata a partire dalle capacità biologiche insite nei corpi stessi, e in particolare nei corpi delle donne.
Tra i più fiorenti settori del capitalismo ci sono infatti quelli trainati dalle scienze della vita. Medicina riproduttiva e medicina rigenerativa hanno aperto nuovi mercati globali, la cui fonte di plusvalore coincide direttamente con le potenzialità generative dei corpi delle donne, ma non solo. Aumenta la domanda di oociti, uteri, sperma, placenta, sangue del cordone ombelicale, cellule staminali, embrioni. Spuntano cliniche specializzate in fecondazione assistita e maternità sostitutiva e agenzie intermediarie pronte a fornire questi materiali in vivo, dagli Stati Uniti all’India, passando per l’Europa dell’Est e la Cina.
Ma chi sono i fornitori di questi materiali? Cooper e Waldby analizzano il lavoro riproduttivo e rigenerativo ai tempi del biopotere, focalizzandosi più che su questioni etiche e giuridiche sulle condizioni di vita di una manodopera «clinica» oggi globalmente diffusa, quando il capitalismo fa dell’appropriazione della vita una nuova frontiera di colonizzazione dietro la spinta di nuove tecnologie.
This book explores the proliferation of various forms of embodied, transactional work associated ... more This book explores the proliferation of various forms of embodied, transactional work associated with the lower echelons of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. It argues that activities such as surrogacy, tissue donation and clinical trials should be understood as a specific kind of post-Fordist service work, continuous with but also distinct from the various forms of embodied service labor that proliferate in today's postindustrial economies. Clinical labor is critical to the innovation strategies of the increasingly lucrative knowledge and service industries associated with pharmaceutical R&D and transnational surrogacy. Yet it is rarely if ever analyzed qua labor. Instead, it is considered as the exclusive purview of bioethical discourse, whose normative categories too often neglect the critical role of clinical labor within the political economy of the life sciences. This book provides a detailed account of the contemporary transnational geographies of clinical labor, mapping the contractual economies that link Indian and East European surrogates or egg donors with intending parents in North America and Western Europe, and the far-flung distribution of outsourced pharmaceutical research that recruits human research subjects in New Jersey, Ahmedabad and Shanghai for the worldwide registration of new prescription drugs. It also situates clinical labor within a longer historical perspective, showing how human subject research and reproductive labor emerged out of the confined institutional spaces of the Fordist household, prison and clinic of the mid-twentieth century to take on the more distributed, outsourced forms of independent contract work that dominate today. During this process, we argue, clinical labor also moved from a position of legal exceptionalism with regard to the dominant forms of unionized, insured labor that were established in the mid-twentieth century to become increasingly emblematic of the experience of labor in the present moment. The legal instruments of "volenti non fit injuria" and "specific performance" which once designated clinical labor as the exception to the Fordist social contract are now defining conditions of post-Fordist labor. In light of this paradoxical history, we draw on our analysis of clinical labour to cast a critical perspective on contemporary theories of labor, both neoliberal and Marxist.
Regenerative medicine is a field characterized by a global struggle for scientific, economic and ... more Regenerative medicine is a field characterized by a global struggle for scientific, economic and national advantage. Drawing on a wide range of interviews, primary and secondary sources, this book investigates the dynamic interactions between national regulatory formation and the global biopolitics of regenerative medicine and human embryonic stem cell science. Today governments are under intense competitive pressure to fund and develop attractive national environments for embryonic stem cell science, which promises both to improve the health and productivity of aging populations and to develop therapies for global health markets.
This study traces the development of internationally circulating arguments for and against stem cell research, and the various transnational bioethical spaces that have opened up to try and steer these arguments towards compromise and implementation. It considers the flow of embryonic and reproductive biological materials from south to north, and the ways these flows play into broader relations around global biopolitics. It investigates the place of transnational regulatory bodies like the EU and the UN in organizing and modifying the international and national debates around stem cell science, and ways in which national debates and policies influence each other. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of power that fuels the emergence of global regenerative medicine in the age of biotechnology.
As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues—such as skin, bones, heart... more As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues—such as skin, bones, heart valves, embryos, and stem cell lines—are stored and distributed for therapeutic and research purposes. The accelerating circulation of human tissue fragments raises profound social and ethical concerns related to who donates or sells bodily tissue, who receives it, and who profits—or does not—from the transaction. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell survey the rapidly expanding economies of exchange in human tissue, explaining the complex questions raised and suggesting likely developments. Comparing contemporary tissue economies in the United Kingdom and United States, they explore and complicate the distinction that has dominated practice and policy for several decades: the distinction between tissue as a gift to be exchanged in a transaction separate from the commercial market and tissue as a commodity to be traded for profit.
Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research—involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony—to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination—from HIV and other pathogens—on blood banks’ understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom’s Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues “hospital waste.” They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.
The Visible Human Project is a critical investigation of the spectacular, three-dimensional recor... more The Visible Human Project is a critical investigation of the spectacular, three-dimensional recordings of real human bodies - dissected, photographed and converted into visual data files - made by the US National Library of Medicine in Baltimore. Catherine Waldby uses new ideas from cultural studies, science studies and social studies of the computer to situate the Visible Human Project in its historical and cultural context, and to consider the meanings such an object has within a computerised culture.
In this fascinating and important book, Catherine Waldby explores how advances in medical technologies have changed the way we view and study the human body, and places the VHP within the history of technologies such as the X-ray and CT-scan, which allow us to view the human interior.
Bringing together medical conceptions of the human body with theories of visual culture from Foucault to Donna Haraway, Waldby links the VHP to a range of other biomedical projects, such as the Human Genome Project and cloning, which approach living bodies as data sources. She argues that the VHP is an example of the increasingly blurred distinction between `living' and 'dead' human bodies, as the bodies it uses are digitally preserved as a resource for living bodies, and considers how computer-based biotechnologies affect both medical and non-medical meanings of the body's life and death, its location and its limits.
Papers by Catherine Waldby
Journal of medical ethics, Jan 29, 2017
In 2016, the Office of the State Coroner of New South Wales released its report into the death of... more In 2016, the Office of the State Coroner of New South Wales released its report into the death of an Australian woman, Sheila Drysdale, who had died from complications of an autologous stem cell procedure at a Sydney clinic. In this report, we argue that Mrs Drysdale's death was avoidable, and it was the result of a pernicious global problem of an industry exploiting regulatory systems to sell unproven and unjustified interventions with stem cells.
Australian Journal of Social Issues, 1990
ABSTRACT
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 08164640701816223, May 9, 2008
En ocasiones se ha planteado un límite explicativo para la sociología en el terreno de lo biológi... more En ocasiones se ha planteado un límite explicativo para la sociología en el terreno de lo biológico. El cuerpo, en tanto resi-dencia más propia de la razón biológica, aparece entonces como un espacio exclui-do de lo social, como frontera última para las ciencias sociales. ...
The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science, 2009
The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science, 2009
Reframing Reproduction, 2014
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 09505439509526426, Sep 23, 2009
서울국제여성영화제10주년기념국제학술회의, Apr 1, 2008
Soc Stud Sci, 2001
At the very end of Lily Kay's meticulous history of classical genetics, she remarks that the... more At the very end of Lily Kay's meticulous history of classical genetics, she remarks that the Human Genome Project (HGP) - published, like her book, on the cusp of the new millennium - is not driven primarily by scientific imperatives. Rather, she claims, it is motivated by a broader ...
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 10350339109360337, Apr 29, 2009
This paper is concerned with the absence of the heterosexual male body from government policies a... more This paper is concerned with the absence of the heterosexual male body from government policies addressed to the prevention of AIDS/HIV transmission. It takes as its point of departure the Commonwealth Government Green Paper, ADDS: A Time to Care A Time ...
Uploads
Books by Catherine Waldby
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Temporal Oocytes: Fertility and Deep time
Chapter Three: Twentieth Century Oöcytes: Experiment and Experience
Chapter Four: Precious Oocytes: IVF and the Deficit Spiral
Chapter Five: Global Oocytes: Medical Tourism and the Transaction of Fertility
Chapter Six: Cold Chain Oöcytes: Vitrification and the Formation of Corporate Egg Banks
Chapter Seven: Private Oocytes: Personal Egg Banking and Generational Time
Chapter Eight: Innovation Oocytes: Therapeutic Cloning and Mitochondrial Donation
Chapter Nine: Conclusion
Tra i più fiorenti settori del capitalismo ci sono infatti quelli trainati dalle scienze della vita. Medicina riproduttiva e medicina rigenerativa hanno aperto nuovi mercati globali, la cui fonte di plusvalore coincide direttamente con le potenzialità generative dei corpi delle donne, ma non solo. Aumenta la domanda di oociti, uteri, sperma, placenta, sangue del cordone ombelicale, cellule staminali, embrioni. Spuntano cliniche specializzate in fecondazione assistita e maternità sostitutiva e agenzie intermediarie pronte a fornire questi materiali in vivo, dagli Stati Uniti all’India, passando per l’Europa dell’Est e la Cina.
Ma chi sono i fornitori di questi materiali? Cooper e Waldby analizzano il lavoro riproduttivo e rigenerativo ai tempi del biopotere, focalizzandosi più che su questioni etiche e giuridiche sulle condizioni di vita di una manodopera «clinica» oggi globalmente diffusa, quando il capitalismo fa dell’appropriazione della vita una nuova frontiera di colonizzazione dietro la spinta di nuove tecnologie.
This study traces the development of internationally circulating arguments for and against stem cell research, and the various transnational bioethical spaces that have opened up to try and steer these arguments towards compromise and implementation. It considers the flow of embryonic and reproductive biological materials from south to north, and the ways these flows play into broader relations around global biopolitics. It investigates the place of transnational regulatory bodies like the EU and the UN in organizing and modifying the international and national debates around stem cell science, and ways in which national debates and policies influence each other. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of power that fuels the emergence of global regenerative medicine in the age of biotechnology.
Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research—involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony—to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination—from HIV and other pathogens—on blood banks’ understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom’s Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues “hospital waste.” They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.
In this fascinating and important book, Catherine Waldby explores how advances in medical technologies have changed the way we view and study the human body, and places the VHP within the history of technologies such as the X-ray and CT-scan, which allow us to view the human interior.
Bringing together medical conceptions of the human body with theories of visual culture from Foucault to Donna Haraway, Waldby links the VHP to a range of other biomedical projects, such as the Human Genome Project and cloning, which approach living bodies as data sources. She argues that the VHP is an example of the increasingly blurred distinction between `living' and 'dead' human bodies, as the bodies it uses are digitally preserved as a resource for living bodies, and considers how computer-based biotechnologies affect both medical and non-medical meanings of the body's life and death, its location and its limits.
Papers by Catherine Waldby
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Temporal Oocytes: Fertility and Deep time
Chapter Three: Twentieth Century Oöcytes: Experiment and Experience
Chapter Four: Precious Oocytes: IVF and the Deficit Spiral
Chapter Five: Global Oocytes: Medical Tourism and the Transaction of Fertility
Chapter Six: Cold Chain Oöcytes: Vitrification and the Formation of Corporate Egg Banks
Chapter Seven: Private Oocytes: Personal Egg Banking and Generational Time
Chapter Eight: Innovation Oocytes: Therapeutic Cloning and Mitochondrial Donation
Chapter Nine: Conclusion
Tra i più fiorenti settori del capitalismo ci sono infatti quelli trainati dalle scienze della vita. Medicina riproduttiva e medicina rigenerativa hanno aperto nuovi mercati globali, la cui fonte di plusvalore coincide direttamente con le potenzialità generative dei corpi delle donne, ma non solo. Aumenta la domanda di oociti, uteri, sperma, placenta, sangue del cordone ombelicale, cellule staminali, embrioni. Spuntano cliniche specializzate in fecondazione assistita e maternità sostitutiva e agenzie intermediarie pronte a fornire questi materiali in vivo, dagli Stati Uniti all’India, passando per l’Europa dell’Est e la Cina.
Ma chi sono i fornitori di questi materiali? Cooper e Waldby analizzano il lavoro riproduttivo e rigenerativo ai tempi del biopotere, focalizzandosi più che su questioni etiche e giuridiche sulle condizioni di vita di una manodopera «clinica» oggi globalmente diffusa, quando il capitalismo fa dell’appropriazione della vita una nuova frontiera di colonizzazione dietro la spinta di nuove tecnologie.
This study traces the development of internationally circulating arguments for and against stem cell research, and the various transnational bioethical spaces that have opened up to try and steer these arguments towards compromise and implementation. It considers the flow of embryonic and reproductive biological materials from south to north, and the ways these flows play into broader relations around global biopolitics. It investigates the place of transnational regulatory bodies like the EU and the UN in organizing and modifying the international and national debates around stem cell science, and ways in which national debates and policies influence each other. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of power that fuels the emergence of global regenerative medicine in the age of biotechnology.
Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research—involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony—to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination—from HIV and other pathogens—on blood banks’ understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom’s Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues “hospital waste.” They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.
In this fascinating and important book, Catherine Waldby explores how advances in medical technologies have changed the way we view and study the human body, and places the VHP within the history of technologies such as the X-ray and CT-scan, which allow us to view the human interior.
Bringing together medical conceptions of the human body with theories of visual culture from Foucault to Donna Haraway, Waldby links the VHP to a range of other biomedical projects, such as the Human Genome Project and cloning, which approach living bodies as data sources. She argues that the VHP is an example of the increasingly blurred distinction between `living' and 'dead' human bodies, as the bodies it uses are digitally preserved as a resource for living bodies, and considers how computer-based biotechnologies affect both medical and non-medical meanings of the body's life and death, its location and its limits.
In this paper, I will present some fieldwork interviews with Australian and British women who have travelled overseas to purchase oocytes. Like the more notorious practice of international surrogacy, this kind of fertility tourism allows women and couples to circumvent regulations and obtain kinds of third party fertility services that may be illegal in their resident jurisdiction. I will focus in particular on the ways the women negotiate the issue of the donor’s legal and biological identity in the process of assisted family formation. I will discuss the imperative to ‘match’ the donor with the recipient, and hence to conceal the donation, and the emergence of an alternative ethic that publicly celebrates the trace of the Thai donor in the formation of a ‘rainbow’ family.
For the 2014 event held in October, three eminent obstetrics and gynaecology specialists discussed the topic: ‘Eggsurance’ – False hope or sensible fertility planning? The pros and cons of egg freezing for social reasons.
Professor Catherine Waldby set the scene about the social context of egg freezing, while Professor Martha Hickey and Dr Devora Lieberman debated the pros and cons of social egg freezing.
An audio recording of the evening is available here, together with the slide presentations of each speaker. We hope you enjoy listening to the presentations as much as we did.
Please note: Presenters at the event argued positions in a debate and any opinions expressed in the course of the evening were not necessarily representative of individual views.
https://soundcloud.com/varta-2/egg-freezing-and-the-negotiation-of-future-fertility
I nostri corpi in vivo e in vitro sono sempre più oggetto conteso tra ricerca biomedica, speculazioni finanziarie, trattati internazionali e normative nazionali. Le tecnologie della vita e dell’informazione hanno messo biologicamente la vita a lavoro. In Biolavoro globale Cooper e Waldby ricostruiscono la recente storia - segnata da linee di sesso, razza e classe - di questa messa a produzione della vita in sé. Le autrici si spingono oltre le analisi sul biocapitalismo cognitivo, oltre le prospettive moraliste bioetiche, mettendo corpi e materia al centro del discorso. Tra medicina riproduttiva e rigenerativa, mercati e banche bio-tech, indagano i modi in cui oociti, spermatozoi, cordoni ombelicali, placenta e embrioni sono diventati essenziali alla bioeconomia. Dalla fecondazione assistita alla maternità surrogata, passando per la clonazione e la ricerca sperimentale, le autrici spiegano chi vende e chi compra gameti e fluidi, chi si assume i rischi della sperimentazione farmaceutica e chi ne trae profitti. Per scoprire che le scienze bio-tech hanno aperto nuovi mercati globali, la cui fonte di plusvalore coincide direttamente con le potenzialità generative dei corpi delle donne, e non solo.
Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely considered as labor. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby take on that project, analyzing what they call "clinical labor," and asking what such an analysis might indicate about the organization of the bioeconomy and the broader organization of labor and value today. At the same time, they reflect on the challenges that clinical labor might pose to some of the founding assumptions of classical, Marxist, and post-Fordist theories of labor.
Cooper and Waldby examine the rapidly expanding transnational labor markets surrounding assisted reproduction and experimental drug trials. As they discuss, the pharmaceutical industry demands ever greater numbers of trial subjects to meet its innovation imperatives. The assisted reproductive market grows as more and more households look to third-party providers for fertility services and sectors of the biomedical industry seek reproductive tissues rich in stem cells. Cooper and Waldby trace the historical conditions, political economy, and contemporary trajectory of clinical labor. Ultimately, they reveal clinical labor to be emblematic of labor in twenty-first-century neoliberal economies.
for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University,
funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation. The main participants
of the project were one philosopher—Fredrik Svenaeus—
one historian—Ulla Ekström von Essen—and three ethnologists—
Martin Gunnarson, Susanne Lundin and Markus
Idvall—from Södertörn University and Lund University,
but we also benefitted from the help and advice of medical
researchers and physicians from the Karolinska Institutet
—Annika Tibell and C. G. Groth—and many other scholars
from Sweden and abroad, especially from the Baltic Sea Region.
You will find some of our collaborators represented
as authors in this volume, but most of them are not on the
list of participants, since they, for ethical reasons, have to
remain anonymous. The persons in question have helped
us with information about and access to practices which are
precarious objects of study—organ transplantation and organ
trade—subjects that are highly sensitive and often hard
to speak about for the people involved. We want to thank
the health care personnel, patients and other persons, who
have generously offered us their time without any other
return than to be able to support the growth of knowledge
and reflection in this field. We hope that this book and other
outcomes of our research project, such as articles in journals
and newspapers, and presentations at conferences and
meetings with the public, will help to build sound political
judgement and policies on organ, tissue and cell donation.
The rules and procedures of organ, tissue and cell transfer
are, indeed, vital, not only in the sense that they concern
who will live and who will die, but also in the sense that
the decisions in question determine how we are to view the
moral essence of human relationships as such. What duties
do we owe to each other regarding the giving away of what is
most intimately ours: our bodies and the organs, tissues and
cells they consist of? And what limits should we set regarding
procuring and transferring the “things” in question?