Promising Potency: Bio-evangelical Networking in a Korean Stem Cell Enterprise

ABSTRACT

The notion of potency has been central in the shaping of the field of stem cell sciences. It not only offers a unique promissory quality to stem cells, but also an interpretive flexibility that can be exploited outside of the scientific research community. One Korea-based stem cell company actively exploits this aspect to amplify its promise of experimental stem cell therapy through an evangelical Christian network. The notion of stem cells' potency is at the crux of their discursive maneuvers that portray stem cells as a ‘gift that God has prepared in our body.' In their entrepreneurial endeavor to exploit business opportunities in evangelical Christian communities, the company strategically exploits the differences between two social worlds (that of the stem cell research community and of evangelical Christians), reflecting a process of ‘bio-evangelical networking'. The presumed religion/science divide, the grammar of miracles, the convention of religious witnessing, as well as faith in this-worldly blessings are actively sought and mobilized as a backdrop for the proliferation of stem cell promises in this religious niche. The notion of potency, once constructed, reformulated, and even fetishized in the scientific community’s effort to consolidate public support, thereby becomes a problem for the stem cell enterprise itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Promise
• potentiality
• citationality
• boundary objects/persons
• stem cells
• Korea

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank to Joseph Dumit, Ayo Wahlberg, Timothy Choy, Chris Kortright, Seo Young Park, Maya Costa-Pinto, and Euisol Jeong for reading and commenting on the manuscript at various stages. Editors of Science as Culture and anonymous reviewers have greatly helped me improve the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Noes on contributor

Jieun Lee is an assistant professor at the Institute of Humanities at Yonsei University. Her research focuses on how entities, practices, relations, and temporalities come to matter in relation to different modes of care. Her dissertation ‘The Promises of Biology and the Biology of Promises: An Ethnography of the Korean Stem Cell Enterprise’ concerned the intertwining of the ontology of stem cells as a future-oriented life form with the anticipatory mode of living in contemporary Korea. Before joining Yonsei University, she conducted an ethnographic study on dementia care as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

Notes

1 In stem-cell biology, ‘niche’ refers to the micro-environment where stem cells reside in constant interaction with it. Hence, I use the term ‘niche’ to highlight the specificity of interactions between an entity and its environmental context – here, between stem cells as a promissory thing and evangelical Christian churches as a community of faith.

2 The process of translation in the RNLBio case becomes rather conspicuous partly because it takes place against the backdrop of a putative divide between religion and science. While it has long been refuted in STS at various levels (Latour, 1993; Cho, 2014; Harrison, 2015; Josephson-Storm, 2017; Park and Cho, 2018; Thomas, 2018), this divide is constantly staged and performed in debates over scientific theories and emerging biotechnologies. Those debates are generative of certain scientific claims, as seen in the renewed value attributed to adult stem cells (Beltrame, 2014) and of a niche of Christian audiences who are interested in the resolution of the divide by means of Christian faith.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork was supported by an IDRF fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, and the writing stage was partly supported by the European Research Council VITAL Grant (No. 639275), ‘The Vitality of Disease – Quality of Life in the Making.’