My Body, My Cells: Rhetoric and the Molecularization of the Human

ABSTRACT

In September 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration held a public hearing inviting comments on the regulation of human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products. This essay uses Nikolas Rose’s concept of molecularization to show the rhetorical conflicts that emerged between lay public arguments and biomedical experts’ claims about the limits of personal autonomy, ownership, and the definition of cells and tissues as products. By analyzing how public actors negotiate the regulation of human tissues, I argue that a rhetorical account of molecularization shows how and for whom bodies are commodified and physically distributed. Through this rhetorical account of molecularization, I move between the molecular level of the body (the micro) and the situatedness of human bodies (the macro) to rethink the ways bodies are defined, even at the level of the cell.

KEYWORDS:

• Body
• medicine
• ownership
• public hearing

Acknowledgments

I thank Christa Olson, Jenell Johnson, Meg Marquardt, Stephanie Larson, Brandee Easter, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Notes

¹ Examples of the kinds of cells and tissues of concern at the public hearing are bone, skin, corneas, ligaments, tendons, heart valves, some stem cells, semen, and others (and do not include vascularized human organ transplants like kidneys or hearts).

² Waldby and Mitchell describe this case in detail in chapter 3, “The Laws of Mo(o)re.”

³ Although these testimonies are public, I’ve chosen to use pseudonyms to add a measure of privacy when speakers are disclosing their personal health experiences.

⁴ When I say holistic here, I mean that cells or tissues are considered in their individualized, embodied context— that they were extracted from a donor who considers their body to be autonomous, and that this person identifies these cells or tissues as part of their body (even when they’ve been extracted).

⁵ See also Disability Rhetoric by Dolmage; “‘Her Pronouns Wax and Wane’: Psychosocial Disability, Autobiography, and Counter-Diagnosis” by Price; and Authoring Autism by Yergeau.

⁶ I am certainly not the first person to argue that the “creation of commercial products from human tissues has raised questions of profit and property, consent and control” (Andrews and Nelkin 8).

⁷ John Lynch talks extensively about embryonic stem cells and definitional work in What are Stem Cells? Definitions at the Intersection of Science and Politics. While stem cells are central to the discussion and the 2016 FDA public hearing, the focus is almost exclusively on stem cells taken from adults. The focus of the hearing shifts arguments away from specific concerns about embryonic stem cell research and toward broader conversations about cells and tissues that are taken from adult bodies, often for the purpose of treating the donor. For a more in-depth analysis of stem-cell-specific discourse, see Lynch’s monograph.

⁸ While I don’t examine the online comments in this essay, a future longer version of this project will take these into account.

⁹ Interestingly, there is not the same kind of resistance to this kind of identification with bodily material when it relates to organ donation. The Internet is saturated with videos of parents listening to a transplanted heart to “hear their child’s heartbeat again.” At the same time, vials of donated blood are not strongly associated with individual identity in the same way. Identification with bodily material varies greatly.

¹⁰ An important rhetorical component of the interpretations of the FDA guidelines is the management of risk— both for patients’ personal risk and for researchers and companies willing to take risks in order to develop new methods of treatment. Rose discusses risk management in depth in The Politics of Life Itself, and risk is certainly part of molecularization and his interpretation of neoliberal biopolitics. While there is much more to say here, in this essay I’ve chosen to spend more time highlighting definitional work and interpretation as it relates to component body parts and their relationship to the holistic human body.

¹¹ Western biomedicine is predicated on a medical history in which Black bodies have been treated as resources to be mined for the benefit of white people. This history includes, but is certainly not limited to, chattel slavery, medical experimentation on enslaved people, and more contemporary examples like Henrietta Lacks. For further discussion about the rhetoric and history of racism in gynecology and in the Tuskegee syphilis study, see Jensen, “From Barren to Sterile: The Evolution of a Mixed Metaphor” and Reverby, Examining Tuskegee.