Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program

Social Studies of Science
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DOI: 10.1177/0306312713476131
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Latent life: Concepts
and practices of human
tissue preservation in the
International Biological
Program
Joanna Radin
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Abstract
Before the rise of DNA sequence analysis or the controversies over the Human Genome
Diversity Project, there was the International Biological Program, which ran from 1964 to
1974. The Human Adaptability arm of the International Biological Program featured a complex
encounter between human geneticists and biological anthropologists. These scientists were
especially interested in what could be learned from the bodies of people they referred to as both
primitive and in danger of going extinct. In this article, I address how new access to technologies
of cold storage, which would allow blood to be transported from the field to the lab and be
stored for subsequent reanalysis, gave shape to this episode in Cold War human biology and has
ramified into our genomic age. This case study highlights the importance of cryopreservation to
projects of genetic salvage as well as to the life sciences, more generally. I argue that ‘latency’, a
technical term initially used by cryobiologists to describe life in a state of suspended animation,
can be extended as a concept for science studies scholars interested in technoscientific efforts
to manage the future.
Keywords
biological anthropology, blood, cryopreservation, genetic salvage, indigenous body parts, latency,
population genetics, temporality
In the early 1990s, a group of geneticists, biological anthropologists, and evolutionary
biologists proposed a large-scale and international effort to sample and archive human
genetic variation. The Human Genome Diversity Project (hereafter referred to as the
Corresponding author:
Joanna Radin, Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Section of the History of Medicine,Yale
University, P.O. Box 208015, New Haven, CT 06520-8015.
Email: joanna.radin@yale.edu
476131SSS0010.1177/0306312713476131Social Studies of ScienceRadin
2013
Article
at SETON HALL UNIV on April 4, 2015
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2 Social Studies of Science 0(0)
Diversity Project) was intended to counteract the Human Genome Project’s lack of
attention to ‘genetic variation among the diverse populations that comprise our species,
or even between individuals within any given population’(Weiss et al., 1992: 80). While
there were many ways in which Diversity Project organizers might have endeavored to
attend to variation, they chose to emphasize the importance of collecting DNA from
isolated or indigenous populations. These communities were cast as uniquely valuable
portals to the human evolutionary past. They were also described as being in danger of
vanishing (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1991). Because Diversity Project organizers believed
themselves to be engaged in an effort to overcome a perceived Euro-American focus of
the Human Genome Project, they were surprised and chagrined to find that their plans
provoked intense debates about race, colonialism, and the ethics of human subject
research.
The controversies that rippled off the Diversity Project have inspired influential eth-
nographic and sociological research on race and genomics (Bliss, 2012; Fujimura et al.,
2008; Fullwiley, 2008; Koenig et al., 2008; Lock, 1997, 2001; M’Charek, 2005; Reardon,
2001, 2005; TallBear, 2007; Wailoo et al., 2012; Whitmarsh and Jones, 2010). Less com-
mon, however, has been attention to the historical conditions of possibility for the sal-
vage genetics of the Diversity Project. Natural historical and ethnological collectors have
long justified their efforts in terms of salvage: the attempt to metaphorically ‘freeze’
artifacts, traditions, and languages believed to be disappearing (Gruber, 1970). In the
Cold War era, justifications for salvage were rearticulated after innovative techniques
facilitated the freezing of blood. The metaphor of freezing then became a reality in prac-
tice. New access to cold storage technologies – including mechanical refrigeration, dry
ice, and liquid nitrogen – supported the accumulation of thousands of vials of blood in
the field and their long-term preservation in the lab.
My work explores human-oriented studies of the International Biological Program
(IBP), which ran from 1964 to 1974. The IBP was a large-scale effort to take stock of the
biosphere prior to the advent of the DNA-based study of human difference. Human
Adaptability was the only one of seven sections of the IBP to address the role of humans
as functional agents in the environment (Collins and Weiner, 1977; Little, 2012). Though
biologists from over 50 countries participated in the IBP – already well known to histo-
rians for its contributions to ecological science – American scientists were among the
best funded and most influential contributors to the initiative (Aronova et al., 2010; Blair,
1977; Kingsland, 1995; Kwa, 1987; Worthington, 1975). Amidst anxiety about the toxic
byproducts of chemistry and physics – first after a ‘Chemist’s War’ (1914–1918) and
then a ‘Physicist’s War’ (1939–1945) – emerged a pervasive hope that biology might
develop into kind of salvation science (Midgley, 1992; Waddington, 1972). In the minds
of IBP-affiliated scientists, such salvation would be predicated on the salvage of samples
of unpolluted nature – including so-called primitive humans – before it was too late.1
Long before the Diversity Project, then, members of these kinds of populations were
situated as objects of genetic salvage. The Human Adaptability arm of the IBP emerged
out of a complex relationship between anthropologists and population geneticists who
argued over the appropriate kinds of human subjects for studies of biological variation
and the appropriate practices with which to study them. I draw on technical reports and
archival records to excavate how concepts and practices of preservation converged to
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Radin 3
stabilize primitive peoples and their blood as subjects and objects of study. Certain spe-
cialized populations, I show, became fundamental to the project of genetic salvage and
human population genetics, more broadly, during and long after the IBP. I argue that
concepts of primitive peoples as living relics of human adaptability became aligned with
access to freezers as technologies for deferring the present.
Jenny Reardon’s (2001, 2005) analysis of the Diversity Project warrants specific
attention here, for she describes the circumstances that led members of indigenous com-
munities to become objects of genetic salvage projects several decades after the IBP. In
addition to diagnosing the failure of scientists to formulate a research agenda that
engaged with concerns about justice and governance in the postcolonial contexts of the
mid-1990s, when read in view of the history of earlier projects such as the IBP, Reardon’s
account of the Diversity Project also becomes a marker of the remarkable endurance of
ideas about indigenous peoples as endangered, closer to nature, and repositories of evo-
lutionary knowledge of value to Western science (see also Reardon and TallBear, 2012).
This is no coincidence. Many of those who orchestrated the Diversity Project were either
participants in the IBP or were trained by those who were (Santos, 2002). And many of
those who participated in the IBP had ties, either personal or intellectual, to even older
colonial projects (Fullwiley, 2011; Tilley, 2011).
My engagement with the postcolonial dimensions of genetic salvage during the IBP is
part of a recent effort to dig deeper into the material histories of human biology (De
Chadarevian, 2010; Landecker, 2007; Lindee and Santos, 2012; Sommer, 2007, 2008).
Warwick Anderson’s (2000, 2008, 2013) work on Cold War Kuru science breaks impor-
tant ground in its examination of the complex socio-technical matrix and norms of
exchange through which the parts of bodies marked as primitive were transformed into
valuable epistemic objects. Along with exchange, freezing became an equally important
component of the transformation of bits of bodies into epistemic resources. Attention to
the historical importance of freezing – in its figurative and literal senses – and to the sci-
ence of human population genetics contributes to efforts to excavate a deeper genealogy
of genetic salvage projects while also mutating existing theoretical frames for making
sense of genomics as a form of postcolonial technoscience (Kowal et al., 2013).2
The politics of practice relating to cloning, organ transplantation, tissue regeneration,
and artificial insemination – to name but a few dramatic biotechnological innovations –
have attracted a great deal of attention in science and technology studies (STS) (Clarke,
1987; Clarke and Fujimura, 1992; Franklin, 2007; Franklin and Lock, 2003; Sharp, 2006;
Thompson, 2005; Waldby and Mitchell, 2008). The history and role of cryopreservation
technologies, which are fundamental to each of these enterprises, have remained in the
background (with the notable exceptions of Parry, 2004a; Landecker, 2007). Highlighting
cryopreservation provides a practice-oriented way of reckoning with issues of temporal-
ity, ethics, and value.3 Attention to cryopreservation can also contribute new insights into
long-standing efforts to address the management of stored biomaterials across the life
sciences (Bowker, 2005; Fortun, 2008; Pálsson, 2007; Parry, 2004b; Tutton and Corrigan,
2004; Weir and Olick, 2004).
It is important to recognize that at the time of the IBP, the analysis of blood was
one among many techniques for studying patterns of human genetic diversity and was
not considered superior to those techniques. ‘Genetic salvage’ in a pre-genomic,
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pre-DNA-oriented age not only included the accumulation of blood, a relatively new
practice, but also continued older practices such as anthropometry, finger printing,
dentition studies, hair texture analysis, and somatotype (body shape) photos.4 At the
time IBP-affiliated scientists were collecting blood, they only had the ability to ana-
lyze a limited range of blood groups, antibodies, and abnormal hemoglobins.5 But
they collected in a state of anticipation: these scientists believed that innovations in
the still new field of molecular biology would reveal many more variations of existing
kinds of blood-based biomarkers. It was for this reason that the ability to freeze blood
came to be seen as especially important. If the subjects of their research – primitive
peoples – were in fact disappearing, the genetic secrets in their blood were in danger
of disappearing too. However, if such blood could be frozen as a research material, it
could be reanalyzed even after the communities themselves ceased to exist.
In his essay, ‘The Newer Physical Anthropology’, Stanley Garn (1962) drew attention
to the impact of recent technical innovation on the discipline. His title referenced a piv-
otal essay, ‘The New Physical Anthropologist’, by Sherwood Washburn (1951).
Washburn, himself a physical anthropologist, had emphasized that a shift in focus to
population, developed in collaboration with geneticists, would be instrumental for
sloughing off old associations with racial typology (Haraway, 1988; Washburn, 1951).
Garn saw new technologies as equally important for that transformation. He opined, ‘[t]
oday’s physical anthropology leans heavily upon today’s technology. [These new tech-
nologies] freedAmerican physical anthropology from its last-century technical and intel-
lectual fetters’ (Garn, 1962: 917). This included both emerging techniques for analyzing
blood and new access to technologies of cryopreservation.
In this article, I examine both the adoption of cryopreservation as a resource for IBP-
affiliated population geneticists and biological anthropologists and the justifications that
such scientists provided for salvaging the blood of primitive peoples. I suggest that the
freezing of primitive blood by IBP-affiliated scientists gained support through the circu-
lation of ideas about the latent, or as yet untapped, genetic knowledge of humans thought
to be portals to the past. These concepts were joined with future-oriented beliefs that the
ability to make primitive blood physiologically latent – to freeze it – would enable it to
become available for new uses even after the communities themselves had disappeared.
In this sense, latency was understood to be a property of primitive bodies that were ‘fro-
zen in time’ as well as a technological strategy for keeping bodies, or at least their parts,
in the past but available to scientists in the future.
Latency and mid-20th-century technologies of
cryopreservation
In mid-20th century, a Catholic priest and scientist named Basile Luyet used the term
‘latent life’ to define the liminal period in which a biological substance is neither fully
alive nor dead (Luyet and Gehenio, 1940). His experiments in freezing and thawing
various biological substances inaugurated the field of cryobiology, the science of
‘frosty life’ (Parkes, 1958). To cryobiologists, who came from the field of physics as
well as biology, latent life was understood to be an idealized state of suspended anima-
tion (Keilin, 1959).6
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Radin 5
Here, it is important to mark the close relationship between liminality and latency.
Victor Turner famously described liminality as an in-between state or threshold experi-
enced during rites of passage like marriage. Liminal subjects are ‘at once no longer clas-
sified and not yet classified’ and thus exist in a state of ‘pure possibility’ (Turner, 1987:
6–7). Subsequent commentators have pointed out that in the realm of biotechnology,
liminality also marks a space of ‘purgatorial anxiety’, in which pure possibility is miti-
gated by a sense of responsibility (Rabinow, 1999). In her book, Liminal Lives, Susan
Squier (2004) synthesized these depictions to argue for a concept of liminality that is
thoroughly biocultural. Drawing on fictional representations of late-20th-century bio-
technology to emphasize the emergent properties of human life, in her account, liminal
lives escape ‘the fixity and regulation of clock time into a realm between what is and
what may be’and ‘share with non-human life-forms the possibility of being harvested for
a use that transcends their own life’ (Squier, 2004: 4). The latent lives in my account of
genetic salvage share these properties. However, I have embraced ‘latency’ in order to
bring historical specificity to the ways in which cryopreservation has constrained and
enabled possibility and responsibility in the realm of biomedicine. Whereas Squier
(2004) is focused on the ‘epistemological power of fiction’ (p. 6), in this case study, I am
interested in how scientists wrote about the potential of this technological practice in
their scientific publications, how they put it into use, and how those uses both met and
confounded their expectations.7
On the one hand, the ability to freeze blood, to make it latent, allowed IBP researchers
to transport it from the field to the lab using normal ice, dry ice, and, sometimes, liquid
nitrogen. On the other hand, it also allowed them to imagine this blood as a resource for a
future in which primitive peoples no longer existed. This frozen blood, then, came to be
understood to be latent in another sense: it had the potential to yield new knowledge about
biological variation as novel analytical techniques were developed. Latency, then, like
Squier’s biocultural concept of liminality, refers to the extent to which blood was imag-
ined to contain information that would only be able to be accessed in time.8 These entwined
concepts and practices of latency create a space for examining freezers – so mundane as
to be virtually invisible (Landecker, 2005) – as part of the apparatus of postcolonial bio-
medical infrastructure (see, for example, Anderson, 2009; Hecht and Anderson, 2002).
The latent potential of blood collected and frozen during the IBP has been realized.
Hundreds of thousands of those blood samples persist at various degrees of frozenness in
mechanical and liquid nitrogen freezers around the world. Many of them are even cur-
rently being thawed to be mined for DNA. However, the scientists who collected this
blood did not imagine a future in which primitive peoples did not vanish. Nor did they
imagine that certain communities would come to demand that their preserved body parts
be removed from ongoing efforts to harvest previously latent forms of value. It is when
read against this history of the earliest efforts to freeze human blood as a resource for the
future that the concept of latency reveals a richness that goes beyond Father Luyet’s
technical terminology. Before proceeding with the case of genetic salvage during the
IBP, it is important to discuss some of the key features of cryopreservation that supported
the efforts to put primitive blood on ice.
Thus far, I have been using the terms ‘the freezer’and ‘cryopreservation’as shorthand
for a linked set of cold storage technologies. These technologies include mechanical
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refrigerators, freezers, and chemical compounds such as liquid nitrogen and liquid car-
bon dioxide (‘dry ice’). Much of what has been written about the history of these tech-
nologies is associated with the initial circumstances of their innovation for use in homes
and on the farm (Cowan, 1985; Freidburg, 2009; Hamilton, 2003; Horowitz, 2006;
Petrick, 2006). The present case demonstrates that when viewed as a set of biomedical
technologies ‘in use’ (Edgerton, 2007), cryopreservation reveals itself also to have been
constituted through the involvement of an extremely heterogeneous array of actors,
including human biologists, industrial and military biophysicists, cattle breeders, and the
bodily substance of soldiers, cows, and so-called primitive peoples.
Mechanical refrigeration was first established for household and industrial use and
widely adopted in the 1930s, displacing the ice box (Anderson, 1953). The demands of
World War II (WWII) led to the conscription of existing refrigeration companies – whose
primary market was the preservation of foodstuffs – and transformed them into providers
of freezing for a new set of scientific consumers (Thevenot, 1979). REVCO (stands for
‘Refrigerated Vending Company’), for example, whose name became synonymous with
low-temperature scientific preservation following the war, began in 1938 as a manufac-
turer of ice cream vending machines.9 During WWII, REVCO was commissioned by the
US government to make and sell its first −40°C low-temperature freezer for the aircraft
industry. REVCO continued to produce deep freezers, built-in refrigerators, and heat
pumps after the war. By 1965, it was only manufacturing scientific refrigeration equip-
ment, making it the supplier of choice for many biomedical researchers.
In the United States, the flourishing of mechanical refrigeration stimulated the market
for another technology: dry ice. The two technologies could be used together in the ‘cold
chain’ that connected farm to household and field to lab (Belasco and Horowitz, 2009).
The raw carbon dioxide required for the production of dry ice came from industrial
byproducts, particularly from fermentation and lime processing.10 Early cryobiological
experiments relied upon dry ice (usually introduced into a water bath) to produce tem-
peratures in the range of −70° to −80°C (Luyet and Gehenio, 1940). Because −80°C is
the approximate temperature of dry ice, it became a standard setting for commercial deep
freezers, including those manufactured by REVCO.
Wartime transportation of blood for transfusions given to soldiers stationed in the
Pacific formalized the ‘cold chain’ for shipping the perishable substance and its compo-
nents over long distances (Kendrick, 1989; Turner, 1970). A procedure for shipping
whole blood from California to the Pacific theater was developed whereby full bottles
were gathered in Oakland and packed with ice into insulated plywood boxes. They were
then air-shipped to Hawaii. From Hawaii, they could be sent on to Guam where they
would be re-iced and forwarded to islands in the South and Central Pacific for distribu-
tion. In less than 7 days, blood could reach soldiers stationed in the most remote theaters
of war (Starr, 1998). By the 1960s, IBP-affiliated scientists had begun employing those
channels in reverse: collecting blood – albeit in smaller amounts and not intended for
transfusion – and shipping it back to centers of calculation (Latour, 1987) in places like
Bethesda, London, and Sydney for long-term storage.
For a long time, the ability to store whole blood at temperatures low enough to extend
its viability for more than a few weeks was impeded by the fact that upon defrosting,
cellular components would very often be destroyed (Lederer, 2008). It was not until 1949
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Radin 7
that a team of British researchers made the accidental discovery that the addition of glyc-
erol to a cellular matrix would protect cells during freezing and thawing (Landecker,
2005, 2007; Parry, 2004a; Polge et al., 1949). This relatively low-tech intervention trans-
formed the potential for freezing tissues at ultra-low temperatures for future uses and, in
concert, transformed liquid nitrogen (which maintains tissue at a temperature of −196°C)
from a waste product in the distillation of liquid oxygen from air to an indispensable
resource in cryopreservation.
Along with these innovations, researchers became interested in improving mobile
cold storage. Dry ice was expensive and difficult to transport over long distances. The
cumbersome nature of mechanical refrigerators – even those that ran on kerosene and
were therefore portable – made their use problematic in the field. Liquid nitrogen prom-
ised more possibilities. Storing nitrogen in the liquid state was more efficient than main-
taining it as a gas (the volume reduction between gaseous nitrogen at atmospheric
pressure and the liquid state is about 700-fold). Not only could it provide extremely low
temperatures, but it was also inert and nonflammable, making it safe for the biologics it
was protecting and the field technicians handling it.
It would take several decades for human biologists to perfect the use of liquid nitro-
gen – in the 1960s, they relied primarily on dry ice and −20°C and −40°C freezers – but
its increased use in practices like artificial insemination, especially in the realm of cattle
breeding, captured their imagination. An advertisement for the Denver-based company
Cryenco expressed the power of the idea of latency with an image of a tilted hourglass
accompanied by the following text:
Suspended animation – stopping and starting the biological clock at will – has been one of
man’s age old dreams … including Jules Verne. Today, through Cryobiology, scientists are
slowing down and even theoretically stopping the chemistry of life processes.
The text went on to note, ‘Prolonging cell life is finding practical application in the use
of frozen bull semen for artificial insemination of cattle’.11 As I will show, techniques of
cryopreservation that were initially developed to reduce variation in agricultural stock
would come to be promoted as useful for taking stock of human biological variation.
This is reflected in the particular concepts and practices IBP-affiliated scientists imple-
mented for collecting blood from primitive peoples, to which I now turn.
Situating the primitive as stock worth taking … and
freezing
In the summer of 1962, James Neel – a key figure in the development of human genetics –
and a multidisciplinary team of researchers undertook a pilot study to investigate the feasi-
bility of conducting human population genetic studies on remote ‘Amerindian’populations.
Asignificant portion of their work involved collecting blood samples, which would be trans-
ported back to Michigan on dry ice, placed in mechanical freezers, and subsequently ana-
lyzed for a range of serologic markers. Neel led the team, which included cultural and
physical anthropologists and a linguist, into the Brazilian bush, where they attempted to
sample all members of one village of the Xavante tribe. That fall, having returned from the
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field both humbled and invigorated by the initial investigation, Neel gave a series of lectures
in which he began to promote his new research agenda.12 He revealed to his audience that an
IBP was on the horizon, asserting that ‘the study of primitive people will be an important
aspect of that program’.13
That November, a dozen scientists, including Neel, assembled at World Health
Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva for a weeklong meeting of the ‘Scientific
Group on Research in Population Genetics of Primitive Groups’. The scientists in atten-
dance had been invited on the basis of their experiences in working with population
isolates. This research ranged from assessing the impact of radiation on Japanese survi-
vors of the atomic bomb, to seeking the causes of Kuru, and to establishing a guide to
genetic polymorphisms in humans. Neel was elected as Chairman. This meeting yielded
a draft report (WHO, 1964), ‘The Scientific Group on Research on the Population
Genetics of Primitive Groups’ (hereafter referred to as the 1964 WHO Report), which
was intended as a set of practical guidelines for human population genetic research in
which ‘primitive’ groups were cast as ideal populations for study. As I will describe,
some scientists opposed the emphasis on such communities. Aware of this dissent, the
authors of the document took care to enumerate their justifications:
(a) Such groups present both in their size and level of economy the closest approxi-
mation one can find to the conditions under which man has lived for the greater
part of his existence. It is probable that much of the genetic endowment of mod-
ern man has been shaped by the action of natural selection and other evolutionary
processes at those cultural levels.
(b) The relatively small size of these populations and the simplicity of their ecology
render them more manageable for intensive studies than larger, more complex
groups with their special problems of sampling.
(c) The majority of these populations are threatened with imminent cultural disinte-
gration and in some instances loss of physical identity in the face of advancing
civilization. It is therefore urgent to study them fully and as soon as possible.
(d) The appropriate techniques for such intensive studies are now available.
This list provides a useful framework for examining the interplay of concepts and prac-
tices of preservation that took root in the planning of the IBP and its Human Adaptability
section. The 1964 WHO Report was circulated among the authors’colleagues.14 One of the
scientists it reached was a Harvard physical anthropologist and physician named Albert
Damon, who subsequently applied to be included in the IBP with a biomedical and anthro-
pological project to study eight primitive populations in the Western Pacific. When drafting
grant proposals for what became known as the ‘Harvard Solomon Islands Project’ (for the
IBP did not provide funding), Damon leaned heavily on Neel’s publications and on the
1964 WHO Report. I will now unpack the assumptions underlying each of these four
points – ‘approximation to early man and natural selection’, ‘manageability for intensive
studies’, ‘urgency’, and ‘appropriate techniques’ – points which encompasses practices of
cryopreservation. I place James Neel and Albert Damon’s efforts to implement this proto-
col alongside critiques from their contemporaries of the focus on primitive groups. My aim
is to show how concepts and practices of preservation operated in tandem to cast primitive
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Radin 9
peoples as embodiments of latent or asyet untapped genetic resources and therefore worthy
of storing in a state of latency or suspended animation.
Approximation to early man and natural selection
The ‘myth of the primitive’ in modern anthropology can be traced back, at least, to
Rousseau’s noble savage. In the 19th century, ideas about cultural evolution situated the
uncivilized primitives closer to nature than the ‘civilized’ anthropologists who studied
them (see, for example, Stocking, 1987). Pointing to mid-20th-century American eco-
logical anthropologists such as Julian Steward and Leslie White – who represented such
societies as existing in equilibrium with their habitats – anthropologist Adam Kuper
(2005) has argued that the ‘idea of primitive society is perhaps even more potent when
projected against an image of the future … in which we all inhabit a global village, set in
a wasteland’. This was exactly how IBP-affiliated scientists fearfully understood the
situation at mid-century. For example, in a widely cited article, Neel (1970) argued,
In the most sophisticated way we can summon, we must return to the awe, and even fear, in
which primitive man held the mysterious world about him, and like him we must strive to live
in harmony with the only biosphere that we can be certain will be occupied by our descendents.
(p. 821)
After researching the genetic effects of the atomic bomb on Japanese survivors with his
University of Michigan colleague William Schull, Neel set his sights on Amerindian
groups who were distinguished by their presumed lack of exposure to radiation and other
man-made environmental pollutants (Lindee, 2004). These supposedly geographically
isolated populations would provide baselines against which levels of radiation-induced
genetic aberration in less isolated populations could be measured. Neel also believed that
most genetic differences between human groups could be interpreted as the result of
natural selection and having adapted to a state of optimal equilibrium with the environ-
ment (Neel, 1958). According to the contributors to the 1959 volume Natural Selection
in Man, ‘many independent lines of enquiry have shown that human polymorphisms are
subject to natural selection. The time has now come for a systematic attack’(Roberts and
Harrison, 1959: 45–46).
Not everyone agreed. The emphasis on natural selection, linked to the study of evolu-
tionarily significant communities, provoked criticism from within the anthropological
community. In 1963, the International Committee for the IBP, of which Neel was also a
member, circulated a proposal to each of the national committees considering participa-
tion in the IBP for research on human adaptability. This proposal used language and
assumptions similar to those outlined in the 1964 WHO Report. Gabriel Lasker was one
of a dozen leading American anthropologists and physiologists asked to evaluate the
proposal. In his response, he termed ‘unsupported’ the claim that ‘There is now strong
evidence that the present world distribution of genetically determined characters is in the
main, the result of natural selection’.15
Lasker also stressed that the proposal’s animating emphasis on natural selection was not
only scientifically dubious but also that ‘the political implications of these assumptions is
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that people are adapted where they are and will be healthier (or fitter) if they stay where
they are. This may make the program unattractive in the have-not nations’.16 Here, Lasker
highlighted the deterministic implication that disappearing primitive groups could not be
expected to make the transition to modernity because they were biologically predisposed
– adapted via a long process of natural selection – to thrive in an environment that could no
longer support them. Nations, particularly those newly formed following the collapse of
colonial empires, would not warm to being told that they ‘had not’ either in wealth or
biology.
There was a final dimension to Lasker’s critique: he charged that the focus on primi-
tive groups was politically irresponsible. Returning to the tenuous evidence for the influ-
ence of natural selection, he concluded,
The facts are, of course, that the modes of natural selection of genetically determined characters
in man are still largely unknown and the main purpose of including this aspect in the program
is in the hope of discovering the explanation of the genetic polymorphisms. It would therefore
be unfortunate to phrase the problem [as] that the socially pressing questions (the ‘population
bomb’) are ignored while touchy questions (possible racial differences in adaptability to
particular circumstances) are highlighted.17
Lasker saw the proposed project as retrograde, particularly when there were many ways
in which human biology could potentially be harnessed to address pressing social prob-
lems. He feared that the focus on studying primitives belied desires to create a curiosity
cabinet of rare human genetic polymorphisms, reminiscent of a distasteful tradition in
physical anthropology with which he was all too familiar (Lasker, 1999). The legacy of
his own teacher, Harvard physical anthropologist E.A. Hooton, had been tarnished by
Hooton’s inability to move beyond racial taxonomy (Marks, 1995).18
Practitioners have long critiqued the way in which anthropology ‘others’its subjects by
placing them in the past (Fabian, 1983; Wolf, 1982). Yet the same phenomenon persisted
in the population genetics work of the Human Adaptability arm of the IBP. Those who
supported investigation of primitive groups believed that geographically isolated popula-
tions lived in different times and in different relationships to nature and were thus latent
archives of human evolutionary history. As summarized in the published description of
his contribution to IBP, Italian population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza stated that
It is thus hoped to obtain a picture of population structure of the Babinga Pygmies which may
serve as an example of a population living in conditions very nearly as primitive or at least very
little different from those that must have prevailed for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
(Collins and Weiner, 1977)
To Cavalli-Sforza, who would express similar ideas decades later in his leadership of the
Diversity Project, these peoples were figuratively frozen in time (for example, Cavalli-
Sforza et al., 1991).
The 1964 WHO Report encouraged scientists to save these primitive peoples or at
least pieces of them. Anxieties about the destruction of the perceived harmonious bal-
ance between primitive bodies and environments combined with new access to preserva-
tion, by means of cold storage, to keep these bodies in the past. Freezing the blood
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Radin 11
salvaged from these populations not only would facilitate its analysis in the short term,
which I will return to at the end of this section, but also would make it available as an
enduring scientific resource. In the words of Albert Damon, ‘[e]ach such group, a unique
baseline human adaptation, genetically and culturally, to an unpolluted environment, is a
priceless resource for understanding man’.19
Manageability of human island populations
The authors of the 1964 WHO Report recognized island populations as biogeographic
laboratories in which nature had run experiments on humans for thousands of years. The
primitive populations selected for study in the IBP were understood to be isolated in
terms of both culture and geography and therefore closer to nature than other kinds of
human communities. This extreme isolation supposedly made it easy to identify and
delimit the populations intended for study in addition to establishing them as portals into
the human past (Gannett and Griesemer, 2004; Lipphardt, 2010; Sommer, 2008). In an
essay on the design of human genetic surveys, published in one of the first methodologi-
cal guides for the IBP, Neel’s collaborator William Schull characterized primitive groups
as ‘generally isolated, often highly inbred, and usually small’ (Baker and Weiner, 1966).
Schull saw his task as a matter of refining the procedures outlined in the 1964 WHO
Report, which he explicitly referenced. Yet his description of the pitfalls to be avoided in
stabilizing primitives as ideal population isolates reveals the extent to which he and his
collaborators overlooked or ignored evidence that appeared to undermine their goals.
For example, Schull warned of the difficulty in actually defining and locating the
population intended for study. ‘Unfortunately’, he observed, ‘human populations can be
viewed as fixed only if the interval between the initiation and the completion of a census
is infinitesimally small’ (Baker and Weiner, 1966: 27). Furthermore, citing Neel’s work
with Xavante populations, already underway in the early 1960s, Schull noted that a polit-
ical schism had caused a village to be reduced in size by half within the span of just a few
years. In another example, efforts to study a migratory hunter-gatherer population in
India known as the Bihor were complicated by the fact that members of the group trav-
eled in bands that changed size depending upon the season (Baker and Weiner, 1966:
26–27). To Schull, these and other realities did not diminish such populations as ideal
subjects but were recast as potential challenges that researchers would have to overcome
in stabilizing them as such.
Newton Morton, a human geneticist who had also worked with Neel and Schull as
part of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, presented technical reasons for oppos-
ing the focus on so-called primitive populations. He felt that the intended objectives for
working with these groups provided jointly by the IBP and by the 1964 WHO Report
were unrealistic. In a sharply critical article, Morton (1968) acknowledged that ‘[i]n this
generation we have a precious opportunity to study basic problems in human biology in
rapidly-disappearing primitive populations’ but continued with the caution that
We must seize this opportunity vigorously and intelligently, but not with such uncritical
enthusiasm that the enormous cost and dubious yield of a ‘collect now, think later’ philosophy
will discredit our efforts. (p. 192)
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Morton proceeded to outline an alternative approach for estimating gene frequencies
based on sampling of an array of local populations, as opposed to isolated primitive
populations. While he agreed with the view that primitive populations were endangered,
Morton was displeased to find that anxiety (‘collect now, think later’), not epistemology,
was driving the agenda of IBP-affiliated researchers. However, neither his nor Lasker’s
concerns about the political repercussions of focusing on these communities altered the
trajectory or priorities of the research for making tissue collections under the auspices of
the IBP.
Urgency
Indeed, it was the urgency posed by a pervasive discourse of imminent environmental
destruction that had stimulated the effort to ‘take stock’ of the planet’s biological
resources (Worthington, 1975). According to IBP leaders, the window of opportunity
for studying the remaining pockets of nature unpolluted by culture and its toxic byprod-
ucts was quickly closing. Great emphasis was placed on the latent epistemic potential
of these relics. IBP leaders believed that as much as the future threatened to destroy
ways of life, it would also bring progress in science and technology that would allow
cryopreserved tissues to generate new and uniquely valuable insights. Joseph Weiner,
head of the Human Adaptability arm of IBP, wrote,
At this period of history, we are witnessing the progressive disappearance of many long-
established isolated and inbreeding communities. It is obviously a matter of some urgency to
utilize the special opportunities for genetic analysis provided by these communities before they
are broken up forever. This is one reason for a concerted and organized effort in the immediate
future as planned in the IBP. Reasons for putting special stress on the study of primitive groups
are manifold and are given in the [1964] WHO memorandum on this subject. (Baker and
Weiner, 1966: 17)
In an ecological program that sought to understand humans as functional agents in envi-
ronmental systems, such naturalized human communities would be particularly impor-
tant sites of collection.20
Physiologist Allan Brown viewed the rhetoric of urgency as troubling doublespeak.
Like Lasker, Brown had also been directly asked to respond to the International Proposal
for the IBP. And like Lasker, Brown felt that the insistence on the scientific importance
of looking at disappearing primitive groups was a way for biologists to avoid addressing
a major social problem – that of overpopulation – while securing funding to support a pet
agenda in human population genetics. In a letter to the US National Committee for IBP,
based at the National Academy of Sciences, Brown expressed his dismay:
I am troubled by the emphasis on urgency … I could just as well argue that, if a situation is
‘changing fast or even disappearing’, then it cannot affect the steadily growing pressure of
human population, so why waste the effort to study it?
Brown concluded, ‘I am not convinced that IBP will not be embarrassing to biology’.21
His criticism calls attention to the fact that the IBP-affiliated scientists who supported
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Radin 13
these studies of endangered human groups did not necessarily expect their research to
contribute to the survival of these communities. The 1964 WHO Report did state that
‘provision for medical, dental and related services should be made’, and they almost
always were for the duration of fieldwork.22
As a physician, Albert Damon soon recognized that providing medical services was
also a way to recruit participants. In a 1971 research proposal, he noted, ‘[t]herapy is
given where needed; this activity, an ethical necessity, greatly enhances cooperation
without interfering at all with the primary research objective’.23
In the 1960s, then, the primary goal of research on primitive isolates was to salvage
information that might benefit civilized communities’ understandings of themselves.
Like canaries in a coalmine or sentinel species, these groups living under extreme envi-
ronmental and, increasingly, cultural stress would reveal the extent to which Western
Civilization was in peril. A pamphlet entitled ‘Man’s Survival in a Changing World’,
produced to publicize the IBP in the United States, explained, ‘it can be truly said that
this is the last generation of scientists to have the opportunity to study primitive cultures,
and the first generation to have adequate tools in genetics, molecular biology and physi-
ology to do it’.24
Techniques
The sense of having ‘adequate tools in genetics, molecular biology and physiology’ con-
tributed to the appreciation of blood as a substance of value. In the early 1960s, freezing
blood was widely advocated as a means of making it available for reanalysis as new
techniques emerged. Even as Newton Morton claimed that mid-century population
genetics was not up to the task of exploiting the value of human blood, he recognized that
freezing was creating novel possibilities. In his view, the only redeeming feature of the
proposed plan for genetics research under IBP would be
improved methods and facilities for collection and long-term storage of biological materials …
Much of our research for several years after completing fieldwork in Brazil has depended on
frozen aliquots of serum, saliva, and glycerolized erythrocytes [cryopreserved red blood cells],
which we and others are still using for many studies. (Morton, 1968: 200)
The authors of the 1964 WHO Report asserted that ‘blood specimens collected in the
near future should ultimately be [reanalyzed]; thus it is important that they be preserved
in a biologically active form’. And while
further research is needed in order to discover the best methods of preservation, … in general,
red cells are best preserved either in liquid nitrogen or at -70°C. Valuable serum or plasma
should be frozen at the lowest available temperature.25
Over the next 8 years, Human Adaptability researchers began to investigate and field-
test methods for collecting, transporting, and storing blood and blood components using
both liquid nitrogen and mechanical refrigeration. One vivid example is provided in the
efforts ofAlbert Damon. Stymied by a lack of published information on cryopreservation
during the preparation for the Harvard Solomon Islands Project, he wrote directly to a
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range of cryobiological experts to figure out who could supply him with the equipment
and instruction to transport and freeze blood.26
While undergoing some rudimentary lab training in Madison, Wisconsin, Damon had
learned that local cattle breeders were among the first to adopt liquid nitrogen–based
cryopreservation techniques in their efforts to standardize herds. Rather than trucking
live bulls to different farms, it was now possible to ship just their semen. Damon was
perplexed by the system these agricultural experts had developed, but was eager to learn
how it worked and what tools he could purchase. He wrote to a representative ofAmerican
Breeders Service:
I understand that … the equipment you have developed seems to be just what we shall need for
the collection, storage, and transportation of our blood specimens and possibly specimens of
other tissues. We shall be studying some thousand subjects … One of our students …will be in
Madison … and I hope it will be possible for him to visit you and learn about prices, shipping
conditions and techniques for obtaining and transporting our specimens.27
In return, Damon received a copy of the March–April 1966 edition of the American
Breeders Service Newsletter. The main feature of the newsletter was a centerfold on
‘Precision Processing’ that demonstrated, through pictures, the steps taken to ensure
accurate, large-scale industrial processing of cryogenically frozen bull sperm. Visible in
many of the pictures were the kinds of equipment – the racks, ampoules, and freezers –
that Damon would need to support the collection of such a large number of samples.
Damon also wrote to A.P. Rinfret at the Linde Division of Union Carbide, in
Tonawanda, New York, which was the American Breeders Service’s main engineering
affiliate. After thanking Damon for his letter, Rinfret shared his knowledge of places to
acquire supplies of liquid nitrogen in the field (‘From World War II days I recall small
naval installations at Santa Cruz, Florida Island and Bougainville’), and he agreed to
send a local representative to discuss the specific needs of the project. Rinfret concluded
by stating,
Your undertaking appears of great fundamental interest. If any of our experience in the
cryogenic preservation of biological materials will enhance the prospects for success, don’t
hesitate to let me know.28
Rinfret was uninterested in what Damon was hoping to learn about human biological
diversity. He was interested to know what Damon might find out about transporting
samples intended for long-term preservation.
Several years later, in part due to his newly acquired expertise, Damon was invited
to participate in a second meeting of the working group that had produced the 1964
WHO Report. The panel had expanded from 12 to 18 scientists, all of whom were now
affiliated with the Human Adaptability arm of the IBP. Many of these new individuals,
like Damon, had been invited because they had begun to try out new methods for han-
dling and transporting blood intended for analysis and long-term cold storage. Neel was
again voted Chairman. This newly assembled group now called itself ‘The Working
Group on Research in Human Population Genetics’ (WHO, 1968). In the span of 6
years, ‘primitive groups’ had disappeared, but only from the title of the report. It is
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Radin 15
possible to conclude that the elision of the term ‘primitive groups’ represented a step in
their naturalization as the ideal groups upon which to conduct research on human popu-
lation genetics.
The 1968 WHO Report, which was also republished in a 1970 issue of Current
Anthropology, the leading journal in American anthropology, credited authors of the
1964 WHO Report with recognizing ‘the urgency for the study of the remaining primi-
tive populations of the world’and recommending ‘guidelines for the conduct of the inter-
disciplinary studies required’(WHO, 1968).29 While this version included the caveat that
‘the emphasis here on primitive groups by no means implies that other populations may
not be equally valuable, or even more valuable for studying certain genetic problems’,
the authors added still more reasons for focusing on primitive groups, including that
‘isolation, effective in keeping populations primitive, has also important epidemiological
consequences [while] other [reasons] depend upon the extreme ecological conditions in
which some of these groups live’ (WHO, 1968: 5).
The report produced in 1968 by this new WHO group fought to articulate instructions
for collection, transport, and long-term cold storage of blood in much greater detail than
had been provided in the original 1964 WHO Report. For example, in a section entitled
‘Methods using ordinary refrigeration’, it was noted that the main causes of deterioration
were not keeping the samples cold enough and keeping them too cold; freezing solid
resulting from the ‘erroneous use of solid carbon dioxide [dry ice] or storage in deep
freeze’ (WHO, 1968: 23). The authors also stressed that each glass vial should have a
serial number scratched on it with a diamond.
This is the nearest that can be devised to a disaster-proof identification system, the need for
which has repeatedly been shown when some, or even all, the specimens from an expedition
had been unidentifiable on arrival (e.g. owing to the labels having been washed off by melting
ice). (WHO, 1968: 24)
Emphasizing the extent to which the contingencies of this particular mode of cryopreser-
vation had consequences for what could and would practically be collected, they wrote,
Specimens should be packed in insulated containers. These may be thermos flasks, but
expanded polystyrene boxes insulate almost as well and are lighter and more convenient. Ice
should be enclosed in a bag of stout polyethylene and, if the journey has to be a long one,
provision made for its renewal (preferably substituting another ready-frozen container). Only
in quite exceptional cases is it justified to collect specimens more than one day’s travel from a
road head. (WHO, 1968: 23–24)
This recommendation, that only those populations that could be accessed without com-
promising the ability to keep their blood cold, is a powerful example of how certain
technologies of cryopreservation constrained, even as they enabled, the project of
genetic salvage. Several years later, Damon, Neel, and other human biologists would
be granted access to a National Science Foundation–funded ‘floating laboratory’called
the R/V Alpha Helix. The Alpha Helix had multiple onboard freezers, which facilitated
the collection of blood in especially hard-to-reach regions of Melanesia and the
Amazon.
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Aware of resources like the Alpha Helix, as well as innovations in the use of liquid
nitrogen, the authors of the 1968 WHO Report were optimistic that they would be able
to optimize the use of cryopreservation technologies, writing that
the experience of the last 10 years leads to the confident belief that, once such methods have
been perfected, it will be possible to store biological materials without appreciable deterioration
for periods of the order of fifty years … Thus, detection of all genetic markers will still be
possible many years after an expedition has collected the specimens. (WHO, 1968: 26)
The 1964 and 1968 WHO Reports, which were soon codified in methods guides
intended for IBP-affiliated scientists, became valuable resources for human biology in
general. Detailed sections on ‘Blood collection and subdivision’ as well as ‘Transport of
blood specimens’, which included information on working with both ‘ordinary’ refrig-
eration (a household freezer, which remained a common form of cryopreservation) and
liquid nitrogen, were published in an influential volume, Human Biology: A Guide to
Field Methods (Weiner and Lourie, 1969).30
To facilitate analysis, oftentimes following the protocol laid out in such manuals, a
single sample would be divided into several sterile vacutainers (a glass test tube with a
rubberized vacuum seal) and shipped in Thermos flasks, so that multiple laboratories in
different parts of the world could simultaneously subject the same specimen to different
tests. This was the case with samples collected by Damon, who had neither the training
nor the laboratory setup to conduct analysis of blood himself. It was not uncommon for
him (as well as his colleagues) to ship aliquots of the same specimen to labs in Sydney,
Australia; Atlanta, Georgia; Bethesda, Maryland; and Cleveland, Ohio, while also retain-
ing some in his own freezers.31
Sometimes the samples were returned to Damon, but in many more cases they colo-
nized the freezers at these multiple research sites. Some of the samples collected during
the IBP have been destroyed due to freezer failure or the closing of labs. Some have
fulfilled their potential, having been thawed so that they can be analyzed using novel
genomic techniques (Chan et al., 2006; Merriwether, 1999).And others have confounded
expectations for their future use, having been reclaimed by communities from which
they were collected (Couzin-Frankel, 2010).
Concluding thoughts
What is the significance of tracking the interplay of IBP-era concepts and practices of
preservation in terms of latency? The fact that the specimens that were accumulated dur-
ing the IBP remain bioavailable in freezers around the world, and are now being used for
purposes ranging from genetic genealogy to the detection of incidentally frozen environ-
mental toxins and microbial agents, makes it evident that figures like Neel and Damon
were prescient in imagining a future in which frozen blood would reveal itself to have
new and unexpected uses.32
In my account of genetic salvage during the IBP, freezers filled with primitive blood
became an emergent form of life (Fischer, 2003), expressive of an anticipatory world-
view characterized by a fixation on the management of bodies over time. More broadly,
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Radin 17
in its orientation toward the future, cryopreservation has come to support a politics of
temporality in which ‘our “presents” are necessarily understood as contingent upon an
ever-changing astral future that may or may not be known for certain, but still must be
acted on nonetheless’ (Adams et al., 2009: 247).
Crucially, IBP-affiliated scientists’ anxieties about a particular kind of future were
expressed through the kinds of humans on which they focused their energies and the
kinds of technologies they used to transform those humans into enduring subjects and
objects of knowledge. Repeated claims about the urgency of their stocktaking project
lent authority to the initiative. The effort to integrate bodies associated with the deep past
into a technoscientific system oriented toward a particular vision of the future is an
exceptional example of how
anticipation reconfigures the ‘lay of the land’ as sites that in colonial logics were mapped as
either primitive (past and out of time) or modern (present and in time) and turns them both into
productive ground for anticipatory interventions, each forecasting its own type of darker and/or
more hopeful futures. (Adams et al., 2009: 248)
Both hopeful and dark futures are coming to light as blood samples frozen during the
IBP are being thawed for uses other than those for which they were collected, and notions
of pollution, vulnerability, inequality, and endangerment that characterized the circum-
stances of their accumulation must now be reckoned with (Kowal, 2013). IBP-affiliated
scientists succeeded in structuring a way of doing population genetics predicated on
access to the blood of primitive peoples that has ramified into the present. They also were
accurate in predicting that it would become more difficult to collect such blood. However,
this was not because primitive peoples had vanished. Cold War–era scientists’ vision of
the future did not include a world in which the barriers to collecting such blood would
come from these peoples themselves, who would persist in ‘real’time outside the freezer.
The indigenous rights movement that was gaining authority around the time of the
Diversity Project gave way to a new set of postcolonial relations in which some such
communities have resisted being identified as ‘primitive’ and, in some cases, resisted
allowing their body parts to be frozen as enduring resources for science (Kowal et al.,
2013; Reardon and TallBear, 2012).
The point is not to condemn researchers who worked in the past but to understand how
attempts to induce and harness latency have given momentum to anticipatory regime that
animates our current genomic age.33 During the IBP, the primitive body was believed to
contain a latent or untapped archive of human evolution. Practices of freezing enabled bits
of that body to be made physiologically latent, frozen in a supposed state of suspended
animation. Tracking concepts and practices of preservation in terms of latency helps to
uncover a specific history of the future as seen from the vantage point of mid-20th-century
life science, which has shaped and constrained its practice in the 21st century.
This process of anticipation continues in the contemporary realm of genomic medi-
cine, which has come to depend upon access to vast preserved collections of human tis-
sue and DNA sequence data from all kinds of humans. It is often only many years after
bodily material is collected, if ever, that it reveals its biomedical potential. Francis
Collins, the Director of the US National Institutes of Health and former Director of the
US National Human Genome Research Institute during years of the Diversity Project,
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recently described the uncomfortable emotions that have time to emerge during this
indeterminate period as the ‘awkward interval’ (Kolata, 2012). It is awkward because it
encourages subjects and researchers to see value as located in life that is latent and in a
future that may never arrive. It is a deferral of the present that, over time, becomes a
future past. Nowhere is this awkward orientation toward what has yet to be discovered
expressed more boldly than in a 21st-century marketing campaign for REVCO freezers,
the tagline of which is ‘the future, inside’. When contemplating the horizons of biomedi-
cine, however, we should not lose sight of its histories, which are also inside the freezer,
latent and laden with life.
Acknowledgements
Susan Lindee, Emma Kowal,Amy Hinterberger, WarwickAnderson, Jenna Healey, Jenny Reardon,
Erica Dwyer, Sarah Richardson, Rene Almeling, Peter Collopy, Matthew Hersch, Mike Lynch, and
anonymous reviewers greatly helped me think through the arguments in this article at various
stages of its development. I owe special thanks to Veronika Lipphardt, Sandra Widmer, Susanne
Bauer, and participants in the ‘Historicizing Knowledge about Human Biological Diversity’ col-
loquium at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The same goes for members of the
Fall 2010 writing group at the Philadelphia Center for the History of Science (PACHS).
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. When I use the term ‘primitive’ in this article, it is as an actor’s category, reflecting the lan-
guage of International Biological Program (IBP)–affiliated scientists who located such popu-
lations in the past. By the time of the Diversity Project in the 1990s, certain older scientists’
use of the term ‘primitive’ would mark them as ethically and epistemologically retrograde.
2. In this sense, attention to collections of frozen blood raises questions relevant to considera-
tions of the ethical use of human remains and even nonbiological forms of cultural property
in museum and other scientific contexts (Kakaliouras, 2008). It also reinforces the claims of
those who call for a more serious engagement with collections and collecting in the 20th-
century life sciences (Strasser, 2011).
3. The imbrication of time, value, and ethics is central to the broader project from which this
article is derived (Radin, 2012).
4. Jonathan Friedlaender (1975) edited a book based on research begun during his involvement
with the IBP that called upon a range of field practices, including but not limited to those to do
with blood, to identify what he called ‘patterns of human variation’. See also the compendium
of articles that came out of the IBP-affiliated Harvard Solomon Islands Project (Friedlaender
1987).
5. Blood had been analyzed for genetic traits, such as the ABO groups, since the turn of the 20th
century (Marks, 1996; Schneider, 1996; Silverman, 2000). However, that blood was not col-
lected with the express intention that it be stockpiled for future use.
6. Cori Hayden (2003) has written about the biopolitical dimensions of suspended anima-
tion. My exploration of latency as it pertains to concepts and practices of freezing builds on
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Radin 19
Hayden’s analysis but is also representative of an initial effort to inaugurate a ‘cryopolitical’
project.
7. Michelle Murphy (2012) is thinking about latency in fascinating ways in her work on the
biosocial afterlife of environmental toxins. While I am hewing to a conservative interpreta-
tion of latency in this article, her ideas reinforce my belief in the broader analytic utility of
the term. In the realm of valuation, Klaus Hoyer (2009) has written about how time figures in
markets for old bone and prosthetic devices.
8. Indeed, in engineering, latency is defined as the measure of time delay in a system.
9. The dairy industry has always been closely linked to cryopreservation. Early efforts to freeze
human breast milk by using dry ice were pioneered by Borden, a leading producer and dis-
tributor of bovine milk (Swanson, 2009).
10. One of the few discussions of dry ice and its appeal situates it in terms of the market for ice
cream in the USSR, which did not have widespread access to reliable electricity in the dec-
ades after World War II (Smith, 2009).
11. The advertisement can be found in the AIBS Bulletin, 1962, 12(5).
12. Talk given at Symposium of Nuclear Proteins, Viruses and Atypical Growth at Yale. Neel
Papers, SB 15, Case 2, 6th Shelf, Neel MS Coll 96 VI, Talks 56–69. Folder: Talks, 1962–1963
(American Philosophical Society (APS)).
13. See note 12.
14. World Health Organization (WHO) ‘Scientific Group on Research in Population Genetics
of Primitive Groups’. 27 November to 3 December 1962. Report to Director General. Series
5. Folder: IBP: Sections: HA 1963–1967 (US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), IBP
Collection).
15. 4 March 1964 letter from Lasker to Campbell. Series 1: Folder: USNC/IBP: Ad hoc:
Membership, Laughlin, WS, Survey of Biologists re: Interest in IBP, 1964 (NAS). Lasker’s
critique expressed sentiments that would later be articulated in the neutral theory of molecular
evolution, which undermined the emphasis on natural selection as the primary engine of vari-
ation (Provine, 1990).
16. See note 16.
17. See note 16.
18. Another critic would argue that, far from producing a post-racist anthropological genetics,
a number of scientists are presently prostituting their mentalities to prove racist theory.
They grasp at such findings as the presence of Rh negative gene solely among northern
Europeans, or the sickle-cell gene predominantly but not exclusively among blacks, as
proof of the validity of the belief in race as an empirical object. (Burke, 1972)
19. ‘Proposal for use of R/V Alpha Helix’, Folder: Travel Corr and Grant Appl, 1971–1972.
Peabody Museum Archives – Solomon Islands Expedition (WW Howells files) Box 2 of 6
(Harvard University Peabody Museum (HPM), Harvard Solomon Islands Collection).
20. One of the acknowledged failures of IBP was ecologists’ resistance to cooperating with
Human Adaptability researchers. Ironically, they chose to focus on pristine ecosystems for
reasons not dissimilar to human biologists’ decisions to focus on primitive peoples.
21. 2 March 1964, letter from Brown to Cantlon, 2 March 1964. Series 1: Folder: Ad hoc:
Membership: Cantlon, JE, Survey of Biologists re: Interest in IBP, 1964 (NAS).
22. ‘WHO: Scientific Group on Research in Population Genetics of Primitive Groups’, 27
November to 3 December 1962, Report to Director General, 1963. Series 5: IBP: Sections:
HA 1963–1967 (NAS).
23. ‘Proposal for use of R/VAlpha Helix’. Folder:Travel Corr and GrantAppl, 1971–1972. Peabody
Museum Archives – Solomon Islands Expedition (WW Howells files) Box 2 of 6 (HPM).
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24. ‘Man’s Survival in a Changing World’. No. 2. US Participation in the IBP. Personal collection
of author.
25. ‘Scientific Group on Research in Population Genetics of Primitive Groups’, 27 November
to 3 December 1962, Report to Director General. Series 5: Folder: IBP: Sections: HA 1963–
1967 (NAS).
26. 20 April 1966 letter from Damon to John Peterson at American Breeders Service, Inc. Box 5
Harvard Solomon Island Expedition (1966–1972). Folder: A. Damon, Correspondence, Data.
Solomons Corresp Misc 1966 (HPM); Letter from A.P. Rinfret at the Linde Cryobiological
Lab to Damon, 28 April 1966. (Storage). Box 5 Harvard Solomon Island Expedition (1966–
1972) Folder: A. Damon, Correspondence, Data. Solomons Corresp Misc 1966 (HPM).
27. Inc., 20 April 1966, letter from Damon to John Peterson at American Breeders Service. Box 5
Harvard Solomon Island Expedition (1966–1972). Folder: A. Damon, Correspondence, Data.
Solomons Corresp Misc 1966 (HPM).
28. 28 April 1966 letter from A.P. Rinfret to Damon. Box 5 Harvard Solomon Island Expedition
(1966–1972). A. Damon, Correspondence, Data. Solomons Corresp Misc 1966 (HPM).
29. The full text of this report was later published as ‘Research on Human Population Genetics
Report of a WHO Scientific Group’, in Current Anthropology 1970; 11(2): 225–233.
30. The volume was so successful that it was republished, with the section on blood collection
included as a special appendix, in 1981 (Weiner and Lourie, 1981).
31. Unprocessed portion of the Harvard Solomon Islands Collection (HPM).
32. I have begun to understand this phenomenon as one of ‘recursive production’, whereby the
same substance is made to generate new knowledge over time as it is passed through novel
experimental systems. This is a mutation of what Charis Thompson (2005) has referred to as
‘the biomedical mode of reproduction’ and serves to extend arguments about latency into the
realm of economic valuation.
33. The 1964 and 1968 WHO Reports have recently been examined by Trudy Turner, who
specializes on the ethics of biological anthropology and who participated in the American
Anthropological Association’s inquest into accusations made against Neel that he had know-
ingly infected members of the Yanomami with measles (Borofsky, 2005). She concludes that
Neel and others who collected tissues during the IBP were at the vanguard of ethical research
protocols for their time period. These two reports go further in their stated protections for
research subjects than was then required of biomedical scientists (Turner, 2012).
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Author biography
Joanna Radin is anAssistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Section
of the History of Medicine at Yale University. Her research examines the social and technical condi-
tions of possibility for contemporary biomedical infrastructure. She has published several oral histo-
ries with biological anthropologists, two coauthored articles on controversies surrounding nanotech-
nology, and a coedited volume on the past, present, and future of the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA). She is currently at work on a book about frozen blood and biological variation.
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Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program

Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program

Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program

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