History of Biotechnology

Harvard University Spring 2013

Department of the History of Science Professor: Sophia Roosth
Lecture: Tuesdays & Thursdays 11a-12p Office Hours: Tuesdays, 2-4 PM
Section: TBA Or by appointment, Science Center 364
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Course Description: What becomes of life when researchers can materially manipulate
and technically transform living things? In this course, we will historically investigate
biotechnology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying attention to how efforts
to engineer life are grounded in social, cultural, and political contexts. Topics include
reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and cloning, genetically modified foods,
bioprospecting, genomics, stem cells, intellectual property, and biosafety and biosecurity.
The course is organized around five crosscutting domains in which we will explore the
ethical, legal, and social impacts of biotechnology: (1) food, (2) property and law, (3) sex
and reproduction, (4) disease and drugs, and (5) genomic identities. We will read and
discuss historical and anthropological accounts of biotechnology, primary scientific
publications, and legal cases. We will learn to evaluate the social constitution and impact
of biotechnology on daily life, as well as how to place contemporary issues and debates
in biotechnology in historical context.

Assessment
Attendance and Participation: 30%
Midterm: 20%
Final Exam: 20%
Two Response Papers: 15% each, 30% total

No background in the history of science is required.

Participation. This is a lecture course. You are expected to attend all lectures, read and
reflect on the assigned texts, pose relevant questions, and offer informed and thoughtful
responses in both lecture and section.

Blog. Students are encouraged to post regularly to the course blog. We will collect and
comment on recent articles related to developments in biotechnology, as well as track
biotechnology in literature, art, and other domains. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court
will rule on Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, a case that will
decide the patentability of human genes. On the blog, we will follow developments in this
case over the course of the semester. Participation in the course blog counts as extra
credit toward your participation grade.

The midterm and final exams are both one-hour exams. The midterm will be proctored
during class on March 26th; the final exam will be scheduled during your section the
week of April 29th. Each exam will consist of two short essay questions. A week before
the exam, I will distribute a list of five possible essay prompts; three of those five

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questions will constitute the exam, and you may choose to answer two of the three
prompts. All of the essay questions will be based on material covered in readings and
lectures, and the final exam is not cumulative.

Two response papers (4-5 pages) are due one week after the end of the unit about which
you wish to write. In one paper, choose a contemporary case, scientific development, or
legal/ethical/social controversy, and offer a historical analysis of it, drawing on readings
and examples from lectures. The other paper should draw upon several readings from
the course, or other scholarly texts of your choice, that all address a related topic.
Compare these differing secondary accounts of the same (or similar) event(s) in the
history of biotechnology. For both papers, you may choose paper topics based on your
interests and their relevance to the themes developed in their respective units. While you
may write papers for any two units of your choosing, you are strongly encouraged to
submit your first response paper before spring break. Feel free to consult with me or your
TF while brainstorming topics you’d like to write about in your papers. If you choose,
you may rewrite one of the two papers, revising it on the basis of feedback received on
your first draft. Your grade will be based on the quality of the revised paper.

Paper Deadlines
Unit 1. Tuesday, February 19
Unit 2.Thursday, March 7
Unit 3. (Due after Spring Break) Monday, March 25
Unit 4. Thursday, April 11
Unit 5. Tuesday, May 6

Disabilities. Please contact me by the end of the second week of the semester if you have
a documented disability so that we can make any necessary accommodations.

Collaboration. Students should be aware that in this course collaboration of any sort on
any work submitted for formal evaluation is not permitted. You are encouraged to discuss
your paper assignments with other students and to study together for exams. However, all
work should be entirely your own and must use appropriate citation practices to
acknowledge the use of books, articles, websites, lectures, discussions, etc. that you have
consulted to complete your assignments.

I welcome student visits and would be happy to talk to you – please make use of my
office hours or schedule another time to meet with me!

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SCHEDULE OVERVIEW

Prologue: Themes and Introductions (1/29)

Unit I: Food
Zymotechnology: Beer Brewing & Proto-
Biotech (1/31)
Patenting Plants (2/5)
From the Green Revolution to Golden Rice
(2/7)
Terminator Genes, Seed Banks, & GMOs
(2/12)

Unit II: Property & Law

The Recombinant DNA Controversy (2/14)
Bodies Bought and Sold (2/19)
Patenting Life: Bacteria and OncoMice™ (2/21)
Bioprospecting and Indigenous Rights (2/26)

Unit III: Disease & Drugs

Family Control & Population Control: The Pill (2/28)
Shared DNA: Patient Activism & Personalized
Genomics (3/5)
Clinical Trials and Pharmaceutical Markets (3/7)
The Stem Cell Debate (3/12)

Unit IV: Sex & Reproduction

Eggs and Sperm for Sale (3/14)
New Reproductive Technologies (3/28)
Biotechnical Kinship: Redefining Who Counts as
Family (4/2)
Seeing Double: Cloning and SCNT (4/4)

Unit V: Identity
Mapping the “Human” (4/9)
The Human Genome Diversity Project (4/11)
National Genomes (4/16)
Criminal Databases & The Innocence Project (4/18)
Race and Ancestry in a Biotechnical Age (4/23)

Epilogue: Biotech Today & Tomorrow (4/25)

Review & Discussion (4/30)

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SCHEDULE

All readings are uploaded to the course iSite.

Tuesday, January 29: Introductions

Course topics and assignments. No assigned reading.

UNIT I: FOOD
This unit traces the long history of how scientists have sought to control and modify
the foods we eat, from the late nineteenth century to now. Researchers have
manipulated microbes, plants, and animals in order to standardize flavors, produce
new varieties, improve crop production, and insure against global famine. In this unit,
we will appraise questions of intellectual property, global markets, food movements
and activism, as well as definitions of “natural” and “artificial.”

Thursday, January 31: Zymotechnology: Beer Brewing & Proto-Biotech

No assigned reading.

Tuesday, February 5: Patenting Plants

Bugos, Glenn E. and Daniel Kevles. 1992. “Plants as Intellectual Property: American
Practice, Law, and Policy in World Context.” Osiris 7: 74-104.
Sackman, Douglas. 2005. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. University
of California Press, 53-65.

Thursday, February 7: From Green Revolutions to Golden Rice

Kloppenburg, Ralph. 2004 [1988]. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant
Biotechnology, 1492-2000. 2nd edition. University of Wisconsin Press, 157-179,
291-310.

Tuesday, February 12: Terminator Genes, Seed Banks, and GMOs

Gusterson, Hugh. 2005. “Decoding the Debate on ‘Frankenfood’.” In Making Threats:
Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subramanian, and
Charles Zerner, eds. Rowman & Littlefield, 109–33.
Seabrook, John. 2007. “Sowing for Apocalypse: The Quest for a Global Seed Bank.” The
New Yorker (27 August): 60-71.

UNIT II: PROPERTY & LAW

This unit investigates how biological materials became objects of legal and ethical
contention in the second half of the twentieth century. Should human cells, tissues,
and organs, as well as whole organisms – from microbes to mammals – be exchanged
in global markets? Do you have rights of ownership over your own bodily tissues?
Who “owns” local knowledge about the pharmaceutical efficacy of plants, and whose
responsibility is it to steward biodiversity? Is the safety of biotechnological research a
question answered by scientific or legal expertise?

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Thursday, February 14: The Recombinant DNA Controversy
Mendelsohn, Everett. 1984. “‘Frankenstein at Harvard’: The Public Politics of
Recombinant DNA Research.” In Tradition and Transformation in the Sciences.
Everett Mendelsohn, ed. Cambridge University Press, 317-335.
Rogers, Michael. 1975. “The Pandora's Box Congress.” Rolling Stone (June 19): 37-40,
42, 74, 77-78, 82.

V IEW IN C LASS: Excerpts from “Hypothetical Risk: Cambridge City Council's Hearings
on Recombinant DNA Research” (1976).

Tuesday, February 19: Bodies Bought and Sold

Landecker, Hannah. 1999. “Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in
Law and Science.” Science in Context 12(1): 203-225.
Boyle, James. 1996. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the
Information Society. Harvard University Press, 21-24, 97-107.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2005. “The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the
Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’ Organs.” In Global Assemblages. Aihwa Ong and
Stephen Collier, eds. Blackwell, 145-167.

Thursday, February 21: Patenting Life: Bacteria and OncoMice™

Kevles, Daniel J. 1994. “Ananda Chakrabarty Wins a Patent: Biotechnology, Law, and
Society, 1972-1980.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
25(1): 111-135.
Kevles, Daniel J. 2002. “Of Mice and Money: The Story of the World's First Animal
Patent.” Daedalus 131(2): 78-88.
SKIM: Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303.

Tuesday, February 26: Bioprospecting and Indigenous Rights

Merson, John. 2000. “Bio-Prospecting or Bio-Piracy: Intellectual Property Rights and
Biodiversity in a Colonial and Postcolonial Context.” Osiris 15: 282-296.
Hayden, Cori. 2003. “From Market to Market: Bioprospecting's Idioms of Inclusion.”
American Ethnologist 30(3): 359-371.

UNIT III: DISEASE & DRUGS

In this unit, we will focus on the relation of biotechnology to medicine. While some
drugs control “normal” biological processes (like fertility) and others treat symptoms
of illnesses, some scholars now argue that biotechnology blurs the boundary between
treatment and enhancement. How do pharmaceuticals define what counts as “health”?
How might genetic testing and consumer genomics services allow patient
communities to organize for access to treatment? And how do recent debates in
biomedicine (e.g., stem cells) reflect ideas about how human health intersects with
issues of governance, value, ethical variability, and biotechnological substance?

Thursday, February 28: Birth Control and Population Control: The Pill

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Tone, Andrea. 2001. “Developing the Pill.” In Devices and Desires: A History of
Contraceptives in America. Hill and Wang, 203-232.
Oudshoorn, Nelly. 2004. “Astronauts in the Sperm World: The Renegotiation of
Masculine Identities in Discourses on Male Contraceptives.” Men and
Masculinities 6(4): 349-367.

Tuesday, March 5: Shared DNA: Patient Activism and Personalized Genomics

Taussig, Karen-Sue, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath. 2003. “Flexible Eugenics:
Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics.” In Genetic Nature/Culture:
Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide. Alan Goodman,
Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee, eds. University of California Press, 58-76.
Richards, Martin. 2010. “Reading the Runes of My Genome: A Personal Exploration of
Retail Genetics.” New Genetics and Society 29(3): 291-310.

Thursday, March 7: Clinical Trials and Pharmaceutical Markets

Petryna, Adriana. 2007. “Clinical Trials Offshored: On Private Sector Science and Public
Health.” BioSocieties 2(1): 21-40.
Dumit, Joseph. 2012. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Decide Our
Health. Duke University Press, 55-85.

Tuesday, March 12: The Stem Cell Debate

Franklin, Sarah. 2005. “Stem Cells R Us: Emergent Life Forms and the Global
Biological.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as
Anthropological Problems. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds. Blackwell, 59-
78.
Maienschein, Jane. 2005. “Hopes and Hypes for Stem Cells.” In Whose View of Life?
Embryos, Cloning, and Stem Cells. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
249-297.

UNIT IV: SEX

Biotechnology has changed the way people procreate. In this unit, we will examine
various new reproductive technologies (NRTs), such as cryopreservation, in vitro
fertilization, surrogacy, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis. How are these
technologies shaped by medical, religious, legal, and social definitions of “biology,”
“kinship,” and “parenthood”? Have NRTs in turn influenced what counts as family in
the twenty-first century?

Thursday, March 14: Eggs and Sperm for Sale

Almeling, Rene. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. University of
California Press, 52-83.
Spar, Debora. 2007. “The Egg Trade – Making Sense of the Market for Human Oocytes.”
New England Journal of Medicine 356: 1289-1291.

Spring Break: No Class March 19 or 21

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Tuesday, March 26: In Class Midterm

Thursday, March 28: New Reproductive Technologies

Franklin, Sarah, and Celia Roberts. 2006. Born and Made: An Ethnography of
Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Princeton University Press, excerpts from
Chapter 1.
Vora, Kalindi. 2009. “Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital
Energy.” Subjectivity 28: 266-278.
Inhorn, Marcia. 2006. “Making Muslim Babies: IVF and Gamete Donation in Sunni
Versus Shi’a Islam.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 30: 427-450.

Tuesday, April 2: Biotechnical Kinship: Redefining Who Counts as Family

Laqueur, Thomas. “‘From Generation to Generation: Imagining Connectedness in the
Age of Reproductive Technologies.” In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies,
Anxieties, Ethics. Paul Brodwin, ed. Indiana University Press, 75-98.
Thompson, Charis. 2002. “Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic.” In
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Sarah Franklin and Susan
McKinnon, eds. Duke University Press, 175-202.
SKIM: In re Marriage of Buzzanca 61 Cal. App. 4th 1410, 72 Cal. Rptr. 2d 280 (1998).

Tuesday, April 4: Seeing Double: Cloning and Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer
Franklin, Sarah. 2007. “Sex.” In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham:
Duke University Press, 19-45.
Maienschein, Jane. 2005. “Facts and Fantasies of Cloning.” In Whose View of Life?
Embryos, Cloning, and Stem Cells. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
212-248.
Holub, Miroslav. 2001. “Cloning.” Harper’s Magazine (September).

UNIT V: IDENTITY
If the Human Genome Project sought to define what makes us all human, then
subsequent projects – the Human Genome Diversity Project, the International HapMap
Project, and various regionally-defined genome projects (African, Mexican, Iranian,
and Icelandic Genome Projects, for example) – aimed to locate human difference and
diversity on a genetic level. In this unit, we critically examine how selfhood, identity,
and ancestry (as well as legal rights of ownership or judgments as to criminality or
innocence) are newly understood as biotechnological categories.

Tuesday, April 9: Mapping the “Human”

Bucchi, Massimiano. 2004. “A New Science?” In Science in Society: An Introduction to
Social Studies of Science. Routledge, 125-142.
Fortun, Michael. 1998. “The Human Genome Project and the Acceleration of
Biotechnology.” In Private Science: The Biotechnology Industry and the Rise of
Contemporary Molecular Biology. Arnold Thackray, ed. University of
Pennsylvania Press, 182-201.

Thursday, April 11: The Human Genome Diversity Project

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Andrews, Lori and Dorothy Nelkin. 2001. “Bleed and Run.” In Body Bazaar: The Market
for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age. Crown Publishers, 64-81.
M’charek, Amade. 2005. “The Mitochondrial Eve of Modern Genetics: Of Peoples and
Genomes, or the Routinization of Race.” Science as Culture 14(2): 161-183.
Harry, Debra, Stephanie Howard, and Brett Lee Shelton. 2000 [1998]. “Some
Implications of Genetic Research for Indigenous Peoples.” Indigenous Peoples,
Genes and Genetics: What Indigenous People Should Know About Biocolonialism,
19-25. Available Online: http://www.ipcb.org/pdf_files/ipgg.pdf

Tuesday, April 16: National Genomes

Pálsson, Gísli and Paul Rabinow. 2001. “The Icelandic Genome Debate.” Trends in
Biotechnology 19(5): 166-171.
Fortun, Michael. 2008. Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCode Genetics in a World of
Speculation. University of California Press, 223-239.

Thursday, April 18: Criminal Databases and the Innocence Project

Lynch, Michael, Simon Cole, Ruth McNally, et al. 2008. Truth Machine: The
Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting. University of Chicago Press, 142-
182.
Boyer, Peter J. 2000. “DNA on Trial.” The New Yorker (17 January): 42-53.

Tuesday, April 23: Race and Ancestry in a Biotechnical Age

TallBear, Kim. “Native-American-DNA.com: In Search of Native American Race and
Tribe.” In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Barbara Koenig, Sandra Lee, and
Sarah Richardson, eds. Rutgers University Press, 235-252.
Hamilton, Jennifer. 2012. “The Case of the Genetic Ancestor.” In Genetics and the
Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History. Keith Wailoo, Alondra
Nelson, and Catherine Lee, eds. Rutgers University Press, 266-294.
Bolnick, Deborah, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, et al. 2007. “The Science and Business
of Genetic Ancestry Testing.” Science 318(5849): 399-400.

Thursday, April 25: Epilogue: Biotech Today and Tomorrow

No assigned readings.

Tuesday, April 30: Review and Discussion