490843

2013
SSS43410.1177/0306312713490843Social Studies of ScienceKowal et al.

Article

Social Studies of Science

43(4) 465­–483
Indigenous body parts, © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0306312713490843
the half-lives of postcolonial sss.sagepub.com

technoscience

Emma Kowal
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne,VIC, Australia

Joanna Radin
Program for History of Science and Medicine, Section of the History of Medicine,Yale University, New
Haven, CT, USA

Jenny Reardon
Department of Sociology and Science and Justice Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz,
Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Abstract
Biological samples collected from indigenous communities from the mid-20th century for scientific
study and preserved in freezers of the Global North have been at the center of a number of
controversies. This essay explores why the problem of indigenous biospecimens has returned to
critical attention frequently over the past two decades, and why and how Science and Technology
Studies should attend to this problem. We propose that mutation – the variously advantageous,
deleterious, or neutral mechanism of biological change – can provide a conceptual and analogical
resource for reckoning with unexpected problems created by the persistence of frozen indigenous
biospecimens. Mutations transcend dichotomies of premodern/modern, pro-science/anti-
science, and north/south, inviting us to focus on entanglements and interdependencies. Freezing
biospecimens induces mutations in indigenous populations, in the scientists who collected and
stored such specimens, and in the specimens themselves. The jumbling of timescales introduced
by practices of freezing generates new ethical problems: problems that become ever more acute
as the supposed immortality of frozen samples meets the mortality of the scientists who maintain
them. More broadly, we propose that an ‘abductive’ approach to Science and Technology

Corresponding author:
Emma Kowal, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne,VIC 3010,
Australia.
Email: e.kowal@unimelb.edu.au
466 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

Studies theories of co-production can direct attention to the work of temporality in the ongoing
alignment of social and technical orders. Attending to the unfolding and mutating vital legacies of
indigenous body parts, collected in one time and place and reused in others, reveals the enduring
colonial dimensions of scientific practice in our global age and demonstrates new openings for
ethical action. Finally, we outline the articles in this special issue and their respective ‘mutations’
to postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, a field that, like genome science, is racked with
ethical and temporal dilemmas of reckoning for the past in the present.

Keywords
biospecimen, cryopreservation, DNA, genomics, indigenous, mutation, postcolonial,
technoscience, temporality

‘Indigenous DNA’: beyond perpetual returns

In February 2003, members of the Havasupai – an indigenous nation located at the base
of the Grand Canyon – filed a lawsuit against geneticists at Arizona State University
(ASU). The suit charged ASU scientists with misusing blood samples that the Havasupai
provided in the early 1990s for a genetic study of diabetes, a disease that afflicted many
members of their community. The consent document agreed to by the Havasupai speci-
fied that samples could be used for other studies of ‘behavioral/medical disorders’
(Harmon, 2010). Over the following decade, researchers did reuse them for other kinds
of genomic investigations, including research into schizophrenia and ancient population
movements. The community became aware of the new research in 2003 when a member
attended a dissertation defense at ASU where these studies were discussed. Many
Havasupai felt that such studies cast them in a negative light and, by suggesting that they
had migrated to the Grand Canyon from somewhere else, threatened their sovereignty.
The New Times, a Phoenix area newspaper, reported that, to some tribal members, the
violence in these new uses for old blood was akin to ‘a scientist asking Christians from
Nazareth to give blood for a diabetes study, then producing research to suggest that Jesus
never existed’ (Rubin, 2004).
The legal battle was resolved in April 2010 with a settlement that awarded the tribe
US$700,000 and the right to reclaim the 151 remaining frozen samples. When seven
Havasupai men and women made the 300-mile trip to ASU to recover this old blood,
New York Times reporters covered the story, publishing a now iconic photo and video of
the encounter (see Drabiak-Syed, 2010; Harmon, 2010; Harry, 2009; Mello and Wolf,
2010; Reardon and TallBear, 2012).1 Assisted by laboratory staff, tribal leaders donned
standard protective clothing: plastic goggles, blue lab coats, and bright orange industrial
gloves. They also carried a prayer staff and eagle feathers.2 The lid of the freezer was
opened, laying bare the white box inscribed with the name of the principal scientist
responsible for the samples, Markow. A white-haired male elder broke into ritual song
while one of the women sang along and another reached her gloved hand into the freezer,
removing the lid of the box to reveal what lay inside. Taken at face value, these public
images – the ritual objects of the Havasupai meeting the ritual objects of science – appear
to depict the collision of two discrete and antithetical cultures. Postcolonial Science and
Technology Studies (STS), however, locate this encounter within a deeper colonial
Kowal et al. 467

history of entanglements around matters of knowledge production (See for example

Anderson, 2008; Fullwiley, 2011; Raj, 2007).
The Havasupai case also bears similarities to the Human Genome Diversity Project
(HGDP) of the 1990s (hereafter referred to as the Diversity Project), an effort to sample
and archive human genetic variation that focused on indigenous DNA (see Cunningham,
1998; M’Charek, 2005; Reardon, 2005). Like Diversity Project organizers, the ASU
geneticists who reused Havasupai DNA did so without directly engaging indigenous
populations. In both cases, the indigenous communities identified many potential harms,
including genomic articulations of old forms of colonial exploitation (see TallBear,
2013). And like the Diversity Project, the case of the Havasupai samples has become an
intellectual and ethical touchstone for the public understanding of genomic science
(Drabiak-Syed, 2010; Harry, 2009; Mello and Wolf, 2010; Reardon and TallBear, 2012).
STS critiques focused on the efforts of scientists in the Diversity Project to treat sepa-
rately, or to purify, technoscientific and social domains (M’Charek, 2005; Reardon,
2001). The assumption of stark divisions between science and society, however, continue
to typify renderings of indigenous genomics in popular and critical scholarship (e.g.
Cunningham, 1998; Foster, 1999; Marks, 2003; Pearce et al., 2004). The failure to rec-
ognize the ongoing co-production of social and technical orders is at least partially
responsible for what Jenny Reardon (2008) once deemed the ‘perpetual return’ of trou-
bling episodes of race and racism in science. As long as social scientists seek to debunk
race and rid their analyses of biological difference, she argued, and as long as scientists
deny the politics inherent in their work, each camp will be periodically shocked by the
return of biological claims about the existence of races and the use of those claims in
debates over the proper ordering of society (Reardon, 2008).
And yet the Havasupai case is not only a story of perpetual returns. While the prob-
lems raised by this and numerous other efforts to study indigenous DNA since the 1990s
resonate with the Diversity Project, they are not the same. Processes of co-production
are ongoing and nonlinear, raising new questions about what it means to live and die,
to seek justice and experience harm, and to create and resist group identities in the dif-
ferent spatial and temporal contexts in which body parts continue to be studied and
collected anew.
This issue is devoted to bringing these processes into view. Together, these articles
demonstrate that efforts to identify a return of scientific racism or biocolonialism are no
longer sufficient, if they ever were, for making sense of the tensions surrounding indig-
enous genomics. The articles underscore new dynamics and questions that arise out of
the contemporary co-production of life and ethics, biology and politics, technology and
time.
In this critical introduction, we highlight one such novel question that we believe
helps to frame all the articles: the question of temporality. Time has always been central
to research on indigenous bodies. For many human biologists, indigenous blood has long
been understood as a kind of portal into the human species’ evolutionary past. After
World War II, technologies of cold storage, like the freezer, were employed to preserve
bits of these bodies for future reanalysis.3 The construction of time and the technologies
created to preserve its imprints have received much less attention. Yet, as indigenous
body parts become the object of more and not less attention, and as the contents of more
468 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

freezers become objects of scrutiny, the practices of freezing and thawing have unmoored
time and the very idea of preservation (Radin, 2013). We offer mutation as an idiom for
understanding both what has happened in the freezer and for what might happen to our
approach to the postcolonial, science and technology as we consider these novel
dynamics.

Defrosting time: mutations, ethics, life

Over a decade ago, Peter Redfield (2002) used the analogy of ionizing radiation to
explain how the ‘half-life’ of colonial rule shaped local technological and social histories
in French Guiana. His conclusion is striking:

Every place is local, but not equally so; in considering points of context we must also factor in
historical mass and inertia, as well as potential isotopes of colonial rule … In mediating
Chakrabarty’s provincializing urge and Latour’s call for symmetry, I imagine colonial history
extending into an uneven decay curve against the sky. Receding from the ground, it still emits
radiation, and oversees the boundaries of provinces below. (Redfield, 2002: 813)

Inspired by Redfield’s use of half-lives to explore the legacies of colonialism in geopo-

litical space, for us, mutation offers an idiom for understanding postcolonial dynamics of
the collection and preservation of biological tissues across time.4 The unexpected,
unfolding, and ever ‘mutating’ legacies of indigenous body parts, collected in one time
and place and reused in others, reveal enduring colonial dimensions of scientific practice
in our global age and demonstrate new openings for ethical action in the realm of the
biosciences.5 We propose that mutation – in its invocation of the variously advantageous,
deleterious, or neutral mechanism of biological change – is an idiom for reckoning with
the uneven and unexpected consequences that constitute the raw material of postcolonial
technoscience (Anderson, 2002; Harding, 2011; McNeil, 2005; Seth, 2009).6
Of course our interest in mutation arises, in part, from its historical role in the study
of indigenous populations. In the decade following World War II, understanding the
mechanisms and consequences of ‘genetic mutation’ was of great concern to human
biologists (Lindee, 1994; Salzano, 2004; Santos, 2002). These scientists were trained in
population genetics, evolutionary biology, and sometimes anthropology. They set their
sights on human communities understood to be geographically isolated portals to the
past. They believed that these communities possessed unique, naturally occurring ‘muta-
tions’ that might reveal evidence of optimal adaptation to the environment. At the same
time, they could serve as experimental controls against which humans exposed to ioniz-
ing radiation and other forms of industrial pollution could be compared. However, time
was running out. These populations were situated as ‘vanishing’. If they disappeared, it
was feared that they would take invaluable information about the human species’ adap-
tive potential with them. Aided by new access to technologies of cold storage, a number
of human biologists stockpiled bits of these so-called primitive bodies for future scien-
tific uses (Radin, 2013).
At first glance, the significance of freezing blood appears straightforward. New access
to technologies of cold storage offered a way to preserve biological samples, and to in
Kowal et al. 469

effect ‘freeze’ evolution. Human biologists believed that the ability to thaw these sam-
ples for reanalysis in a future that progressed linearly from the present would permit
flashbacks to a clearly defined past. However, contemporary practices of thawing old
blood for new uses reveal the freezer to be a faulty time machine (Radin, 2012). While
preservation has been idealized as the temporary suspension of life, in actuality, it
mutates life, transforming its relationship to ideas about past, present, and future as well
as the technical and the social. Dimensions of the past are selectively and unpredictably
brought into the present (Radin, 2013).
Today, in the highly competitive, future-oriented world of commercial genomics
(Fortun, 2008), old frozen tissue samples are mined not only for human DNA but also
for the DNA of microorganisms, such as malaria (see, for example, Chan et al., 2006).
Such samples have come to play an important role in speculation about the promissory
future of personalized medicine, the end of health inequalities, and the anticipation and
prevention of disease, not to mention biosecurity (Bustamante et al., 2011; Lakoff,
2009; Lakoff and Collier, 2008; McInnes, 2011; Rajan, 2006; Rotimi and Jorde, 2010).
For these and other reasons, members of many indigenous groups have developed
interests in the reuse of samples collected from themselves or their kin. In one case,
research conducted on samples without explicit community consent was likened by an
indigenous scholar to the sexual exploitation of a child, a connection that shocked scien-
tists, many of whom still understood these samples as inert pieces of human prehistory
(Dodson and Williamson, 1999). In other cases, such as that of the Havasupai, indige-
nous peoples have sought to remove their samples from regimes of technoscientific
knowledge production, presuming frozen samples of their own or their kin’s blood to be
inalienable from their individual and/or collective bodies. Defrosting samples has
become a potentially ethically hazardous process, as some scientists are faced with the
prospect of destroying collections rather than risking negative unanticipated conse-
quences (Couzin-Frankel, 2010; Friedlaender and Radin, 2009). Shifting norms of bio-
medical ethics and indigenous rights have increased the stakes involved in thawing old
blood for new uses.
While this transformation might appear to have afforded indigenous peoples authority
at the expense of science, the story cannot be so simple. Apart from providing a new
source of agency, this mutation generates new demands. It compels indigenous people to
care about the immortal lives of their own and their kin’s body parts, and to be active
participants in decision making about their use (Kowal, 2013).7 As the case of the
Havasupai illustrates, this includes innovations in cultural practice (see also Kakaliouras,
2012). The imperative to permanently embody extra-corporeal samples can be experi-
enced as a burden. In a YouTube excerpt of the 2004 documentary, Napepe: Blood
Memory and Cultural Rights among the Yanomami Indians, which chronicles the quest
of the Yanomami to have blood samples taken by scientists in the 1960s and 1970s
returned to them, one (unnamed) Yanomami man comments, ‘If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t
mind. But this whole blood business keeps hanging around in our minds’ (Marin, 2004).
This sentiment suggests that celebratory narratives of expanding indigenous control of
research require a critical gaze as much as do laudatory accounts of scientific progress
(Reardon, 2012).
470 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

As these examples and the articles in this collection illustrate, the relationship between
time and life mediated by the freezer is far from one of straightforward extension.
Freezing induces mutations, transforming and compounding the ethical, biomedical, and
commercial potential of such materials in time. These mutations highlight the ambiguous
nature of change and its variously negative, positive, or neutral potential.

Mutating postcolonial STS

Postcolonial STS is well situated to reckon with the tensions between the imperative to
overturn Western scientific imperialism (in this case, through expanding indigenous con-
trol of genome research) and the complex subjectivities that such efforts act on and pro-
duce.8 As Maureen McNeil (2005) reminds us, we must make visible the ‘imperial
compulsion at the heart of modern technoscience [that] has been manifested in repeated
constructions of the resources of the non-Western world as primitive and exotic, danger-
ous and attractive – suitable for Western appropriation’ (p. 110). Yet at the same time, we
must be attuned to the more ambiguous colonial legacies that the articles in this issue
document.
Warwick Anderson (2009) has described two overlapping intellectual movements
within postcolonial STS, one concerned with ‘subjugated knowledges’ and the other
with ‘conjugated subjects’. Studies of subjugated knowledge seek to identify those forms
of knowing that have been marginalized or made invisible within Western society
(Foucault, 1980). Sandra Harding’s (2009) work is exemplary in this regard. As she
explains,

[a] main focus of postcolonial STS in perpetuity will remain the delicate task of undermining
the Enlightenment notions of science and technology that have been so useful to colonial and
imperial projects while advocating radically transformed versions of them on behalf of better
sciences and technologies. (p. 416)

The role of postcolonial STS here is to draw on a more culturally diverse repertoire of
resources in the service of making science for an equitable and inclusive world.
Alternatively, a focus on conjugated subjects – the ‘hybrid, partial and conflicted’
products of colonial science (Anderson, 2009: 394) – leads one to question the supposed
totalizing efficacy of technological imperialism. As Itty Abraham (2006) explains, in
postcolonial contexts, science ‘exists simultaneously as history, as myth, as political slo-
gan, as social category, as technology, as military institution, as modern western knowl-
edge, and, as instrument of change’ (p. 213). Conjugated subjects express the surfeit of
meaning and significance attached to technoscience in postcolonial contexts. In
Abraham’s (2006) view, more so than the local knowledge it subjugates, ‘[t]his excess
defines postcolonial techno-science and refuses to let it settle into a stable ideological
position, making it eminently available, but never complete, as a political instrument’
(pp. 213–214).
Our use of mutation calls attention to this instability. The conjugation – or mutation –
that freezing induces in samples, collectors, donors, and contemporary users alike belies
straightforward political instrumentality. Simple dichotomies such as premodern/modern
Kowal et al. 471

or anti-science/pro-science fall away. The assumption that scientists seek to study indig-
enous people and indigenous people resist them is one such dichotomy. As explored in
these articles, far from promoting continued research, beginning in the 1960s, some sci-
entists argued on both technical and ethical grounds that sampling from groups now
referred to as indigenous was not the most appropriate way to study human genetic evolu-
tion (Radin, 2013). More recently, some indigenous populations began to actively seek
out genomic investigation (Kent, 2013).
In Anderson’s terms, the articles in this special issue engage with both the subjugated
and the conjugated. While Radin’s and TallBear’s articles serve to interrogate the foun-
dation and reproduction of dominant forms of scientific knowledge about indigenous
people, Kowal’s, Anderson’s, and Kent’s articles reveal more about the conjugated sub-
jects – including ethical researchers, ‘big men’, and ‘authentic’ indigenes – that form
through and around indigenous body parts. In this way, we are pushing against narratives
of biocolonialism that position scientists in the Global North against subjects in the
Global South,9 as well as accounts that present the genomic future as a rapidly enfolding
embrace of inclusion (Bustamante et al., 2011; Hayes, 2011; see also Epstein, 2007).10
As we have argued, the act of freezing indigenous samples has unanticipated mutating
effects on samples, scientists, and indigenous people alike. Rather than complete opposi-
tion or its total absence, the articles in this issue highlight partial articulations (see
TallBear, 2013) that leave their differentiated mark on all parties.

Temporalizing co-production
Our engagement with mutation provides an opportunity to reconsider processes of co-
production in terms of temporality (Jasanoff, 2006). As already noted, co-production
provided an important framework for understanding the debates sparked by the
Diversity Project (Reardon, 2001, 2005). While population geneticists argued that new
technologies for collecting, preserving, and analyzing DNA were the key to an interna-
tional effort, when viewed through the idiom of co-production, it became evident that
workable ethical norms and social understandings should accompany this technical
endeavor.
As insightful as the analytic yoking of the scientific and technical to the social and
ethical has proven, an emphasis on simultaneity can divert attention from the importance
of attending to processes of co-production over time. This is not to say an idiom of co-
production forecloses temporal analyses – quite the opposite. We are calling for a rein-
vestment in co-production as a temporalized form of interrogating dynamic negotiations
between technical and social orders. This goes beyond looking at the history of a particu-
lar episode of co-production (or its failure), toward an examination of the shifting terrain
upon which co-production takes place, including through the interventions of STS schol-
ars, over time.
The effort to freeze indigenous biospecimens is one among many cases where STS
scholars might identify the temporal mutations that necessitate ongoing and shifting acts
of co-production. As Redfield (2002) argues, attending to half-lives, or in our terms
mutation, demonstrates that time is ‘a passage forward through the very pasts we might
472 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

think we are leaving behind’ (p. 814). Time does not always lead us forward or toward
resolution.
The construction of temporality itself is where we locate the intellectual and ethical
potential of the nexus of science studies and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial scholars
have asked, what are the continuities and discontinuities between the ‘colonial period’
and the contemporary world? How does the legacy of colonialism persist and shape
relations on every scale, from the global to the intimate? How does the construction of
time, particularly the teleological future implied by Western historicism, work as an
instrument of control? (Appiah, 1991; Chakrabarty, 2000; Fabian, 1983; Ganguly,
2004). These scholars have been at the vanguard of theorizing the nonlinear ways in
which the past and future are continually reworked in the service of politically charged
presents.
Yet, Anderson (2009), Harding (2008), and Seth (2009) have each observed that sci-
ence studies and postcolonial studies – despite considerable intellectual and political
common cause – have remained remarkably separate. Each author offers a different diag-
nosis: studies of globalization replaced those of colonization (Anderson, 2009); a post-
colonial focus on race proved too narrow for STS scholars interested in the construction
of all forms of difference (Harding, 2009); postcolonial critiques lacked interest in recon-
structive projects (Harding, 2008); and scholars showed a reluctance to pay attention to
hybridity (Seth, 2009). We suggest that to create mutual curiosity, we must be willing to
recognize lacunae on both sides.
New work in STS focused on temporality may provide some cause to replace critique
with efforts to reconstitute the relationship between postcolonial studies and STS. These
scholars provide some clues as to what a temporalization of co-production might involve.
For instance, Asdal (2012) has emphasized that ‘“[h]istory” is not a given stable entity,
the context, within which the open present is embedded’ (p. 397). Her argument, which
points toward a complex, multiple, and nonlinear temporality, is informed by Bowker’s
(2000, 2005) work on memory practices in the modern sciences. Bowker (2005) demon-
strates that archives and databases do not store facts, but rather disaggregate classifica-
tions that can be reassembled to take the form of facts about the world. New questions
reveal new properties of the archive, challenging any lingering technocratic optimism
(Taylor, 1988) that better organization will yield more certain knowledge. According to
these scholars, our experiences and understandings of time flow from the multiple con-
texts and configurations of our information infrastructures.
Within the biological register, Astrid Schrader’s (2010) case study of the ‘phanto-
matic ontology’ of the microbe Pfiesteria, which is only sometimes toxic and only some-
times an animal, opens up still other visions of how STS can critically engage with
temporality. Schrader (2010) draws on Derrida’s (1994) characterization of the specter,
or phantom, and Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action, to point out that there are things
for which we must be responsible that are ‘neither of the “past” nor of the “future”, but
which affirm an indeterminate relationship between being and becoming and between
“past” and “future”’ (Schrader, 2010: 278). The ethical problems posed by the recursive
uses of indigenous biospecimens similarly challenge scientists to cultivate new forms of
responsibility. This is a responsibility to the past and to the future, and to the new tempo-
ralities created by their entanglement.
Kowal et al. 473

Adams et al. (2009) begin to provide us with language for identifying and attending
to these entanglements. In their analysis ‘of thinking and living toward the future’, an
anticipatory stance that characterizes early 21st-century technoscience, they identify
abduction as a key process (Adams et al., 2009: 246). Coined by philosopher of science,
Charles Sanders Peirce, abduction is a form of reasoning that explains present phenom-
ena by inferring what may have occurred in the past. Adams et al. (2009) adapt the con-
cept to describe ‘a state of being’ that involves ‘tacking back and forth between the past,
present and future … [Abduction is] the labor of living in anticipation, of being out of
time’ (p. 255). Stefan Helmreich’s ethnography of ocean bioscience also employs the
concept of abduction to describe how genomic knowledge of marine micoorganisms is
recorded and assembled with reference to the future. He draws on the double-meaning of
abduction as ‘capture’ to explore how forward-looking reasoning can be unexpectedly
detoured, a phenomenon similar to the temporal and ethical uncertainty we explore here
through ‘mutation’ (Helmreich, 2009). This is the kind of labor needed to reckon with the
biosocial mutations of indigenous biospecimens.
Human population genetics, which has long relied on indigenous biospecimens, is
one field where, if it is to address the critiques it currently faces, acts of co-production
must incorporate the labor of abduction. While human population genetics has partici-
pated in justifying the temporal tactics of colonization, it also is a space where time acts
back on scientists. Although the freezer is a technology explicitly designed to resist
change over time, the temporal mutations induced through cryopreservation undercut
this attempt at stability. For many human population geneticists working today, time,
which has for so long been a tool of evolutionary and anthropological thinking (Fabian,
1983), is no longer on their side. Indigenous peoples have not died out, as predicted by
generations of Western scholars, including many human population geneticists.
Meanwhile, the founding figures of human population genetics face temporal limits as
they end their careers and have to reckon with the politics of thawing and reconstituting
their relationship to the enduring subjects of their research (Couzin-Frankel, 2010;
Kowal, 2013).
Attending to not just the tacking back and forth between the scientific and social
fields but also between dimensions of time – the mortal and immortal, the past and future
– opens up new ethical terrains. What happens when the supposed immortality of frozen
tissues intersects with the mortality of their creators? Who can and should speak for these
enduring materials when their mortal makers die? We can begin to answer these ques-
tions that arise from what we might call abductive co-production by recognizing that
ethical and temporal certainty breaks down when frozen resources for the future begin to
transcend human timescales; scientists are themselves conjugated in the unfolding of
time, with its indeterminate, yet powerful, effects. As Anderson’s (2013) and Kowal’s
(2013) articles in this issue illustrate, certain scientists neglected to anticipate the trans-
formations in their own identities that would occur through transacting in indigenous
body parts. The circulation of these samples, as well as efforts to maintain them in the
frozen state, ever expands the circle of interest in indigenous biospecimens, proliferating
the locations, identities, and timescales to be managed through the work of abductive
co-production.
474 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

Summary of contributions
The articles in this issue have inspired our call for attention to the temporality of co-
production. While they do not all explicitly engage with this framework, they go far in
demonstrating the complex and emergent forms of life (Fischer, 2003) that can be identi-
fied by working together the contributions of postcolonial and STS critiques of time with
theories of co-production.
Joanna Radin’s article demonstrates the power of an abductive approach to co-pro-
duction by historicizing the Diversity Project as well as STS critiques of it (Reardon,
2001, 2005; Santos, 2002). She locates the beginning of the project of salvaging and
freezing indigenous biospecimens in the Human Adaptability arm of the International
Biological Program (1964–1974), an international effort to take stock of human biologi-
cal variation. The scientists who took advantage of new access to technologies of cold
storage believed that indigenous peoples were destined for extinction. They did not
anticipate their survival, much less that some indigenous communities would become
critics of such extractive science. Radin argues 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 STS studies of time.
Kim TallBear’s essay demonstrates how indigenous people may be mutating con-
temporary genomic practice. She draws on Stuart Hall’s (Grossberg, 1986) concept of
‘articulation’ and James Clifford’s (2001) elaboration of ‘indigenous articulations’ to
explore the competing articulations of scientists and indigenous peoples in relation to
genomic knowledge. In a world where genomic knowledge wields increasing power
on the national and global stage, TallBear questions who will benefit. Drawing on the
example of Kennewick Man, an ancient skeleton over which scientists and Native
Americans have fought for authority, she shows how two narratives common to
genomic science, ‘the vanishing indigene’ and ‘we are all related/we are all African’,
can work together to undermine indigenous articulations of identity and claims to legal
rights. Articulation is a useful frame with which to understand the cultural work of
genomic scientists and to consider the implications for indigenous peoples. TallBear
(2013) argues that while scientific articulations of indigeneity grounded in the notion
of (despoiled) purity are often strongly contested by indigenous groups, there is the
potential for ‘indigenous articulations of genomics’ to emerge where tribes draw on
genomic technologies for their own purposes.
Michael Kent’s article on the Uros community of the Peruvian Andes illustrates a dif-
ferent mutation of indigenous genomics, underscoring variations in how different indig-
enous communities relate to technoscience. The Uros are a small group of 2000 people
who live in the middle of the extensive reed beds of Lake Titicaca and trace their ancestry
to the Urus, considered the first major ethnic group of the Andes. Their main economic
base, tourism, was threatened by the Peruvian state’s attempts to control tourism –
attempts that were supported by the claim that the Uros are not ‘authentic’ and that the
‘real Uros’ had died out some time ago. Kent traces how genetic evidence of biological
continuity with ancient Urus populations proved vital in changing local perceptions of
the Uros’ authenticity. Genomic knowledge shapes and is shaped by Uros identity along-
side other sources. Kent’s article traces the emergence of new ethical arrangements and
Kowal et al. 475

terms of engagement between geneticists and indigenous populations, in which indige-

nous groups have the political leverage to negotiate their relationship with scientists.
However, as Kent notes, genomics is a double-edged sword with the potential to backfire
if the neighboring populations are also found to have ‘Urus’ DNA sequences. A scientific
finding that inhabitants of the region ‘are all Urus’ could have significant consequences
for the Uros (echoing TallBear’s analysis of the ‘we are all African’ narrative).
Warwick Anderson’s and Emma Kowal’s articles shift our attention from the relations
between genomic knowledge and indigenous subjects to the relations between scientists
and indigenous body parts. Anderson’s (2000, 2008) article builds on his groundbreaking
history of encounters from the late 1950s between scientists and the Fore people of the
Papua New Guinea highlands who suffered from a degenerative neurological disease
known as kuru, the cause of which was later discovered to be a novel biological agent,
the prion. Drawing on Appadurai’s (1986) concept of the ‘tournament of value’,
Anderson’s contribution to this subject extends his own previous work by examining the
tensions between notions of objectivity, value, and scientific exchange. His subject, the
Nobel-prize winning scientist D. Carleton Gadjusek, was a man unusually interested in
the social labor underpinning scientific transactions. He rejected sterile claims to the
objectivity of scientific endeavor, always acknowledging – and here we recognize the
recurrence of radioactive metaphors – the ‘phosphorescent glow from decaying past rela-
tionships’ (Anderson, 2013). Rather than impeding scientific practice, Gadjusek’s invest-
ment in relationships aided him in collecting vast amounts of Fore body parts, which
subsequently underwent a ‘magical transformation’ in the bush laboratory, whereby ‘the
value produced in social relationships now seemed to inhere in the objects acquired
through exchange’. These practices of ‘scientific sorcery’ cut the network of social rela-
tionships surrounding the object and its acquisition in order to produce the scientific
value of the sample. Drawing also on anthropological scholarship on the gift, Anderson
(2000) analyzes Gadjusek’s practices of accumulation as he ambivalently sought to dom-
inate global networks of kuru knowledge production and become a ‘big man’ of science.
He highlights the ambiguous, conjugated identity of the scientist who was known to the
Fore not as Carleton, but as Kaoten. While Carleton circulated disembodied samples in
a global scientific economy, for Kaoten (and for the Fore), body parts remained personi-
fied, their social and emotional affiliation and ties to personhood unattenuated by any
scientific magic.
Kowal’s article takes up similar themes in the postcolonial context of 21st-century
genetic research in a settler state. Drawing on ethnography of genetic researchers who
work in indigenous communities in Australia, she explores the emerging ethical terrain
where the postcolonial scientist must combine her technoscientific skills with techniques
of care (De la Bellacasa, 2011). In the contexts Kowal describes, indigenous communi-
ties are seen as the victims of exploitative research practices of the past. Scientists must
care for the ‘vulnerable indigenous collective body’ to avoid ethical censure that will
jeopardize their ability to conduct research and obtain funding. Kowal draws on the
notion of ‘ethical biovalue’ (Rose and Novas, 2003; Waldby, 2002) to analyze the cre-
ation and maintenance of DNA samples collected from indigenous populations. In order
to sustain the value of samples over time, scientists who maintain indigenous DNA col-
lections must maintain affective ties with representatives of donor communities, as well
476 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

as a range of other actors, including indigenous academics and members of Aboriginal

Institutional Review Boards. Geneticists who allow these ties to atrophy, or who fail to
appoint a successor guardian, risk eroding the ethical biovalue of their samples. Without
ethical biovalue, collections become ‘orphan’ DNA. Orphaned samples are made func-
tionally sterile, unable to produce data, scientific articles, knowledge, or prestige. This
analysis illustrates the mutations that may be induced in indigenous biospecimens over
time, as they fall out of step with the co-production of ‘ethical science’ outside the
freezer.
Klaus Hoeyer and Anja Jensen’s article provides an example of how our framework
of mutation may be relevant to broader horizons of STS research. Their study of ‘aggres-
sive organ harvesting’ of Danish donors who are neither entirely dead nor alive illustrates
the transformative work accomplished when body parts are extracted and deployed for
new purposes. Hoeyer and Jensen’s article analyzes an interview study of Intensive Care
Unit nurses and specialists focusing on the resuscitation of brain-dead patients who
undergo cardiac arrest. These ‘not quite dead’ bodies need to be actively ‘revived’ in
order to preserve their organs until they can be transplanted. They find that health profes-
sionals experience the active nature of cardiac resuscitation as more disturbing than the
use of drugs to preserve the ‘donor’ body to enable successful transplantation. Cardiac
resuscitation of the brain-dead patient (a physically dramatic act of chest-thumping and
electrocution) disrupts the desired aesthetic of ‘a quiet and dignified transition from
patient to donor’ (Hoeyer and Jensen, 2013). Staff seek this ‘dignified’ aesthetic for the
sake of the donor’s relatives, but equally, it acts to smooth the temporal disruptions that
organ donation induces. It is in this liminal period that the human patient undergoes a
mutation into a ‘donor’, a means to preserve organs akin to a freezer. Organ donation,
like the cryopreservation of indigenous DNA, gives death a future.

Conclusion
Postcolonial scholars have long considered how the colonial past comes to bear on the
present, whether through deliberate preservation or dogged persistence of colonial rela-
tions. The history and management of present-day collections of indigenous biospeci-
mens has motivated us to reflect on these temporal dynamics as they pertain to the
practices of technoscience. In particular, incorporating postcolonial and STS critiques of
time with theories of co-production provides new conceptual resources for grappling
with the ethical challenges that accompany the dispersal of the body across space and
time in the name of knowledge.
Figuring the unfolding consequences of this dispersal in terms of ‘mutation’ focuses
our awareness on the counterintuitive and the unexpected. It is a means of acknowledg-
ing the generative and unintended potential of efforts to study human beings, and the
human species, through its parts. It draws attention to how multiple contexts and times-
cales – evolutionary, human, and microbial to name just a few – are torqued as well as
imbricated through technologies of freezing and practices of thawing (Adams et al.,
2009; Asdal, 2012; Bowker, 2005; Schrader, 2010). We have proposed ‘abductive co-
production’ as a method for identifying mutations and their unfolding and unexpected
effects across time.
Kowal et al. 477

The mutating fates of indigenous biospecimens are a leading edge of ethical practice
not only for genomics but for biomedicine in general. As Felix Cohen (1953) famously
commented,

[l]ike the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political
atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities,
reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.

While ‘disappearing’ indigenous populations were once considered the canaries in the
coal mine of a decaying planet, in postcolonial settler states the treatment of indigenous
communities has become as a litmus test for a humane society.11 Within biomedicine,
indigenous biospecimens are increasingly the crucibles in which ethical practice is deter-
mined. For example, the recent sequencing of the first ‘Australian Aboriginal’ genome is
raising novel questions about the reuse of preserved biospecimens. The sample – hair,
not blood – was sourced from a Cambridge museum that had held it for 88 years after it
was collected from an unknown Aboriginal man at a railway station. The researchers’
decision to seek approval from an indigenous organization generated much debate among
scientists (Calloway, 2011; Rasmussen et al., 2011). Similarly, the Havasupai case has
led to proposals for new standards in informed consent (Mello and Wolf, 2010).
It is likely that ethical occlusions and innovations will continue to flow from the bio-
medical use of indigenous body parts frozen in the past and thawed in the present, neces-
sitating an abductive approach to co-production. The temporal reconfigurations enabled
through cryopreservation are reconfiguring technoscience in ways never imagined by the
prolific collectors of the mid-20th century. It remains to be seen whether the mutations
indigenous body parts tend to induce will be lethal to smooth workings of global science,
as some scientists fear,12 or whether genomics will benefit from the hybrid vigor pro-
moted through collaboration with indigenous stakeholders and epistemologies. At this
point, the effects of using indigenous body parts in the present are largely unknown. The
articles in this special issue provide an array of tools to chart a course for genomics and
postcolonial STS take as the status of indigenous body parts continues to mutate.

Funding
Emma Kowal’s research is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career
Researcher Award (DE120100394). Jenny Reardon’s research was supported by the National
Science Foundation under Grant No. #0351475. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or rec-
ommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes
  1. The journey was captured by the New York Times and presented as a video clip (Bracken and
Harmon, 2010) on the New York Times website, along with a picture gallery, a podcast and
324 comments that were posted in less than 24 hours from around the globe.
  2. Thanks to Kim TallBear for assistance in determining the correct terms for these objects.
  3. To be sure, this blood was collected prior to the advent of DNA analysis. In the 1960s and
1970s, scientists used blood primarily for immunogenetic and biochemical analysis.
478 Social Studies of Science 43(4)

  4. Historically speaking, radiation and mutation have often been linked. In the 1950s, the belief
that the former caused the latter was instrumental in motivating scientists to accumulate blood
from indigenous peoples, the thought being that they had not yet been exposed to ionizing
radiation (Neel, 1958).
  5. The relationship between body parts marked ‘indigenous’ and those that are not is an impor-
tant question raised by this essay. Recent debates in the literature about the new uses of old
samples in the general population indicate that the concerns we raise may apply, in a mutated
form, to all human biospecimens. See, for example, Bathe and McGuire (2009), Trinidad
et al. (2011).
  6. The unexpected destructive aspects of mutation also present a productive challenge to the
idealizing and future-oriented ‘political economy of hope’ that surrounds biotechnologies
(Novas, 2006). It should be noted that Anderson (2002) used the figure of ‘mutation’ to
describe postcolonial students of STS when he decried the futility of identifying the canon
of the subdiscipline: ‘Like “modernity” it just keeps on mutating’ (Anderson, 2002: 652).
Other important works that use the word mutation but do not explore its explanatory potential
include Rose (2001) and Ong (2006). The relationship between Latour’s (1986) concept of
immutable mobiles and our discussion of mutation requires further analysis. Although it is
tempting to cast mutation as a failure of immutability, in our telling mutation enables some
forms of mobilization while inhibiting others.
 7. This move articulates with arguments for ‘participant-centric initiatives’ that grant
research participants an ongoing role in actively managing what research is done on
samples they have donated. These initiatives have arisen in the context of biobanks and
data linkage and have responded to ‘changes in attitudes towards privacy and individ-
ual involvement, greater functionality in IT’ and recognition of the need to ‘build the
long-term public trust’ in genomic research in the face of ever larger biobanks and data
sets (Kaye et al., 2012). There is a range of models, with the more involved end of the
spectrum (termed ‘dynamic negotiation’ and ‘citizen science’) involving a web interface
modeled on social media, where research participants have a secure login and password
to access a personal page where they can manage their participation and even conduct
their own research projects. These participant-centric practices follow closely the lead of
indigenous research ethics, although this legacy is not acknowledged (and perhaps not
consciously realized).
  8. In our usage, postcolonialism is not strictly a reference to conditions on the ground following
the retreat of colonial administration. The postcolonial can be both a spatiotemporal marker of
places where the legacies of colonialism persist or leave their traces, and a theoretical frame
for focusing on the effects of these legacies.
  9. In the 1990s, the organization Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) was a
leading critic of attempts by the Global North to appropriate and exploit the biological and
genetic resources of the Global South, such as the Hagahai gene patenting controversy and
the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) (ETC Group, 2013).
10. For an example of this second inclusionary narrative, see the Southern African Genomes
Project. Their website includes a video where the main scientist, Vanessa Hayes, outlines the
rationale for the project:

‘Our research in the past has been very European-centric, has been based around what the
European DNA has to offer, which has been extremely limited in comparison to the rest of the
world. Up until this point Indigenous people had not been included.’
She explains this as ‘a money factor’: ‘now that the cost of doing this kind of work is coming
down it just has to change. We have an obligation as a community, as a scientific community,
Kowal et al. 479

to include all Indigenous people in DNA databases’. The Human Genome Project is likened
by Hayes to an encyclopedia that has been a useful but limited resource for understanding
disease. The Southern African Genomes Project “opens the door to the entire library, and it
provides not only just one [European] encyclopedia, but a library worth of books to look at
and to understand disease. And more and more doors will be opened as more and more indi-
viduals from Indigenous populations get included into this big library” (University of New
South Wales, 2010).
11. In work in progress, Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal explore how samples taken from
indigenous peoples, once considered by human biologists to be the most biological
humans, are now deemed by bioethicists and indigenous advocates to be the most human
biospecimens. That is, indigenous samples are seen as less amenable to fragmentation
and alienation from donors and their communities than other samples. We see this as an
instance of ‘cryopolitics’, a broader concept we are developing that seeks to temporalize
biopolitics by drawing attention to the political, ethical, and ontological consequences of
cryopreservation.
12. Such concern expressed by scientists can be readily found online. For example, with regard to
the decision by the geneticists who sequenced the ‘first Aboriginal genome’ from a hair sam-
ple held in a museum to seek permission from an Aboriginal organization, see Khan (2011)
and Dieneke’s Anthropology Blog (2011).

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Author biographies
Emma Kowal is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the
University of Melbourne. She is a cultural anthropologist who has previously worked as a medical
doctor and public health researcher in indigenous health settings. Her research encompasses indig-
enous relations with the Australian state, White antiracism, and the ethics and politics of genomics
in indigenous contexts.
Joanna Radin is an Assistant 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 techni-
cal conditions of possibility for contemporary biomedical infrastructure. She has published several
oral histories with biological anthropologists, two coauthored articles on controversies surround-
ing nanotechnology, and a co-edited 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.
Jenny Reardon is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in the Center for
Biomolecular Science and Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She
founded and co-directs the Science and Justice Research Center at UCSC. She is the author of Race
to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005)
and is currently working on a second book manuscript entitled The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics,
Justice, Knowledge after the Genome.