JOANNA RADIN
Yale University
Indigenous blood and ethical regimes in
the United States and Australia since
the 1960s
A B S T R A C T
Blood samples collected from members of
indigenous communities in the mid-20th century by
scientists interested in human variation remain
frozen today in institutional repositories around the
world. This article focuses on two such
collections—one established and maintained in the
United States and the other in Australia. Through
historical and ethnographic analysis, we show how
scientific knowledge about the human species and
ethical knowledge about human experimentation are
coproduced differently in each national context over
time. Through a series of vignettes, we trace the
attempts of scientists and indigenous people to
assemble and reassemble blood samples, ethical
regimes, human biological knowledge, and
personhood. In including ourselves—a U.S.
historian of science and an Australian
anthropologist—in the narrative, we show how
humanistic and social scientific analysis contributes
to ongoing efforts to maintain indigenous samples.
[indigenous, biospecimens, science, genomics,
postcolonial, ethics, cryopreservation]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 749–765, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12168
EMMA KOWAL
Deakin University
uman populations characterized as geographically isolated,
H
close to nature, and—most recently—indigenous have long at-
tracted interest from scientists,1 who have been critiqued for
seeing them as portals to the past (e.g., Fabian 1983; Kuklick
1991; Reardon and TallBear 2012; Stocking 1987; Wolf 1982).2
This perspective animated the earliest anthropological efforts to document
and salvage the social practices, cultural artifacts, and languages of such
groups (e.g., Gruber 1970; Trouillot 1991).
In a mid-20th-century iteration of this interest, peoples who now iden-
tify as indigenous came to be valued by a range of scientists who sought to
salvage their blood. Assumptions about the isolation of these populations
allowed them to be cast as natural laboratories for the study of unique so-
matic signatures and genetic mutations thought to have been accumulated
through millennia of living in a state of adaptive equilibrium. With new re-
search priorities and forms of molecular analysis, this blood became a pre-
cious and polyvalent biomedical resource (Bangham and de Chadarevian
2014; Radin 2013; Reardon 2005; Santos et al. 2014).
Concern about the homogenizing forces of an encroaching modernity
allowed this project of salvage to be cast as an especially urgent one,
essential to generating knowledge relevant to the future of the species
more broadly. Anthropologists, human geneticists, and epidemiologists
anticipated that such blood, if properly preserved at low temperature,
could reveal manifold facets of human evolution and variation—even
after the societies from whom they were collected had disintegrated—and
would continue to do so as “yet unknown” future technologies emerged
(Radin 2013, 2014).3 Through the eyes of these scientists, indigenous
populations were understood to be both fundamental and exceptional:
It was their apparent lack of social and cultural change that made them
essentially and uniquely biologically human.
A crucial episode in the mid-20th-century effort to freeze a precious
resource before it was too late was the International Biological Program
(IBP), a large-scale effort to take stock of the biosphere that ran from
1964 to 1974. Its Human Adaptability arm (the only one of seven program
C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
areas dedicated to the study of humans) represented one of
the first coordinated, worldwide efforts to salvage and pre-
serve bodily substance from members of supposedly disap-
pearing populations to aid in the present and future study
of human relations to the environment (Radin 2012; Santos
2002). Histories of the IBP have tended to focus on its fail-
ure to achieve its broad ecological goals (Aronova et al. 2010;
Coleman 2010; Kwa 1987). However, when we examine the
legacies of its human-oriented endeavors, it becomes ev-
ident that the IBP was hugely influential in shaping the
course of research in human biology, biological anthropol-
ogy, and human population genetics in ways that persist in
the present (Collins and Weiner 1977; Little 1982; Roberts
1993; Ulijaszek and Huss-Ashmore 1997).
The materials on which we focus here are part of the
afterlife of the Human Adaptability arm of the IBP: two col-
lections of frozen blood samples that endure into the 21st
century, one in Australia and the other in the United States.
These stockpiles of human biological variation, made pos-
sible through mid-20th-century technologies of preserva-
tion and transportation, are truly global assemblages. Our
approach, following anthropologists Stephen J. Collier and
Aihwa Ong, is to view freezers filled with blood samples
as phenomena that are articulated in specific situations
yet are “abstractable, mobile, and dynamic.” As such, they
are “domains in which the forms and values of individ-
ual and collective existence are problematized in the sense
that they are subject to technological, political, and ethical
reflection and intervention” (Collier and Ong 2005:4). The
subjects of this article—blood sample collections but also
ethical frameworks and even scientists themselves—are
“assemblages.” In this sense, they are the products of un-
even and shifting technological, political, and ethical beliefs
and practices. These assemblages are ideal substrates for a
science studies analysis of how biological knowledge about
the human species and ethical knowledge of human ex-
perimentation have shifted—or as we prefer, “mutated”—
over time. Within these mutating assemblages of the human
species and human subjects, we are particularly interested
in continuities and changes in the roles of samples, persons,
and communities marked as “indigenous”—and the differ-
ent circumstances in which that label becomes significant.
We draw on the conceptual term assemblage as a noun but
are also attentive to the verb form, tracing how different ac-
tors, ourselves included, perform the work of assemblage
and reassemblage.
This article, then, is an intellectual experiment across
multiple axes of space and time. It brings us, an Australian
anthropologist and a U.S. historian, into dialogue about
the divergent fates of our research subjects—scientists
and members of indigenous communities—and research
objects—freezers of old, cold blood and the ethical regimes
that govern their use. Emma Kowal is an anthropologist and
750
a trained physician who studies the ethics and politics of
human genome research in Indigenous Australia. This re-
search has pulled her into the past, where she has become
involved with negotiating the management of a contested
set of frozen blood samples collected in the 1960s by Robert
(Bob) Kirk, a British–Australian geneticist whose research
focused on human biological variation. Kirk led Australia’s
contribution to the Human Adaptability arm of the IBP.
Joanna Radin is a historian of science, who began her
research with an interest in collections of frozen blood
from human communities in the Pacific and Amazon
created under the auspices of the IBP. Many of these col-
lections endure, and the project of tracking their vital lega-
cies has oriented her attention toward their management
in the present. Among others, she has examined the col-
lection practices of Nobel Laureate D. Carleton Gajdusek,
a physician and biomedical researcher who accumulated
hundreds of thousands of samples through his own ex-
peditions and exchanges with other scientists, including
Kirk.4
We were brought together through our own inter-
national academic networks. We first met at the 2009
American Anthropological Association annual meeting
at a presidential session on “Consuming Genomics” that
Joanna co-organized with Deborah Bolnick, a biological
anthropologist and science studies scholar. Over dinner
in Philadelphia, we realized the extent of our overlapping
and congruent interests. This article has emerged from our
attempts since then to assemble fragments of historical
data relevant both to the relationship between Gajdusek
and Kirk and to the enduring collections of fragmented
body parts the two scientists assembled in the mid-20th
century. Although the two collections are the product of
the same epistemologies and technical practices, they are
embedded in different ethical regimes and have met very
different fates in the present. Gajdusek’s collection, housed
in the United States, has received substantial funding to
be reassembled for genomic analysis; Kirk’s collection in
Australia has, until recently, languished under institutional
indifference due to prohibitive ethical barriers.
In the balance of this article, we tell the tale of these
two collections and consider their implications for the pro-
duction of knowledge about the human as a species and
about humans as experimental subjects. We first outline the
bureaucratic, ethical, and moral contexts of the two collec-
tions, describe the combination of concepts and theoretical
approaches we employ, and spell out the stakes of our anal-
ysis. We then present a series of historical and ethnographic
vignettes drawn from our engagement with the two collec-
tions. Finally, we analyze the different kinds of reassem-
blage work currently occurring in the Australian and U.S.
collections, linking it with broader discussions of the hu-
man as subject and object of research.
 Indigenous blood and ethical regimes
Ethical regimes and moral economies
Our use of the term ethical regimes does not denote regimes
that are normatively “ethical” and that might be opposed
to “unethical” regimes. Rather, the term allows us to draw
attention to regimes of ethics, the “specific biotechnol-
ogy policies and styles” of bureaucratic structures and
systems developed largely within state and academic
research institutions to facilitate scientific and biomedical
research (Ong and Chen 2010:4; see also Jasanoff 2005).
These structures include ethical review bodies, informed
consent procedures, and committees and panels formed
within professional associations, all of which have become
subjects of historical and ethnographic attention (Epstein
2007; Hamilton 2009; Hoeyer and Hogle 2014; Petryna et al.
2006; Stark 2011).
This recent research has demonstrated that such struc-
tures, while appearing to transcend local circumstance
and deploy “universal” ethical principles of beneficence,
nonmaleficence, autonomy, and justice, are in all cases
conditioned by multiple and varying moral economies. In
invoking the phrase “moral economies,” we direct atten-
tion to the intellectual as well as the political stakes of
our project (Fassin 2011). For several decades, historians
of science have used the phrase (often credited to labor
historian E. P. Thompson) as a means of exploring the
“affect-saturated values” that create the “balanced system
of forces” that allow scientific communities to operate
(Daston 1995).5
In other words, the bureaucratic structures of an eth-
ical regime only make sense and produce “ethical” action
within the moral economies in which they are deployed.
Kirk’s and Gajdusek’s collections are embedded within very
different moral economies in at least two ways. First, Kirk’s
collection is recognized as being composed of indigenous
biospecimens, while Gajdusek’s is not, or to put it more
precisely, it has not yet been explicitly identified in this
way (although it does contain samples from Alaskan Native
communities). But even if Gajdusek’s collection were so
identified, it is unclear what the immediate or long-term
consequences would be. The definition of “indigenous
biospecimens” and the reach of bureaucratic mechanisms
to regulate them differ significantly between Australia and
the United States, as we discuss below.
The effect of these differing moral economies is illus-
trated by the fact that aliquots (portions) of samples of the
same individuals very likely exist in the Kirk and Gajdusek
collections. In other words, we are not just dealing with two
similar collections (similar in that they maintain materials
from groups who would today identify as indigenous)
that are managed differently. More than that, we see how
frozen samples collected from the same person stand to
assume different ethical valences and even different modes
of personhood depending on whether they are stored in
 American Ethnologist
the United States or in Australia. It is our comparative
analysis that has highlighted this circumstance and may
have consequences for the endurance of such materials in
U.S. freezers.
At this point, a brief review of the dominant ethical
research regimes in the United States and Australia is nec-
essary. The development of such institutionalized regimes
in virtually all industrialized countries can be traced to
post–World War II concerns about the abuses of Nazi sci-
ence, expressed most famously in the “Nuremberg Code”
(Nuremberg Military Tribunals 1946–49:181–182) and the
Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association 1964),
along with concern about unethical domestic research, the
most famous U.S. case being the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
(United States Department of Health and Human Services
1979; see also Beecher 1966). Institutional review boards
(IRBs) in the United States and human research ethics
committees (HRECs) in Australia were developed to review
research applications and ensure that proposed research
designs and methods conformed to prevailing ethical stan-
dards. Since the 1980s, technologies such as information
sheets, consent forms, and procedures for withdrawal
from research have emerged, producing more complex
and bureaucratized ethical regimes (as summarized most
recently in Hoeyer and Hogle 2014).
U.S. and Australian ethical regimes are generally sim-
ilar, united above all by the symbolic ideal of donor con-
sent as articulated through international organizations like
UNESCO (Hoeyer 2008). However, the emergence of histor-
ically specific moral economies in the two countries has led
to distinctively different ethical regimes governing research
in groups marked as “indigenous.”
In Australia, a comprehensive Indigenous critique of
Western research has developed since the 1980s, in paral-
lel with global critiques (Smith 2012) that consider research
to be an extension of colonization and thus the cause of
ill health and harm rather than its alleviation (Johnston
1991; Paul and Atkinson 1999; Royal Australasian College
of Physicians 2003). Such critiques tend to converge on a
vision of research practices controlled by Indigenous peo-
ple and modified to suit their aims, priorities, and methods
(Henry et al. 2002). The strong notion of pan-indigeneity
in Australia—a sense of a national Indigenous polity—
and the relatively greater attention given to indigenous is-
sues by Australian governments (in comparison with U.S.
governments6 ) have been influential in translating these In-
digenous critiques into a nationwide Indigenous-specific
ethical regime.
Crucial elements of this regime are the guidelines
for Indigenous health research released by the Australian
National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC;
1991, 2003). The guidelines address issues of consultation
and community involvement in research as well as own-
ership and publication of data. These national guidelines
751
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
are used by all Australian HRECs to make decisions about
Indigenous health research projects. In addition, four of the
eight Australian states and territories have specific HRECs
with majority or solely Indigenous membership. Some uni-
versity HRECs require approval from an Indigenous HREC,
and all require a letter of approval from a community
for research to proceed. As we explore below, research on
old biospecimens collected long before this ethical regime
emerged has proven a difficult issue in Australia, but the
emerging consensus requires researchers using so-called
indigenous biospecimens to seek consent from the donors
(or their descendants) and their communities.
In the United States, the ethical regime for research in
American Indian and Alaskan Native communities shares
some similarities with Australia but also has some key
differences. Many Native American tribes have been far
more successful than groups in Australia at asserting their
sovereignty rights and creating a sustainable economic
base. Thus, while indigenous critiques of research similar
to those in Australia have also emerged in the United States
since the 1980s (see, e.g., Indigenous Peoples Council
on Biocolonialism 2000; Rural Advancement Foundation
International [RAFI] 1994), these are expressed bureau-
cratically as tribal guidelines for research (and sometimes
tribal moratoriums on research; see Navajo National Coun-
cil 2002) rather than in a national regulatory approach.
Some tribes and the Indian Health Service have developed
comprehensive guidelines and systems of ethical approval
and oversight, while some tribes have none. Such locally
innovated ethical regimes generally do not reach outside
the physical territory of the tribe (or Indian Health Service
facilities) to affect research conducted elsewhere (Sahota
2007). This combination of factors makes it less likely that
the current custodians of Gajdusek’s collection, and others
like it in the United States, would consider that they hold
“indigenous” samples requiring special regulatory status
or that they would seek to consult with American Indian or
Alaskan Native stakeholders on their management.
The problem of boundaries also applies on a larger
scale to the ethical regulation of samples outside their
nation of origin. For example, as we mention above, if a
portion of a sample that is considered “indigenous” in
Australia is stored in a freezer overseas, it falls outside the
Australian ethical regime, effectively losing its “indigenous”
status. That different settler colonial nations, in this case,
the United States and Australia, have similar ethical regimes
for managing human biospecimens but different practices
for those now marked as “indigenous” points to the un-
even legacies of mid-20th-century projects to consolidate
knowledge about the human species. The differences bring
into sharp relief the historical contingencies that constitute
technoscience as it unfolds in contexts that are never fully
postcolonial (Abraham 2006; Anderson 2009; Comaroff and
Comaroff 2003; Hecht 2011; Seth 2009; Simpson 2007).
752
Our efforts to highlight those differences may also,
in turn, lead to collections assembled under the ethical
regimes of the 1960s and 1970s and currently maintained
in different nations being reassembled in the 21st cen-
tury. It may also lead individual specimens—such as those
from Alaska Natives or Australians maintained in collec-
tions in the United States—to become the subject of claims
by members of indigenous groups, threatening some col-
lections with disassemblage (Mello and Wolf 2010).
The coproduction of mutating ethical regimes
In the introduction to a recent special issue of Social
Studies of Science focused on indigenous body parts and
postcolonial contexts, we argued for the need to attend
to the “unfolding and mutating vital legacies” of research
materials “collected in one time and place and reused in
others” (Kowal et al. 2013:465). For us, “mutation”—in its
invocation of the variously advantageous, deleterious, or
neutral mechanisms of biological change—is also an idiom
for reckoning with the unique and unexpected outcomes of
efforts to freeze bits of indigenous bodies for future uses.
The concept of mutation served to point to the tem-
poral dimensions of “coproduction,” a concept developed
within science and technology studies to describe how so-
cial and technical domains of life are mutually produced
(Jasanoff 2006).7 Science studies scholars who draw on co-
production frameworks assume that “successful” scientific
advances are those that have succeeded in social and polit-
ical realms as much as in technical ones.
In our view, coproduction is a form of engaged sci-
ence studies that allows for the diagnosis as well as the
rehabilitation of global assemblages. We were inspired by
Jenny Reardon’s (2001, 2005) demonstration of the value
of a coproductive approach in interpreting the challenges
that beset scientists involved the Human Genome Diversity
Project (HGDP) of the early 1990s. The HGDP, a global stock-
taking project of indigenous genetic material, was a direct
descendant of the biological salvage efforts of the IBP (San-
tos 2002). Reardon diagnosed the derailment of the HGDP
as the result of a failure to coproduce social protections ap-
propriate to the science in question. HGDP organizers had
not considered that an emerging pan-indigenous rights
movement, global concerns about biopiracy and gene
patenting, and broad concern about informed consent
would arouse suspicion and mistrust among those they
sought to enroll in their research. For Reardon, coproduc-
tion was both an analytic strategy as well as therapeutic
practice for achieving a more socially aware and justice-
oriented genomic science. Her book, Race to the Finish
(2005) was meant to be both a critique and a blueprint.
In the decades since the HGDP was proposed, ad-
vances in genomics have made indigenous biomaterials
more desirable and more politicized than ever. The ethical
 Indigenous blood and ethical regimes
innovations that came out of the Euro-American meeting
rooms of the last decade of the 20th century—such as group
consent and statements condemning racism—are proving
inadequate to the task of determining the appropriate use
of samples stored in freezers since the 1960s. This situation
has arisen, in part, because morality and ethics, as Didier
Fassin has argued, “are not a given, but the result of the ac-
tion of men and women to defend certain values against
others” (2011:484). With Reardon, we concluded that copro-
duction must be regarded as a process that is “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 different spatial and tem-
poral contexts in which body parts continue to be studied
and collected anew” (Kowal et al. 2013:467).
A coproduction approach to the reuse of biospecimens
and the mutating ethical regimes that surround their
management directs our efforts toward tracking ongoing
realignments of social and technical orders.8 Both kinds
of work—social and technical—are required to maintain,
rehabilitate, and renew sample collections. In the case
examined in this article—the material afterlives of two
collections of blood created during the IBP and persisting
today—the technical work of maintaining the value of
the samples has involved transferring old blood to new
cryovials, recombining aliquots, entering data into sample
management systems, and myriad quality assurance prac-
tices. At the same time, the ethical viability of samples must
also be negotiated. Doing so has come to involve obtaining
institutional ethics approval, keeping within the bounds
of accepted ethical practice (or working to change what is
acceptable), and maintaining a scientific guardian for the
samples. A failure of either scientific or social work places
the samples in jeopardy, causing mutations that threaten
to render them either subject to being returned, destroyed,
or impossible to discard (Kowal 2013).
The comparative story we tell here is of two responses
to fragmentation, two modes of coproduction, resulting in
local variations of global assemblages or communities of
fate (Ong and Chen 2011; Ong and Collier 2005). One as-
semblage exists in the United States and incorporates (and
perhaps intensifies) the epistemological practices that frag-
ment persons and knowledge-making subjects. Samples
there are being transformed into substrates for the genomic
future without addressing the fragmented social ties and
subjectivities that were produced at the time of their ini-
tial assemblage. The assemblage in Australia tells a differ-
ent story. Its current fate is grounded in resistance to frag-
mentation, in responding and contributing to postcolonial
critiques of scientific exchange and knowledge production.
Within this ethical regime, only biospecimens that are rec-
ognized as connected to (and, perhaps, belonging to) their
donors can produce knowledge, and only virtuous scientists
can speak the truth about indigenous bodies.
 American Ethnologist
Our comparative analysis of these collections has three
aims. First, we seek to illustrate the merits of a compar-
ative approach to studying the mutating relationship be-
tween social and technical orders in two national contexts.
The following section narrates our engagement with these
two collections through a series of vignettes that track back-
ward and forward through time and space and illustrate
the overlapping and competing attempts of scientists, so-
cial scientists, and indigenous people to consolidate the
human species and the indigenous subject. In assembling
fragments in this way, we aim to re-create the experience of
temporal, ethical, and political disorientation that can oc-
cur when preserved biospecimens fall out of sync with the
dominant ethical regime (or we could say, fail to coproduce
the dominant ethical regime), even as we outline patterns
and meanings that might be emerging from the disorder.
Our second aim is to show what can be gleaned from
a reflexive analysis of the insights gained from our col-
laborative, interdisciplinary approach. In the final section
of the article, we analyze the ethical, historical, and tech-
nical work that is currently being conducted on the Aus-
tralian collection to facilitate its future use for scientific
study. This work of reassembling scientists, samples, and
personhood—work that has not been deemed necessary for
sustaining the U.S. collection—illustrates the differential la-
bor required for samples to maintain their potential to pro-
duce knowledge over time.
It also illustrates the differing potential of sample col-
lections to influence broader ethical regimes and the social
relations they produce. For example, Klaus Hoeyer (2005)
has argued that the practice of “biobanking” has generated
a new form of actor in the medical assemblage: the rights-
bearing tissue sample. By talking about samples as prox-
ies for persons, freezers become potentiated with intense
expectations. Human relationships with donated samples
are reconfigured. We argue that this profound shift in the
making is influenced by “indigenous” samples, particularly
as they have been conceived within Australia. The contem-
porary management of Kirk’s collection suggests that in-
digenous biospecimens have come to set the benchmark
for the ethical treatment of human subjects in ways that
may ultimately travel beyond Australia. The “special” con-
ventions developed for management of indigenous samples
are increasingly evaluated as the standard for all human
samples.
Comparison of the U.S. and Australian cases illustrates
the creative potential of mutating ethical regimes and failed
attempts at coproduction. The successful coproduction of
Gajdusek’s samples saw them mutate within the United
States, where their use required IRB approval from both the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the research uni-
versity where they are now maintained. It did not require
specific approval from organizations such as the National
Congress of American Indians, an advocacy group that
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American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
has made policy recommendations about the appropriate
use of biospecimens collected from communities who now
identify as indigenous (American Indian and Alaska Na-
tive Genetics Resource Center 2012), or from the specimen
donors or their descendants.
In contrast, Kirk can be understood to have failed
to coproduce samples to fit an emerging ethical regime
in Australia in which informed consent must be demon-
strated for the use of all indigenous biospecimens. His sam-
ples mutated to the point that they were no longer viable
substrates of science. The work of rehabilitating them—
remedial work of coproduction, of realigning ethical and
technical domains—has, to date, been more productive in
the realm of ethics than in the production of biological
knowledge. Reestablishing the collection as a scientific tool
has mutated the ethical regimes of indigenous research
and, potentially, broader notions of personhood. Gajdusek’s
samples, while today scientifically more productive than
Kirk’s, have not yet contributed to developing new protec-
tions for vulnerable populations (Kowal and Radin 2015).
Finally, throughout the article, we highlight stakes that
are integral to all social inquiry but that become particularly
visible at the intersection of indigeneity and science, his-
tory and anthropology. At this intersection, moral precarity
is unavoidable. The scientists we study considered them-
selves to be virtuous and were so considered by their peers.
Only through mutations in social, technical, and geopo-
litical orders have their methods and outputs come to be
viewed with suspicion. Studying them cannot teach us what
to avoid but shows us that shifting ethical terrain is un-
avoidable. We conclude that to be ethical is to be open to the
dynamisms inherent in producing knowledge in a changing
world. This means, among other things, resisting the com-
fort provided by the static approvals of IRBs or universaliz-
ing moral principles derived from a Western philosophical
tradition that seeks to transcend time and place.
Like the contemporary scientists whose work interests
us, we too are subject to the ethical imperative to be virtu-
ous, truth-seeking scholars: in our case, as an anthropol-
ogist and a historian making knowledge about indigenous
bodies and about the scientists that handled them. We are
equally implicated in the contemporary ethical norms we
study, a system geared toward questioning our motives for
analyzing the 20th-century history of biology and its after-
math. To some, to analyze this area at all is to be complicit in
the relations of power that made past biocollecting possible.
If we must study this issue, such an interlocutor might say,
we should, at a bare minimum, emphatically condemn the
scientist collectors and their efforts. In response, we would
argue that demonizing these scientists and their histori-
cal projects of collecting may lead to missed opportunities
to better characterize past and present attempts to under-
stand human nature and human difference, including at-
tempts that are currently considered ethical.9
754
In taking this approach, we do not mean to be obstruc-
tive, apologetic, or opaque. Our position aims to reflect
our intellectual stance, following key anthropological
critiques that consider “ethics” an object of empirical study
(Brodwin 2000; Hoeyer 2005; Ong and Chen 2011; Petryna
2005). As scholars appointed through research universi-
ties, we are unavoidably imbricated in the networks that
brought the collections we study together and that now
seek to retain or distribute them (Calvert 2013; Marcus
1997). We are entangled in overlapping commitments to
indigenous people, scientists, and colleagues who have
varied expectations and make varied demands on our
methods, our arguments, and our politics. This precarious
position is inherent to knowledge making of all kinds. It is
particularly visible in fields such as ours where “historical”
figures can and do speak back and where ethnographic
subjects are highly interested in the outcome of analysis.
In this environment, some would find comfort in a nor-
mative position, either explicitly bioethical or wrapped in
critical theory of some kind. Readers searching here for such
an argument will be frustrated. There is no moral to this
story and no prescription for policy. There are no villains
or heroes among this story’s actors, including its narrators.
There are only fragmented, shifting efforts to understand
humans, over time.
Fragment 1: Canberra, 2011
Emma’s story begins in Canberra, Australia’s national capi-
tal, on a crisp autumn day in May 2011. She was at the Aus-
tralian National University to visit a professor of genetics
named Simon Easteal who had asked for her help with an
old collection of Indigenous DNA samples. They had first
spoken on the phone eight months earlier when Emma,
who had heard about the existence of the collection from
geneticists working in Indigenous communities, decided to
call Simon. Ten minutes into the conversation, he had asked
for Emma’s help to determine what should be done with the
collection. For over a decade after the collection was closed
to scientific study, he had sought advice on what do to with
it, without success. Emma’s experience and contacts within
the world of Indigenous health research and her particular
expertise in the social and ethical aspects of Indigenous ge-
nomic research made her well situated to help him negoti-
ate unfamiliar ethical terrain.
Approaching the striking frontage of the John Curtin
School of Medical Research, where she was to meet Si-
mon, Emma was greeted by an imposing façade of glass
and jagged edges, Black Mountain rising behind it. The
new structure backed onto and concealed the original 1960s
building that was being progressively demolished. Simon
met her in the foyer, and she followed him through the secu-
rity entrance, through open, light spaces with walls of solid-
color blocks, and into one of the few glass-walled offices
around the edges of the open-plan floor.
 Indigenous blood and ethical regimes
Figure 1. Box labeled “Master Workbooks Index, Vol. 1” on Professor Simon
Easteal’s desk at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian
National University, Canberra, May 30, 2011. Credit: Emma Kowal.
On entering, she noticed a wooden box in a pleas-
ing shade of teak, about 20 centimeters square (Figure 1),
placed on the desk. The label on the front read “Master
Workbooks Index, Vol. 1.” The box contained handwritten
index cards with separators from A to Z. Each card was in-
scribed with a three-letter code at the top left-hand corner,
each code referring to an Indigenous Australian commu-
nity or to some other group or nation. Written below each
code were the associated range of sample numbers, dates of
collection, and corresponding analysis results books. In all,
over a hundred thousand samples were indexed in this box,
including some seven thousand samples collected from the
particular Indigenous Australian communities that Emma
was there to discuss with Simon. She recalls feeling over-
whelmed as she leafed though the box. Every card, ev-
ery corner of the world, each three-letter code condensed
decades of colonial history and scientific endeavor. All of
these fragments were assembled inside the box.
Fragment 2: New York, 2009
Joanna’s story begins in a semirural region of the United
States in the fall of 2009. She was at the State University of
New York at Binghamton to visit a biological anthropolo-
gist named Ralph Garruto, who maintains a large collection
of old, cold blood samples as part of what he has named
a “serum archive.” She had been researching the history of
anthropological blood collection undertaken in Amazonia
and Melanesia under the auspices of the IBP. She wanted
 American Ethnologist
to know what had happened to all of the blood samples,
whether any still survived. She was interested to learn that
some of them were stored in freezers at Binghamton. This is
what led her to contact Ralph.
She walked across the campus, an array of concrete
buildings nestled on a hill overlooking the Susquehanna
River, to a low-slung hall known as “Science 3,” where she
was to meet Ralph. There, she learned about his archive,
a series of freezers that he had brought north to Bingham-
ton from his former post at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.
Binghamton was first established in 1946 as the two-year
Triple Cities College to serve World War II veterans seek-
ing degrees under the GI Bill. The region was home to IBM’s
first manufacturing plant, and the college was able to sat-
isfy a demand for semiskilled technical laborers as the com-
puter industry rapidly expanded following the war. In 1950,
Triple Cities was incorporated into the State University of
New York system as Harpur College. In 1965, it was reorga-
nized as the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Though it is recognized as the crown jewel in the New York
State university system, it does not have a medical school.
The recruitment of Ralph and his research materials were
part of an effort to prepare students to pursue postgradu-
ate degrees that could lead to careers in biomedicine and
biotechnology.
On this first visit, Joanna received a tour of the serum
archive, which consisted of a suite of three rooms in
the building’s basement. The first contained a filing cab-
inet, two computers, and bound sets of field notes and
“bleed lists”—identifying information of those who gave
their blood—on a bookshelf. All of the historical informa-
tion available pertaining to original collection of the frozen
blood was kept there. It was assembled in keeping with
standards outlined in technical reports produced by the
WHO and reproduced and disseminated in official IBP pub-
lications (Radin 2013).
The second room was a wet lab where technicians,
many of whom were pursuing master of science degrees in
biomedical anthropology, handle old blood. In the wet lab,
a wipe-off board listed more than a dozen collections cur-
rently being archived, including samples from an Indige-
nous community in Northern Australia. The third room was
the freezer room. In it, a bank of more than a dozen tall
REVCO –20°C freezers, wired up to alarms, produced a deaf-
ening white noise.
Within these three rooms a rotating cast of tech-
nicians–known as “serum archivists”–whose work is sub-
sidized by an NIH grant, carefully transferred old blood
samples, many of which have never been analyzed, into
a form that will facilitate their use in genomic research.
Since 2003, day in and day out, these serum archivists have
methodically assessed the quality of each blood sample,
transferring materials from cracked glass vials into plastic
cryovials.
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American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015

Back in his office, Ralph showed Joanna the detailed

technical manual of protocols he has produced for archiv-
ing serum. It was Ralph’s hope that this effort would allow
these fragments to be assembled into new forms of knowl-
edge that might help address questions of health and illness
among descendants of the people whose blood samples are
in the freezers.

Fragment 3: Canberra, 1960–1970s

From the late 1960s, the human biology lab at the John
Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian Na-
tional University was a major center of international bio-
logical research. It was led by Robert Louis Kirk, a modest, Figure 2. Bob Kirk’s framed copy of Norman Tindale’s Tribal Boundaries
quiet man who grew up in a middle-class family in cen- in Aboriginal Australia (1974) on the wall of a temporary tearoom in the
tral England. In the early 1950s, after completing graduate soon-to-be-demolished old building, John Curtin School of Medical Re-
studies with Lancelot Hogben at Birmingham University, he search, Australian National University, Canberra, May 30, 2011. Credit:
was recruited to the University of Western Australia in Perth. Emma Kowal.
The university had been established in 1911 as the first
free university in the British Empire and sought to develop
of the 500 different language groups across the country
the fledgling state economy by investing in human capital.
(Figure 2). It was a talking point when Kirk showed visitors
Student enrollments increased fourfold in the two decades
through the lab. Seeing the map when she visited, now
after World War II as the university benefited from a boom-
displaced from its original site and relegated to a temporary
ing economy, increased demand for higher education, and
tearoom, Emma imagined that, for Kirk, it had functioned
no local competition from other institutions. Kirk benefited
as an organizing device, marking out territories repre-
from the demand for academics and was recruited by Ho-
sented in his collection and those not yet assembled, and
race (Harry) Waring, a close colleague of Hogben’s who had
as a reminder of a scientific puzzle to be solved through the
been appointed as the first professor of zoology in 1948. At
laborious production of protein types.
this juncture, a series of chance events shifted Kirk’s scien-
By the time the IBP had come to a formal end in 1974,
tific interests from snail to human evolution. Kirk quickly
some within Kirk’s lab felt that his knowledge of both Abo-
recognized that the enormous state of Western Australia,
riginal genetics and Aboriginal people was itself fragmen-
which takes up a third of the Australian continent and is
tary. He had no Aboriginal friends and few acquaintances.
only sparsely settled by Europeans, presented a remarkable
His own collecting trips had been short and mainly con-
scientific opportunity to gain insights into human evolution
fined to the early 1960s. His scholarly contributions to the
by collecting blood in Aboriginal settlements.
peopling of Australia and the Pacific were based on simple
Over the next decade, he initiated the collection that
descriptive genetics that did not incorporate theoretical de-
became his life’s work. By the time the IBP began planning
velopments in the field.
in earnest in 1965, Kirk had already made many field trips
While the map and the starch gel factory promised sci-
to the north of Western Australia and published articles
entific mastery of Aboriginal biology, that promise turned
on the novel blood proteins he had found among Indige-
out to be fleeting. By the time direct DNA methods were es-
nous groups there. He was sought out to lead a major IBP
tablished in the late 1980s, Kirk had lost touch with the most
study of human adaptation among Australian Aborigines.
recent science. The man who had devoted his career to the
His collection expanded exponentially after he moved to the
study of human evolution had failed to adapt. After his re-
John Curtin School in 1967 and assembled a state-of-the-
tirement, he abandoned the collection, refusing to answer
art starch gel laboratory. His facility attracted thousands of
routine questions his former staff would occasionally put to
samples from researchers impressed by his ability to rapidly
him about it.
produce multiple blood group and protein results.
Although his lab analyzed samples from around the
Fragment 4: Bethesda, Maryland, 1960s and
world, Australian samples were always Kirk’s special inter-
1970s
est. Anthropologist Norman Tindale’s groundbreaking map
of Australia, produced in 1974, dominated the tearoom Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the U.S. son of Hungarian-Slovak
of Kirk’s wing of the John Curtin School. Instead of the immigrants was a precocious child with an innate interest
state boundaries seen on conventional maps of Australia, in explorations, scientific and otherwise. He grew up
Tindale’s two-meter-high map depicts the territory of each in Yonkers, New York, where he was an avid Boy Scout,

756
 Indigenous blood and ethical regimes
keeping meticulous notes on the many excursions made
by his troop. From a young age he had interests in science
and visions of his own future greatness, which he began to
invest in at the University of Rochester, where he studied
physics, biology, chemistry, and math.
After earning a medical degree from Harvard and do-
ing postgraduate work in neurology at Columbia, Gajdusek
conducted virology research at the Walter Reed Army Med-
ical Service Graduate School. There, he met Dr. Joseph
Smadel, who would later create a position for him as part
of the extramural research program at the NIH. After gradu-
ate school and before joining NIH, he spent time in Tehran
and in Melbourne, where he studied with disease ecologist
and Nobel Laureate MacFarlane Burnet and initiated a life-
long interest in Pacific peoples. It was during these early
years that Gajdusek became interested in the relationship
between population and disease. He began to collect blood
samples as he traveled, to be subjected to various kinds of
immunological and virological analyses back in the lab.
Though he spent a good deal of time in the field while
at NIH, by the late 1950s, Gajdusek had become director
of laboratories of virology and neurological research at the
agency. Visitors came from all over the world to learn about
the innovative work he was leading on slow viruses (later
identified as prions) and other kinds of epidemiological
mysteries. Ralph Garruto would later join the lab, first as a
postdoctoral fellow, then as a formal member. He soon be-
came a close collaborator.
In 1976, Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize for hav-
ing discerned the etiology of kuru, a degenerative neuro-
logical disease affecting the Fore people of the Papua New
Guinea highlands that had puzzled scientists for decades.
Crucial to his success had been his ability to work with col-
lections of infected brains and other body parts collected
from the Fore people and frozen at NIH (Anderson 2014).
Beyond his research on kuru, Gajdusek was an in-
veterate collector of blood and other fragments and took
advantage of all of the resources at his disposal to make
his assemblages. They included the Alpha Helix, a floating
laboratory managed by the Scripps Institute for Oceano-
graphic Research and funded by the U.S. National Science
Foundation. In 1972, Gadjusek took the Alpha Helix to col-
lect blood from a range of populations in the island regions
of the Western Pacific (Radin 2012; Widmer 2014). This work
was undertaken in conjunction with the IBP. His field notes
from that voyage reveal the challenges he faced in making
such collections and the extent to which he relied on a
colleague in Australia, Bob Kirk, to analyze the thousands of
samples he accumulated. When one of the freezers on the
ship failed, it was Kirk that Gajdusek appealed to for help.
Gajdusek collected boys as well as blood. During his
Western Pacific trip, as on many others, Gajdusek estab-
lished intimate and, in some cases, sexual relationships
with a number of young, male islanders he encountered. He
 American Ethnologist
was not secretive about his liaisons, bringing his “boys” on
board the Alpha Helix, which prompted the ship’s captain
to write to administrators at the Scripps Institute that he
wished Gajdusek would employ greater discretion. In field
notes that he later copied, bound, and donated to several
university libraries, Gajdusek recorded details of his sex-
ual encounters and documented the challenges of bringing
up boys he had adopted from the Pacific and relocated to
the United States. His meticulous archiving of the details of
both enterprises—boys and blood—but especially the for-
mer, would come back to haunt him in the 1990s when,
in Europe, he was convicted of child molestation and sen-
tenced to 12 months in prison and five years probation. He
never returned to his lab or to the United States.10
It was under this shadow of ethical violation that
Ralph inherited his mentor’s collection of human frag-
ments. Ralph believed Gajdusek had suffered greatly in his
final years (he died in 2008) and urged Joanna to resist a
simplistic or sensationalist characterization of Gajdusek’s
actions. She has taken this injunction seriously. Neverthe-
less, other perceptions of Gajdusek’s transgressions con-
tinue to compete with and, in some cases, overshadow his
scientific legacy.11
Fragment 5: Canberra, 1990s–2011
In the world of human genetics, the 1990s were marred
by controversy surrounding the Human Genome Diver-
sity Project. Efforts to sample communities, initially labeled
“isolates of historical interest,” were criticized as grossly
insensitive attempts to steal the genetic resources of in-
digenous communities and patent them for the benefit
of scientists, governments, and multinational corporations
(M’Charek 2005; Reardon 2005). The World Congress of
Indigenous Peoples dubbed it the “vampire” project. The
most extreme criticism held that the project was part of a
conspiracy to create biological weapons that would selec-
tively target indigenous people, a biotechnological means
to complete the genocidal project of colonization (Indige-
nous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism 2000).
In the wake of this controversy, Bob Kirk’s collection
was shut down in the late 1990s by Judith Whitworth, the
then head of the John Curtin School, in what head of depart-
ment Simon Easteal called a “voluntary moratorium” on re-
search. Using the samples had, by that point, raised a range
of ethical concerns. One might say the collection could
no longer “hide the length of its network” (Redfield 2002).
The absence of formally documented informed consent—
indeed, most samples had been collected before such a
standardized protocol existed—was the most obvious eth-
ical obstacle that left the university highly vulnerable to cri-
tique in an environment of worldwide indigenous concern
about the “vampiric” tendencies of genetic researchers.
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American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
It was a difficult time for Simon, who had assumed cus-
todianship of the collection a few years before. Sue Ser-
jeantson, a key figure in international human leukocyte
antigen (HLA) research, had been the guardian of the collec-
tion from the time Kirk retired in 1987 until 1994, when she
left the lab to become the ANU deputy vice chancellor for
research. Simon, who had taken up the John Curtin School
post vacated by Kirk in 1987, had been involved with the
collection from that time but officially assumed guardian-
ship after Serjeantson left. In the decade that followed the
closure of the collection, Simon made a number of unsuc-
cessful attempts to establish what should be done with it,
until Emma became involved. All the while, the collection
itself was fragmenting under institutional pressures and sci-
entific neglect.
At the time of Emma’s visit to the lab, the wing of the
old building where Kirk’s laboratory once stood had been
recently demolished to make way for Phase 2 construc-
tion of the new building. The place where it once existed
was empty space 20 meters above a cavernous hole in the
ground. The collection that had been housed in the lab
was in fragments, dispersed among various freezers set at
various temperatures throughout the old building and the
new: a clotted sample here, a box of plasma samples there;
a few hundred extracted DNA samples in one place, sam-
ples elsewhere that had evaporated, leaving a small yellow-
ish deposit; even a closely wrapped and taped frozen parcel
marked “R L Kirk” that had never been opened.
Emma followed Simon around the old building, from
freezer to freezer, looking for boxes of samples, as he told
of recent freezer malfunctions that threatened parts of the
collection. The old building was to be completely vacated in
a few months. Lab administrators argued there was insuffi-
cient freezer space in the new building to accommodate the
collection and urged Simon to find a permanent home for it
elsewhere.
Reassemblage: Scientists, samples, personhood
Emma is currently working with Simon, his university, and
a group of senior Indigenous leaders to develop a man-
agement strategy for the collection. This attempt to thaw
the collection takes place in a politico-ethical environment
that has mutated to the point that Kirk would be unlikely to
recognize it. Over the last two decades, key organizations
and Australian national agencies have acknowledged the
continuities between oppressive colonial practices and
contemporary research on Indigenous people and have
demanded a range of reforms to give Indigenous people
more power over research. These organizations include
RAFI, the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism,
tribal councils and national indigenous organizations,
and government agencies in Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand.12 As a result of these shifts, using the collection
758
today entails a set of practices and assumptions that are not
part of the management of the collection under Ralph Gar-
ruto’s stewardship in the United States, even though the two
collections are partial mirror images, potentially containing
aliquots of samples collected from the same people.
Scientists responsible for the Australian samples were
unable to keep up with the mutating social landscape:
social and scientific worlds fell out of sync. In Australia,
the task of reestablishing the coproduction of indigenous
biospecimens in the present has become a project of piec-
ing together fragments.
There are at least three aspects to these multiple and
concurrent acts of reassemblage.13 First, Kirk himself must
be reassembled as an ethical subject. Ethical guidelines
produced specifically for research in Indigenous Australian
communities make it clear that the “motivations” and “in-
tegrity” of the researcher are critical factors in judging the
ethics of research (NHMRC 2003). A simulacrum of a pre-
empirical mode of knowledge production, only an ethical
person can produce ethical research.14 As the collection of
samples preceded the doctrine of formally documented in-
formed consent and the exact circumstance of collection
can never be known, establishing the intentions that guided
the initial assemblage of body fragments now understood to
be indigenous has become crucial.
These intentions have sent Emma into the archives
to excavate Kirk’s character. His mention of using inter-
preters when collecting samples, his distaste for the as-
sembly line sampling practices of other expeditions he
witnessed,15 ethical advice given to an anthropologist col-
league, and his wife’s involvement with land rights activism
are all fragments that can be drawn together to make an
argument about his moral fiber—and, therefore, the legit-
imate use of the biological tissues he extracted and chose to
preserve.
Given Gajdusek’s personal history, his biography may
be unlikely to stand up to similar ethical scrutiny. His later
career was marred by accusations of child molestation that
led to his voluntary exile to a remote community in north-
ern Europe. Kirk, meanwhile, was known as a quiet En-
glishman with a devoted wife and two daughters. He greatly
admired Gajdusek, who sent him samples and was a wel-
come visitor to his lab and his home. Ironically, it is the
scandalous American’s samples that can still be used to pro-
duce biomedical knowledge, while in recent years the mild
Englishman’s collection has been most productive in con-
tributing ethical knowledge to the moral economy of In-
digenous research in Australia.
We have attended to the personal histories of Kirk and
Gajdusek here not to pass judgment on intimate encoun-
ters of the scientific or the sexual kind but to highlight the
varied political and ethical mutations induced through
the passing of time amidst different moral economies. In
the future perfect tense, much that is currently considered
 Indigenous blood and ethical regimes
ethical will have been wrong, regardless of how well it
conforms to contemporary norms.
As Emma has become actively involved with the reha-
bilitation of Kirk’s collection through her collaboration with
Simon, she is acutely aware of her wager with the future.
Her experience working in Indigenous health and her
contacts in the field have made her appear a valuable inter-
locutor for scientists who seek to conform to current ethical
approaches and provide benefits to Indigenous people. She
has been instrumental in developing an Indigenous con-
sultative process that is led by national Indigenous leaders.
Responsibility for the consequences of the collection’s
rehabilitation will be borne not just by scientists but also
by Emma and the Indigenous leaders with whom she is
collaborating.
She is uneasy about her potential role in reigniting
racial science if the attempt to construct an ethical ap-
proach to indigenous genomics fails. She is equally uneasy
with the possibility of success. As we discuss below, an indi-
genized form of genomic research in Australia could ensure
the protection of vulnerable indigenous peoples and their
biospecimens, but it could also accelerate the development
of fragmented personhood contained in all frozen samples.
The coproduction of Kirk’s collection as a viable
biomedical resource in the 21st century requires the re-
assemblage not just of Kirk but also of his samples. To
rehabilitate the collection, each vial of stored blood also
requires reassembly into a person with the capacity to give
or withdraw consent. Crucially, this process would not usu-
ally be required in Australia if the samples were not marked
as “indigenous.” While Australian ethical guidelines allow
collections of old, cold blood to be stripped of identifiers
and used by scientists with a waiver of consent, this process
is cautioned against where “participants are vulnerable”
(NHMRC 2007).
The construction of Indigenous people as vulnerable
within the dominant ethical regime (Kowal 2014) has led re-
searchers to find ways and means to piece together genealo-
gies from the sample archive, travel to remote communities,
contact donors or, in most cases, their descendants, and
ask them to make decisions about the use of their deceased
kin’s blood. It requires historical expertise. The ongoing use
of the samples may require a “managed collection” to be set
up that would be under the control of Indigenous people.
This massive undertaking requires scientists in the present
to reassemble themselves as specialists in Indigenous con-
sultation and to call on the expertise of historically oriented
anthropologists.
This process highlights the operation of two very dif-
ferent notions of vulnerability. As pieces of fragmented
personhood now unmoored from an organizing principle
of scientific authority (Bamford 2007), the samples have
become highly vulnerable to destruction. When Emma
first visited Simon, the collection was endangered both
 American Ethnologist
institutionally and physically, a fact dramatically illustrated
by the progressive demolition of the building that housed
it. The Tindale map that once hung proudly on a wall of the
wing was similarly vulnerable, exiled to a temporary tea-
room, as the architects of the new building decreed that
nothing could be hung on its walls.
To protect the collection, Emma, Simon, and the In-
digenous leaders with whom they collaborate, must work
to shift the samples into a quite different mode of vulner-
ability. They must reestablish the vital link between these
biological objects and the vulnerable Indigenous subjects
from whom they were derived. The samples will thereby be
transformed from vulnerable objects that can be destroyed
into vulnerable subjects that demand protection. In other
words, to reduce the vulnerability of the collection, it must
be made vulnerable in a fashion intelligible to contempo-
rary Australian ethical regimes.
The effort to reconstitute the Indigenous collection is
also a fragmentation of the collection as a whole. On a sub-
sequent visit to the John Curtin School, Emma found the
resourceful lab technician hired to go through the archives
with the wooden box on her desk, lid open. Some of the
index cards had been turned perpendicularly, protruding
above the other cards. These are the cards relating to the
Indigenous community collections, singled out for easy ref-
erence. The other cards are those that continue to stand,
seemingly unproblematically, for communities, races, and
ecosystems that persist in freezers beyond the Australian
continent, at least for now.
In the United States, Ralph views the collection as pri-
marily a biomedical—and not an indigenous—one. He is
aware that emerging concerns about secondary uses of
samples, which have resulted in instances of repatriation,
may be endangering the persistence of Gajdusek’s collec-
tion (BBC News 2015; Couzin-Frankel 2010; Harmon 2010).
It is true that an indigenous community’s lawsuit against
researchers who it claimed misused its samples has led to
new suggestions for the appropriate use and reuse of pre-
served biomaterials (Mello and Wolf 2010). Yet these sug-
gestions have not become requirements. In the meantime,
Ralph and many others who manage such unique mate-
rials do so in an ethical environment that may eventually
be affected by novel articulations of vulnerability and harm
emerging in the United States and beyond.
Conclusion: Mutating personhood
In this article we have examined how mutating ethical
regimes have differential effects on the contemporary man-
agement of two collections of human biospecimens. One
collection, now located in the United States, and the other,
now located in Australia, were assembled under the aus-
pices of international collaborative research into human
adaptability. Carleton Gajdusek and Bob Kirk, the two
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American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
scientists who made these collections during the Cold War,
shared both samples and assumptions about the present
and future utility of these materials.
However, the ways in which these samples can be
used in the 21st century reflects variable and mutating
understandings of vulnerability and protection, scientific
authority, and the politics of indigeneity. Recognizing the
divergent fates that the two collections have met in the
present provides a new vantage point for asking questions
about what it means to do “ethical” research, particu-
larly involving communities who come to be marked as
vulnerable.
Since the time that Kirk and Gajdusek initially assem-
bled their collections, new configurations of law, bioecon-
omy, and justice have emerged that require new forms
of coproduction if collections are to remain productive of
knowledge about the human species and about human sub-
jects research. Use of the samples in Kirk’s freezers is shaped
in this moment by locally specific ethical forms innovated
to mitigate potential harm from research in Indigenous
communities. As yet, it is unclear whether every sample in
Kirk’s and Gajdusek’s cosmopolitan freezers—or, for that
matter, any frozen human-derived samples—may be mu-
tating in the ways Kirk’s Indigenous samples have and, thus,
will eventually require the same work of coproduction.
As Simon, Emma, and their colleagues work to re-
assemble the Indigenous samples into persons, they may be
simultaneously reassembling the personhood of all biolog-
ical samples, beyond those from communities recognized
as indigenous. Alongside the discourse of particularity
that has produced indigenous-specific research guidelines,
some have argued that indigenous people have simply
demanded what all research participants should want.
According to this view, it is indigenous peoples’ height-
ened sensitivity to material and epistemic injury, rather
than their cultural or epistemological differences, that has
come to drive indigenous-specific research guidelines. As a
review of ethical guidelines for indigenous genetic research
has argued, “Indigenous groups are most vulnerable to
research exploitation and harm; therefore, identifying
principles that work for Indigenous people will lead to best
practices for all populations” (Taniguchi et al. 2012).16
This reading is supported by the popularity of
“participant-centric initiatives” in literature on research in
the “post-genomic” age (a term referring to the period since
the human genome was first sequenced in 2000). These
articles argue that all research participants should have
control over what their samples are used for into the future,
should be offered the chance to contribute to research
design, and should even conduct their own research (Kaye
et al. 2012).17 In this emerging world where “participants
are partners,” the humanity of indigenous biospecimens—
a new way of consolidating the human—may be the future
of all samples. In other words, the work of coproduction
760
that indigenous samples currently require in Australia and
in some domains in the United States may come to be
required for all biospecimens to remain in sync with social
worlds over time.
The possibility that indigenous samples are, as it were,
the leading edge of personhood raises interesting questions.
That the Indigenous Australian samples in Kirk’s collection
require reassemblage into subjects marks them out as
more human, less able to be fragmented, than other sam-
ples. These indigenous samples have become once more
fundamental and exceptional, no longer as the substance
of the most biological humans but, instead, as the most
human of biospecimens. It was once the supposed lack of
exposure to European influence that made indigenous
people the most biological of all humans. Today, it is the
recognition of the devastating effects of empire that may
make them the most human biospecimens—where to be
vulnerable is to be human.
This deceptively simple formulation highlights a con-
tinuity between the role of indigenous people in science
and cultural politics before and after the major shifts in
indigenous rights discourse in the 1980s (Niezen 2003).
The meaning of “vulnerability” shifted dramatically, but
in both old and new formulations, indigenous people
remain exceptionally and fundamentally human, at least
in the realm of science. In the 1960s, scientists sought to
salvage genetic material from communities around the
globe who were made vulnerable to fragmentation by the
encroachment of industrialization. In the 21st century,
vulnerability is used to refer to indigenous communities
who are seen to be at risk of exploitation by scientists whose
intentions must be policed. Will this language of vulner-
ability become elevated beyond local contexts to a new
and global bioethical norm (Rogers et al. 2012)? If so, what
mutations will it induce in the relationship between social
and technical orders in highly varied national and local
contexts?
We are especially ambivalent about the potential ex-
pansion of this biosociality of vulnerability from something
specifically “indigenous” to a general human condition. Is
this the development of democratic science, enabling better
and more-just forms of ethical engagement and knowledge
production (Reardon 2012)? Or is this the encroachment of
neoliberal forms of biological citizenship: the optimization
of personal biological productivity for individual gain (Ong
2006)? Or is it something else, entirely?
Moreover, we ask, in broadening claims to ethical pro-
tection, is the paradigmatic Western subject, a transna-
tional member of a sprawling and uneven biomedical and
technological marketplace, marking her- or himself as an
equally vulnerable, exceptional subject? And could this uni-
versalizing gesture serve to erase, negate, or deny the ba-
sis on which some indigenous people have come to make
claims on scientific authority (Reardon and TallBear 2012)?
 Indigenous blood and ethical regimes
This surfeit of questions erupts when we pry open the lids
and doors of biomedicine’s freezers.
Although bioethicists are somewhat troubled by the
questions old samples provoke, they offer solutions and
policy frameworks (Ludman et al. 2010; Public Population
Project in Genomics and Society: International Policy In-
teroperability and Data Access Clearinghouse 2014; Steins-
bekk and Solberg 2011). Reaching for a normative answer
to the question of how old indigenous blood should be
managed in the present can provide comfort, making it ap-
pear that the mutations induced through time can be mas-
tered by ever-progressing bioethical norms. But as we have
sought to show, shifting norms only further mutate what it
means to be vulnerable, biological, and human. Far from
impartial observers or ethical arbitrators, we recognize our
location at the center of these uncomfortable possibilities.
All scholars, whether genome scientist, bioethicist, indige-
nous studies scholar, historian, or anthropologist, are in-
volved in and mutate through the act of prying. These are
the conditions and the stakes of contributing to fragmented
attempts to understand humans as subjects and objects of
the science of life.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Kowal’s research is supported by an Aus-
tralian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award.
We would like to thank Ralph Garruto and Simon Easteal for their
ongoing commitments to thinking through these issues with us,
and Warwick Anderson for his ongoing support. We also extend
our thanks to colleagues who provided valuable feedback when
versions of this article were presented at the following workshops
and conferences: the Postgenomic Perspectives on Human Diver-
sity Workshop at the University of Sydney; the Australian and New
Zealand Society for the History of Medicine Conference; the Uni-
versity of Melbourne History and Philosophy of Science Research
Conference; the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association; the Australian Anthropological Society conference; the
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle; the Lipphardt
Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin;
the Norwegian Museum of Technology and Science, Oslo; the His-
tory of Science colloquium at UCLA; the History of the Life Sci-
ences since 1945 workshop in Pittsburgh; “Breaking Scientific Net-
works” at UC-Davis; and the STS Life Sciences Workshop at Har-
vard’s Kennedy School.
1. Populations now known as “indigenous” were referred to us-
ing various terms, including primitive, in the language of 19th- and
early 20th-century science. We use the contemporary term indige-
nous to refer to the communities whose blood specimens are the
focus of this article. Indigenous in our usage refers to descendants
of precolonial populations in settler colonial nations, for example,
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, Native
Americans in the United States, First Nations in Canada, and Maori
in New Zealand. We use indigenous biospecimens in this article to
refer to biological samples in a collection that derive from indige-
nous people of the nation where the collection is stored. Thus, only
samples from Indigenous Australians, and not samples from Papua
New Guinea or Turkey, are indigenous biospecimens in the context
of the Australian collection we discuss. In referring to the Aboriginal
 American Ethnologist
and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, we capitalize Indige-
nous, following Australian convention.
2. On the issue of race in the selection of isolates in Cold War
biology, see Lipphardt 2010.
3. Radin discusses this history and its ramifications in a book,
forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
4. The politics and values of exchange involved with Gajdusek’s
fieldwork have been beautifully interpreted by Warwick Anderson
(2000, 2008, 2013).
5. Scholars have applied the idea of moral economy as a means
of tracing noncommercial forms of circulation and exchange of re-
search materials (see Kohler 1994; Strasser 2005). Critiques of “bio-
capital” or “bioeconomy,” however, have highlighted the fallacy of
imagining the realm of knowledge production to be unmarked by
that of commodity production (see Cooper 2005, 2007; Helmreich
2008; Shapin 2008; Sunder Rajan 2006; Waldby and Mitchell 2006).
6. This difference is generally attributed to the presence in the
United States of African Americans and to historical slavery. Politi-
cal and public attention to Native American issues is overshadowed
by a focus on African Americans as the primary racial Other and
Hispanics as a second racial minority. In Australia, Indigenous peo-
ple are the primary racial Other, illustrated by the fact that Aborig-
inal and Torres Strait Islander status is usually the only ethnoracial
classification asked about on forms.
7. Coproduction is a specific intervention in a broader science
studies project of destabilizing and reconstituting boundaries be-
tween nature and culture (e.g., Haraway 1991, 1997; Latour 1999,
2005).
8. Elsewhere, we have used the term abductive co-production to
call attention to the recursive ways technical and social orders must
be realigned again and again. See Kowal et al. 2013.
9. We are in conversation here with Bruno Latour’s (2004) argu-
ments that critique has “run out of steam” and should “add reality”
and not “subtract reality” from its objects of study.
10. Anderson (2008) writes perceptively and sensitively about
this aspect of Gajdusek’s career.
11. See, for example, the controversial material and focus pre-
sented in Lindquist 2009.
12. National guidelines similar to Australia’s have been produced
in Canada and New Zealand (see Canadian Institutes of Health Re-
search 2007; Health Research Council of New Zealand 2008).
13. In other work in progress, Emma explores this as “ethical re-
habilitation.”
14. Michel Foucault pointed out that Descartes’s “non-aesthetic
subject of knowledge” has been a major feature of modernity (see
Rabinow 1997:279). This apparent reversal points to a temporal di-
mension of the shifting nature of “objectivity,” wherein ideas about
what makes a reliable knower in the present are used to test the le-
gitimacy of research materials accumulated in the past (see Daston
and Galison 2010).
15. These were large multidisciplinary expeditions to study the
biology and culture of Indigenous Australians from many different
communities run by the University of Adelaide from 1926 to 1976.
16. A recent high-level NGO report into Indigenous health re-
search similarly noted its “pioneering role in the reform of research
in Australia.” See Brands 2014:1.
17. Richard Rottenburg (2009) refers to these shifts as the rise of
“civic science” or “lay expertification.”
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