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HEALTH, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
Species of Contagion
Animal-to-Human Transplantation in the
Age of Emerging Infectious Disease
Ray Carr
Health, Technology and Society
Series Editors
Rebecca Lynch
Life Sciences and Medicine
King’s College London
London, UK
Martyn Pickersgill
Usher Institute
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
Medicine, health care, and the wider social meaning and management of
health are undergoing major changes. In part this reflects developments
in science and technology, which enable new forms of diagnosis, treat-
ment and delivery of health care. It also reflects changes in the locus of
care and the social management of health. Locating technical develop-
ments in wider socio-economic and political processes, each book in the
series discusses and critiques recent developments in health technologies
in specific areas, drawing on a range of analyses provided by the social
sciences. Some have a more theoretical focus, some a more applied focus
but all draw on recent research by the authors. The series also looks
toward the medium term in anticipating the likely configurations of
health in advanced industrial society and does so comparatively, through
exploring the globalization and internationalization of health.
Species of Contagion
Animal-to-Human Transplantation
in the Age of Emerging Infectious
Disease
Ray Carr
Independent Scholar
Corrimal, NSW, Australia
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
For Maisie
Series Editors’ Preface
Medicine, health care, and the wider social meanings and management of
health are continually in the process of change. While the “birth of the
clinic” heralded the process through which health and illness became
increasingly subject to the surveillance of medicine, for example, surveil-
lance has become more complex, sophisticated, and targeted—as seen in
the search for “precision medicine” and now “precision public health”.
Both surveillance and health itself emerge as more provisional, uncertain,
and risk-laden as a consequence, and we might also ask what now consti-
tutes “the clinic”, how meaningful a concept of a clinic ultimately is, and
where else might we now find (or not find) health care spaces and
interventions.
Ongoing developments in science and technology are helping to
enable and propel new forms of diagnosis, treatment, and the delivery of
health care. In many contexts, these innovations both reflect and further
contribute to changes in the locus of care and burden of responsibility for
health. Genetics, informatics, imaging—to name but a few—are redefin-
ing collective and individual understandings of the body, health, and dis-
ease. At the same time, long established and even ostensibly mundane
technologies and techniques can generate ripples in local discourse and
practices as ideas about the nature and focus of health care shift in
response to global debates about, for instance, One Health and
Planetary Health.
vii
viii Series Editors’ Preface
The very technologies that (re)define health are also the means through
which the individualisation of health care can occur—through, for
instance, digital health, diagnostic tests, and the commodification of
restorative tissue. This individualisation of health is both culturally
derived and state-sponsored, as exemplified by the promotion of “self-
care”. These shifts are simultaneously welcomed and contested by profes-
sionals, patients, and wider publics. Hence they at once signal and
instantiate wider societal ambivalences and divisions.
This Series explores these processes within and beyond the conven-
tional domain of “the clinic”, and asks whether they amount to a qualita-
tive shift in the social ordering and value of medicine and health. Locating
technical use and developments in wider socio-economic and political
processes, each book discusses and critiques the dynamics between health,
technology, and society through a variety of specific cases, and drawing
on a range of analyses provided by the social sciences.
The Series has already published more than 20 books that have explored
many of these issues, drawing on novel, critical, and deeply informed
research undertaken by their authors. In doing so, the books have shown
how the boundaries between the three core dimensions that underpin the
whole Series—health, technology, and society—are changing in funda-
mental ways.
In Species of Contagion, Ray Carr focuses on an area that has galvanised
debate and analysis within biomedicine, the social sciences, and popular
culture: animal-to-human transplantation. This exciting monograph
considers compelling questions around what and who counts as “self ”
and “other”, and the technoscientific production and negotiation of “nat-
uralness” and “purity”. Through Species of Contagion, Carr illustrates the
complexities of understandings of hybridity and contagion within bio-
medical regulation and industry activities, and the transformations that
can happen both because of and to contemporary practices of xenotrans-
plantation. Accordingly, this monograph provides a bold and vital analy-
sis of the reconfiguring of (the relations between) forms of capital, logics
of power, and somas across diverse biological entities.
ix
x Acknowledgements
6 Conclusion205
Index217
xi
1
Introduction: Forms of Contagion
The surgeon completes the transplant of the pig heart into the baboon …
The pig heart initially becomes a healthy pink color as the recipient’s blood
flows through it. It begins to beat. But, after as little as two minutes, the
surgeon watches as it becomes a mottled, dusky blue color, and the con-
tractions become weak and irregular. Blood ceases to flow through the
organ as the small capillaries in the heart muscle become occluded by clots.
The blood vessels rupture, and the heart rapidly swells due to the leakage of
blood and fluid into the muscle wall. The heart stops beating. It is now an
ugly black mass. (D. K. C. Cooper and Lanza 2000, 55)
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 1
R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_1
2 R. Carr
immune system as a mechanism that divides self from non-self recalls the
sovereign division between friend and enemy (Schmitt 2007). However,
contemporary immunology offers more than one understanding of
immune function, and accordingly different accounts of how the body
treats the presence of other species, whether in the form of microbes or
transplants. Immunological theories sometimes render immune system
activities as maintaining balance within cellular networks or as adaptive
systems. Even Burnet’s paradigmatic explanation of the immunological-
self had ecological aspects (Anderson and Mackay 2014).3 More strik-
ingly, in the 1970s, Niels Jerne’s “idiotypic network theory” proposed
that a destructive immune reaction is prompted by a disturbance in the
interactions within a network of immune cells, rather than being caused
by a transgression of the self/other boundary. Immunologist Klaus
Rajewsky explains that for Jerne “the antibody response is just an adapta-
tion to a new equilibrium” (Eichmann 2008, 162). Polly Matzinger’s
(2001) “danger theory” goes further in postulating that the immune sys-
tem responds to cellular signals of stress and injury, as “a flexible system
that adapts to a changing self ” (8). While these theories remain at the
fringes of immunology, medical historian Alfred Tauber (2000) argues
that most contemporary immunologists understand destructive immune
system responses as occurring within a network of cellular and molecular
interactions, dependent on context.4 Nevertheless, many theorists remain
attached to the concept of the immunological self (Tauber 2000).
Xenotransplantation can be thought of as a hybrid technology. It aims
to take live tissues from other animals and incorporate them into the
human body, co-opting the biological functions of other animals to sup-
plement human biology. Transplants can involve non-human animal
cells, tissues, or organs.5 Human clinical trials of cellular transplants have
been performed in several countries, using pig cells, in an attempt to treat
diabetes and Parkinson’s disease (LCT n.d.; Valdes-Gonzalez et al. 2005).
One company in New Zealand, Living Cell Technologies (LCT)/Diatranz
Otsuka, already secured government approval to commercialise its cellu-
lar xenotransplantation product for diabetes in Russia (LCT 2010).6
Other companies are attempting to develop technologies for transplant-
ing pig organs into humans; however, this is far more difficult because of
the radical immunological rejection of non-human organs, and these
1 Introduction: Forms of Contagion 3
experimental pig transplants are yet to succeed for any length of time in
non-human experimental subjects (usually baboons). To reduce the risk
of immune system rejection, some researchers are genetically altering pig
source animals to make them “more human”. In more than one way,
then, xenotransplantation technologies blur the biological boundaries
between humans and other animals (Brown 1999; P. S. Cook and
Osbaldiston 2010; Marie Fox 2005; Sharp 2013).7
Concern over the interplay between the self and other manifests in an
intriguing problematic in xenotransplantation. On the one hand, the
radical immunological rejection of tissues from other species presents an
obstacle to transplantation. And on the other hand, from a regulatory
point of view, the possibility that infectious disease might be spread by
the practice of xenotransplantation poses significant problems. The
extraordinarily intimate contact between live human and non-human
animal flesh opens the individual, and potentially, entire human popula-
tions, to novel viruses and other microbes lying latent in transplant tis-
sues. It is possible that a virus or other microbe might be transferred,
along with the transplant, into the human recipient, and onward from
there into the human population. (This kind of transmission of an animal
virus into the human population is called zoonosis, while the term xenozo-
onosis denotes this same process happening through xenotransplanta-
tion.) Infectious disease experts have warned that the technologies used
to overcome immune rejection, such as genetic engineering and immu-
nosuppression, could even facilitate a microbe adapting to better infect
the human population. Diminishing the boundaries between self and
other is thus posed as a public health risk as well as a potentially lifesaving
technology.
How is the immune system response to non-human tissues under-
stood in the xenotransplantation industry?8 Above I quoted xenotrans-
plantation researchers David Cooper and Robert Paul Lanza (2000),
describing the rejection of a xenograft. They continue by explaining the
baboon’s extraordinary immune response to transplanted pig tissues as
follows:
The surgeon has witnessed the most powerful immunological reaction that
the human body can mount, a response initially developed millions of
4 R. Carr
that it does not “attack” transplanted tissues, also called “inducing toler-
ance”. The term “tolerance” usually refers to the immune system’s lack of
reactivity to the organism’s own cells; techniques for inducing tolerance
aim to transfer the immunity from one’s immune system onto donor tis-
sues as well.
A team of researchers based at Harvard Medical School, led by immu-
nologist David Sachs, has been exploring methods of inducing tolerance
in both human-to-human transplantation and animal-to-human trans-
plantation. Sachs (2011) defines tolerance as “the specific absence of a
destructive immune response to a transplanted tissue in the absence of
immunosuppression” (p. 501). The lack of a damaging reaction does not
mean that the immune system does not respond at all, as is often pre-
sumed under the self/non-self model. The immune system does respond
to “tolerated” tissues, but it is not strictly destructive; from this perspec-
tive, the immune system is capable of positive reactions as well as damag-
ing ones:
animals, the approach that flows from the imperative of security employs
infectious processes and adapt life and pre-empt the possibility of disease
outbreaks. As hinted already, biotechnology’s promissory discourses are
not the only future-oriented narratives shaping the xenotransplantation
field, as alongside these is the future painted of potential catastrophic
zoonotic outbreaks. I address the intersection of these speculative logics
in Chap. 4.
The imperative of security structures the relationship between humans
and animals along quite different lines to the dualistic friend/enemy
structure of sovereign power. It provides an alternative to the inside/out-
side division that theorists often identify as the guiding premise of human
exploitation of non-human animals. Nevertheless, security mechanisms
are also methods of control and coercion, and their operation is not gen-
erally concerned with the wellbeing of individuals, since they focus on
collectivities, or existing livelihoods, as are oriented to the future. As
Evans and Reid’s (2014) critique of contemporary political economy
argues, security apparatuses may exacerbate the vulnerabilities of those
already most exposed, as the expectation placed on individuals and com-
munities to become resilient to future catastrophes supersedes protective
strategies from government. Moreover, as I will explore throughout this
book, while security, as a mode of power, is essentially liberal, in some
cases it can nonetheless effectively incorporate sovereigntist binaries
within its operations to support the continuation of human domination
of non-human animals. Speculative life sciences rely on non-human bod-
ies—their lives and deaths—for the development of biocapital. And
xenotransplantation procedures—even while they may undermine
human/animal binaries—relentlessly circulate value from other animals
to (some) humans.
Morse 1993). Around the same time public health and infectious disease
experts raised concerns that the community might be infected with a new
animal disease via xenotransplantation technologies. These fears for the
public health were formulated with reference to the new paradigm of
emerging infectious disease. In Chap. 4, I trace the development of these
discourses and how they informed conceptualisations of xenozoonosis.
The term “emerging” here signals a change in scientific understanding of
microbes and infectious disease. Scientists and public health experts
increasingly began to comprehend microbes, especially viruses, as highly
adaptable and able to infect humans in new ways (Domingo and Perales
2001). Furthermore, in this perspective, humans, non-human animals,
and microbes were increasingly understood as interconnected in continu-
ally emergent relationships.
In this chapter I propose that both the construction of xenozoonosis
and the US regulatory approach to infectious disease risk in xenotrans-
plantation are best understood as security apparatuses. I give a longer
exegesis of Foucault’s account of governmentality in Security, Territory,
Population, and extend his analysis to the contemporary context of emerg-
ing infectious disease and xenotransplantation, drawing on the work of
Walker and Cooper (2011).
Of the countries I study in this book, the response to xenozoonosis in
the United States most clearly exemplifies the workings of liberal security
apparatuses. In keeping with the way that xenozoonosis has been concep-
tualised by infectious disease experts in the liberal US context, govern-
ment regulation stimulates a range of pre-emptive and preparedness
measures, including biotechnological innovations, which further mobil-
ise movements and interconnection between humans, pigs, and microbes.
While in the United States the conceptualisation of xenozoonosis has
provoked a deployment of security mechanisms, in Australia the concep-
tualisation has resulted in a moratorium on xenotransplantation, a deci-
sion that has involved the deployment of an older method of ensuring
public health: prevention of contact and exclusion. Why is Australia’s
response so out of keeping with the paradigm of emerging infectious
disease, with its emphasis on the interconnection and adaptation? In
Chap. 5, I seek to resolve this puzzle of Australia’s distinctly local response,
24 R. Carr
Notes
1. On the other hand, people who have received extracorporeal blood per-
fusion treatments using pig tissues have been found to have pig cells
remaining in their bodies nine years later (Collignon and Purdy 2001;
Paradis et al. 1999), which indicates the human immune system may not
always respond quite so radically or effectively to all “otherness”.
2. Burnet’s clonal selection theory proposed that the immune self emerges
during the prenatal period, at which point the body produces a vast
number of immune cells through mutation, each reactive to different
molecules. The immune system becomes tolerant, or non-reactive, to
“self ” by deleting all immune system cells or molecules that react to
existing cells in the body leaving only those that would target something
from outside (Burnet 1959).
3. Burnet’s (2015) explanation of the immune self is ecological, invoking
notions from evolution, in that he understands the “self ” to emerge from
mutation, or variation, and selection of appropriate immune cells rela-
tive to the bodily environment.
4. For this reason several theorists suggest that the “self ” concept is now
redundant (Pradeu 2012; Tauber 2000).
1 Introduction: Forms of Contagion 25
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34 R. Carr
The great system of irrigation at Sze Chuan was intended for the
cultivation of rice only; but the great and terrible growth in the
demand for opium has caused the cultivation of the poppy so to
increase that it is encroaching on the rice lands.
This may be regarded as the saddest and most terrible fact as
regards the future of China.
The use of opium is of comparatively recent date, but the growth and
spreading of the habit has been most rapid.
At the first, both local and government officials did their best to stop it
and to stamp out the culture of the poppy; but although laws were
passed making death the penalty for its cultivation they became a
dead letter, until to-day it is estimated that eighty per cent. of the
men and fifty per cent. of the women, in one or two populous
provinces, are opium smokers. They do not all smoke to excess.
There are moderate smokers as we have our moderate drinkers; but
all through the province of Sze Chuan the opium shops are as thick
as the gin shops in the lower parts of London.
It is not necessary to dilate on the effects of opium when freely
indulged in. They are too well known. China’s only hope is to
emancipate herself from the vice that is eating away her manhood.
But will she be able to do it?
OPIUM CULTURE
ENCROACHING
ON THE RICE LANDS,
SZE CHUAN