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