The Hoarding Economy of Endometrial Stem Cell Storage

‘Stem-cell Banking: Lifeline or Sub-prime?’ ¹

Commercial tissue banking developed in the United States from the early ad hoc storage of donated or collected organs and tissues in laboratories and hospitals into a complex ‘do-it-yourself’ network of tissue recovery specialists, tissue vendors, tissue banks and those in need of tissue, primarily for research but increasingly for clinical or therapeutic use. No centralized collection and distribution network coordinates the several thousand tissue banks that exist to store collected tissue, nor have the industry’s claims been subject to close regulatory scrutiny (Waltz, 2007: 1204–6). Tissues once considered of no use to the persons from whom they originated were often, like other forms of medical waste, routinely classified as medical waste or garbage and recycled once outside the hospital for both research and cosmetic use. From their medical classification as waste, detritus, garbage or byproduct, the tissues banked in commercial stem cell bank accounts have been revalued over the last 20 years in light of their stem cell composition and transformed according to their therapeutic utility into ‘clinical gold’ (Waldby and Mitchell, 2006: 14).

The tendency of the commercial stem cell banking industry to market its services as ‘phenomenal’, ‘life-saving’ and ‘revolutionary’ has been criticized for obscuring the ethical ambiguities surrounding for-profit stem cell banking, especially in contexts where non-profit and public banks exist for tissues, as in the case of umbilical cord blood. Furthermore, the commercialization of tissue banking in the United States has taken place in the relative absence of national or state regulation. ² The ethical ambiguities surrounding stem cell banking are most apparent in the simultaneous development of both public and private services for storing umbilical cord blood. Both individualized and public storage services for umbilical cord blood have grown significantly since 1988, when a French research team led by Dr Eliane Gluckmann successfully transplanted umbilical cord blood stem cells into a 6-year-old child to treat a rare blood disorder (Gluckmann et al., 1989). In 1992, the New York Blood Center (NYBC) established its Placental Blood Program to provide a publicly accessible source of umbilical cord blood, particularly to ethnic minority patients. In the same year, Cryo-Cell, C’elle’s parent company, began to provide commercial umbilical cord blood banking services. Since 2000, the number of both private and public cord blood banks globally has expanded almost exponentially, capitalizing on the promise of cord blood’s potential beyond its initial use in treating blood diseases. Private banks located in the United States are the largest cord blood banks measured by units stored. In 2007, Cryo-Cell was storing more than 140,000 units of cord blood while its closest competitor, Cord Blood Registry, was storing 180,000 units, dwarfing the 33,000 units stored by the largest public bank, the NYBC’s National Cord Blood Program (Martin et al., 2008). ³

The ethical controversies surrounding human tissue storage intensify when, unlike cord blood, the therapeutic use of banked tissues is highly speculative and far less established in the medical literature. The initial response to C’elle’s endometrial stem cell storage services, for example, was sceptical at best: as one commentator asked: ‘Stem-cell banking: lifeline or sub-prime?’ (Nelson, 2008; see also Park, 2007; Pollack, 2008a, 2008b; M. Roberts, 2007). However, among for-profit enterprises engaged in commercial stem cell banking targeted at individuals, the ease of collection and ‘non-controversial’ nature of banked tissues are a key means of promoting individualized tissue banking services. Initial processing fees range from US $499 for C’elle’s menstrual blood service to US $7500 for New York-based NeoStem’s private bone marrow bank account. These fees are in addition to annual payments, spread out over the life of the account, from approximately 15 to 20 years, ranging in price from US $69 per year for banking baby or milk teeth, US $99 for C’elle’s menstrual blood banking, and US $699 annually for a bone marrow account.

Despite the considerable cost, individual stem cell banking is promoted as an opportunity to invest in the potential of scientific innovation and to reap the future corporeal benefits of biotechnology’s clinical applications in regenerative medicine. C’elle is the first US firm to market stem cell banking of menstrual blood to individual women. Just as the umbilical cord blood banking industry sought to successfully promote the collection and preservation of stem cell-rich cord blood, C’elle also seeks to revalue another substance once considered waste. Given the relatively recent attempts to regulate markets for human tissues in the United States, and the competitive market logics underwriting the US health care system, the evolution of C’elle from Cryo-Cell’s umbilical cord blood banking services marketed to middle-class consumers is not altogether surprising.

However, C’elle’s marketing strategies, its narratives of expectation and its invitations to women to become C’elle clients differentiate C’elle from umbilical cord blood banking enterprises. C’elle, like its parent company Cryo-Cell and other umbilical cord blood storage companies, also promotes its services as transformative: by banking cells, one transforms a waste fluid into a substance with potential therapeutic value. Separated from the body and held in a state of deferred regeneration, the endometrial stem cell is presented as an opportunity to invest in one’s own potential for self-regeneration (Cooper, 2008). Yet, unlike other substances similarly transformed, menstrual blood has never been recycled through institutional networks, like those for umbilical cords, in which medical waste sent for disposal is transformed into a commodity for research or commercial use. Nor is the collection of menstrual blood associated with the same risks that accompany both ova donation and umbilical cord blood collection, both rich sources of stem cells produced by what Donna Dickenson (2007) suggests is women’s ‘reproductive labour’ (see also Nahman, 2008). ⁴ Account holders receive materials and instructions for ‘discreetly’ collecting menstrual fluid to send back to Cryo-Cell’s laboratories for testing, processing and cryogenic preservation.

As a reproductive tissue, menstrual fluid may signal the productivity and fecundity of the female body. However, in a normative procreative reading of female sexuality, menstrual fluid is also unrealized potential, a negative sign of (re)productivity. Feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s tended to conceptualize and interpret menstruation as a symbol of women’s social status, arguing that in contemporary Euro-American commodity cultures, very little spiritual, mythological, or cultural value is attributed to menstrual blood itself (Buckley and Gottlieb, 1988; Laws, 1990; see also Douglas, 1966). More recent work by social historians elucidates how the purchase of technical means to manage menstruation characterized the modern New Woman’s approach to menstruation in the early 20th century (Vostral, 2005). Defining management of menstruation as a technical achievement continues to mediate North American medical discourse, for instance, in the controversial suggestion by some medical professionals that long-term monthly menstruation is an ‘evolutionary aberration’ necessitating pharmaceutical means of menstrual suppression (Meghani, 2005; see also Coutinho and Segal, 1999; Rako, 2003). In either instance, menstrual fluid is interpreted as simply material, a waste fluid par excellence.

C’elle turns the logic of menstrual waste on its head. Similar to the metaphors of donated organs as ‘gifts of life’, C’elle deliberately fetishizes menstrual fluid and attributes value in the process (Lock, 2001). C’elle moves menstrual fluid from a state of mere materiality or derelict substance to one of life-saving potentiality. Similar to the procreative logic of sexuality that links the essence of femininity to biology, C’elle suggests that menstruating female bodies are productive precisely because of their biological capacities. However, C’elle also shifts these procreative logics. It is the immaterial potential of stem cells derived from menstrual fluid rather than the telos of procreative sex (a living infant) that is valued. Menstrual blood materializes as a ‘harbinger of future fecundity’ yet is delinked from fertility (Van de Walle and Renne, 2001: xvi). The menstruating body’s value is dependent on the potential regenerative capacity and hence the utility and productivity of its endometrial stem cells, rather than its reproductive function within the social grid of biological kinship.

Instead of identifying with the shared denigration of women’s biological difference, or the over-idealization of female procreative capacities (a dialectic analysed at length within feminist scholarship), C’elle asks the prospective client to consider loss in a register different from that of ‘infertility’: the individual loss of vitality, or what one stem cell entrepreneur termed the massive traumatic ageing of an entire generation of middle-class consumers. Ageing, disease, indeed, human finitude, are the traumas on which regenerative medicine, cosmeceutical research (‘curative’ cosmetics designed to return skin tissue to youthful elasticity and vitality), and C’elle’s business model hope to capitalize. Rather than remaining mired in this sense of existential loss, however, C’elle invites clients to therapeutically experience its inverse, the future-oriented assessment of health risks and potential therapies.

C’elle’s revaluation of menstrual fluids does not rely solely on the potential of stem cells in the fluid itself. C’elle also appropriates narratives of empowerment to invite prospective account holders to invest in their own regenerative potential. The company’s glossy images of thin, glowing young women are laden with the language of entrepreneurial health and self-empowerment: with C’elle, one can turn one’s ‘monthly miracle’ into an investment in one’s own ‘personal wellness portfolio’, hedging against the inevitability of illness and debilitation by retaining stem cells in a state of cryogenic suspension until the unforeseen day when they might be needed. C’elle’s invitation to invest in one’s own bodily capacities thus contrasts with the more explicitly exploitative nature of women’s engagements in the bioeconomy described in Waldby and Cooper’s (2008) discussion of oöcyte vending, even as both represent a transformation and ‘reconfiguration in bodily potentiality’ (see Waldby and Cooper, 2010: 17).

An investment in C’elle (via a menstrual blood account) is presented as an investment in future health, a financially and somatically savvy calculation that allows an individual to safely anticipate future illness. This investment empowers, but not through a revaluation of women’s self-image or self-esteem from ‘apathetic and powerless subjects … into active, participatory citizens’ (Cruikshank, 1999: 3). Instead of psychological pedagogies of self-empowerment, C’elle revalues sexed-female biology. This form of bio-empowerment invites pedagogies of the micrological and the cellular, rather than the macrological and the social, wherein one’s body is more like a ‘“project” – a system that can be divided and dissected down to the molecular level’ (Nelkin and Andrews, 1998: 35).

Investing in the Self

Historians of late 20th-century consumption emphasize how modern forms of saving, such as bank saving, were never promoted solely on the basis of their profitability to the account holder. Consumer bank saving was also imagined as a moral activity permitting preparation for and openness to an uncertain future. Money saving had an ‘alchemistic’ quality; saving could ‘turn a quantity of money into a new quality’ (Lehtonen and Pantzar, 2002: 216). Saving one’s money made possible the purchase of costly consumer goods such as refrigerators, televisions, automobiles and homes. At the same time, saving made possible new relationships to the future. As a moral exercise of thrift, saving required reorientation of one’s immediate desire for objects to the delayed satisfaction of acquiring objects in the future. Saving money to buy consumer items in the future thus intensified the saver’s relationship to objects, combining waiting in the present with the anticipation of future consumption. Similar to bank saving’s intensification of the saver’s relationship to desired objects, saving one’s stem cells promises to intensify one’s relationship to one’s own biological life by transforming imagined suffering or illness into potential recovery and renewal.

The rationales for banking stem cells may be as diverse as those of money saving. As Donna Dickenson argues, commercial stem cell banking enterprises effectively extract surplus value from stem cells by charging a woman ‘for the privilege of having the bank store what is rightfully hers’ (2007: 99). Yet for the account holder, stem cell banking may be conceived as an act of generosity, reconfiguring responsibility for one’s own health and in relation to one’s ‘genetic kin’ (Nash, 2004). C’elle’s promotional testimonials include Barbara, a Cryo-Cell client who describes her motivations for opening an endometrial stem cell bank account:

I’m going to have a surgical procedure done soon, an ablation, a uterine ablation done, and I wanted to store my own stem cells for me before I had that procedure done. ⁵ We have a family history of Alzheimer’s and heart disease in our family, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to store the stem cells. And then I thought it would be a good idea possibly for maybe my other family members because they’re not able to store stem cells for themselves, so I stored … uh, I’m going to store another sample for my sister, and my parents and my brother. (C’elle, 2008b)

The individually held stem cell account removes the possibility that one’s already ‘customized’ cells circulate to completely unknown recipients, a form of circulation that characterizes the solidaristic donation ethos of public organ and blood exchange systems. In addition to securing cells from use by others, stem cell storage services promise to defer the deterioration of cells by preserving them from the body’s processes of ageing and degeneration. Although significant historical work has uncovered the extent to which medical discourses ‘objectify’ the body, the reduction of bodies or body parts to the status of object or commodity is not necessarily viewed by patients or subjects of scientific research as wholly negative. Indeed, the fetishizing of organs as ‘more than commodity’ partly organizes the contemporary practices of organ donation (Lock, 2001). Similarly, the uncertain and partial use-value of the banked stem cell suggests its systematicity is complex; it possesses a virtual capacity to substitute for all other values as fetishized ‘gift of life’, as ‘bio-insurance’, as ‘speculative investment’ or as ‘unalienated possession’.

The use-value of cells banked in an individualized stem cell bank account may never be fully realized by any one individual tissue bank account holder, despite the savvy marketing of private accounts, an uncertainty of which most account holders are arguably aware. Banked cells, commercial banks argue, may never realize a use-value, yet it is only by saving one’s own stem cells that those same cells may be transformed into a personalized therapy. C’elle suggests to potential endometrial cell bank account holders that their bodies are both genetic and bio-economic resources. To save cells in an individualized account not only intensifies the account holder’s relationship to her body as an untapped resource for potential therapies but also intensifies her interdependency with market-led innovations in therapeutic applications of biotechnology. Saving a ‘body part’ is intertwined with obligations towards genetic kin, with belief in techno-scientific progress, and with faith in the innovations of market-led enterprises that offer, in the absence of any substantive means of collection and storage of an adult’s stem cells, the possibility of preparing for one’s future (ill-)health. This dual aspect of the stem cell bank account, as a relationship to one’s embodied self and one’s relationship to others, recalls the moral and anticipatory enticements to money saving that were central to the development of Euro-American commodity cultures.

Stem cell banking, as Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell (2006) suggest, is thus an exemplary instance of the reconceptualization of health and health care as a form of individualized risk management of future uncertainty. Bodily tissues directed at future therapeutic use for those who bank them are posited as a form of insurance against future illness and disease, a form of ‘personalized risk management’ that, in the case of umbilical cord blood, parents undertake for the future life of their child and, potentially, the child’s close relatives. The individualized stem cell bank account becomes a means of committing responsibly to one’s health and the health of others. Since its inception, this moral dimension of investing for oneself and others has been articulated alongside the rationally calculative aspects of banking as a form of insurance. If insurance promises to provide financial compensation for future unforeseen events, the stem cell bank account similarly promises an individually tailored therapy whose potential profits will be measured in the benefits of extended health.

The rhetoric of taking active responsibility for one’s future health is reflected in how stem cell banking entrepreneurs market the individual stem cell bank account as a new form of risk management, or in the words of NeoStem’s (2007) chief executive, ‘a different kind of insurance, a bio-insurance’ against the uncertainty of future illness. Stem cell banking thus seems to interpellate the medical subject’s relationship to her body as a calculative risk-hedging enterprise. Like modern forms of insurance, the stem cell bank account holder’s calculative practices consist of assessing future risk against the present cost of storage and processing. Oriented toward an incalculable future, individual stem cell accounts thus seem, according to Catherine Waldby (2006: 67), to ‘call [neoliberal medical] subjectivity into being’. Calculative, risk-aware and entrepreneurial, this neoliberal medical subject is invited to rationalize unforeseen genetic futures by investing in personalized stem cell therapies. As both a speculative investment and a form of bio-insurance, the claims made by commercial stem cell banking seem to orient account holders toward a future of foreseeable risks (for example, in Barbara’s account of family histories of Alzheimer’s and heart disease), to provide one way of making calculable the seemingly incalculable value of life.

In their discussion of the transformation of umbilical cords from waste product to valued substance, Waldby and Mitchell (2006: 124) argue that the emergence of private stem cell banking is not a simple story of the commodification of a formerly discarded substance. Rather:

The form of possession that the account creates is novel in the contemporary field of human tissue biopolitics because it severs questions of property from questions of commodification.… The account and its contents are constituted as the property of the account holder, but they do not partake of the commodity form – they have no legal exchange value and are not negotiable for price on a market. The value of the cord blood for the account holder resides precisely in its not being alienated, in its perpetual retention, because of its self-regenerating capacities.

Descriptions of stem cells as commodified can thus only partially explain how the stem cell account attributes a calculable value (the costs for processing and storage) to property never completely alienated from the account holder and never fully circulated in a market. The language of the commercial stem cell storage industry mirrors that of the bank saving of money, yet the extension of logics of saving is limited by the individualized nature of commercial stem cell storage services. Unlike interest-bearing money saving, banked cells may never enter into circulation.

The commercial stem cell banking industry suggests that this incomplete alienation or maintenance of the body’s vitality in reserve is a key motive for investing in a personalized account rather than donating tissues to a public bank. However, I suggest in the following discussion that the interpretation of stem cell banking as a form of personalized risk management may obscure the possibility that banking one’s stem cells is actually more akin to the ‘irrational’ practice of hoarding than to the ‘rational’ practice of saving and investment. This is not to position practices of hoarding as inherently pathological compared to the reasoned calculations of saving and investment, as I will demonstrate below. Rather, this reading suggests that such purportedly ‘irrational’ practices are central to ensuring continued investments in the speculative bioeconomy. As Lois McNay (2009) writes, the desire to invest in one’s individual capacities for self-regeneration situates the flexible, self-regulating and autonomous individual as a key technology, rather than a limit, to new governmental forms of social control.

Unlike the collectivization of funds in insurance schemes, where contributions may be drawn from individuals, firms or national governments, commercial stem cell banking does not engage in the pooling of resources found in other forms of insurance, in which payments contributed to a shared pool may be used by other insured members. Without the collective pooling of resources from other individuals – the hallmark of social insurance in 20th-century welfare states – how else might one differentiate between practices of insurance or other forms of speculative investment and the autologous stem cell bank account’s particular form of economy? Has the economistic language of ‘banking’ and ‘saving’ stem cells become naturalized insofar as the differences between the storage of stem cells and the bank saving of money are difficult to discern? Furthermore, does the interpretation of stem cell banking as a form of insurance or investment, while fruitful for gleaning how contemporary forms of biotechnology capitalism imagine human body parts as ‘financialized’ rather than simply commodified (Cooper, 2008), also assume that banked stem cells will eventually circulate, something the commercial stem cell banking industry itself cannot guarantee? Not necessarily, for as Waldby and Mitchell (2006) assert, unlike savings institutions that pool account holders’ money in order to allow circulation beyond the institution itself, the autologous stem cell account is valued primarily because the stem cells deposited do not circulate.

Just as money saving was never promoted solely based on its financial returns to savers, the growth of commercial stem cell banking does not correspond to any explicit guarantee by commercial stem cell banking services that banked cells will do anything in the future. However, the status of the partially alienated stem cell bears closer scrutiny. If stem cells in a private stem cell bank account do not fully make their salto mortale, their ‘mortal leap’ into circulation as commodities, then their retention in the individualized stem cell bank account bears a closer resemblance to hoarding than to saving or investment. Although the language of insurance, investment and future profits is used frequently by commercial stem cell banks and aptly characterizes the speculative nature of much of the stem cell banking industry’s claims, the following section suggests that autologous stem cell banking also resembles the form of proto-saving described as hoarding.

The desire to save without circulating that characterizes the figure of the miser in Marx’s political economy also characterizes the desire to store one’s stem cells in an autologous stem cell bank account. This desire may appear more obscure than that of the rational individual invited to calculate her future corporeal risks. Yet it is this very obscurity that suggests a need to reconsider how much explanatory power is ascribed to the call to become a calculative, risk-aware individual. Does the explanation that stem cell banking responds primarily to a neoliberal logic of self-investment not inadvertently affirm the centrality of the ‘rational’ subject that is the object of critique? I suggest an alternative conceptual genealogy for the subjectifying practices of stem cell banking, compelled less by the calculative rationality of neoliberal medical subjectivity formation and rather by the drive to place oneself at the centre of all forms of exchange. Like the hoarding of money described by 19th-century political economists, including Marx, saving one’s stem cells responds to a more inchoate desire to simultaneously participate in and to transcend the economy of commodities in which body parts increasingly circulate.

The Drive of Private Stem Cell Banking

In his wild imaginings, in his nocturnal delirium (Hingespinst), the miser, the hoarder, the speculator, becomes a martyr to exchange value. He now refrains from exchange because he dreams of a pure exchange.… The hoarder behaves then like an alchemist (alchimitsch), speculating on ghosts, the ‘elixir of life,’ the ‘philosopher’s stone.’ (Jacques Derrida, 1994: 57)

For Marx and other 19th-century political economists, hoarding’s origins lay before capitalism. The miser who hoards appears at the first sign of the circulation of commodities even though his hoard represents the naïve petrification of the metabolic process of capital’s circulation (1976: 227–8). Unlike the capitalist who saves in order to re-circulate, the hoarder is not interested in the circulation of money. The hoarder’s interest lies instead in saving money from circulation. What distinguishes the hoarding of the miser from the capitalist’s saving (lauded by political economists as the ‘abstinence’ of the capitalist) is the nature of the miser’s ‘obsessions’. However, his ‘mad’ or one-sided desire to hoard, to buy without selling, is revealing, for it exemplifies how the circulation of commodities contains a seeming paradox: objects only become valuable as commodities if they are put back into circulation to be used up. The ‘reasoned’ practice of the capitalist thus relies on what Rowlinson (1996: 355) describes as the ‘principle of continuous auto-alienation’. The continuous auto-alienation of capital is necessary for the creation of surplus value; without circulation, objects are immobilized into a seemingly unproductive hoard.

Today, mainstream political economy echoes Marx’s genealogy of the miser and the capitalist by considering hoarding the precursor to rational practices of credit. However, for Kojin Karatani (2005), Marx’s discussion of the miser and capitalist is open to an altogether different interpretation in which hoarding is not figured as pathology but rather is central to understanding the systemic and self-reprod-ucing nature of capitalism. Rather than see hoarding as the ill-disci plined and primitive precursor to modern capitalism, hoarding reveals the significance of ‘metaphysical’ belief in capitalism’s self-reproduction. The significance of this belief is no more evident than in economic crises, where hoarding is decried as the symptom of a loss of faith, trust and confidence. In times of crisis, Karatani argues, and contemporary economists concur, people ‘revert’ to hoarding money, because it is money that permits one to buy anything else. However, hoarding is not a pathological aberration from capitalist circuits of exchange, or a practice ‘parasitic’ on or marginal to capitalism, but rather a revelation of the more fundamental and systemic ‘drive’ within capitalism to continuously self-reproduce.

The dual figures of the miser and the capitalist in Marx’s text thus gain new salience when Karatani reads from their shared obsession with accumulation (the capitalist’s ‘complete’, the miser’s one-sided and partial) not the familiar notion of ‘commodity fetishism’ in which objects endlessly become commodities, but ‘the fetishism of commodity as drive’ in which the motor of capitalism is the compulsion to repeat – ‘the drive to attain the right to consume anywhere and anytime, instead of consumption at this moment’ (Karatani, 2005: 209). This drive is reflected in the relentless efforts to shore up an economic system in crisis. It is also reflected in what I term the hoarding economy of stem cell banking when it manifests in the desire to ‘save’ any bankable body part. As Joy, a client of a Texas-based stem cell bank stated:

I’m a big believer in stem cell research. I stored the cord blood for both my children and now that we’ve found stem cells in baby teeth, I’m very excited about that, and I researched and found Bioeden right here in Austin, Texas. And I’ve bought a kit for both my kids. I’m just waiting for them to lose their teeth. (Bioeden, 2007)

This compulsion to repeat appears most clearly in Marx’s Capital as the drive embodied, not by the figure of the capitalist, but by the figure of the miser. For the miser is not a hoarder of objects, things, or even ‘money’ but ‘one who hoards the right to exchange – in the strict sense, the right to stand in the position of equivalent form – at the expense of use’ (Karatani, 2005: 7). The miser’s desire to stand in the position of equivalent form exemplifies faith and belief in capitalism, a desire not for objects and material wealth, but for the more transcendent aim of overcoming any and all limits to accumulation: the miser’s goal is to ‘“accumulate riches in heaven,” as it were’ (Karatani, 2005: 209). By suggesting that the centrality of the figure of the miser is visible for Marx only after hoarding ceases to function as the dominant form of economy, Karatani’s retrospective interpretation suggests that the root of all forms of capitalism is embodied not in the figure of the capitalist but rather in the figure of the money-hoarder, the one ‘who gives up the actual use-value in exchange for [the] “right”’ to ‘exchange anything, anytime, anywhere’ (Karatani, 2005: 209).

For Marx, the miser represents the desire to accumulate in which the objects hoarded have no immediate use-value. Incompletely alienated, money accumulated by the miser ‘is petrified into a hoard’ (Marx, 1976: 228). Unlike the more ‘rational’ capitalist, the miser does not accumulate in order to exchange. Rather, the miser pursues an endless desire to continue hoarding objects that have no immediate use-value. For this reason, the miser in Marx’s texts has been identified as one of the figural presentations of the concept of money. While stem cells have yet to become ‘the currency of the future’ (see Nelkin and Andrews, 1998: 35), their spectral virtue, like money, is their seemingly endless potentiality, what Derrida (1994: 45) notes is the ‘appearance or simulacrum’ of ‘that which, in the desire to hoard, speculates on the use of money after death’. Indeed, the pluripotency of the embryonic stem cell, or its capacity to be transformed into any other cell, marks what the biotech industry terms the ‘gold standard’ of all stem cells, as a signifier of potential without any limits (Cooper, 2008). It is the figure of the miser that sheds light on why the rhetoric of the autologous stem cell account and its seemingly limitless potential is so powerful and so seductive: ‘Your cells. Your use. Your life’ (NeoStem, 2007).

Hoarding, as a form of contemporary economic reasoning, reveals how the dynamics of emergent forms of biocapital are therefore characterized by circulation – the construction of new markets for cells, tissues, information and labour – as well as its continual deferral. The figural presentation of the miser suggests that autologous or individualized stem cell banking is more than a calculative form of saving for eventual return. Rather, it is motivated by hoarding, a hitherto under-acknowledged (and frequently pathologized) form of economic reasoning. In a ‘metaphysical’ sense, the autologous stem cell banking economy’s particular form of hoarding economy satisfies the drive, not for any object or commodity, but for the ‘right’ to fill the empty place of the general equivalent – the place in which anything can be exchanged for or transformed into anything else – with one’s simultaneously finite yet potentially regenerative living body.

Hoarding Life

C’elle’s menstrual blood bank accounts support a central claim made about novel biotechnological advances: that the distinction between two domains, the financial and the corporeal, are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. This intermingling of the biological and the economic is apparent in sectors of biotechnology imagined as engines of regional and national economic growth and development. For Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006: 12), the growth prospects of capitalist economies are now inextricably interconnected with biopolitics, with ‘how modernity put life at the explicit center of political calculation’ (citing Foucault, 1990 [1978]; see also Lock and Franklin, 2003; Rose, 2007). Rajan’s elaboration of the neologism ‘biocapital’ describes how the shaping of the modern life sciences and the new forms of capital investment in those sciences are transforming national economies, global legal regimes, scientific research agendas and the very formation of subjects. The engine of economic growth in biocapital’s political economy is life itself and its primary resources are the parts of living bodies (organs, cells, genes), especially stem cells, that demonstrate the greatest potential for differentiation into other cells and tissues.

Commercial stem cell banking seeks to capitalize on the generative capacities of living bodies by disseminating biotechnology production from academic domains of knowledge to more mundane consumer use. ⁶ Indeed, in the contemporary bioeconomy, stem cells, like gold for modern industrial societies, are ‘greeted as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life’ (Marx, 1976: 229–30). Unlike public banks that hold tissues or blood for use in common, commercial stem cell banking promotes the individual stem cell account as a way to preserve one’s own tissues in anticipation of future stem cell-derived therapies. The stem cell bank account thus offers a place for the account holder to hoard that most incalculable of values embodied in the potency of the stem cell, the regenerative potential of the living body.

The private banking of umbilical cord blood, menstrual fluid and other bodily tissues offers the possibility of revaluing substances formerly considered excess or waste. According to some commentators, they do so by moving what once lay outside the circulation of capital inside to circulate equivalent to the money-form. Stem cell banking thus seems to provide further support for the thesis that biotechnology capitalism, like all phases of capitalism, creates new instances of the commodification of the body’s parts (see Parry, 2004; Parry and Gere, 2006). Yet is the commodification (partial or otherwise) of the body and its parts really such a novel thesis? Are not bodies today already so fully commodified that it is only with difficulty one can imagine a life in which some form of value is not already assigned? If the commodification of the body is analysed as the insertion of body parts into market economies, then autologous stem cell banking is simply another instance of the commodification of life itself. This article argues that stem cell banking does more than this.

Instead, this article suggests that because stem cells in an individual stem cell account are saved but potentially never ‘used’, storing stem cells for future use has more in common with a speculative economy of hoarding than with commodity fetishism and the calculative practices of money saving and investment that rely, implicitly, on the circulation of capital. Just as Marx presented the figure of the miser as naïve in relation to this circulation, critics who interpret individualized stem cell storage simply as a ‘poor investment’ targeting credulous consumers similarly construct account holders as naïve (see Scott and Chiao, 2007). In doing so, Marx’s crucial distinction between hoarding and saving, and the compulsion shared by both, is further obscured. Karatani’s reflections on the miser make clear that hoarding, however marginal it may remain in contemporary economic theory, is not merely an anachronism, pathology or parasite on capitalist circuits of exchange. Rather, the hoarding economy of commercial stem cell storage lays bare a more fundamental logic central to contemporary biotechnology economies: the desire to harness bodily surplus towards the pre-emption of biological finitude that marks the ‘metaphysics’ of capital, the ‘pure exchange’ of life for life.

In conclusion, this article returns to the question of subjectivity: is the subjectivity called into being by stem cell banking that of the speculative capitalist? Is the ‘enterprising, self-actualizing’ assessor of genetic risk who saves their cells imagined as a ‘rational miser’, who throws the substance-less thing of value again and again into circulation? Or is this entrepreneurial subject more like the ‘mad capitalist’, the miser, who desires to preserve the potential for transformation? Although the promotional materials of commercial enterprises like C’elle characterize account holders as savvy investors in personal wellness portfolios and invite potential clients to weigh the costs, risks and benefits of investing, the incomplete alienation of the account holder from their banked cells points to the limits of equating personal stem cell storage with existing practices of insurance or money saving. Rather, this article proffers an alternative means of interpreting the desires and aspirations solicited by autologous stem cell banking. The stem cell account holder is invited, I argue, to identify with the figure of the miser in which ‘value is defined not by exchange but by its conspicuous absence’ (Freeland, 2003: 215).

As Slavoj Žižek (2006: 61) argues, the ‘madness’ of the miser is no more ‘mad’ than that of the capitalist. Hoarding is not an aberration within capitalist systems of economic exchange, but rather a ‘drive’ that ‘propels the whole capitalist machinery … the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction’. Indeed, autologous bone marrow banking service NeoStem congratulates interested account holders: ‘Thank you for your interest in NeoStem … thank you for your interest in YOU!’ (NeoStem, 2007). The drive for expanded self-reproduction – the drive to place oneself in the position of general equivalent – ‘originates in the precariousness inherent in exchange between others’, that is, in the relational vulnerability that is the under-acknowledged substrate of all forms of exchange (Karatani, 2005: 7). This precariousness is partly visible in the notions, disseminated in part by the popular representations of genetic science and the scientific imaginaries of post-genomic medicine, that each individual (and indeed each genetically defined ‘racial community’) is so biologically unique that one’s continuing survival requires a deeply personalized strategy for hedging future corporeal uncertainties. Recognition of this precariousness is obscured by the presumption that individuals exist in ontological isolation rather than with others, indeed, that each subject primarily is rather than with (Nancy, 2000; see also Esposito, 2008; Kelly, 2008). Perhaps the exhortation to invest in the individual stem cell account can be more productively conceived as a response to this precariousness through an ‘impersonal’ drive to accumulate without exchange, a drive originating from a profound sense of loss, not of youthful vitality, nor of reproductive potentiality, but a loss that Donna Haraway (Haraway and Harvey, 1995: 510) so presciently described as a new form of enclosure: ‘the enclosure of our own bodily commons’.