Day 135: Book Excerpt: Sex Cells

The market for sex cells incorporates both financial compensation and the language of donation, a combination that appears oxymoronic at first glance. The reason that paid donation sounds so incongruous is the longstanding assumption that gifts and commodities are not only completely distinct from one another, but are also very different kinds of things. Arjun Appadurai traced this assumption among social scientists to the different legacies of Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx, providing the following summary.

Gifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and spontaneity in which they are typically exchanged, usually are starkly opposed to the profit-oriented, self-centered, and calculated spirit that fires the circulation of commodities. Further, where gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the drive—largely free of moral or cultural constraints—of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality.

In an echo of Zelizer’s argument, Appadurai considers this dichotomy to be an oversimplified depiction of economic life, and he has encouraged scholars to trace the social life of things. In particular, he underscores the possibility that the same thing can sometimes be both a gift and a commodity, albeit at different points in its trajectory. Lesley Sharp pushes this point further, drawing on research in organ donation to contend that multiple understandings of the same bodily good might be operating at the same time, especially in medical settings. For the deceased’s kin, a donated organ is a part of the family that lives on; for the recipient, it is a lifesaving gift; for the doctors, it is a valuable commodity that should not be “wasted” on an undeserving recipient. Sharp concludes, “The language of gift exchange may obscure capitalist forms of commodification. In other words, two models of commodification might be at work simultaneously, one more akin to Mauss’s understanding of the symbolically charged gift and reciprocity, the other to Marx’s notion of commodities as goods produced under the alienating conditions of capitalism.”

The question is whether these various understandings matter for the people whose bodies are being commodified. What happens when paid donation is considered to be more of a gift or more of a job? Shifting the focus from determining which things are actually gifts or actually commodities to comparing the use of gift rhetoric and commodity rhetoric makes possible an analysis of whether commodified exchange can be experienced in different ways.
The first possibility is that framing donation as a gift or a job makes no difference whatsoever. It is merely language that “obscures,” to use Sharp’s word, what is really going on. This is a common theoretical vision of bodily commodification, one that also appears in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ definition of it as “encompassing all capitalized economic relations between humans in which human bodies are the token of economic exchanges that are often masked by something else – love, altruism, pleasure, kindness.” These scholars echo the view of Titmuss and others that the monetary exchange is fundamental, that commodification is inherently objectifying and alienating, and calling it something else does nothing to change the experience of being paid for bodily goods.

The second possibility is that these gendered frames do have consequences. Given that gift exchange is traditionally associated with affective ties and reciprocity while commodified exchange is marked by contractual relations that conclude when payment is rendered, it is possible that even just the use of gift language evokes a sense of sociability, a sense of connection between donor and recipient that is more durable and lasting than would be expected given the monetary exchange. This is especially plausible in a market for genetic material, as eggs and sperm are purchased in the hopes of conceiving children. Our culture’s emphasis on biogenetic ties in defining kinship may mean that donors are considered more as family than as strangers.

However, forging such connections may result in the expectation that donors and recipients demonstrate care and concern for one another, a form of emotional work. Arlie Hochschild originally formulated the concept of “emotional labor” in her study comparing female flight attendants, who had to exhibit empathy for the customer’s every concern, with male debt collectors, who had to manufacture anger with debtors over the phone. Subsequent studies have revealed that these sorts of gendered expectations for emotional work appear in many kinds of employment, and they are based in large part on the cultural norms of nurturing femininity and distant masculinity discussed in the previous section.

More recent research on emotional labor suggests that it may be experienced as more than just coercive and alienating. In a study of nursing home workers, Steven Lopez finds that meaningful interactions can result from “organizational attempts to create hospitable conditions for the development of caring relationships between service providers and recipients.” This raises the possibility that instilling an emotional connection between gamete donor and recipient may forestall feelings of alienation, in that both parties are offered an alternative narrative to the stigmatized story of handing over cash for body parts.

Since the dominant assumption has been that bodily commodification is inherently and uniformly degrading, there has been relatively little empirical research on the experiences of those who participate in such markets, including the market for sex cells. There is a rich tradition of sociological and anthropological research on reproduction, some of which includes discussions of commodification, but most of it centers on pregnancy, abortion, and birth, so there is little known about men’s experiences in this realm. In general, there has been less concern about the commodification of men’s bodies.

~~Sex Cells- The Medical Market For Eggs And Sperm -by- Rene Almeling

Day 55 : Book Excerpt : The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn’t understand, like “MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations.”
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What he wanted us to understand was that cells are amazing things: There are about one hundred trillion of them in our bodies, each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They make up all our tissues—muscle, bone, blood—which in turn make up our organs.

Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a white (the cytoplasm) that’s full of water and proteins to keep it fed, and a yolk (the nucleus) that holds all the genetic information that makes you you. The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It’s crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell. All the while, little cytoplasmic factories work 24/7, cranking out sugars, fats, proteins, and energy to keep the whole thing running and feed the nucleus. The nucleus is the brains of the operation; inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do their jobs, whether that’s controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page.

Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis—the process of cell division—makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing blood we’ve lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a perfectly choreographed dance. All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control, he told us. Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.

“We learned that by studying cancer cells in culture,” Defler said. He grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in enormous print: HENRIETTA LACKS.

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions—if not billions—of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice.

Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

~~The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks -by- Rebecca Skloot