Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Contamination in vitro, in vivo



Contamination in vitro, in vivo
All of these journal, magazine, and newspaper headlines call our attention to a problem—a crisis even—of contamination, invasion, and toxicity.  Some of them are referring to contamination between species of plants and animals.  Others decry the contamination of human cells.  But what does it mean that when we come together to talk about cell and tissue cultures or environmental conservation, we simply can’t seem to get out of the language of invasion and contamination?



Native Species Invaded (1)
Double-Edged Helix (2)
Bio-invasions Spark Concern (3)
Immortal Cells of an Unknown Woman That Made it to Space Before Gagarin (4)
Cases of Mistaken Identity (5)
It’s a Cancer (6)
Congress Threatens Wild Immigrants (7)
We’d like to talk about the ways in which science journalism and environmental justice workers engage in the discourse of contamination.  To do so, we have to bring together two spaces that are often not talked about together.  The first is the laboratory, which is meant to be a sterile, human-controlled environment where, according to both scientists and science journalists, contamination is not to occur lest scientific progress be halted.  The second is the land, a space that is full of various sorts of contaminations, levels of toxicity, and symbiosis of various bacterias and other beings.  Some are acceptable and others are deemed dangerous.  With regard to the land, many environmental justice activists have engaged in a binary discourse about the pristine, native land that must be conserved and the toxic human activities that put this vulnerable and “virgin” nature in danger.  As you might expect, those discourses in similar colonial, racist, classist, and gendered histories.  One example Holly is working through is around fracking.  She asks, “how can we take seriously fracking as a contaminating act when the populations that it most adversely affects--poor and working class whites and immigrant families--are considered already ‘contaminated,’ ‘toxic,’ ‘invading.’” What about human cells in the lab?  Sandra has been tracing how the scientific community discusses cell culture contamination and the HeLa cells.  Both popular science journalism and even many cell culturists have referred to the now famous cervical cells of Henrietta Lacks as both contaminated and contaminating.  If black women's bodies are always already toxic, even to scientific communities, how can we even begin to think about black women’s health?
So we’d like to talk about the idea of contamination in both spaces, in vitro and in vivo.  The theoretical framework for our blog is Mel Chen’s Animacies, Banu Subramaniam’s chapter, “The Aliens have Landed!  Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions,” and Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet.  
In vitro...HeLa Cell Contamination
As Robert Stevenson, who later became president of the American Type Culture Collection put it, Stanley Gartler “showed up at the [1966 Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture] with no background or anything else in cell culture and proceeded to drop a turd in the punch bowl” (Skloot 2010, 154).  This in itself is a contaminating act that introduces the abject into the mix.  In Garlter’s presentation, he revealed the HeLa cells’ capacity to pass themselves off as other cells and contaminate the samples with which they come into contact.  Thus, results of studies scientists had drawn while working with various other cell lines must be called into question and years of work might need to be completely disregarded.  Gartler recommended that attendees return to their labs and review their cell and tissue cultures for HeLa contamination.
One of the affected cell lines that Gartler identified was fellow scientist Leonard Hayflick’s WISH line; these particular cell tissues originated from the amniotic sac of one of Hayflick’s daughters.  Hayflick’s concern for his cell line turned to racial paranoia.  He called his wife during a conference break to ask whether he was, in fact, his daughter’s biological father.  As he retold the anecdote during his own presentation, “She assured me that my worst fears were unfounded” (Skloot 2010, 156).  The room, reportedly, “erupted in laughter, and no one said anything else publicly about Gartler’s findings” (ibid).  Racial and sexual anxiety turned to comedy as the threat of miscegenation was covered over.  It was not just that HeLa appeared to the scientific community as a contaminating actant, but that it had the capacity to make contaminated and contaminating subjects out of others, Hayflick’s daughter for example.
The link between HeLa contamination and the destruction of professional careers and scientific progress emerges through the racialization, gendering and hypersexualization of the cells.  For example, Michael Roger’s particularly sensationalist journalistic account of HeLa contamination argued “In life, the HeLa source had been black and female.  Even as a single layer of cells in a tissue culture laboratory, she remains so” (1976, 50).  Boundaries between Henrietta Lacks’s blackness and femaleness and the HeLa cells were continuously blurred, and blackness and femaleness often meant sexual contamination for scientists and journalists alike.  For instance, one journalist wrote that a letter from Nelson-Rees, a biologist who dedicated his work to the detection of HeLa contamination, was like “a note from the school nurse informing the parents that little Darlene had VD” (Michael Gold quoted in Landecker 2007, 172).  Weasel also points to discussions around HeLa and the HPV virus and speculation that because of Lacks’ supposed sexual promiscuity she contracted cervical cancer.  Ann Enright writes that if HeLa had HPV, “that means she slept around” (Enright 2000). One gathers that Nelson-Rees’ dedication to unveiling HeLa was a toilsome task not simply because it required him to be the bearer of bad news for otherwise good scientists, but because of the racial, gender, and sexual anxiety that the HeLa “bomb” produced in the cell culture community.  He acknowledged to Michael Rogers, “I hoped I’d never have to look another HeLa in the face” (1976, 51).  Rogers then asks, “How did the HeLa cell become a monster amidst the Pyrex?” (1976, 48).


Surveillance and regulation have become critical techniques that bind the practices of medicine and science to a larger national and geopolitical project—one that biologists see themselves as taking on.  For example, Roland Nardone, a cell biologist at the Catholic University of America is referred to in one article as “the Paul Revere of cell contamination” (Chatterjee 2007, 929). In the same journal article Nelson-Rees is described as embarking on a “lonely crusade” to trace HeLa contaminants (ibid, 930).  The reference to a “crusade” is particularly telling in this orientalist narrative as it sutures the discourse of the biomaterial of a black woman’s cervix to signifiers of another radically different “other” who is neither Christian nor white.  HeLa contamination emerges as a crisis of insecurity, as scientists attempt to contain the unwieldiness of blackness, gender, and sexuality.  The surveillance becomes a part of the modern colonial and scientific project, once again re-asserting the (white) human’s ability to enact an order of things. So, what is left for black women’s health if we are understood as always already toxic?
In vivo...Kern County Fracking
Banu Subramaniam’s “The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions” argues that the rhetoric regarding invasive species in ‘native’ ecologies mirrors larger discourses on race, class, and gender throughout the country. In particular, the desire to halt the merciless contamination of foreigners transforms peaceful biologists into killer conservationists. Although Subramaniam recognizes the problem of habitat destruction, she encourages scientists and science studies researchers to not let invasive species paranoia overshadow the reality that “Nearly all the U.S. crops are exotic plants while most of the insects that cause crop damage are native species.” (143). GMOs, for instance, are seen as less hazardous even though they also erase biological diversity, and the author wants us to reflect on this contradiction. “Ultimately, it would seem that is a matter of control, discipline, and capital” (ibid). Subramaniam explains that as long as aliens know their place as workers and controlled commodities under the command of natives, then their presence can be tolerated; anything else disrupts the natural order of things (ibid). The author’s keen analysis at times makes it impossible to distinguish between plant and human as ‘alien.’
Throughout her article the author critiques white claims to indigeneity as a platform for the ‘invasive species’ controversy. “A species that enters the country for the first time is called an ‘alien’ or an ‘exotic’ species; after an unspecified passage of time, it is considered a resident; after a greater unspecified passage of time, it is considered a naturalized species’ (136). The process of naturalization is a construction of white settler colonialism benefiting whites by ostracizing non-native and native others; usually people of color, the poor, and women. A recent example could be the Santa Cruz ban on fracking two weeks ago, making our county the first in the state to officially prohibit the harmful practice. However, Santa Cruz’s campaign, which no doubt developed from many resources and hours of organizing, is largely symbolic, as the threat of fracking isn’t really an issue here. http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/santacruz/ci_25801873/santa-cruz-county-first-ban-fracking. My question then, is how could similar political will, by powerful actors (Santa Cruz is a majority high-earning white population), be used to support movements lead by people most directly affected by fracking? Instead we have a clear instance of “Not In My Backyard” when the threat most likely wouldn’t appear there anyway. However, if Santa Cruzans were to consider San Joaquin and Fresno counties as their backyard, which might be a good ideas since we share watersheds with them, then the righteous ire in our town might have a bigger practical impact.


In regard fracking in Kern County, California, my dissertation topic, Subramaniam offers three points to take seriously in my own thinking. Firstly, the position of white settler as native: in California the fracking debate is dominated by wealthy affluent whites living on the coasts, meaning that the least affected group shapes the discourse and modes of resistance for and against fracking. By deliberating what is safe and what isn’t, where and when, the economically and racially privileged group claims a native authority. Secondly, Subramaniam contends that contamination rhetoric most strongly associated with people of color, women, and the poor do not necessarily garner the same reputation as other harmful environmental practices: the jewel of Kern County, Bakersfield, has already been deemed the most toxic city in the nation. Kern County deaths from air quality, heart disease, and diabetes rates are the highest in California (and in some cases the U.S.) a direct result from many forms of environmental contaminates, poverty and racial injustice. Yet these realities rarely make headlines. Kern County residents, mostly Latino, white, and overwhelming poor, seem to be the wrong kind of ‘victims’ of contamination. Thirdly the article warns of the dangers of reproducing hegemonic representations of contamination even while taking a personal anti-fracking position in my research. People are getting sick from fracking; Kern County residents are already sick from air pollution and toxic water (problems that arose long before new fracking techniques and have other links to the oil industry.) Yet as a privileged researcher, while writing about the connections between toxicity, disease, bodies, and land in Kern County I must heed Subramaniam’s critique that even benevolent intentions regarding contamination can reify points one and two: white settler as the authorative native voice, and overemphasizing issues that concern privileged groups. In my many months researching fracking in Kern County, I have found only one news source centering on low-income Latinos from the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment:





Contamination, Toxicity, and Invasion


In both the discussion of the HeLa 'crisis' and fracking, the threat of contamination unfurls on multiple points of connection. The two commentaries parallel one another in that both the identification of, and response to, alleged contamination to a vulnerable population. Sandra's analysis sharply reveals the overt racism and sexual degradation of the black female body encroaching on the pristine cellular makeup of the white universal subject. Here racially marked and gendered bodies act as an imperial menace, rendering the dominant group as a passive group potentially victimized by their toxicity, miscegenation. By contrast, the example of fracking, elite whites must act as the imperial benefactor, saving themselves by erasing the poor and people of color who are disproportionately affected by fracking. In both cases, privileged whites position themselves as savior and protector of the people and land by assigning the gendered and racialized body as the contaminating villain (the black woman), or gutting out the racialized and low-income bodies as victims of contamination (the hugely underrepresented low-income communities in CA fracking debates) in order to reify white supremacy and colonial authority. There is little conversation about the toxicity of fracking onto the majority of the population in Kern County--poor whites and immigrant communities.  This silence is also a story of racial contamination--one that prevents us from imagining the effects of environmental toxicity on communities already assumed to be both toxic and invading.  In this discourse, immigrants have no claim to the land anyway.  

Footnotes
1 United Press International, “Native Species Invaded,” ABC News, March 16, 1998, Cited in Subramaniam
2 Michael Rogers, 1976, Double Edge Helix
3 “Bio-invasions Spark Concerns,” CQ Researcher 9, no. 37 (October 1, 2000): 856, Cited in Subramaniam
5 Rhitu Chaterjee, “Cell Biology.  Cases of Mistaken Identity.” Science, 3/2007.
6 Quote by refuge biologist Keith Weaver in Joseph B. Verrengia, “When Ecologists Become Killers,”  NBC News, October 4, 1999, Cited in Subramaniam
7 H. Weiner, “Congress Threathens Wild Immigrants,” Earth Island Journal 11, no 4 (1996). Cited in Subramaniam