Life on Ice

In the mid-twentieth century, scientists anxieties about survival and salvation led them to stockpile and freeze materials from communities that seemed to embody potentially valuable biological resources. This has grown into a monumental, tissue-based infrastructure that enables a huge range of contemporary research in the private and public sectors. Preserved tissues have been mined again and again, each time for new constituents, and arguments have been made about the urgency of acquiring ever more high quality specimens. At the same time, concerns about privacy and property have dominated the ethical, legal, and social discussions surrounding what has been referred to as the stored tissue issue. In this book Joanna Radin explains the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice. This is a fascinating inquiry into how and why the question who do I think I am? came to be asked in the language of science and how the practice of accumulating blood samples shaped the emergence of biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age."