CHANGING COLLECTING PRACTICES OF BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS: THE SHIFT FROM PHENOTYPE TO GENOTYPE (1940-TODAY)
Priska Gisler, Collegium Helveticum, UZH/ETH Zurich
Over a couple of decades biomedical research interests have moved from the phenotype of whole organisms, their morphology and corporeal characteristics like body height, hair, eye colour towards the molecular level of living beings. In the name of a personalized medicine researchers and clinicians increasingly gathered biological tissues, biochemical components, proteins, nucleic acids as well as personal data with the hope to develop individual treatments and to prescribe suitable drugs. The practices and methods of molecular biology consequently changed the style of science collections.
Thus, while the skins, skeletons, birds, reptiles, embryos on show in natural history museums in various parts of the world lost much of their scientific significance, putting together biological materials in huge collections has remained a prevalent scientific task. Along the novel assemblages of biological materials namely emerged a range of societal hopes. They concerned medical diagnostics, the treatment of illnesses, the extension and improvement of lifetimes and life qualities. This project will track changing collecting practices in the biomedical sciences and the technologies and methods used to access living bodies in order to gain insight into human life and the human.
At the beginning, the focus on biological materials collections will lead us back to the Serological Museum, founded by Alan Boyden at Rutgers University, N.Y., at the end of the 1940ies. The zoologist Alan Boyden was a pioneer in immunology and in preserving tissues and making them accessible for molecular analyses. Whether and in which way Boyden was successful in building up a “world centre for the study of comparative serology” (Boyden, 1953, 58) and implementing his instructions on how to collect animal blood, will be a starting point of analysis.
The preoccupation with zoology as a scientific field in the 1950s will lead us to ask for the role research objects and biological materials – like blood – came to play for the biomedical sciences and the how the according research began to contribute to a novel understanding of human life. The traces left behind by actors involved in Boyden’s undertaking (the Serological Bulletin for example) and the studies founded upon the data gathered in this museum, will allow to return to a transition period in the history of the biomedical sciences. Although the serologists’ early insights in the human body differ widely from the cur- rent results in molecular biology and genomics, I will argue that the methods and practices developed by the zoologists in the 1950s have coined the ways the so called personalized medicine for humans has later been approached, and that they have framed important aspects of the contemporary understanding of human life itself.