The Promises of Biology and the Biology of Promises: An Ethnography of the Korean Stem Cell Enterprise

Research output: Book/ReportPh.D. thesisResearch

  • Jieun Lee
This dissertation considers the ontology of stem cells as a future-oriented life form characterized by its potentiality in relation to the anticipatory mode of living in contemporary Korea. The biological notion that stem cells have the potential for differentiation and the capacity for self-renewal is central in the future-oriented enterprise of stem cell research and industry, as it promises the technological control of biological time within the vision of regenerative medicine. Through the promises of regenerative medicine that garner anticipations and commitments, stem cells are cultured both as a biological object and an object of investment that holds the biological and economic potential in themselves. Since the specificity of stem cells as a life form that is defined and cultured as cells in the state of potentiality is predicated on the promises that they make, I conceptualize stem cells as a “promissory thing”—a material-semiotic entity whose mode of being enacts and is enacted by diverse forms of future-oriented practices. This ethnography explores how this promissory thing is produced by, and is generative of a myriad of anticipations that instigate scientific, religious, and economic commitments with differently imagined futures. I argue that promises are constitutive of the stem cell biology, rather than being derivative of it.

Since the biological concept of stem cells is predicated on the future that they promise, the biological life of stem cells is inextricably intertwined with the social life of promises. I first examine the sites where the biological concept of stem cells is materialized and their promises are substantiated through various forms of experimental labor. Part I concerns the bodily, intellectual, and affective engagements of donors, scientists, and patients as the mediums of (re)production of stem cells and promises. The vital potentiality of stem cells is a product of various forms of labor instigated by differently imagined futures. As stem cells are derived from the living tissues, cultured and studied by scientists, and made to show their efficacy through patients’ bodies in anticipation of materializing the promises of stem cell biology, they are produced as a new form of biovaluable. The promises of biology move beyond the closed circuit of scientific knowledge production, and proliferate in the speculative marketplaces of promises. Part II looks at how the promises of stem cell promises create and find their niches in places where the future-oriented affects are valorized—faith in the potent entity, anxieties about the uncertain futures, and dreams about futures that are different from the present. In these future-oriented marketplaces, the plasticity of technologized biology and biological time can appear promising with the backdrop of the imagined intransigence of social, political, and economic order in the Korean society.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2015

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