Excerpt from Ch. 5 of my book manuscript In touch with life – investigating epistemic practices from a hands-on perspective, forthcoming 2017 with Duke University Press.

Vital bodily limits – reconfigurations, boundary work
With the advent of in vitro technologies, research on the phenomena of life appears to have discarded the body as a necessary context within which to study living processes. But, is that really so? Skin and cell membrane arguably remain relevant bodily limits in research practices while recognizing biology’s “many bodies, corresponding to many skins: in higher organisms, there is the multicellular body contained within an outer integument; in all organisms, cellular bodies are contained by cell membranes; and in eukaryotic organisms nuclear bodies are contained by nuclear membranes” (Keller 2006: 293). The lethal effects of the “physical erasure of this boundary” and the importance of the skin, or membrane in the theory and practice of the life sciences shows the “inappropriateness of its conceptual erasure” (Keller 2006: 293). In fact in vitro technologies did not make body contexts and contours obsolete, but made it necessary to revise the accepted boundaries between the inside and the outside of the living ‘unit’ (Landecker 2002: 670).

This discussion illustrates that there exists no stable bodily boundaries in the life sciences. Depending on the research question, boundaries have to be continually drawn anew. Moreover, cell membranes cannot be conceptualised as pre-existent, fixed borderlines. The membrane is permeable and continuously in motion, so the boundary work of the body must be seen as dynamic and active.

Boundaries of biology’s research bodies do not coincide necessarily with the bodily limits of living organisms. With the possibility of culturing cells in vitro internal processes became exteriorised. Hence, the bodily boundaries in research practices have moved inwards, from organism to cell, and from in vivo to in vitro. But most importantly, they keep shifting in and out. As internal life processes are taken out of the body and placed into a glass tube, reconfigurations of vital boundaries are made explicit and must be dealt with on a conceptual as well as on a practical level. Cell life in vitro depends on highly advanced and laboriously maintained compensation technologies, for which the artists from the Tissue & Culture and Art Project coined the term “techno-scientific body” (Catts and Zurr 2003/2004) which of course includes trained researchers’ bodies.

Sterility forms an important constituent of the compensation technologies that make cell proliferation in vitro possible. Cell cultures do not have an immune system and are therefore prone to any contamination by other organisms. What makes the concept of sterility so intriguing is that not only does it call attention to the shifting bodily boundaries of the research object, it also draws attention to researcher’s own bodies and the vital part they play in reconfiguration processes and compensating technologies. The ‘disembodiment’ of living processes has led to an embodied epistemic practice in the Life Sciences that requires an acute awareness of one’s own body. Strictly regimented sterile working environments show that the postulated borderline between the investigator and the investigated is not pre-existent, but the result of laborious processes and demanding body and boundary work.

Bibliography
Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Beyond the Gene but beneath the Skin.” In Genes in Development: Re-Reading the Molecular Paradigm, edited by Eva M. Neumann-Held and Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, 290-312. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Landecker, Hannah. “New Times for Biology: Nerve Cultures and the Event of Cellular Life in Vitro.” Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., vol. 33 (2002): 667–694.

Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr. “The Ethical Claims of Bio Art: Killing the Other or Self-Cannibalism?” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art: Art & Ethics, vol. 4 & 5, no. 2 & 1 (2003/2004): 167–188.