Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program

Abstract

Before the rise of DNA sequence analysis or the controversies over the Human Genome Diversity Project, there was the International Biological Program, which ran from 1964 to 1974. The Human Adaptability arm of the International Biological Program featured a complex encounter between human geneticists and biological anthropologists. These scientists were especially interested in what could be learned from the bodies of people they referred to as both primitive and in danger of going extinct. In this article, I address how new access to technologies of cold storage, which would allow blood to be transported from the field to the lab and be stored for subsequent reanalysis, gave shape to this episode in Cold War human biology and has ramified into our genomic age. This case study highlights the importance of cryopreservation to projects of genetic salvage as well as to the life sciences, more generally. I argue that ‘latency’, a technical term initially used by cryobiologists to describe life in a state of suspended animation, can be extended as a concept for science studies scholars interested in technoscientific efforts to manage the future.