Disembodied Self: Staging the Trouble Through Careful Bodily Engagements

Based on a project on stem cell research and therapy, I scrutinize how biological materials are extracted from bodies and put into circulation, and how this creates openings for ‘doing’ reflexive STS research. I draw on (auto-)ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a pre-clinical stage biotech company that uses a patented technology to obtain multipotent adult mesenchymal stem cells from a minimally invasive muscle micro-biopsy. First active in equine medicine, this company is now also developing in human medicine using the same technology. Hence, apart from a few minor technical adjustments, animal and human cells follow exactly the same path, from extraction, to collection, transport, culture, and cryopreservation. After observing this process repeatedly in horses and humans and following the cells in motion, I volunteered to experiment with it myself by donating a muscle sample from my thigh for R&D purposes, with the aim of moving from participant-observer to observer-participant (and back again) (Seim 2021). This gift was not only motivated by an altruistic purpose (helping the people who facilitated my access to the field), but by the more selfish desire to use this personal detachment as a device of reflexivity generating more care and engagement in the future of fragile living entities. By temporarily transforming myself into a clinical subject, I not only helped to prevent the anonymity of donation, I also troubled the bodily engagement and attachment of biomedical scientists to their ‘objects’ (Myers 2008). What difference does it make whether the donor is an animal or a human being (and to whom)? And what if that human being is me? Initially considered as an anecdotal reflexivity experience, this paper questions the collaboration of various actors – human and non-human – in the development of medical therapies and highlights how such a process inevitably transforms entangled beings (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011).