Essays on technology’s effect on our relationship with our bodies: “A timely and perceptive look . . . at some of the most anxiety producing issues of the day.” —Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley As birth, illness, and death increasingly come under technological control, struggles arise over who should control the body and define its limits and capacities. Biotechnologies turn the traditional “facts of life” into matters of expert judgment and partisan debate. They blur the boundary separating people from machines, male from female, and nature from culture. In these diverse ways, they destroy the “gold standard” of the body, formerly taken for granted. Biotechnologies become a convenient, tangible focus for political contests over the nuclear family, legal and professional authority, and relations between the sexes. Medical interventions also transform intimate personal experience: giving birth, building new families, and surviving serious illness now immerse us in a web of machines, expert authority, and electronic images. We use and imagine the body in radically different ways, and from these emerge new collective discourses of morality and personal identity. This book brings together historians, anthropologists, cultural critics, and feminists to examine the broad cultural effects of technologies such as surrogacy, tissue-culture research, and medical imaging. The moral anxieties raised by biotechnologies and their circulation across class and national boundaries provide other interdisciplinary themes for discourse in these essays. The authors favor complex social dramas of the refusal, celebration, or ambivalent acceptance of new medical procedures. Eschewing polemics or pure theory, contributors show how biotechnology collides with everyday life and reshapes the political and personal meanings of the body. Contributors include Paul Brodwin, Lisa Cartwright, Thomas Csordas, Gillian Goslinga-Roy, Deborah Grayson, Donald Joralemon, Hannah Landecker, Thomas Laqueur, Robert Nelson, Susan Squier, Janelle Taylor, and Alice Wexler. “This impressive collection offers a number of rich examples of why the development of anthropological studies of science, technology, and their disruptive social effects is a leading edge of critical enquiry.” —Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University

To retain their usefulness, cultures that manufacture economically valuable products must be uncontaminated, viable, and genetically stable. Maintaining Cultures for Biotechnology and Industry gives practical advice necessary to preserve and maintain cells and microorganisms important to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in ways that ensure they will continue to be able to synthesize those valuable metabolites. This book covers not just those strains currently being used but also those yet to be discovered and engineered. This text is essential for anyone working with cultures who wants to avoid the frustration of losing strains and needs to be able to devise and evaluate new strategies for preservation. Written by hands-on experts in their respective fields Contains helpful tables and protocols for preserving or maintaining cells, cultures and viruses Discusses means to preserve cells by freezing, lyophilization, drying, cyoprotection, spore storage, continuous propagation and subculturing when absolutely necessary, and others Gives information needed to test cultures for stable retention of important characteristics Gives principles needed to devise and evaluate preservation strategies for newly identified and newly engineered cells and organisms Lists culture sources for each class of organism Includes information for characterizing and monitoring recombinant organisms, especially important because of their propensity for genetic stability Discusses the history of the continually evolving field of culture preservation Examines the importance of genetically stable cultures as it relates to maintaining patent positions

This book provides a general introduction as well as a selected survey of key advances in the fascinating field of plant cell and tissue culture as a tool in biotechnology. After a detailed description of the various basic techniques employed in leading laboratories worldwide, follows an extended account of important applications in, for example, plant propagation, secondary metabolite production and gene technology. Additionally, some chapters are devoted to historical developments in this domain, metabolic aspects, nutrition, growth regulators, differentiation and the development of culture systems. The book will prove useful to both newcomers and specialists, and even “old hands” in tissue culture should find some challenging ideas to think about.

This book provides detailed insights into the role of microorganisms and microbial products in biodeterioration, conservation and restoration of cultural heritage. Topics to be discussed are microbial colonization and their growth control on both artworks and aerosol of indoor environments such as libraries or museums, as well as human health hazard from exposure to microbial agents. In addition innovative biotechnological protocols and strategies for the removal of undesired layers on artwork surfaces are described in detail. Also the advances and perspectives in this emerging biotechnological field are discussed, supported by the latest original findings.

Under the vast umbrella of Plant Sciences resides a plethora of highly specialized fields. Botanists, agronomists, horticulturists, geneticists, and physiologists each employ a different approach to the study of plants and each for a different end goal. Yet all will find themselves in the laboratory engaging in what can broadly be termed biotechnol

The book starts with an introduction to basic knowledge of instruments which deals with principle, working, uses, limitations and precautions of about ten instruments.Basic Knowledge of precaution of;Culture Media for Bacterial Growth, Plant Tissue Culture and Standard Solutions has been given in simple and easy-to-follow language.The biotechnology exercises such as Plasmid and DNA isolation, DNA size determination, Restriction digestion, PCR, Gus gene assay, RFLP, RAPD, Isolation of bacteria by streak and Pour plate method, Growth characteristics of E.Coli by Plating and Turbidimetric method and the plant tissues culture exercises such as Cell suspension culture, Androgenesis, Somatic embryogenesis, Preparation of plantlet to greenhouse field, have been given in a student friendly manner. Matter for Viva-voce has also been included.

How global biotechnology is redefining "life itself." In the age of global biotechnology, DNA can exist as biological material in a test tube, as a sequence in a computer database, and as economically valuable information in a patent. In The Global Genome, Eugene Thacker asks us to consider the relationship of these three entities and argues that—by their existence and their interrelationships—they are fundamentally redefining the notion of biological life itself. Biological science and the biotech industry are increasingly organized at a global level, in large part because of the use of the Internet in exchanging biological data. International genome sequencing efforts, genomic databases, the development of World Intellectual Property policies, and the "borderless" business of biotech are all evidence of the global intersections of biology and informatics—of genetic codes and computer codes. Thacker points out the internal tension in the very concept of biotechnology: the products are more "tech" than "bio," but the technology itself is fully biological, composed of the biomaterial labor of genes, proteins, cells, and tissues. Is biotechnology a technology at all, he asks, or is it a notion of "life itself" that is inseparable from its use in the biotech industry? The three sections of the book cover the three primary activities of biotechnology today: the encoding of biological materials into digital form—as in bioinformatics and genomics; its recoding in various ways—including the "biocolonialism" of mapping genetically isolated ethnic populations and the newly pervasive concern over "biological security"; and its decoding back into biological materiality—as in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Thacker moves easily from science to philosophy to political economics, enlivening his account with ideas from such thinkers as Georges Bataille, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, and Paul Virilio. The "global genome," says Thacker, makes it impossible to consider biotechnology without the context of globalism.