Culturing Life: How cells became technologies, by Hannah Landecker

THE discovery that it was possible to grow cells in a lab dish transformed them from being the immutable building blocks of individual bodies into plastic, malleable resources with a life of their own. In Culturing Life, anthropologist Hannah Landecker skilfully interweaves the scientific, historical and cultural aspects of this transformation, and examines how cell culture challenges humanity’s notions of individuality and immortality. This disembodiment of life, she contends, has even changed the meaning of the word “biological”. Although well argued, the book is peppered with sociological concepts and language that make it hard going in places for the…