Dissertation Research: "I contain multitudes": Genetic chimeras and material negotiations of identity

这个科学和技术研究论文改进补助金使用人种学和历史研究方法来追踪遗传马赛克和嵌合体的出现和表征。将比较四例人类遗传多拷贝性。 在每种情况下，遗传上不同的细胞群在人体中共存，或在身体之间传播（对身体的概念本身提出质疑）。人类自发的嵌合体是由异卵双胞胎在子宫内的组织交换，或胚胎在发育早期的完全融合而产生的。遗传镶嵌是由单细胞突变引起的，这种突变存在于改变的细胞系中，该细胞系与原始细胞群一起在生物体中增殖。 术语微嵌合体描述了胎儿细胞和DNA分子在母体中的持续存在，以及母体细胞在孩子体内的持续存在，两者都在怀孕后持续存在。微嵌合体也指器官接受者的状况，其中供体细胞增殖并持续存在。 本论文使用这四个遗传多样性的情况下（嵌合体，镶嵌，胎儿微嵌合体和移植微嵌合体）获得经验，批判，购买的前提下，人类是遗传独特性和离散的历史和文化的特殊性。 换句话说，其目的是密切关注和批判性的想法，即个人身份必然与一个独特的和单一的基因组。在当代生物医学和生物政治学中，遗传学和身份越来越多地被混为一谈，但从基因到自我的链条既不是不可避免的，也不是不可侵犯的。这个项目的实地考察探索了临床和实验的情况下，人类被构建为多个，遗传。研究嵌合现象的实验室研究人员和技术人员将细胞和分子分为男性和女性、正常和病理、母体和胎儿、动物和人类、自我和他人等离散类别。 本项目研究微观层面上的基因身份和整体层面上的人类自我是共同产生和相互稳定的。 大多数情况下，少数细胞的遗传特性（例如在法医测试和产前筛查中）可以与独立个体重叠。本研究中的案例提供了一个机会来探索遗传异质性破坏个体和身份概念的情况。 扭转这种关系，该项目还研究了是否社会政治的个性和身份的概念被编织到细胞和分子的遗传身份在实验室中的实际分配。NSF的资金将支持在美国，加拿大和英国的实地考察，在实验室、诊所、会议和支持团体中，关于基因镶嵌和嵌合体的知识被产生、谈判和争论。每个研究团体的调查员和技术人员都将接受采访。挑战他们被归类为怪物，边缘或混合体的方式的患者活动家也将接受采访。 参与者民族志研究将在几个会议上进行，来自不同社区的研究人员聚集在一起，讨论与人类遗传身份和多样性的建设相关的紧急技术和医学问题。 本论文项目的智力影响主要是在遗传学和身份的社会研究，生物社会性和奠定行动主义的实证工作，以及遗传学的本质主义或决定论概念的理论批评领域。 作为一个自我和多重性的研究与身体的材料和技术实践，它补充了理论文献的自我，碎片和多重性。 这项研究的更广泛的影响和意义与个人和群体谁与他们的身份的生物医学特征的斗争。 这些人同时具有多种生物身份，这可能为对人进行分类和排斥提供了体制和官僚基础。此外，微嵌合体研究表明，我们都在某种程度上遗传分布。 该项目将对有关基因鉴定的政治和技术辩论作出重要和及时的贡献;辩论既具体化了基因个体，具有讽刺意味的是，也助长了例外的扩散。

This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant uses ethnographic and historical research methods to trace the emergence and characterization of genetic mosaics and chimeras. Four cases of human genetic multiciplicity will be compared. In each case, genetically different cell populations co-exist in a human body, or travel between bodies (calling into question the very notion of a body). Spontaneous human chimeras result from tissue exchanged between fraternal twins in utero, or the complete fusion of embryos early in development. Genetic mosaics result from a single-cell mutation, which persists in an altered cell line that proliferates in the organism's body alongside the original cell population. The term microchimerism describes the persistence of fetal cells and DNA molecules in the maternal body, and maternal cells in the child's body, both of which persist after pregnancy. Microchimerism also refers to a condition of an organ recipient in whom donor cells proliferate and persist. This dissertation uses these four cases of genetic multiplicity (chimerism, mosaicism, fetal microchimerism and transplantation microchimerism) to gain empirical, and critical, purchase on the historical and cultural specificity of the premise that humans are genetically unique and discrete. In other words, the aim is to focus closely and critically on the idea that individual identity is necessarily bound to a unique and singular genome. In contemporary biomedicine and biopolitics, genetics and identity are becoming increasingly conflated, but the chain from genes to selves is neither inevitable nor inviolable. Fieldwork for this project explores clinical and experimental situations in which humans are constructed as multiple, genetically. Laboratory researchers and technicians concerned with mosaic and chimeric phenomena sort cells and molecules into discrete categories of male and female, normal and pathological, maternal and fetal, animal and human, and self and other. This project examines the thesis that genetic identity on the microscopic level and human selves on the holistic level are co-produced and mutually stabilized. Most of the time, the genetic identity of a few cells (such as in forensic testing and prenatal screening) can be made to overlap with a self-contained individual. The cases in this study offer an opportunity to explore circumstances in which genetic heterogeneity disrupts notions of individuality and identity. Reversing this relationship, the project also examines whether socio-political notions of individuality and identity are woven into the practical assignment of genetic identity of cells and molecules in the laboratory. NSF funds will support fieldwork in the United States, Canada and the U.K., at laboratories, clinics, conferences and support groups in which knowledge about genetic mosaics and chimeras is produced, negotiated and contested. Investigators and technicians in each of the research communities will be interviewed. Patient activists who challenge the ways in which they are classified as monstrous, marginal or hybrid also will be interviewed. Participant ethnographic research will be conducted at several conferences at which researchers from different communities come together and discuss emergent technical and medical issues associated with the construction of human genetic identity and multiplicity. The intellectual impact of this dissertation project primarily is in the areas of social studies of genetics and identity, empirical work on biosociality and lay activism, and theoretical criticisms of essentialist or determinist notions of genetics. As a study of selfhood and multiplicity identified with the very material of the body and in technical practice, it supplements theoretical literatures about the self, fragmentation, and multiplicity. The broader impact and implications of this study have to do with individuals and groups who contend with biomedical characterizations of their identities. The coexistence of multiple biological identities in these individuals may provide institutional and bureaucratic bases for classifying and excluding persons. Furthermore, microchimerism research suggests that we are all genetically distributed at some level. This project will make important and timely contributions to political and technical debates about genetic identification; debates that both reify the genetic individual and, ironically, contribute to the proliferation of exceptions.