Species of Contagion: Animal-to-Human Transplantation in the Age of Emerging Infectious Disease (Health, Technology and Society) 9811682887, 9789811682889

Citation preview

HEALTH, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

Species of Contagion Animal-to-Human Transplantation in the Age of Emerging Infectious Disease Ray Carr

Health, Technology and Society

Series Editors Rebecca Lynch Life Sciences and Medicine King’s College London London, UK Martyn Pickersgill Usher Institute University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

Medicine, health care, and the wider social meaning and management of health are undergoing major changes. In part this reflects developments in science and technology, which enable new forms of diagnosis, treatment and delivery of health care. It also reflects changes in the locus of care and the social management of health. Locating technical developments in wider socio-economic and political processes, each book in the series discusses and critiques recent developments in health technologies in specific areas, drawing on a range of analyses provided by the social sciences. Some have a more theoretical focus, some a more applied focus but all draw on recent research by the authors. The series also looks toward the medium term in anticipating the likely configurations of health in advanced industrial society and does so comparatively, through exploring the globalization and internationalization of health. More information about this series at http://link.springer.com/series/14875

Ray Carr

Species of Contagion Animal-to-Human Transplantation in the Age of Emerging Infectious Disease

Ray Carr Independent Scholar Corrimal, NSW, Australia

Health, Technology and Society ISBN 978-981-16-8288-9    ISBN 978-981-16-8289-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © SEAN GLADWELL This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Maisie

Series Editors’ Preface

Medicine, health care, and the wider social meanings and management of health are continually in the process of change. While the “birth of the clinic” heralded the process through which health and illness became increasingly subject to the surveillance of medicine, for example, surveillance has become more complex, sophisticated, and targeted—as seen in the search for “precision medicine” and now “precision public health”. Both surveillance and health itself emerge as more provisional, uncertain, and risk-laden as a consequence, and we might also ask what now constitutes “the clinic”, how meaningful a concept of a clinic ultimately is, and where else might we now find (or not find) health care spaces and interventions. Ongoing developments in science and technology are helping to enable and propel new forms of diagnosis, treatment, and the delivery of health care. In many contexts, these innovations both reflect and further contribute to changes in the locus of care and burden of responsibility for health. Genetics, informatics, imaging—to name but a few—are redefining collective and individual understandings of the body, health, and disease. At the same time, long established and even ostensibly mundane technologies and techniques can generate ripples in local discourse and practices as ideas about the nature and focus of health care shift in response to global debates about, for instance, One Health and Planetary Health. vii

viii 

Series Editors’ Preface

The very technologies that (re)define health are also the means through which the individualisation of health care can occur—through, for instance, digital health, diagnostic tests, and the commodification of restorative tissue. This individualisation of health is both culturally derived and state-sponsored, as exemplified by the promotion of “self-­ care”. These shifts are simultaneously welcomed and contested by professionals, patients, and wider publics. Hence they at once signal and instantiate wider societal ambivalences and divisions. This Series explores these processes within and beyond the conventional domain of “the clinic”, and asks whether they amount to a qualitative shift in the social ordering and value of medicine and health. Locating technical use and developments in wider socio-economic and political processes, each book discusses and critiques the dynamics between health, technology, and society through a variety of specific cases, and drawing on a range of analyses provided by the social sciences. The Series has already published more than 20 books that have explored many of these issues, drawing on novel, critical, and deeply informed research undertaken by their authors. In doing so, the books have shown how the boundaries between the three core dimensions that underpin the whole Series—health, technology, and society—are changing in fundamental ways. In Species of Contagion, Ray Carr focuses on an area that has galvanised debate and analysis within biomedicine, the social sciences, and popular culture: animal-to-human transplantation. This exciting monograph considers compelling questions around what and who counts as “self ” and “other”, and the technoscientific production and negotiation of “naturalness” and “purity”. Through Species of Contagion, Carr illustrates the complexities of understandings of hybridity and contagion within biomedical regulation and industry activities, and the transformations that can happen both because of and to contemporary practices of xenotransplantation. Accordingly, this monograph provides a bold and vital analysis of the reconfiguring of (the relations between) forms of capital, logics of power, and somas across diverse biological entities. London, UK Edinburgh, UK 

Rebecca Lynch Martyn Pickersgill

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my PhD supervisors, Melinda Cooper, Catherine Waldby, and Dinesh Wadiwel, who were extremely generous, nurturing, and intellectually inspiring. Without their presence and support this book would never have happened. A special thanks also to the many people who read parts of this book and provided invaluable feedback and editorial advice, including Sue Cochrane, Rebecca Pietsch, Linda Steele, Nicky Evans, Brian McLoughlin, Sonja van Wichelen, Jane Durie, and Elizabeth Durie. My thanks to Thom van Dooren for inspiring me to undertake this research, to Sarah Franklin, Anna Tsing, and Donna Haraway, who I have never met but whose works have provided a continuous source from which to rejuvenate my curiosity. I am grateful for the insights of anonymous reviewers on the manuscript of this book and the article published in Animal Studies Journal. Thank you to the editors at Palgrave in giving me this opportunity, and particularly Joshua Pitt who has been incredibly patient and positive throughout. Lastly, for their endless patience and support I want to acknowledge my mother, Jan, co-parent Alasdair, and, most importantly, my amazing daughter Maisie. Part of Chap. 2 of this book was previously published as: Carr, R. (2016). “100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure

ix

x Acknowledgements

Auckland Island Pigs for Xenotransplantation”. Animal Studies Journal, 5(2), 78–100. The views expressed in this book are those of the author and are not representative of any university or other organisation with whom the author is, or has been, employed.

Contents

1 Introduction: Forms of Contagion  1 2 100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure Auckland Island Pigs for Xenotransplantation 39 3 Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates in UK Bioethics 79 4 Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation and Security in the United States117 5 Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium on Xenotransplantation in Australia159 6 Conclusion205 Index217

xi

1 Introduction: Forms of Contagion

The surgeon completes the transplant of the pig heart into the baboon … The pig heart initially becomes a healthy pink color as the recipient’s blood flows through it. It begins to beat. But, after as little as two minutes, the surgeon watches as it becomes a mottled, dusky blue color, and the contractions become weak and irregular. Blood ceases to flow through the organ as the small capillaries in the heart muscle become occluded by clots. The blood vessels rupture, and the heart rapidly swells due to the leakage of blood and fluid into the muscle wall. The heart stops beating. It is now an ugly black mass. (D. K. C. Cooper and Lanza 2000, 55)

Within understandings of biomedicine, the immune system manifests the bodily response to hybridity and contagion. In the above quote, researchers describe the immunological rejection of a pig organ transplanted across species into a baboon. Organs transplanted across species quickly turn black and die as the immune system responds to the newly introduced tissues.1 In Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s paradigmatic work on immunology, the self/non-self distinction explains this reaction: the body rejects the organ because it is “not self ”.2 In this perspective, the body responds to “otherness” by attacking or rejecting it, whereas “self ” is allowed to live, is “tolerated”. The biomedical representation of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_1

1

2 

R. Carr

immune system as a mechanism that divides self from non-self recalls the sovereign division between friend and enemy (Schmitt 2007). However, contemporary immunology offers more than one understanding of immune function, and accordingly different accounts of how the body treats the presence of other species, whether in the form of microbes or transplants. Immunological theories sometimes render immune system activities as maintaining balance within cellular networks or as adaptive systems. Even Burnet’s paradigmatic explanation of the immunological-­ self had ecological aspects (Anderson and Mackay 2014).3 More strikingly, in the 1970s, Niels Jerne’s “idiotypic network theory” proposed that a destructive immune reaction is prompted by a disturbance in the interactions within a network of immune cells, rather than being caused by a transgression of the self/other boundary. Immunologist Klaus Rajewsky explains that for Jerne “the antibody response is just an adaptation to a new equilibrium” (Eichmann 2008, 162). Polly Matzinger’s (2001) “danger theory” goes further in postulating that the immune system responds to cellular signals of stress and injury, as “a flexible system that adapts to a changing self ” (8). While these theories remain at the fringes of immunology, medical historian Alfred Tauber (2000) argues that most contemporary immunologists understand destructive immune system responses as occurring within a network of cellular and molecular interactions, dependent on context.4 Nevertheless, many theorists remain attached to the concept of the immunological self (Tauber 2000). Xenotransplantation can be thought of as a hybrid technology. It aims to take live tissues from other animals and incorporate them into the human body, co-opting the biological functions of other animals to supplement human biology. Transplants can involve non-human animal cells, tissues, or organs.5 Human clinical trials of cellular transplants have been performed in several countries, using pig cells, in an attempt to treat diabetes and Parkinson’s disease (LCT n.d.; Valdes-Gonzalez et al. 2005). One company in New Zealand, Living Cell Technologies (LCT)/Diatranz Otsuka, already secured government approval to commercialise its cellular xenotransplantation product for diabetes in Russia (LCT 2010).6 Other companies are attempting to develop technologies for transplanting pig organs into humans; however, this is far more difficult because of the radical immunological rejection of non-human organs, and these

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

3

experimental pig transplants are yet to succeed for any length of time in non-human experimental subjects (usually baboons). To reduce the risk of immune system rejection, some researchers are genetically altering pig source animals to make them “more human”. In more than one way, then, xenotransplantation technologies blur the biological boundaries between humans and other animals (Brown 1999; P.  S. Cook and Osbaldiston 2010; Marie Fox 2005; Sharp 2013).7 Concern over the interplay between the self and other manifests in an intriguing problematic in xenotransplantation. On the one hand, the radical immunological rejection of tissues from other species presents an obstacle to transplantation. And on the other hand, from a regulatory point of view, the possibility that infectious disease might be spread by the practice of xenotransplantation poses significant problems. The extraordinarily intimate contact between live human and non-human animal flesh opens the individual, and potentially, entire human populations, to novel viruses and other microbes lying latent in transplant tissues. It is possible that a virus or other microbe might be transferred, along with the transplant, into the human recipient, and onward from there into the human population. (This kind of transmission of an animal virus into the human population is called zoonosis, while the term xenozoonosis denotes this same process happening through xenotransplantation.) Infectious disease experts have warned that the technologies used to overcome immune rejection, such as genetic engineering and immunosuppression, could even facilitate a microbe adapting to better infect the human population. Diminishing the boundaries between self and other is thus posed as a public health risk as well as a potentially lifesaving technology. How is the immune system response to non-human tissues understood in the xenotransplantation industry?8 Above I quoted xenotransplantation researchers David Cooper and Robert Paul Lanza (2000), describing the rejection of a xenograft. They continue by explaining the baboon’s extraordinary immune response to transplanted pig tissues as follows: The surgeon has witnessed the most powerful immunological reaction that the human body can mount, a response initially developed millions of

4 

R. Carr

years ago in primitive animal species as a defense against invading micro-­ organisms, largely bacteria and viruses. This innate response has become the reflex reaction to the foreign threat. (p. 55)

Similarly, Bob Elliot, at the time CEO of Living Cell Technologies (LCT), and immunologist Christopher Thanos describe immune rejection of xenografts as a “coordinated attack on the foreign tissue marked by cell-mediated pathways” (Thanos and Elliott 2009, 31). Within the xenotransplantation research community, then, the metaphor of self and other maintains its central position, at least on the surface. However, the practical approaches being adopted to regulate or avoid immune reaction reveal more complex understandings of the immune system. Here I briefly outline two different approaches being taken by researchers in the field, which illustrate two different forms of power, articulated at the cellular scale. The transplantation medical field has succeeded in working around rejection in human-to-human transplantation with the aid of immunosuppressant drugs, and by finding a suitably matched donor. However, immunosuppression alone is not enough to inhibit the rejection in pig-­ to-­ human (or pig-to-non-human-primate) transplants, and many researchers have assumed that genetic engineering will play a role in enabling xenotransplantation. However, the New Zealand company Living Cell Technologies has adopted an alternative approach to the problem that does not involve either of these techniques, instead using seaweed to create a barrier that prevents contact between the “donor” pig cells and the human immune cells. Before being implanted in the human body, LCT’s technicians coat the cells in an alginate substance derived from seaweed. The alginate surface is structured with small holes that, once the pig cells are transplanted, allow oxygen and nutrients from the recipient blood to sustain the cells and enable the cells to perform their therapeutic function (such as releasing insulin). However, the openings in this porous surface are not large enough for human antibodies (immune cells) to penetrate and interact with the pig cells. The seaweed forms a “biocompatible barrier”: unlike pig cells, the human immune system only mounts a mild rejection response to the alginate (Living Cells Technologies 2007, 25). In keeping with the theme of purity employed

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

5

by LCT to market their xenotransplantation products (see Chap. 2), the alginate is “ultrapure” (Elliot 2009). LCT nevertheless expects the alginate encapsulation to break down over time, and that the human immune system, which remains fully active, will subsequently destroy the pig cells. When this occurs, the patient will simply receive another transplant of cells. While the seaweed membrane surrounding the transplanted pig cells does not quite constitute a hermetically sealed enclosure, as far as the immune system is concerned, it is a complete barrier between self and other. The encapsulation creates a tiny, enclosed sanctuary (an island) inside the human body so that the pig cells can augment human biological functioning and yet remain isolated. With this method, there is no need for the bodily response to “otherness” to be altered or suppressed; the “other” is merely contained, temporarily, within the sanctuary. As I discuss in Chap. 4, experts anticipate that suppressing the recipient’s immune system, or otherwise altering the immune response may in fact exacerbate risks of new disease emerging through xenotransplantation. Accordingly, LCT sells “[t]he maintenance of an intact immune system” as “an important safety factor” (Thanos and Elliott 2009, 398), because “[a] suppressed immune system, with lower surveillance of foreign antigens, can provide an opportunity for infection” (Thanos and Elliott 2009, 399). From the perspective of the immunological self, this approach maintains the integrity of the self/non-self distinction. The US-based biotechnology company United Therapeutics, with a proposed high-tech breeding facility for producing “XenoLung” pig transplants, takes a more liberal approach to the immunological self. CEO Martine Rothblatt wishes to develop technologies in two directions: “[t]aking full advantage of the wonderful new tools of transgenetic modifications and cloning”; and “[e]mbracing, not fearing, some level of biochemical incompatibility via using pre-treatment regimens to engender immunological chimerism” (Rothblatt 2012, 387). In her recommendation that we should embrace “incompatibility”, Rothblatt advocates adopting hybridity as a modus operandi. In particular, she planned to use biomedical techniques to adapt the human immune system so that it becomes a hybrid human-pig system, producing “immunological chimerism”. The aim here is to reprogram the immune system so

6 

R. Carr

that it does not “attack” transplanted tissues, also called “inducing tolerance”. The term “tolerance” usually refers to the immune system’s lack of reactivity to the organism’s own cells; techniques for inducing tolerance aim to transfer the immunity from one’s immune system onto donor tissues as well. A team of researchers based at Harvard Medical School, led by immunologist David Sachs, has been exploring methods of inducing tolerance in both human-to-human transplantation and animal-to-human transplantation. Sachs (2011) defines tolerance as “the specific absence of a destructive immune response to a transplanted tissue in the absence of immunosuppression” (p. 501). The lack of a damaging reaction does not mean that the immune system does not respond at all, as is often presumed under the self/non-self model. The immune system does respond to “tolerated” tissues, but it is not strictly destructive; from this perspective, the immune system is capable of positive reactions as well as damaging ones: Until recently, immunologic tolerance was thought to imply the specific absence of an immune response. However, it has now become clear that, at least in the field of transplantation, tolerance can also be brought about by a positive immunologic response of a regulatory nature. (Sachs 2011, 501)

Sachs suggests that healthy bodies require an ongoing positive action from the immune system. Although most components of an individual’s immune system that respond negatively to “self ” are eliminated in the thymus (as Burnet’s clonal selection theory suggests), all bodies typically still retain some self-destructive cells. As these self-destructive antibodies circulate, they sometimes react negatively to the organism’s own cells. However, this response is “downregulated” by other components of the immune system. If a self-antibody begins to aggressively respond to the body’s own cells, other immune cells come into action, responding “positively” with a protective function and calming the destructive instinct. In short, the immune system, in this understanding, can modulate its own interactions, within the community of cells, and according to the context. The team at Harvard have been exploring two ways to induce tolerance in transplant recipients (Sachs et  al. 2009). One is to transplant

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

7

hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), usually using bone marrow or peripheral blood progenitor cells (PBPCs), from the donor into the recipient. Stem cells produce the cells of the body, including immune cells, and, after being transplanted into the recipient, they continue to produce immune system cells of the donor species, creating a mixed donor-recipient immune system.9 The second method deploys the skills of the thymus to eliminate (most) self-reacting immune system cells. In this approach donor thymus tissue is transplanted into the recipient, and in theory it will drain out those immune system cells that are reactive to pigs tissues, coaxing the body to “regard porcine antigens displayed in the donor thymus as self ” (Griesemer et al. 2014, 9). Put very simply, in the first process the human recipient body would be populated with immune cells from the source pig, producing a hybrid repertoire of immune cells. In this second procedure, the pig-reactive components would be removed from the human immune system so that it treats pig tissues as “self ”. To achieve a viable pig-to-human organ transplantation, both strategies are likely to be used together.10 The team at Harvard University has had some success in these techniques with human-human transplants using donors with a mismatched HLA (human leukocyte antigen) (Kawai et al. 2008); the recipient would usually reject these mismatched transplants. Sachs’ team have achieved tolerance by transplanting donor bone marrow along with a kidney transplant, with the result that the recipient body did not destroy the allograft even without immunosuppression. Interestingly, however, while the recipient initially showed signs of mixed donor-recipient immune cells, this disappeared over time, and the body achieved tolerance by another mechanism. That is, in experiments to date, the donor immune system cells, transplanted only to induce tolerance, did not survive very long in the recipient body, but seem to have catalysed other forms of tolerance in the recipient—these remain “mystifying” (Wilkinson 2009). What is clear is that when these techniques were deployed, the recipient immune system adapted its responses so that it no longer rejected donor tissues, even after chimerism disappeared and without immunosuppression. In the language of immunological selfhood, the recipient immune system altered its categorisation of self to include the donor.

8 

R. Carr

The Harvard University researchers have been able to persuade a mouse body to become tolerant to a pig transplant, so that it no longer reacted destructively to it (Sachs et al. 2009). This success is yet to be replicated with cross-species transplants into non-human primates. The experiments with small animals, however, have convinced the scientists involved that the technology could theoretically work with cross-species transplants in humans. With pig-to-baboon transplants, the team have only been able to produce a chimeric immune system very temporarily in the recipient baboon, and this has not supported the acceptance of a pig tissue transplant. Not yet at least. Sachs’ team, like United Therapeutics, expect that a number of genetic-engineering techniques, combined with these tolerance-­inducing mechanisms, will be required to enable pig-to-non-­ human-primate, and subsequently pig-to-human, organ xenotransplantation.11 If successful, this approach would entail modifying the human immunological system to incorporate pig tissues as “self ”. Indeed, the immunological tolerance achieved by human recipients of mismatched HLA transplants seems to point to a capacity for the immune system to re-adjust its own sense of “self ”, or its own reactivity.12 Sachs’ hypothesis is that this involves the “peripheral” regulatory elements of the immune system, which “downgrade”, or counter, its own reactions. Two imperatives reveal themselves in these two examples: one is to represent the body as a unitary entity with integrity (a biological self ) and one is to imagine the body as adaptive or self-adjusting. Donna Haraway (1991) proposes that in biomedicine “the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological” (p. 204). In the two approaches to xenotransplantation I have discussed, who and what counts as self and other? LCT’s approach operates within form of power that Foucault identifies as sovereignty. It tries to prevent dangerous interactions and asserts the importance of an immunological division between self and other. As I discuss in Chap. 2, LCT markets its products along with a narrative that affirms distinct boundaries between the categories of human and animal, representing their source pigs as natural and microbiologically pristine because they have been historically isolated from

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

9

contaminations. Within this context, LCT’s marketing materials also express an imperative to affirm and maintain a sense of biological sovereignty, the boundaries of the self. The encapsulation technology resonates with LCT’s marketing strategy, leveraging off NZ tourism’s 100% Pure narrative, at the biological level as neither humans nor pigs have their biological integrity compromised. In keeping with the narrative, pig source animals remain “natural” and non-genetically modified. And, immunologically, human identity is kept intact. Despite the fact that the human body sustains the pig cells, the components of each species also appear to be separated and maintain their distinct difference. In short, these mechanisms seem to re-impose a duality over and against the hybridity of xenotransplantation. Whereas LCT’s researchers intimated that it is dangerous to undermine the bodily capacity to destroy that which is “foreign”, tolerance induction deliberately reprograms the body’s destructive responses to new components. Even though Sachs and his team use the terms “self ” and “foreign”, it is clear that, for them, immunological response is contextual and adaptable; the immune system can counter its own reactivity and regulate its treatment of antigens. Practically, these technologies treat the immune system as a contingent process of managing dangers to the body through regulation; this renders the immune system as a form of biological governmentality. The body is being secured, with a system that regulates the presence of cells in the body depending on the circumstances, rather than protecting itself at the border from that which is definitively non-self.13 LCT’s technologies seek to ensure that the self remains pure, natural, and human. United Therapeutics’ strategy embraces difference, and the immune system is modified to incorporate the donor pig as self. In order to strive for a more livable world for humans and other animals we need to understand how these differing mechanisms of power meld, antagonise, and interact with each other, and how these interconnections shape our relationships with others. In this book, I examine regulatory and industry understandings of hybridity and contagion in the xenotransplantation field to demonstrate that both sovereignty and security operate dynamically in regulating the

10 

R. Carr

transplantation of non-human animal tissues into humans. I use xenotransplantation as a lens to explore power mechanisms as they address borders and interconnections between bodies, species, and nations, and to demonstrate the entwined histories of infectious disease management, immigration, and economies. As experimental xenotransplantation research progresses into human clinical trials in research-intensive countries, governments have moved to regulate these technologies. Current government regulation responds to the public health issue, highlighted by infectious disease specialists, of a novel human disease emerging via xenotransplantation recipients. In responding to the potential contagious effects of xenotransplantation, government bodies and industry practices position humans and non-­ human animals in relation to one another. Their responses speak to the meaning of hybridity in the social and political contexts in which research and regulation take place. Yet, in the field of xenotransplantation, contagion and cross-species exchanges have been dealt with in surprisingly different ways in various contexts (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011; Cheng 2015a; Rémy 2009; Tallacchini 2011). While fear of a new disease emerging through xenotransplantation practices is widespread, how this threat is understood and managed has varied depending on the country and the species in question. As I will show, apes, baboons, and other monkeys, and pigs, have been treated very differently, and there are divergences between the forms of regulation and practice adopted in New Zealand, the United States, the UK, and Australia (the countries I have chosen to examine in this book). Xenotransplantation emerged as a public health issue during the 1990s. Prior to this period, surgeons had long experimented with transplants from various kinds of non-human animals, beginning as early as the sixteenth century and spanning Europe, the Middle East, Asia, South Africa, and the United States (Deschamps et al. 2005). In the early twentieth century such experiments became almost “common place”, particularly in France where the much-ridiculed Serge Voronoff transplanted thousands of patients with testicular tissue from baboons and chimpanzees (Rémy 2009). Modern xenotransplantation developed during the 1960s (Boneva et al. 2001), in the United States and Europe, with the

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

11

advent of immunosuppressant drugs designed for human-to-human transplantation (allotransplantation), and along with significant successes in allotransplantation. In the 1960s Keith Reemsta, for example, transplanted kidneys from chimpanzees to human recipients in the United States. During the 1980s, a failed experimental attempt to transplant a heart from a baboon into a baby (“Baby Fae”), in the United States, was highly publicised, and briefly derailed research. The public, researchers, and animal activists criticised the researchers for their treatment of non-­ human animals and the lack of appropriate ethical processes regarding recipient risk and consent (Rémy 2009). Following this failure, during 1980s, the research community restricted itself temporarily from further experiments (Deschamps et  al. 2005; Rémy 2009; Sharp 2013).14 The UK government had also initiated a moratorium during the 1980s, until 1992, following the Baby Fae case (Haddow et  al. 2010) catalysed by ethical concerns rather than infectious disease issues. The 1990s saw research reinvigorated, however, as the development of genetic engineering techniques promised a new solution to immunological obstacles and opened further avenues of research. The 1990s also introduced new foci in xenotransplantation research—pigs as a tissue source, cellular technologies, and the problem of xenozoonosis. Longer-­ standing concerns for human recipient and non-human animal welfare have also remained, feeding into the contemporary regulatory landscape, particularly in the UK, as I discuss in Chap. 3. It is significant that during the more recent phase of regulatory development, non-human primates have been almost entirely excluded from research, as tissue sources, on the basis of ethical and infectious disease issues (see Chaps. 3 and 4). The 1990s ushered in a new period of government regulation of xenotransplantation framed dominantly around biological security concerns. As I discuss at length in Chap. 5, recent experiences with HIV and new perspectives on emerging infectious disease facilitated a reframing of xenotransplantation technologies as a risk to the human population at large (Weiss 1999).15 Framing xenotransplantation as a public health issue shaped the regulatory landscape as it shifted concern from individual welfare (non-­ human source animals and human experimental subjects for instance) to population health and security.16 This new stance on xenotransplantation

12 

R. Carr

connected the regulation of xenotransplantation to questions of global and interspecies interconnectedness; the science of viral emergence and environmental change; and strategies of emergency preparedness and pre-emption. It enabled a discursive (including administrative) co-­ production of bodily, species, and national boundaries. Regulating bodies in Europe, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia have now set guidelines for those applying to perform clinical trials in xenotransplantation, which closely follow the models set by the US FDA and European Union. In these countries, applications for clinical trials are expected to be reviewed by both local research ethics committees and a national body for medicines regulation, such as the FDA.17 These agency guidelines typically approach the risk to population health by focusing on researcher requirements to: (i) raise microbiologically protected source animals; (ii) conduct ongoing biological monitoring and surveillance of recipients and source animals; (iii) advise recipients on behaviour management. As I discuss in Chap. 5 the regulation of xenotransplantation here draws from the public health approach to HIV/AIDS with a particular focus on possible spread of disease via blood or sexual fluids. Social and legal scholars have analysed the regulatory development on xenotransplantation research in several countries, and compared jurisdictions.18 Globally, the trend in xenotransplantation government regulation from the late 1990s has been for governments to move from stringent requirements and monitoring to more flexible regulation.19 In the UK and the United States, for example, national regulatory oversight has subsequently given way to local management. However, the timing and meaning of this trajectory are not the same across countries. Tallacchini (2011) for example, has argued that the relaxation of oversight in Canada corresponds to a normalisation of xenotransplantation technologies, compelled partly by the transition of research to transplanting cells instead of organs. In contrast, Beynon-Jones and Brown (2011) argue that in the UK government oversight diminished as the industry failed to progress towards the clinical trials they had promised. Several countries (including the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, and Australia), and global organisations such as the Council of Europe, initiated a temporary moratorium on xenotransplantation in response to disease concerns. The moratorium in Australia was later and longer than

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

13

some others, beginning in 2003 and stretching to 2009;20 in contrast, by 2003 the Council of Europe had lifted their moratorium and published guidelines for research. The US FDA, alternatively, only placed xenotransplantation clinical trials on hold, without a moratorium, and specifically for the purpose of developing guidelines which would enable research to continue (Schuurman 2015).21 I read these differences in regulatory experiences across countries as expressions of two different forms of power and corresponding understandings of contagion; following Foucault, I refer to these as sovereignty and security. Sovereignty operates in a fundamentally negative way, through legal-­ juridical mechanisms. Legal mechanisms divide the prohibited from the permitted and punish transgressions (Foucault 2007, 46). In sovereign regimes of power, political control works by organising the world into clean categories and policing the boundaries between them. In the lecture series Abnormal (2003), Foucault provides a telling example of how sovereign regimes of power understand and relate to contagion. When confronted with the problem of leprosy during the Middle Ages, the sovereign responded by separating out those who were infected and preventing all contact with the community. People with leprosy were cast out of the town walls, often along with a funeral rite, and designated as dead to the community. Here Foucault (2003) highlights the way in which contagion is dealt with through a negative and prohibitive process of spatial separation, remarking that “the individual [is] driven out in order to purify the community” (p. 44).22 Mary Douglas famously proposed that fears of pollution only arise in societies that have a strong social order and structures of symbolic categorization; pollution is associated with that which resists categorisation within the dominant social order, that which strays beyond the divides structuring society. Whether such fears of pollution are informed by understandings of pathogens and microbes, as in contemporary society, or by social taboos or religious edicts, an underlying social system must be in place. As Catherine Waldby (1996, 68) argues, “the biomedical concept of infectious contagion is in a sense a subset of this abjected contagion”. The occurrence of infectious disease, within a particular sovereigntist understanding of bodies and social systems, is frequently identified with boundary crossing, transgression, and fear of loss of

14 

R. Carr

identity (Shildrick 2000). While disease itself is often experienced as abject, vulnerable social identities or perceived invasive threats can serve to exacerbate fears of medical infection.23 For instance, the source of infectious disease is often attributed to marginalised or abject social identities (such as immigrants, sex workers, people who are homeless, and homosexual men) who are targeted for intervention (Craddock 2000; Shildrick 2000; Wald 2008; Waldby 1996).24 Animal studies scholars and philosophers have argued that the construction of “the human” is dependent on the othering or suppression of “the animal” (Agamben 2004; Derrida and Wills 2002; Oliver 2010; Wolfe 2003).25 In particular, the juridical-legal concept of human rights implicitly relies on the human/animal binary and the exclusion of non-­ humans from the community of equals.26 Derrida diagnoses this rights discourse as the “philosophical and juridical machine thanks to which the exploitation of animal material for food, work, experimentation, etc., has been practiced” (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004, 65).27 And indeed, scholars have argued that the same mechanism also structures violence perpetrated against humans who are often represented as “animal” (Agamben 2004; Wolfe 2003). Undoubtedly, a range of other social-­ political discourses construct the animal as constitutive other to the human; “the animal”, Cary Wolfe suggests, lies at the “very heart of the constitutive disavowals and self-constructing narratives enacted by that fantasy figure called ‘the human’ ” (p. 6). The foundational role of the human/animal binary in human society and politics prompts Mary Murray to suggest that concerns about xenozoonosis indicate the precariousness of this critical distinction in xenotransplantation technologies: The perceived transgression of boundaries implied in animal to human organ transplantation and attendant fears of zoonosis can activate anxieties that we may be making animals of ourselves and creating beastly species of Frankenstein-type monsters … these kinds of questions … connect to our sense of ontological security, a security partly founded upon the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between humans and other animals. (Murray 2006, 51)

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

15

As Brown (1999) states, xenotransplantation technologies “merge and confuse” (p. 327) the distinctions between human and animal and also between science and culture.28 Should we, then, read discourses on xenozoonosis as a pollution ritual that affirms a social order in which humans and other animals are properly differentiated? From the perspective of sovereign power, discourses in which xenotransplants, or hypothetical xenotransplant recipients, are figured as contagious can present boundary-making activities, potentially reaffirming ontological boundaries between animals and humans, or nature and culture. I will explore several examples of the (re)assertion of boundaries in response to xenotransplantation technologies in the chapters that follow, including the xenotransplantation moratorium in Australia, which support such a reading. However, this is not the only understanding of contagion at work in xenotransplantation research and regulation. Xenotransplantation biomedical technologies, which aim to mobilise biological functioning across species, entail a completely different operation of power; they involve what Foucault (2007) calls “security mechanisms” or “governmentality”. This form of power does not function by enforcing boundaries, and binary divisions. Instead, it requires circulation for its operation, and targets the states of equilibrium and disequilibrium—and later on crisis and reorganisation—that characterise aggregate systems. Mechanisms within this form of power attempt to modulate natural systemic processes, such as those relating to economies, populations, ecosystems, or the biosphere. Security techniques correspond to what Foucault originally calls biopolitics, the second pole of biopower that focuses on the biological population, also called the “species body”.29 Informed in part by concepts from physics and biology, and later evolving in concert with systems theory, these mechanisms of power function with an understanding of aggregate phenomena that can self-adjust: that can spontaneously find an equilibrium, or evolve and adapt in response to environmental changes. Foucault argues that governmentality, a self-limiting form of power, emerged as classical political economy: a new form of economic governing which was not concerned with simply increasing sovereign wealth and military power but rather finding the ideal relationship between the elements of the economy for population wealth and wellbeing, such as production,

16 

R. Carr

consumption, import, and export. This form of power takes collectives (rather than binaries) as its objects, for example, the population understood as a collective body with its own specific biological dynamics that can be indirectly influenced. We are no longer dealing here with static formations to be protected or maintained, like territories, but dynamic collective processes for which freedom and circulation are critical to functioning: a security mechanism “cannot operate well except on condition that it is given freedom … the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things” (p. 49).30 Accordingly, regimes of power based on the imperative of security understand contagion as neither inherently good nor bad. Infection is a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated, but may be limited, counteracted, or made to function in the interests of the population and its health. For example, vaccination techniques actively induce a low level of infection in order to limit more severe disease outbreaks by creating immunity (Foucault 2007, 58). Rather than fearing or avoiding all forms of disease transmission, this strategy responds to infectious disease by utilising the very process itself, encouraging one form of infection to counteract a less desirable form. Vaccination provokes infection in order to secure populations against its dangerous effects (see Chap. 4). Foucault’s analysis of classical political economy focused on systems that return to equilibrium. However, security scholars have argued that adverse events are no longer only represented as calculable risks within equilibrium systems, they are frequently rendered uncertain and catastrophic, engendering novel forms of preparedness, pre-emption, systems security, and resilience in the face of unknown, but imminent, emergencies (Aradau 2014; M. Cooper 2006; Evans and Reid 2014; Lakoff and Collier 2008; Walker and Cooper 2011). Melinda Cooper argues that new forms of governing economic and other insecurity are tightly interwoven with the emergence of post-Fordist production and financialisation in the life sciences in particular (M. Cooper 2008). Production in the contemporary post-Fordist life sciences, Cooper (2008) argues, is concerned with recreating life “beyond the limits”. Contemporary security apparatuses invest in a continual reinvention of life; “it is all about thriving in complex systems which promote radical connectivity and accept radical uncertainty” (Evans and Reid 2014, 62).

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

17

Biocapital and Trans-species Adaptation Contemporary biomedicine has progressively opened up possibilities for circulation and interconnection of biological fragments as “molecularization” (Rose 2009) and understandings of genetics have refigured biology (cells, embryos and so on) as re-engineerable and re-combinable in a multitude of ways. Anthropologist Sarah Franklin (2006) calls this a shift to “trans-biology”, locating its origins in embryology. Certainly, interconnections and circulations of biological fragments among humans and non-human animals are increasing (and increasingly relevant to governance), because of biotechnological advances and globalisation, among other factors (as I discuss in Chap. 4). Blue and Rock (2011), accordingly, call for analyses of “trans-biopolitics” which explore the apparatuses governing connections and circulations, and power relationships, between (as well as within) multiple species populations.31 As I suggested above, xenotransplantation can be understood as a security apparatus that increases the movement of biological functioning across species for the benefit of human populations. Proponents of xenotransplantation argue that a key advantage of xenotransplantation technologies is in “circumventing the shortage of human allographs for transplantation” (US Food and Drug Administration 2003, p. 2), reducing the burden of chronic disease in society (see also Boneva et al. 2001; Fishman 1998). The history of human-to-human transplantation (allotransplantation), already a recombinatory technology that circulates body fragments across individual bodies, shapes this argument about the need for xenotransplantation technologies. In the 1980s and 1990s, the allotransplantation field boomed with the development of surgical technologies and the use of cyclosporine as an immunosuppressant, which widened the scope of transplantation between different human bodies (Cohen 2001, 7; R. C. Fox and Swazey 2013). These technological developments in allotransplantation since the mid-twentieth century have produced global movements of live body parts, within licit and illicit markets (see Scheper-­ Hughes 2002; Cohen 2001), amidst an ostensible scarcity of human organs. However, the widely publicised organ “scarcity” has been

18 

R. Carr

critiqued by social studies scholars who argue that it is produced by the very technologies and social policies that make transplantation possible and acceptable for a large range of recipients (Cohen 2001; Lock 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2002). As Rémy (2009) argues, success with allografts generated “a demand for grafts that was impossible to satisfy which, in turn, created an incentive to revive experiments in xenografts” (412). In the context of the supposed need for human tissues, and as a tool for decreasing the burden of some chronic conditions, xenotransplantation practices take a liberal approach to species differences. Species do not have definitive “boundaries”; rather, cross-species biological connectivities are elements to inhibit or facilitate towards population-level health outcomes. Rothblatt and United Therapeutics, for example, aim to genetically engineer pigs for XenoLungs, fostering genetic and tissue exchange across species. In this instance, hybridity (or trans-species recombination) and contagion across species in xenotransplantation are not inherently troubling to the operation of power, indeed contagion— melding, recombining—are its modus operandi. Overstated expectations are typical within the life science industries, however. Sunder Rajan, in his seminal account of political economy and the life sciences, points to the speculative nature of capitalism, “biocapital”, evident in contemporary US biotechnology industries. “Exuberant” discourses of hype, he argues, intersect with more traditional modes of scientific fact production, so that the production of biotech and life sciences (in the United States) is inseparable from the hyped up and imagined future on which it depends for venture funding and thus survival (Sunder Rajan 2006, 111). Melinda Cooper adds that “what is new in the contemporary biosciences is not so much the commodification of biological life—this is a foregone conclusion—but rather its transmutation into speculative surplus value” (148). Biocapital, in other words, makes it possible to secure value now from life imagined in the future via a whole set of legislative or regulatory mechanisms as well as strategically capturing the emergent potential of life itself. Processes of infection and exchange are central to the modes within which contemporary security mechanisms and biotechnology operate to (speculatively) extend beyond existing forms of life. In contrast with the moratorium that attempts to prevent contact between humans and

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

19

animals, the approach that flows from the imperative of security employs infectious processes and adapt life and pre-empt the possibility of disease outbreaks. As hinted already, biotechnology’s promissory discourses are not the only future-oriented narratives shaping the xenotransplantation field, as alongside these is the future painted of potential catastrophic zoonotic outbreaks. I address the intersection of these speculative logics in Chap. 4. The imperative of security structures the relationship between humans and animals along quite different lines to the dualistic friend/enemy structure of sovereign power. It provides an alternative to the inside/outside division that theorists often identify as the guiding premise of human exploitation of non-human animals. Nevertheless, security mechanisms are also methods of control and coercion, and their operation is not generally concerned with the wellbeing of individuals, since they focus on collectivities, or existing livelihoods, as are oriented to the future. As Evans and Reid’s (2014) critique of contemporary political economy argues, security apparatuses may exacerbate the vulnerabilities of those already most exposed, as the expectation placed on individuals and communities to become resilient to future catastrophes supersedes protective strategies from government. Moreover, as I will explore throughout this book, while security, as a mode of power, is essentially liberal, in some cases it can nonetheless effectively incorporate sovereigntist binaries within its operations to support the continuation of human domination of non-human animals. Speculative life sciences rely on non-human bodies—their lives and deaths—for the development of biocapital. And xenotransplantation procedures—even while they may undermine human/animal binaries—relentlessly circulate value from other animals to (some) humans.

Structure of the Book The following chapters trace the interplay of security and sovereignty in four case studies of xenotransplantation regulation and industry in New Zealand, the UK, the United States, and Australia. Despite globally circulating narratives of emerging infectious disease, the meaning of

20 

R. Carr

infectious disease risks in xenotransplantation is inflected by local regulatory and industry practice. I start from the assumption that, as a number of scholars suggest, we need to understand the politics and progress of science, technology, and medicine as informed by a range of cultural narratives (Franklin 2007; Squier 2004; Waldby 1996), and explore in depth the imaginaries that inform these varying regulatory responses. In particular, as Shiela Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (2009, 120) observe, government regulation, and investment in science and technology projects, often reflect “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order” (120) (see also Jasanoff 2005, 2015). Benedict Anderson’s (2006) pioneering work on national “imaginaries” offered an understanding of nation as a collectively imagined entity. Anderson’s work is useful for thinking about how understandings of the social body are linked to national media and other widely circulating discourses. More recently, Jasanoff and Kim’s (2009) work on socio-­ technical imaginaries has emphasised the centrality of science and technology in collective imaginaries of social bodies. For instance, the discourses, scientific developments, and regulation of new technologies often reflect on and generate an imagined ideal future community and its social order. Jasanoff and Kim (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 6) define sociotechnical imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order, attainable through, and supportive of advances in science and technology”. This book is not about the history of xenotransplantation or the technology, per se, but about the political, social, and scientific regulation of the hybridity it involves. In each chapter, I analyse different sets of knowledges, imaginaries, and narratives that cut across philosophy, epidemiology, tourism, conservation, and primatology, to illustrate how interconnections, borders, or boundaries are treated in the xenotransplantation field. Throughout the book, I employ both genealogy and discourse analysis. Along with analysing narratives in the xenotransplantation field, in the following chapters, I also trace the emergence and transformations of discourses and practices (for instance, the concept of “emergence” that animates contemporary US biosecurity practices regarding

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

21

infectious disease). Most chapters draw out a theoretical framework before entering into the case study. During my research, I conducted eight face-to-face interviews and three phone interviews with pig farmers and experts in the areas of xenotransplantation research, public health, epidemiology, and transplantation. Several of the experts played key roles in the debate and development of xenotransplantation regulation in Australia. These interviews informed my research and have been included in the discourse analysis in Chap. 5. All but one participant consented to being identified. Chapters 2 and 3 examine two cases in which the response to xenotransplantation and cultural narratives expresses a sovereign form of power by reaffirming the boundaries and categories that xenotransplantation appears to threaten. One of the central mechanisms of sovereignty is purification, the process of separating out elements into clean categories. Purification is often clearly visible in the making of territory and nations, especially in the antipodes. During the colonial period, both New Zealand and Australia were consumed by the task of maintaining British identity in a totally foreign environment, and relentlessly pursued a pure identity in a hybridizing context. In New Zealand, the pursuit of purity has tended to express itself via the mobilisation of romantic narratives of a pristine environment (Belich 1997; Bell 1996). In Chap. 2, I explore the connections between national narratives of purity in New Zealand and a xenotransplantation company that strives to promote the safety of its xenotransplantation products amidst fears of contagion. I argue that the company Living Cell Technologies leverages off broader national imaginaries to position the pigs as the “cleanest pigs on earth” (PharmaVentures 2010) and ease some of the anxieties about xenozoonosis. By mimicking elements of the 100% Pure New Zealand campaign, LCT stages a myth of original purity figured geographically and temporally. Here we are reminded that boundary-making in biomedicine can draw on broader social imaginaries to figure the naturalness of categories, including narratives of nationhood, tourism, and environmentalism. Rather than preventing the hybrid human-animal embodiment generated in xenotransplantation, the New Zealand government has allowed

22 

R. Carr

LCT to conduct clinical trials because of the company’s special source pigs originating on the isolated Auckland Islands. In this context, the problem of contagion is figured as a problem of boundaries, where transgression calls for a simultaneous reassertion of absolute difference. As governments began to regulate burgeoning xenotransplantation clinical trials during the 1990s, they also turned to the question of which non-human animal would be suitable to use as a source for tissues. Up until the 1990s, scientists in the field predominantly targeted non-human primates for xenotransplant tissues, as they are the closest, biologically, to humans. However, during the 1990s, alongside disease concerns, ethics committees also began to argue that developing non-human primates as a source of xenotransplantation tissues was ethically problematic.32 Bioethics committees in the UK, in particular, set out clearly that it would be ethically acceptable to cultivate pigs for human tissues, but not non-human primates (Department of Health 1997; Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1996). These discourses established divisions among species according to their greater or lesser suitability for use in xenotransplantation; based on their assumed level of personhood and capacity to suffer. In Chap. 3, I analyse the bioethical discourses that determine which species are acceptable as xenotransplantation sources in the UK.  My investigation in this chapter involves a close reading of Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics (Singer 1993), and research on pig minds, to illustrate the connections between knowledge practices and ethics discourses in reproducing a human centric hierarchy. I argue that, in the xenotransplantation field, the elevation of non-human primates to the status of (near) persons has a deleterious effect on pigs, who are now being developed as tissue sources in research. I argue that personhood, in this context, operates as a sovereign and biopolitical mechanism that hierarchises non-­ human animals, making some, but not others, available as transplant sources within a utilitarian calculus of suffering. In Chap. 4, I move to exploring security mechanisms which make our interconnections with other species and with environments explicit in the operation of power. During the 1980s and 1990s, a new discourse and set of practices relating to infectious disease emerged, one that has been identified as the “emerging infectious disease” paradigm (Institute of Medicine 1992;

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

23

Morse 1993). Around the same time public health and infectious disease experts raised concerns that the community might be infected with a new animal disease via xenotransplantation technologies. These fears for the public health were formulated with reference to the new paradigm of emerging infectious disease. In Chap. 4, I trace the development of these discourses and how they informed conceptualisations of xenozoonosis. The term “emerging” here signals a change in scientific understanding of microbes and infectious disease. Scientists and public health experts increasingly began to comprehend microbes, especially viruses, as highly adaptable and able to infect humans in new ways (Domingo and Perales 2001). Furthermore, in this perspective, humans, non-human animals, and microbes were increasingly understood as interconnected in continually emergent relationships. In this chapter I propose that both the construction of xenozoonosis and the US regulatory approach to infectious disease risk in xenotransplantation are best understood as security apparatuses. I give a longer exegesis of Foucault’s account of governmentality in Security, Territory, Population, and extend his analysis to the contemporary context of emerging infectious disease and xenotransplantation, drawing on the work of Walker and Cooper (2011). Of the countries I study in this book, the response to xenozoonosis in the United States most clearly exemplifies the workings of liberal security apparatuses. In keeping with the way that xenozoonosis has been conceptualised by infectious disease experts in the liberal US context, government regulation stimulates a range of pre-emptive and preparedness measures, including biotechnological innovations, which further mobilise movements and interconnection between humans, pigs, and microbes. While in the United States the conceptualisation of xenozoonosis has provoked a deployment of security mechanisms, in Australia the conceptualisation has resulted in a moratorium on xenotransplantation, a decision that has involved the deployment of an older method of ensuring public health: prevention of contact and exclusion. Why is Australia’s response so out of keeping with the paradigm of emerging infectious disease, with its emphasis on the interconnection and adaptation? In Chap. 5, I seek to resolve this puzzle of Australia’s distinctly local response,

24 

R. Carr

by looking to the formative moments of an imagined community at Australian Federation. The public health response to xenotransplantation in Australia interprets species barriers within the framework of an organismic body politics and tries to reinstate a firm boundary between humans and animals in the face of these technologies. I read the sovereign response to xenotransplantation in Australia as indicative of a recurring organismic body politics in Australian public health, tracing this politics to immigration and quarantine practices around Federation. This book situates understandings of borders and systems of infection within contextual knowledge practices and cultural imaginaries. The mechanisms of security and sovereignty together dynamically regulate certain forms of human-animal relationships in the field of xenotransplantation, securing human exceptionalism and non-human animal exploitation, although not always in a model of enmity.

Notes 1. On the other hand, people who have received extracorporeal blood perfusion treatments using pig tissues have been found to have pig cells remaining in their bodies nine years later (Collignon and Purdy 2001; Paradis et al. 1999), which indicates the human immune system may not always respond quite so radically or effectively to all “otherness”. 2. Burnet’s clonal selection theory proposed that the immune self emerges during the prenatal period, at which point the body produces a vast number of immune cells through mutation, each reactive to different molecules. The immune system becomes tolerant, or non-reactive, to “self ” by deleting all immune system cells or molecules that react to existing cells in the body leaving only those that would target something from outside (Burnet 1959). 3. Burnet’s (2015) explanation of the immune self is ecological, invoking notions from evolution, in that he understands the “self ” to emerge from mutation, or variation, and selection of appropriate immune cells relative to the bodily environment. 4. For this reason several theorists suggest that the “self ” concept is now redundant (Pradeu 2012; Tauber 2000).

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

25

5. The US Food and Drug Administration (US Food and Drug Administration 2003) defines xenotransplantation “any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of either (a) live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or (b) human body fluids, cells, tissues or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues or organs” (p.  1). This definition does not include the use of non-human heart valves in human patients because these are not live tissues. 6. Although the company and product have now been bought out by its Japanese-owned partner company, Diatranz Otsuka Limited. 7. There is a much longer history of experimentally transplanting animal tissues and organs into humans For this history see Deschamps et al. (2005). 8. This question deserves further research, and a more detailed analysis than I can provide here. 9. The recipient’s own immune cells are first depleted so that they do not destroy the stem cells (Griesemer et al. 2014). 10. Sachs is inspired and intrigued by Jerne’s network theory, even if he does not adopt it directly in this work (Eichmann 2008, 167–70). 11. New CRISPR techniques developed by another biotech firm, eGenesis, allow multiple genetic changes to pigs that could speed up the process of producing pigs whose tissues can survive in a non-human primate body (Reardon 2015) (see Chap. 4). 12. While the scientists provoked the immune system tolerance with the pre-clinical treatment, in the end, the body, through rather mysterious mechanisms, adapted to, and included, the transplant. 13. Haraway (1991) traces the understanding of the immune system as a networked communications system to post-war cybernetic science, which is undoubtedly a formative field of knowledge/practice in these accounts of the immune system. As I explore at length in Chap. 4, Foucault (2007) traces the power mechanism associated with the kind of conceptual apparatus that is evident in network immunology further back to the e­ mergence of political economy (not with reference to the immune system explicitly). 14. As Sharp (2013, 70) details, an experimental transplant of a baboon heart into a 12-day-old baby, “Baby Fae”, which was highly unsuccessful, “led to a decade long, self-imposed moratorium on human xenografting

26 

R. Carr

by xeno experts”. Research was again started in 1992 by high-profile transplantation expert Robert Starlz (Deschamps et al. 2005). 15. The problem of xenozoonosis or “xenosis” (Fishman 1994) initially emerged in US and UK discourses, and subsequently a wave of regulatory activity spread across the globe. Several transplant and infectious disease experts raised the potential for disease transfer into and among the human population; including, Jay Fishman (1994), expert in infectious disease in transplantation; Douglas Smith (1993), pathologist; and HIV researcher Jonathan S. Allan (Allan 1994). These experts drew on the examples of HIV as well as other recently emerging zoonoses, and new insights into viruses to argue that xenotransplantation was perfectly positioned to facilitate new disease in human populations. The intimate connection of non-­human flesh and human flesh, most likely under conditions compromising the recipient’s immune response, they argued, created the perfect opportunities for pathogens to adapt to and spread among humans (addressed in Chap. 4). 16. While informed consent continued to be a model for understanding or managing ethics (consistent with the tradition of health bioethics/ research ethics), xenotransplantation pushed these concepts to the limit. For example, for some it raised the question: if xenotransplantation poses risks for the whole population, should consent be sought from the whole population, not just the recipient (Daar 1997)? 17. In Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA), and in the UK the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. 18. In particular they have described the roles of public and industry in policy development (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011; Brown and Beynon-­Jones 2012; Cheng 2015b; P. Cook 2008; E. F. Einsiedel 2002; Einsiedel et al. 2011; P. E. F. Einsiedel and Ross 2002; Jones and Einsiedel 2011; Tallacchini 2011; Kögel and Marckmann 2020), regulatory institutional boundaries and cultural narratives (Brown et al. 2006; Brown and Michael 2001a; Haddow et al. 2010), and legal and ethical aspects of regulation (Fovargue 2005, 2011; M Fox and McHale 1998; Marie Fox 2005; Freeman et al. 2014; S. A. M. McLean and Williamson 2004; S.  McLean and Williamson 2005, 2007; Mortensen 2005; Samanta 2015; Williamson et al. 2007; Van Rongen 1998). 19. In at least cellular xenotransplantation, if not whole organ xenografts.

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

27

20. By contrast the UK moratorium was initiated in 1997 and ended in 1998. Sweden and Germany had instigated a moratorium by 1998 (M Fox and McHale 1998). New Zealand lifted their moratorium in 2006. 21. In contrast a long-term moratorium on the use of non-human primates as source animals persists in most countries (discussed further in Chaps. 4 and 5). 22. Foucault (2003) expands “Generally, we describe the effects and mechanisms of the power exercised over these categories as mechanisms and effects of exclusion, disqualification, exile, rejection, deprivation, refusal, and incomprehension; that is to say, an entire arsenal of negative concepts or mechanisms of exclusion” (44). 23. However, infectious disease itself is also threatening to the internal structure of a very rigidly organised social system, especially where bodies are understood as firmly bounded and highly differentiated. A contagious disease spreads inconspicuously and uncontrollably from one body to another without respect for those supposedly fundamental borders between bodies, classes, or other social divisions. 24. In other words, the causal explanation and treatment of infectious disease can get hooked in complicated ways into processes of abjecting certain identities, where abjection is a “device of discriminations, of differences” (Kristeva 1982, 69). 25. Derrida has argued that the term “the animal” is already a violent categorisation that suppresses the individual differences among species (Derrida and Wills 2002). 26. For a sophisticated examination of the relationship between animals and human sovereignty see Wadiwel (2015). 27. The exclusion of animals from rights and care hinges on a philosophical canon that represents animals as lacking subjectivity, thought, speech, and the capacity to respond, including in work of Heidegger, Descartes, Kant, Freud, and Lacan (Calarco 2008; Derrida and Wills 2002; D.  Haraway 2008). Dinesh Wadiwel (2015) argues that “[o]ur selfdeclared sovereignty is not gained through our rationality; nor through our cleverness; nor through our extraordinary moral worth. On the contrary, … our capability results from our use of violence to appropriate other animals, a process by which we come, after the fact, to claim a supposed “superiority” over other living beings” (223). In short, the sovereign mechanism mobilises the human/animal duality in support of its workings.

28 

R. Carr

28. Regulation of xenotransplantation also challenges the distinctions between experts and public (Brown 1999; Brown and Michael 2001b). Brown (1999), for example, proposes that all these transgressions provoke a sense of disgust at xenotransplantation. 29. Foucault (2008) describes the two poles of biopower as follows: One of these poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, … All this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life-expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (p. 139) 30. For example, Foucault (2007) remarks that classical political economy seeks to allow and guide, rather than prohibit, desire: “if one gives it free play, and on condition that it is given free play, all things considered, within a certain limit and thanks to a number of relationships and connections, it will produce the general interest of the population” (p. 73). Within this framework, facilitating individual to act economically in accordance with their own interests is thought to benefit the economy as a whole. 31. Blue and Rock (2011) examine, as an instance of trans-biopolitics, government regulation of food consumption and health of human and non-­ human populations (cats and cows) in the public health response to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeld Jakob Disease (CJD). They stress that biopolitical analyses should not be limited to singular species as though they were distinct entities. Svendsen (2017) explores the connections between human-pig interactions and public health. 32. Non-human primates have been increasingly rendered as human-like persons over the past century, particularly since the 1950s. It is not surprising that they are considered the most contagious, and at the same time excluded because the ethics of primate research has become fraught—both of these tendencies reflect the degree to which nonhuman primates are encroaching on the territory of the human.

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

29

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Allan, J.S. 1994. Primates and New Viruses. Science 265 (5177): 1345–1346. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8073267. Anderson, Warwick, and Ian R.  Mackay. 2014. Intolerant Bodies. Baltimore: JHU Press. Aradau, Claudia. 2014. The Promise of Security: Resilience, Surprise and Epistemic Politics. Resilience 2 (2): 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/2169329 3.2014.914765. Belich, J. 1997. Myth, Race and Identity in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of History 31 (1): 9–22. Bell, Claudia. 1996. Inventing New Zealand: Everyday Myths of Pakeha Identity. Auckland: Penguin Books. Beynon-Jones, Siân M., and Nik Brown. 2011. Time, Timing and Narrative at the Interface between UK Technoscience and Policy. Science and Public Policy 38 (8): 639–648. https://doi.org/10.3152/030234211X13111546663331. Blue, Gwendolyn, and Melanie Rock. 2011. Trans-Biopolitics: Complexity in Interspecies Relations. Health 15 (4): 353–368. https://doi. org/10.1177/1363459310376299. Boneva, Roumiana S., Thomas M.  Folks, and Louisa E.  Chapman. 2001. Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 14 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1128/CMR.14.1.1-­14.2001. Brown, Nik. 1999. Xenotransplantation: Normalizing Disgust. Science as Culture 8 (3): 327–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439909526550. Brown, Nik, and Siân M. Beynon-Jones. 2012. ‘Reflex Regulation’: An Anatomy of Promissory Science Governance. Health, Risk & Society 14 (3): 223–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2012.662633. Brown, Nik, and Mike Michael. 2001a. Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies Transplantation. Science, Technology, & Human Values 26 (1): 3–22. ———. 2001b. Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies Transplantation. Science Technology Human Values 26: 3–22. https://doi. org/10.1177/016224390102600101. Brown, Nik, Alex Faulkner, Julie Kent, and Mike Michael. 2006. Regulating Hybrids: ‘Making a Mess’ and ‘Cleaning Up’ in Tissue Engineering and

30 

R. Carr

Transpecies Transplantation. Social Theory & Health 4 (1): 1–24. https://doi. org/10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700062. Burnet, F.M. 1959. The Clonal Selection Theory of Acquired Immunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calarco, Matthew. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Cheng, Myra. 2015a. Islet Xeno/Transplantation and the Risk of Contagion: Local Responses from Canada and Australia to an Emerging Global Technoscience. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 11 (October). https://doi. org/10.1186/s40504-­015-­0030-­2. ———. 2015b. Islet Xeno/Transplantation and the Risk of Contagion: Local Responses from Canada and Australia to an Emerging Global Technoscience. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 11 (1): 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/ s40504-­015-­0030-­2. Cohen, Lawrence. 2001. The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition. Body & Society 7: 20. Collignon, Peter, and Laura Purdy. 2001. Xenografts: Are the Risks so Great That We Should Not Proceed? Microbes and Infection 3 (4): 341–348. https:// doi.org/10.1016/S1286-­4579(01)01388-­0. Cook, Peta. 2008. “Constructing and Fracturing Alliances: Actant Stories and the Australian Xenotransplantation Network.” Doctoral Dissertation, Queensland: Queensland University of Technology. Cook, Peta S., and Nicholas Osbaldiston. 2010. Pigs Hearts and Human Bodies: A Cultural Approach to Xenotransplantation. M/C Journal 13 (5): 1. http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/283. Cooper, Melinda. 2006. Pre-Empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror. Theory, Culture & Society 23 (4): 113–135. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276406065121. ———. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cooper, David K.C., and Robert Paul Lanza. 2000. Xeno: The Promise of Transplanting Animal Organs into Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craddock, Susan. 2000. City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Daar, A.S. 1997. Ethics of Xenotransplantation: Animal Issues, Consent, and Likely Transformation of Transplant Ethics. World Journal of Surgery 21 (9): 975–982. https://doi.org/10.1007/s002689900336.

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

31

Department of Health. 1997. Animal Tissue into Humans: A Report by the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation. London: HMSO. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Roudinesco. 2004. For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. 2002. The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). Critical Inquiry 28: 369. https://doi.org/10.1086/449046. Deschamps, Jack-Yves, Françoise A.  Roux, Pierre Saï, and Edouard Gouin. 2005. History of Xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation 12 (2): 91–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-­3089.2004.00199.x. Domingo, Esteban, and Celia Perales. 2001. Virus Evolution. ELS. https://doi. org/10.1002/9780470015902.a0000436.pub3. Eichmann, Klaus. 2008. The Network Collective: Rise and Fall of a Scientific Paradigm. Boston: Basel. Einsiedel, Edna F. 2002. Assessing a Controversial Medical Technology: Canadian Public Consultations on Xenotransplantation. Public Understanding of Science 11 (4): 315–331. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-­6625/11/4/301. Einsiedel, Professor Edna F., and Heather Ross. 2002. Animal Spare Parts? A Canadian Public Consultation on Xenotransplantation. Science and Engineering Ethics 8 (4): 579–591. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-­002-­0010-­9. Einsiedel, Edna F., Mavis Jones, and Meaghan Brierley. 2011. Cultures, Contexts and Commitments in the Governance of Controversial Technologies: US, UK and Canadian Publics and Xenotransplantation Policy Development. Science and Public Policy 38 (8): 619–628. https://doi.org/10.315 2/030234211X13092649606440. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. 2014. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. 1st ed. Cambridge: Polity. Fishman, Jay A. 1994. Miniature Swine as Organ Donors for Man: Strategies for Prevention of Xenotransplant-Associated Infections. Xenotransplantation 1 (1): 47–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-­3089.1994.tb00049.x. ———. 1998. The Risk of Infection in Xenotransplantation: Introduction. Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 862 (1): 45–51. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-­6632.1998.tb09116.x. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

32 

R. Carr

———. 2008. The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: The Will to Knowledge. Camberwell, VIC: Penguin. Fovargue, Sara. 2005. Consenting to Bio-Risk: Xenotransplantation and the Law. Legal Studies 25 (3): 404–429. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-­121X.2005. tb00677.x. ———. 2011. Xenotransplantation and Risk: Regulating a Developing Biotechnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, Marie. 2005. Reconfiguring the Animal/Human Boundary: The Impact of Xeno Technologies. Liverpool Law Review 26: 149–167. Fox, M., and J.  McHale. 1998. Xenotransplantation: The Ethical and Legal Ramifications. Medical Law Review 6 (1): 42. https://doi.org/10.1093/ medlaw/6.1.42. Fox, Renee C., and Judith P. Swazey. 2013. Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Franklin, Sarah. 2006. The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology. Theory,  Culture & Society 23 (7–8): 167–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263276406069230. ———. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke University Press. Freeman, Michael, Sarah Hawkes, and Belinda Bennett. 2014. Law and Global Health: Current Legal Issues Volume 16. Oxford: OUP. Griesemer, Adam, Kazuhiko Yamada, and Megan Sykes. 2014. Xenotransplantation: Immunological Hurdles and Progress toward Tolerance. Immunological Reviews 258 (1): 241–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/ imr.12152. Haddow, Gill, Ann Bruce, Jane Calvert, Shawn H.E.  Harmon, and Wendy Marsden. 2010. Not ‘Human’ Enough to Be Human but Not ‘Animal’ Enough to Be Animal—the Case of the HFEA, Cybrids and Xenotransplantation in the UK. New Genetics and Society 29 (1): 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636770903561182. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Institute of Medicine. 1992. Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States. Edited by Joshua Lederberg, Robert E. Shope, and Stanley C. Oaks, Jr. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

33

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy In Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity. In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. 2009. Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva 47 (2): 119–146. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11024-­009-­9124-­4. Jones, Mavis, and Edna Einsiedel. 2011. Institutional Policy Learning and Public Consultation: The Canadian Xenotransplantation Experience. Social Science & Medicine 73 (5): 655–662. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2011.06.041. Kawai, Tatsuo, A.  Benedict Cosimi, Thomas R.  Spitzer, Nina Tolkoff-Rubin, Manikkam Suthanthiran, Susan L.  Saidman, Juanita Shaffer, et  al. 2008. HLA-Mismatched Renal Transplantation without Maintenance Immunosuppression. New England Journal of Medicine 358 (4): 353–361. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa071074. Kögel, Johannes, and Georg Marckmann. 2020. Xenotransplantation Challenges Us as a Society. EMBO Reports 21 (9): e50274. https://doi.org/10.15252/ embr.202050274. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New  York: Columbia University Press. Lakoff, Andrew, and Stephen J. Collier. 2008. Biosecurity Interventions : Global Health & Security in Question. New York: Columbia University Press. LCT. 2010. “LCT’s Diabecell Registered for Sale and Use in Russia.” December 2010. http://www.lctglobal.com/html/blob.php/LCT%27s%20 Diabecell%20Registered%20for%20Sale%20and%20Use%20in%20 Russica_101210.pdf?attach=0&documentCode=2409&elementId=20084. ———. n.d. “Products | NTCELL®.” NTCell: Cell Therapy for Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s Disease, Stroke and Hearing Loss. http://www.lctglobal. com/Products-­and-­Services/Ntcell/. Accessed October 19, 2013. Living Cells Technologies. 2007. “Living Cell Technologies: Annual Report 2006-07.” http://www.lctglobal.com/upload/reports/annual-­reports/LCT% 202007%20Annual%20Report.pdf. Lock, Margaret M. 2002. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. California: University of California Press.

34 

R. Carr

Matzinger, P. 2001. Essay 1: The Danger Model in Its Historical Context. Scandinavian Journal of Immunology 54 (1–2): 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1046/ j.1365-­3083.2001.00974.x. McLean, Sheila A.M., and Laura Williamson. 2004. Xenotransplantation: A Pig in A Poke? Current Legal Problems 57 (1): 443–468. https://doi.org/10.1093/ clp/57.1.443. McLean, Sheila, and Laura Williamson. 2005. Xenotransplantation: Law and Ethics. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007. The Demise of UKXIRA and the Regulation of Solid-Organ Xenotransplantation in the UK. Journal of Medical Ethics 33: 373–375. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2007.020768. Morse, Stephen S. 1993. Emerging Viruses. New  York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mortensen, Melanie J. 2005. “In the Shadow of Doctor Moreau: A Contextual Reading of the Proposed Canadian Standard for Xenotransplantation.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 777764. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=777764. Murray, Dr Mary. 2006. Lazarus [ ], Liminality, and Animality: Xenotransplantation, Zoonosis, and the Space and Place of Humans and Animals in Late Modern Society. Mortality 11 (1): 45–56. https://doi. org/10.1080/13576270500453580. Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 1996. Animal-to-human Transplants: The Ethics of Xenotransplantation. London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Oliver, Kelly. 2010. Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness. Research in Phenomenology 40 (2): 267–280. Paradis, Khazal, Gillian Langford, Zhifeng Long, Walid Heneine, Paul Sandstrom, William M. Switzer, Louisa E. Chapman, Chris Lockey, David Onions, and Edward Otto. 1999. Search for Cross-Species Transmission of Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus in Patients Treated with Living Pig Tissue. Science 285 (5431): 1236–1241. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.285. 5431.1236. PharmaVentures. 2010. “Living Cell Technologies: New Technologies and Clinical Trials.” PharmaTelevision News Review. January 20, 2010. http:// www.pharmatelevision.com/Video/439-­P aul-­Tan-­L iving-­C ell-­ Technologies.aspx. Pradeu, Thomas. 2012. The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

35

Reardon, Sara. 2015. Gene-Editing Record Smashed in Pigs. Nature News. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.18525. Rémy, Catherine. 2009. The Animal Issue in Xenotransplantation: Controversies in France and the United States. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31 (3/4): 405–428. Rose, Nikolas. 2009. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rothblatt, Martine. 2012. Borders Are Not Always Boundaries: Are Genetically Engineered XenoLungs from Pigs Feasible before the End of This Decade? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 156 (4): 379–387. Sachs, David H. 2011. Transplant Tolerance. Archives of Surgery (Chicago, IL : 1960) 146 (5): 501–505. https://doi.org/10.1001/archsurg.2011.101. Sachs, David H., Megan Sykes, and Kazuhiko Yamada. 2009. Achieving Tolerance in Pig-to-Primate Xenotransplantation: Reality or Fantasy. Transplant Immunology 21 (2): 101–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. trim.2008.11.005. Samanta, Ash. 2015. Medical Law. London: Macmillan International Higher Education. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs. SAIS Review 22 (1): 61–80. https://doi. org/10.1353/sais.2002.0022. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schuurman, Henk-Jan. 2015. Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Xenotransplantation. International Journal of Surgery, Special Issue: Xenotransplantation 23 (November): 312–321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsu.2015.09.051. Sharp, Lesley A. 2013. The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science. University of California Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 2000. Becoming Vulnerable: Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk. Journal of Medical Humanities 13: 1. Singer, Peter. 1993. Practical Ethics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Douglas M. 1993. Endogenous Retroviruses in Xenografts. New England  Journal of Medicine 328: 142–143. https://doi.org/10.1056/ NEJM199301143280218. Squier, Susan Merrill. 2004. Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine. Durham: Duke University Press.

36 

R. Carr

Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. 2006. Biocapital : The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Svendsen, Mette N. 2017. Pigs in Public Health. Critical Public Health 27 (3): 384–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2017.1282155. Tallacchini, Mariachiara. 2011. Risks and Rights in Xenotransplantation. In Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age, 169–192. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tauber, A.I. 2000. Moving Beyond the Immune Self? Seminars in Immunology 12 (3): 241–248.; discussion 257-344. https://doi.org/10.1006/ smim.2000.0237. Thanos, C.G., and R.B. Elliott. 2009. Encapsulated Porcine Islet Transplantation: An Evolving Therapy for the Treatment of Type I Diabetes. Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy 9 (1): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1517/14712590802630666. US Food and Drug Administration. 2003. “Guidance for Industry: Source Animal, Product, Preclinical, and Clinical Issues Concerning the Use of Xenotransplantation Products in Humans.” https://www.fda.gov/downloads/ BiologicsBloodVaccines/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/ Guidances/Xenotransplantation/UCM533036.pdf. Valdes-Gonzalez, Rafael A., Luis M.  Dorantes, G.  Nayely Garibay, Eduardo Bracho-Blanchet, Armando J.  Mendez, Roberto Davila-Perez, Robert B. Elliott, Luis Teran, and David J.G. White. 2005. Xenotransplantation of Porcine Neonatal Islets of Langerhans and Sertoli Cells: A 4-Year Study. Eur J Endocrinol 153: 419–427. https://doi.org/10.1530/eje.1.01982. Van Rongen, Eric. 1998. Xenotransplantation: Perspectives from the Netherlands. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 862 (1): 177–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-­6632.1998.tb09133.x. Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2015. The War against Animals. Leiden: Brill. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Waldby, Catherine. 1996. Aids and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge. Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. 2011. Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation. Security Dialogue 42 (2): 143–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010611399616. Weiss, Robin A. 1999. Xenografts and Retroviruses. Science 285: 1221–1222. Wilkinson, Richard. 2009. “The Transplant Trick.” Proto Magazine (blog). May 3, 2009. http://protomag.com/articles/organ-­rejection-­chimerism.

1  Introduction: Forms of Contagion 

37

Williamson, Laura, Marie Fox, and Sheila McLean. 2007. The Regulation of Xenotransplantation in the United Kingdom After UKXIRA: Legal and Ethical Issues. Journal of Law and Society 34 (4): 441–464. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-­6478.2007.00400.x. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2 100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure Auckland Island Pigs for Xenotransplantation

Auckland Island is the largest among an archipelago of small islands lying in the Pacific Ocean, 465 kilometres south of the South Island of New Zealand. By all accounts Auckland Island is a harsh, barren, and cold place. Wild icy winds blow off the Antarctic, echoing the icy waters swirling around the pebbly beaches and crashing onto barren rocky outcrops. One visitor observed that “the land here was clothed in wind-moulded, sombre scrub” (Turbott 2002, 6). Muddy shrubs and wild grasses make up the bulk of the vegetation on the island, which is unoccupied by humans but home to many non-human species: including rare native birds, such as Auckland-Islands Teals, sea lions, Yellow Eyed Penguins, and, unexpectedly, a flourishing colony of pigs. This is the birthplace of a breed of pigs that is perhaps one of the most valuable in medical history: Auckland Island Pigs. A visitor to the island would be likely to encounter baby pigs nestling on the rocky beaches with their mothers, and grown pigs grazing among the roots of native shrubs and gorging on grasses and birds’ eggs. Their appearance is strikingly different from domestic pigs: long white, brown, and black hair hangs from lean bodies, framing narrow faces, and long straight tails. These unique pigs are currently also bred on the mainland by a New Zealand–based biotechnology company, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_2

39

40 

R. Carr

Living Cell Technologies (LCT), for clinical trials of animal-to-human transplantation. As discussed in the introduction, since the late 1990s anxieties about the transfer of diseases from animals to humans (xenozoonosis) have plagued the xenotransplantation field, resulting in the tightening of regulations and in moratoriums in some countries. While pigs are generally held to be microbiologically safer than non-human primates, understood to be the source of HIV (Heeney et al. 2006), in the 1990s it was discovered that porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) were endemic to pigs, and that under some circumstances these retroviruses could infect human cells (Patience et  al. 1997). Initial concerns about disease from non-­ human primates led scientists to transition to pigs as source animals for transplants. However, after the discovery of porcine endogenous retroviruses, worldwide holds on the technology ensued (McLean and Williamson 2005). Amidst increasing concerns about emerging viruses and a growing understanding that most new human diseases have emerged from animals, including HIV, “bird flu”, Ebola, H1N1 “swine flu”, and others (Wolfe et  al. 2007), pigs became a more controversial source of tissues. The fear was that any viruses or other microbes contained in pig source animals might not only infect the individual human recipient, but also spread into the broader human population, similar to HIV, producing a new human disease or pandemic (Collignon and Purdy 2001). Consequently, the microbiological “cleanliness” of the non-­ human animals—now predominantly pigs—used for transplants has become a central part of the regulatory approval of human clinical trials in many countries. The regulatory requirements set by many countries are difficult to meet and only a few clinical trials have progressed since this period, primarily those of LCT. In New Zealand, LCT has received approval to go ahead with human clinical trials involving xenotransplantation. This is one of the first trials approved anywhere in the world since the regulatory tightening of the 1990s, and the company gives credit for this success to the pigs they use. In the words of the then CEO Paul Tan: we would never have been allowed by international experts and reviewers who encouraged the New Zealand government to give us permission to

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

41

conduct … human trials in New Zealand, were it not for the fact that we have very special pigs, these pigs are the cleanest in the world. (PharmaVentures 2010)

Simultaneously, over the last 20 years New Zealand has increasingly marketed itself as “100% Pure” for tourism and export products, building on an already existing reputation as being environmentally clean and green. This chapter explores the interconnections between New Zealand’s national narratives of purity and LCT’s construction of the Auckland Island pigs as safe xenotransplantation resources. By repeatedly recounting the Auckland Island pigs’ origin story, which aligns with a broader 100% Pure New Zealand narrative, LCT locates them geographically within an already well-established mapping of purity and cleanliness. This carefully crafted script links them to a problematic myth of “pure nature” and represents the pigs’ biological and categorical purity using the imagery of isolated Auckland Island. The pig population is marked out as clean and distinct from humans, a separate and contained category of animals which are non-threatening to the category of the human. Already steeped in the troubling processes by which the self and other are produced in a post-colonial context, these narratives help to make these pig bodies available for use within an emerging xenotransplantation industry, replicating a familiar dynamic of instrumentalising non-humans for human benefit. Biological and social concerns about contagion in xenotransplantation are deflected via a well-rehearsed national imaginary of purity which positions the pigs as pure, other, and a natural resource. The chapter begins by exploring the 100% Pure New Zealand tourism campaign, situating it in the context of the economy in contemporary New Zealand. I ask what kind of nature this discourse constructs. I then provide a potted history of the Auckland Island pigs, as this history forms the central pillar of LCT’s marketing and regulatory approval strategy to represent the pigs as “clean”, and I discuss some of the continuities with broader imaginaries of New Zealand nationhood. Finally, I draw these together and explore some of the implications for xenotransplantation, and for pigs, arguing that the mobilisation of the Auckland Island pig history in the New Zealand context, along with the evocation of scientific and public health practices related to purity, allows LCT to construct the

42 

R. Carr

Auckland Island pigs as safe xenotransplant products within a particular (sovereign) rationality of purity and categorical boundaries.

100% Pure New Zealand In 1999, Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) launched the 100% Pure NZ campaign which has since developed beyond tourism into a core part of the New Zealand national brand, entwined with a number of industries (Lewis 2011).1 The campaign centres on the environment, consistent with a long history of tourism and agricultural product marketing,2 and extends the clean-green image that the government cultivated in the 1980s and 1990s (Morgan et al. 2002).3 The campaign advertisements feature images of stunning unpopulated landscapes: crisp ice-capped mountains, wild rivers and forests, and lengths of empty beach, headed with the tagline “100% Pure New Zealand”. Humans appear only sparsely, as a couple or small group, often engaging in sporting or outdoor activities, suggestive of nature tourism and adventure tourism. The images depict New Zealand as a place to experience untouched, untainted, or pristine nature. As sociologist Evelyn Dürr notes, “[i]n combination with the ‘100% Pure’ slogan, a state of ‘pure nature’ is suggested, meaning devoid of human presence, culture or civilisation” (Dürr 2008, 61). Here, nature is imagined to have been protected from humans and culture, retaining an Edenic purity that has been lost elsewhere in the world. The logic rests on New Zealand being geographically isolated and ostensibly one of the last land masses to have been settled by humans. Areas of protected national parks are presented as exemplifying untainted nature, also implying a protective attitude towards the environment in New Zealand (New Zealand Tourism n.d.).

Nation Branding The 100% Pure NZ campaign is the country’s first global tourism campaign using a consistently branded destination. The launch followed major stakeholder consultation and relationship development, bringing

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

43

on board both the public and private tourism sectors in New Zealand to back a single vision of the nation presented to the world through the tourist industry (Morgan et al. 2003). Within ten years NZ had increased its number of tourists by 50% (Tourism New Zealand 2009), indicating the campaign’s success in reaching the world market with a fresh vision of New Zealand. As US-based brand consultant Adam Morgan, suggests: The combination of the 100% Pure campaign and The Lord of the Rings has shifted New Zealand from just this supplier of agricultural products to this almost mythological place of extraordinary landscapes, and amazing, well, purity—which is somehow larger than life … It has become the way the world should be, rather than the way the world has become. (as quoted in Tourism New Zealand 2009)

For over 20 years, TNZ has led a very successful campaign further developing what was already a large contributor to the New Zealand economy, second only to the dairy industry.4 This kind of “destination branding”, involving a consolidated state-driven effort with a well-developed framework, is becoming more commonplace as nations compete in global tourism markets. TNZ attributes the broad reach and success of the 100% Pure campaign to their collaboration with other industries and a creative approach to public relations. As TNZ explains, a small tourism budget led the organisation to pursue media focus through other means, and they have partnered with New Zealand–based events, including the World Cup Rugby and the America’s Cup (a sailing race), as well as with the film industry, to create opportunities to also promote New Zealand as a destination. One of the most successful partnerships for 100% Pure New Zealand has been with Peter Jackson’s productions of Tolkien’s Middle Earth novels, a relationship that TNZ actively developed. The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films already advertise in high-definition New Zealand’s diverse and breathtaking environment, from the awe-inspiring mountains and crystalline lakes, to peaceful pastoral landscapes, and lush dark forests. Furthermore, it locates these definitively New Zealand landscapes in another time, a magical pre-modern time. TNZ piggybacked tourism advertising onto marketing for the film in magazines, at film awards, and

44 

R. Carr

in the “making of ” films (Tourism New Zealand 2009). Both Air New Zealand and TNZ fostered an imagined continuation between Middle Earth and New Zealand. For example, the TNZ advertisement called “100% Middle-earth, 100% Pure New Zealand” (100% Pure New Zealand 2013) features depictions of ordinary tourist activities in New Zealand as occurring in a magical world.5 Actors from the movies have been enrolled to sell the purity of NZ and validate the connection between the fantasy of Middle Earth and reality of New Zealand. Elijah Wood (Frodo in the films) is quoted repeatedly as saying: “There’s a real purity in New Zealand. It’s actually not an easy thing to find in our world anymore. It’s a unique place” (New Zealand Dairy Brands Ltd n.d.). The campaign concept of “100% Pure” has also now extended beyond the original domain of tourism into other New Zealand industries. Building on the success of the slogan, many New Zealand export companies deliberately incorporate elements of the 100% Pure campaign to make links between the purity of New Zealand environment and the purity of their products, particularly food, drink, or health products.6 Companies have employed the campaign slogan, font, colour scheme or imagery: for example, 100% Pure New Zealand Honey, “gathered from New Zealand’s vast wilderness” (Pure New Zealand Honey). Agricultural plants and animals, although mostly non-native, are often figured as imbued with the natural purity of NZ, such as New Zealand AngusPure® cows: “The Purest taste from the purest place. On a pair of islands at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, New Zealand’s natural beauty is distilled into a beef so pure, so tender, and so tasty” (New Zealand AngusPure n.d.). Purity, a slippery term, is invoked to suggest a range of meanings including organic, disease-free, natural, and undiluted.7 While the 100% Pure campaign was developed primarily for tourism, it arguably sits within a broader strategy of what has become known as “nation branding” which not only aims to attract tourists to the country but also to create a reputation akin to a corporate brand (Anholt 1998). As geographer Nick Lewis (2011) observes, nation branding “refers to the application of sophisticated expertise and branding techniques to cultivate understandings of the nation” (p.  269) for tourism, export, and investment purposes. This is achieved in part by mobilising already existing cultural and geographical imaginaries. Lewis (2011) further argues

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

45

that “nation branding is a set of strategically developed practices that mobilise imaginaries of nation, the values of place in consumption, and reputational effects of identities on investment and purchase decisions” (p.  265). Crucially, as Lewis suggests, nation branding “scales and co-­ ordinates” (p.  270) cultural narratives to the nation as the significant geographic space. National imaginaries are thus directed towards adding value to national products, by creating an emotional response or association with a nation as the origin-of-goods or destination. But nation brands are also explicitly tied to forms of the nation-state within an emerging globalised economic space. Arguably, since the 1990s, a growing interest in nation branding has developed alongside the emergence of new economy-state relationships, in which nation-states are required to manage global economic competitiveness amidst increasingly internationalised flows of capital, in order to maintain the national standard of living, wealth, and employment of the population (see for example Jessop 1993). Political economist Philip G. Cerny (1997) describes this as the “competition state”. Nation branding is intertwined with this emergent political economy, as Helleiner and Pickel (2005) explain: “The nation-state plays up its distinctive history, geography, and gender and ethnic motifs and in so doing (re) invents a sense of national identity in order to carve out a strategic niche and competitive advantage in the global economy” (p. 204). While the New Zealand economy has long been fuelled by export, for example of primary resources and of meat and dairy products, increasing international competition has put pressure on many of these industries, and the export profile has changed radically since the 1970s due to many changes in global and domestic governance, including trade regulation and government subsidies. Helleiner and Pickel argue that New Zealand’s nation-branding strategy for tourism and agriculture centres on the environment, in an effort to capitalise on its geographical location and history; in particular these industries have leveraged on an already developed understanding on New Zealand as “pure”, clean, and green. The New Zealand government has also invested in rebranding the nation as an innovative, open-minded, young, resourceful country, in an attempt to attract greater overseas investment in ICT and knowledge-based products (see Hall 2010). But, as Lewis argues, the 100% Pure brand is one

46 

R. Carr

pillar of a broader “architecture” of Brand New Zealand alongside other deliberately cultivated state brands such as “New Zealand, New Thinking”, and also independent industry brands (which take on the same themes, as discussed above) (Lewis 2011). Whether by design or not, the 100% Pure campaign has become a central feature of a New Zealand nation brand. As Tourism Industry Association chief executive Tim Cossar observed, “[b]y default, we have curated it in some ways into a national brand” (quoted in Hall 2010, 85). As Lewis (2011) argues, nation branding is performative: it does not label a pre-existing national entity, but contributes to the construction of the economic space of a competitive state in a global economy. To a degree, the competition state, in concert with nation branding, marks out emerging relations between the state, industries, and national resources, including the population. In this emerging relationship, natural resources, populations, histories, or farming practices might provide a competitive edge to a particular nation, and are therefore prone to being co-opted into an increasingly productive relation with political life and the national economy. They are refigured into certain kinds of economic calculability at the level of the nation. An exemplary case of this in New Zealand is the report commissioned by the Ministry for Environment: Our Clean Green Image: What’s It Worth? In this document, the Ministry evaluated the economic value, for New Zealand, of the international perception of New Zealand as environmentally friendly, finding that “our clean green image has real dollar value for our major export markets” (Ministry for Environment 2001).8 While the report itself was produced in support of sustainable development and environmental protection, it is telling that the strategy was to emphasise export value.9 Here natural landscapes, relationships, and practices are incorporated within a logic of national value and of national competitiveness, and are being targeted to make them more productive. Perhaps most importantly, however, it is the competitive value of the perception, or the narrative, of greenness that was in question in the report. The report suggests both that it is the image of New Zealand that is important for export purposes, and that this image might be harder to restore than the environment itself, should degradation of the environment eventually result in damage to international perceptions. The environment itself needed to be protected not

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

47

necessarily for its own sake but in order to maintain the health of the narrative. The relation between narrative and competitive value is central to the context of xenotransplantation. As I discussed above, national brands are kinds of national imaginaries, which are in part narratives, albeit narratives connected with materialities. To an extent, in New Zealand the clean-green nation branding pivots on the capacity for the environment to be brought under a particular narrative of purity, and for that particular narrative to be productively enrolled into a national economy. Furthermore, the competitive value of national narratives also becomes a site for generating particular state-environment relations. That is, it (re) produces a particular kind of calculative relation to nature (and its products) via their capacity to be subsumed under the narrative. As the report by the Ministry for Environment itself suggests, export industries can compete globally when they offer a product that has clean-green qualities (organic, free-range, or sustainable, for example): simultaneously making use of and reinforcing the New Zealand clean-green reputation. This is precisely what the xenotransplantation company LCT has achieved in harnessing the 100% Pure campaign, as I will discuss further below.

The Narrative of Original Purity What is the narrative being mobilised? Why is it so successful? And, what is being commercialised along with it? As Dürr (2008) suggests, the absence of humans in the images of the 100% Pure campaign points to a particular notion of purity, as that which is in its original state, “untainted” by human touch. The text on the Tourism New Zealand website emphasises this point further, pointing to an untouched land: Spend time in New Zealand’s national parks and you'll begin to understand the soul of this place. Our national parks are treasured and preserve our natural heritage, forests, wildlife and landscapes, close to—if not exactly—as it was before people arrived here. (New Zealand Tourism n.d.)

48 

R. Carr

The explanation given for this very special quality of New Zealand is its geographical isolation and late occupation by humans—one commercial for instance opens with the title “welcome to the youngest country on earth” (100% Pure New Zealand 2012). The marketing also suggests that New Zealand has been preserved in a quasi-prehistoric state, with its “ancient”, even antediluvian, flora and fauna: “Unique flightless birds, the world’s heaviest insect and a ‘living dinosaur’ ”. They suggest that the “unique native wildlife of New Zealand” is representative of “[e]ighty million years of isolation in a time capsule” (New Zealand Tourism Guide 2017). The geography of New Zealand is crucial then, existing as an archipelago disconnected from any other major landmass, surrounded by ocean, far from the dense human occupation of Europe and Asia, and thus isolated from human contact. Original purity of nature has been preserved where elsewhere it has been lost. The campaign draws on an already well-established idea of the value of nature that is “untainted” by humans, regularly featured in environmentalism and conservation discourses. These discourses are often characterised by the imperative to preserve nature or “wilderness” by preventing it from being contaminated by humans, or by a call to return environments to their “original” state, as they existed before the intrusion of humans.10 That is, the 100% Pure campaign and some forms of conservation discourse refigure the grand narrative of Genesis and the Fall (Merchant 2013), a key Western imaginary depicting human relationships to nature (Morris and Sawyer 1992). As William Cronon (1996) suggests, the current conservation rhetoric structures purity of nature as that which has been maintained as it was before a “fall”, protected from human corruption.11 Cronon writes, “[t]he classic example is the tropical rain forest, which since the 1970s has become the most powerful modern icon of unfallen, sacred land—a veritable Garden of Eden—for many Americans and Europeans” (p. 18). The story of New Zealand purity harnesses the topos of the fall from grace of the rest of the world, of modernity, of humanity; and the familiarity of these narrative structures makes the campaign formula, of “returning” to a place that is 100% pure, a widely accessible and seemingly intuitive storyline. The connections that TNZ makes between New Zealand and Middle Earth, a world which is itself

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

49

constructed around a tale of the fall (Chance 2001; Mathijs and Pomerance 2006), add a sense of magic to the myth of prelapsarian purity. The motif of original purity has a well-established place in literature. Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin 2010), for example, argues it is one of the key “chronotopes”, or configurations of the relationship between space and time, evident in literature and philosophy. His work suggests that the motif can be seen as part of a broader narrative structure and philosophical ideal in which all value is located in the past while sought after in the present or future.12 Bakhtin (2010) calls this a “historical inversion”, and associates the myth of original purity with philosophical idealism: The historical inversion in philosophical structures is characterized by a corresponding assumption of “beginnings” as the crystal-clear, pure sources of all being, of eternal values and modes of existence that are ideal and outside time. (p. 148)

The inversion narrative renders nature and purity as stable, ahistorical, and essential: each natural entity has its own essential, identifiable, and unique characteristics that are unchanging. As Coyle and Fairweather suggest, the 100% Pure campaign is located firmly in the narrative logic of historical inversion. Nature, as represented in the campaign, is ideal, timeless, and ahistorical and yet contemporaneous with the present; nature here is “sanctified, revered and, ideally, untainted” (Coyle and Fairweather 2005, 152). The idea of New Zealand as a pure space is problematic on a number of levels. The concept employs a familiar construction of pure nature or wilderness, imagined to exist before (non-Indigenous) human contamination. This reifies nature as something stably existing at a particular point in time, neglecting “the changing and dynamic nature of ecologies” (van Dooren 2011, 289), and frames most human interaction with the environment as unnatural, within a nature/culture binary.13 Ironically, although nature is romanticised, the campaign and the export industry involve further intervention in and exploitation of the environment for the purposes of human capital accumulation and consumption.14 The narrative also problematically presents an image of nature that is “innocent of history” and politics (Haraway 1991, 156), suppressing the fact

50 

R. Carr

that, as Gurevitch (2010) argues, “antipodean space was biologically, ecologically and pathogenically (and often violently) reengineered for European settlement” (p. 60). More than Māori, Pākehā and their companion plants and animals are implicated in the extinction of native species, as well as in the destruction, erasure, and commodification of Te Ao Māori (the “Māori world”, including language, cultural practices, community, and culturally important sites—see Gurevitch [2010]; Potts et al. (2013)). Given these histories, the 100% Pure concept might be read as both an economic strategy and, as it intersects with and (re)produces national imaginaries,15 a part of the construction of Pākehā identity and belonging in New Zealand, shaped by tensions between Māori and Pākehā (Holm 2015) and settler relationships with the environment.16 The 100% Pure imaginary, alongside conservation efforts such as culling “invasive” possums (and pigs), may reflect uneasy Pākehā belonging and an ongoing drive to construct a cohesive national community in New Zealand (see Holm [2015]; Ginn [2008]; Potts et al. (2013)).17 Despite the problematic aspects of the 100% Pure narrative, these tropes have been widely disseminated, and the campaign has been a relative success (Tourism New Zealand. Pure as: Celebrating 10 Years of 100% Pure New Zealand). In New Zealand, industry, government, and media mobilise the narrative of prelapsarian purity as a strategy for adding value to products in a context of increasing global competitiveness; the storyline having become a kind of export good, subsuming natural resources under its logic. As I have argued here, the branding of New Zealand environment and products as an embodiment of prelapsarian purity is regularly integrated with representations of the nation as geographically isolated and temporally “the youngest country”. LCT has artfully leveraged these well-developed imaginaries of purity in its efforts to construct pigs found in remote New Zealand as ideal source animals for xenotransplantation. In the next section, I will discuss xenotransplantation in more detail, before exploring the interaction between imaginaries of national purity and the biopolitics of xenotransplantation.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

51

Xenotransplantation and the Auckland Island Pigs Xenotransplantation involves the transplantation of live tissues, organs, or cells from animals to humans for therapeutic reasons. Using cells from pigs, cellular therapies are being developed by several biotechnology companies for the treatment of long-term health or medical conditions such as diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.18 These therapies have the potential to progress into a new large-scale industry revolving around the commercialisation of live non-human animal tissues (cells) for human transplants, and this would have important implications for the lives of those animals used. Pigs are the main animal currently exploited for transplantation research because they are biologically similar to humans, and, compared with non-human primates, they are thought to be less ethically controversial (given that we farm them for food) and less likely to carry diseases infectious to humans.19 Xenotransplantation using pigs has been controversial, however, and one of the central concerns has been the potential for contagion. In the mid-1990s, scientists raised alarms over possible animal-to-human disease transfer (zoonosis) via non-human animal transplants, amid increasing anxiety about new and re-emerging human viruses that are often traced back to non-human animal sources, for example HIV, “bird flu”, Ebola, and H1N1 or “swine flu” (Wolfe et al. 2007). (I discuss this in Chap. 4). In 1997, researchers demonstrated that PERVs, endemic to pigs, could sometimes infect human cells (Patience et al. 1997), resulting in tightened regulation globally, including in the UK, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (McLean and Williamson 2005). The concern was that these viruses (or other microbes) might infect the transplant recipient and spread into the human population, at worst producing a pandemic like HIV (Collignon and Purdy 2001). These concerns have lessened somewhat over time, particularly as studies revealed that only some strains of PERV are likely to infect human cells (Wood et al. 2004). Regulatory frameworks have been put in place in many countries aiming to protect the human population, in part by limiting xenotransplantation to instances where the source animals are proven to be free from certain

52 

R. Carr

infections. The regulatory requirements are extremely difficult to meet and only a few clinical trials have progressed since this period, primarily those of LCT. The fear of xenozoonosis reflects a more general anxiety about the human collective body being infected by non-human animal viruses. Feminist scholarship on identity and difference, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, has highlighted that anxieties over medical and social contagion are often intertwined; for example, “threats to social order from undesirable groups have historically been represented as infectious threats” (Waldby 1996, 91). Perceived infectiousness may indicate a perceived threat to the distinction between self and other, where a constitutive other becomes “too close, too recognizable (threatening merging and indifference)” (Shildrick 2002, 75). The self at stake might be an individual, a group, or a “normative category as a whole” (Shildrick 2002, 71). Accordingly, concerns over disease transmission in xenotransplantation might simultaneously be read as symbolic anxieties about human identity or social cohesion (Murray 2006; Rosengarten 2001). Xenotransplantation crosses traditional species boundaries as humans incorporate live non-human tissues into their bodies, and as scientists emphasise the similarity of pigs and humans (Sharp 2011), in some cases furthering this closeness by genetically modifying pigs using human genes. Ironically, while this confusion is intrinsic to the very act of xenotransplantation, the industry simultaneously relies on the acceptability of doing to other animals what would be forbidden in humans: raising them for spare parts. In order to make this new live-tissue industry viable, it is important for stakeholders to cultivate a source of animals that is understood to be as microbiologically safe as possible. Yet within a particular form of sovereign power, contingent upon firm distinctions between humans and other animals, the perceived infectiousness of non-human animals can be exacerbated by their categorical transgression; conversely, reaffirmation of categories can serve to appease concerns over contagion, treating medical contagion as a problem of boundary control. Within the New Zealand context, LCT has figured the Auckland Island pigs as medically non-­ infectious and also as non-threatening to the category of the human: as pure but firmly other. Scientific discourses have played a role in figuring

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

53

human-pig closeness (Cook 2006; Sharp 2011); here, national narratives are mobilised to do the opposite. As Franklin (2006); Potts et al. (2013); and others have shown, non-human animals (and plants) and human relationships with them are in many different ways connected with projects of nation-making in New Zealand.20 In the case of LCT, the already well-articulated New Zealand national imaginary of purity is brought to bear on biological and social anxieties around contagion, accordingly facilitating the harvesting of these particular non-human bodies for xenotransplantation. LCT uses the origin story of the Auckland Island pigs to position them within the purity of New Zealand, aiding the construction of the pigs as clean, non-infectious, and fundamentally different from humans.

Auckland Island Pigs “And there they were … the purest mammals alive” Tim Shadbolt, Mayor of Invercargill. (White and Wedel 2012)

The “purest mammals alive” ostensibly have their origin on the isolated, wild, uninhabited, and pristine Auckland Island. These pigs are the result of the interbreeding of several groups released on the island from 1807 onwards. Historical research and genetic analysis suggest that some pigs were left by explorers, whalers, and sealers, who released them as a resource for sailors that might end up shipwrecked on these Islands. Others were abandoned by whalers who camped on the island, and still others by a group of Māori who lived there briefly (Robins et al. 2003). Human attempts to settle on the islands were brief and unsuccessful: while sealers set up camp here, the seal population was quickly diminished, and the weather made the island barely habitable.21 The pigs remained on the island as humans abandoned it, and over time a unique breed emerged as they adapted to the cold environment and as a biologically isolated population (Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand 2014). This history is suggestive of the role that pigs played in the imperial exploration and eventual colonisation of Aotearoa, as did sheep in Australia (S. Franklin 2007).

54 

R. Carr

Once valued as companions and food sources for sailors, the status of the pigs changed to invasive pest as Auckland Island later became a site for conservation. The New Zealand government declared the sub-­ Antarctic Auckland Islands a national reserve in 1977, and in 1998 the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) made the zone a world heritage site (UNESCO n.d.). In the 1980s, the Department of Conservation (DOC) set out to restore the entire archipelago by eradicating many introduced animals from the islands, including goats, cats, and pigs, arguing: By the 1980s the presence of alien animals was accepted as inconsistent with the national nature reserve status of the islands and moves were made to remove the invaders and restore the islands to what they once were. (Department of Conservation n.d.-a)

This project was in keeping with a re-branding of New Zealand from the 1970s onwards as “clean and green”, and later as “100% pure”, and with the uneasy construction of nationalism based on environmental purity.22 Ironically then, in contrast to LCT’s characterisation of the pigs as clean, DOC frames them as invaders, highlighting their destruction of native flora and fauna; the conservation narrative figures the pigs as contaminating the heritage status of the Island. Although DOC has made plans for their eradication since the 1990s, the $22 million project has not yet been funded (Department of Conservation n.d.-b). In the face of eradication, two groups saw greater value in the Auckland Island pigs. The Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand championed them as a unique breed that ought to be conserved, and as perhaps holding valuable genes for cold resistance. In 1999, some members of the society travelled to the island to “rescue” the pigs from eradication, and brought 17 back to the South Island, including some pregnant females (Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand 2014). Within months, this population had grown to more than 50. At this point, LCT came into the picture. The company had been searching for the “cleanest” pig population, microbiologically speaking, to gain regulatory approval for human clinical trials of xenotransplantation.23 When LCT heard about the pigs recently retrieved from Auckland Island, the

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

55

company tested them and found that “they were extremely rare, as in they’re very, very clean with none of the modern pig viruses” (Living Cell Technologies 2017). LCT acquired the pigs and began breeding them in biosecure facilities on the mainland to maintain their “pristine” state (Elliott 2012, 45), heralding them as the “cleanest pigs in the world” by virtue of their time on Auckland Island (PharmaVentures 2010). Human clinical trials in xenotransplantation using cells from the Auckland Island pigs were approved by the New Zealand government in 2008 and continue to progress. LCT is now positioned at the forefront of clinical trials in xenotransplantation globally, with one product designed to treat diabetes and another for Parkinson’s disease. The Auckland Island pigs are ostensibly valued by LCT for their lack of human infectious diseases, a lack attributed to their unique history, but rather than focusing on scientific tests for evidence, LCT’s marketing materials and public interviews repeatedly tell the story of the Auckland Island isolation and rescue—although generally excluding talk of them being “pests”. One of their greatest assets for LCT seems to be their story—their narrative.

100% Pure Pigs? “From a clinical perspective they are one hundred percent natural. Clean”. Sir Bob Elliott, co-founder of LCT (D’arcy 2011) “LCT considers its herd to be the purest source of cells and tissue for human Therapeutics”. (Living Cells Technologies 2010) LCT has the sustainable competitive advantage of having a pig herd free of common viruses, bacteria and parasites. LCT’s pig herd originates from the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands, between New Zealand and Antarctica. The pigs have effectively been quarantined and untouched by humans since being left there by Captain Bowen over 200 years ago. (Living Cells Technologies 2010)

Auckland Island is a more extreme version of New Zealand: it is even further away, more isolated, and “uninhabited” by humans. These factors are regularly highlighted by LCT (see above). The company uses these factors to suggest that the pigs, like the island, are isolated, and that they

56 

R. Carr

have had little contact with humans, pigs, or other “land-based mammals” (Elliott 2012, 45) that would transmit diseases to them. LCT thus presents the pigs as untainted by human contact: “[t]he pigs have effectively been quarantined and untouched by humans since being left there by Captain Bowen over 200 years ago” (Living Cells Technologies 2010; my emphasis). The then CEO, the late Sir Bob Elliot argued that this isolation has protected them from modern diseases and furthermore purified them of their old diseases: “[i]n two centuries of isolation from other land-based mammals in this fierce climate, these pigs have lost all microorganisms capable of infecting people” (Elliott 2012, 45). Through isolation from other mammals and especially humans, the pigs are imagined to have returned to a more original clean state. Using similar terms to the 100% Pure campaign, LCT repeatedly describe the pigs as pristine, clean, natural, and pure, for example, stating that “Auckland Island is a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific where LCT’s pure and disease-free pigs have been sourced”, and “[t]he herd is regularly monitored to make sure its pristine state is preserved” (Elliott 2012, 45; my emphasis). The use of the same language and logic allows LCT to connect with and leverage off the national imaginary produced by the 100% Pure campaign. In particular, the word “pristine”, meaning “unspoilt by human interference, untouched” (Shapiro 2017, 364), resonates with the broader national imaginary of an original natural purity existing prior to human contact or cultural contamination. The logic suggests that originally clean pigs become dirty and diseased through contact with humans and domesticated pigs. Likewise, protection from human contact can ostensibly prevent contamination, and maintain or even restore a more original purity. The nature/culture binary, and separation, underlies this conception of cleanliness, just as it does in the 100% Pure narrative. The pigs fall definitively on the side of nature, claimed by cofounder Bob Elliot to be “microbiologically speaking … one hundred percent natural. Clean” (D’arcy 2011). In the same way that other products from New Zealand tap into this imaginary, then, the Auckland Island pig origin story mobilises the now familiar understanding of purity to emphasise that the pigs are microbiologically clean. At the same time, this sense of purity is ambiguous and can extend beyond microbiological cleanliness, as LCT states they are

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

57

“pure and disease-free pigs” (Living Cells Technologies 2010; my emphasis), indicating that purity applies to more than disease. Tapping into the idealism inherent in the narrative of original purity, it also identifies the pigs as an essential category existing independently from others. But this national imaginary of purity is not the only isolation-based narrative exploited by LCT: they also tap into scientific histories of freedom from, and control of, contagion, particularly through isolation. While it is unsurprising that a company developing medical technology would adopt a scientific angle when arguing that their research is safe, what is perhaps surprising is their deploying of scientific ideas in narrative material, rather than relying  only on scientific data. Alongside the national narrative of 100% Pure New Zealand, which informs their marketing strategy, LCT also draws from scientific and public health technologies and practices, used to render humans and other animals “clean” or healthy, to help support the representation of Auckland Island pigs as microbiologically “pristine”.

 paces of Purity: SPF S and Geopolitical Discourses On the Auckland Islands, it’s almost like being in a natural pathogen-free facility because they’re so isolated. (Living Cell Technologies 2017)

In response to concerns over disease, regulatory guidelines for xenotransplantation, such as the US FDA and the New Zealand government regulation, generally stipulate that source animals need to be free of any microbes which could infect humans. At a minimum, only animals which are well documented to be free of specified pathologic agents, demonstrated or hypothesised as significant in the xenotransplant setting, should be used. These animals should come only from closed, microbiologically well-defined and controlled colonies. (World Health Organisation 2011)

58 

R. Carr

It is widely agreed that developing suitable pigs for xenotransplantation depends on raising them in conditions termed “specific pathogen free” (SPF) or “designated pathogen free” (DPF): environments which are sterile and maintain isolation conditions. SPF or DPF animals are bred to be microbiologically clean; usually destined for use in experiments, they are certified to be free of a particular set of microbes. The practice of creating SPF animals emerged during the first half of the twentieth century, when bacteriologists James A. Reyniers and Philip C.  Trexler attempted to cultivate germ-free organisms as standardised tools for use in laboratories; Reyniers and Sacksteder (1958) proposed that in theory “a germfree animal is one free from all living contaminants” (p.  344). While some scientists, including Elie Metchnikoff (p. 242), had earlier created so-called “germ free” animals, Reyniers and Trexler radically altered the field by inventing “isolators” in the 1930s and 1940s as a means of reliably producing pathogen-free organisms (Kirk 2012b). These were units built to house small animals inside a complete barrier from external pathogens, with autoclaved entry and exit holes, windows, and built-in gloves to interact with the organisms inside (Kirk 2012b, 246). The animals were delivered into the completely sealed space through surgery, where they lived in entire isolation from other biological elements.24 The aim of producing these clean animals was to reduce both the threat of contamination by germs when conducting experiments and the potential loss of laboratory subjects to disease (James A. Reyniers and Sacksteder 1958). Historian Robert G.  W. Kirk suggests that the development of Reyniers and Trexler’s perfect lab tool, as the standard material for all experiments, failed on several counts, most profoundly because of the health issues associated with germ-free life.25 Nevertheless, the germ-free animals literally gave birth to SPF animals. As Kirk (2012a) recounts, using the same techniques, Trexler began to produce SPF organisms on a large scale, animals “that were guaranteed to be free of specific microbes, pathogens, and parasites” (p. 89). Subsequently, the main use of germ-­ free animals came to be as the progenitors of SPF populations. Reyniers and Trexler (1955) explicitly generated the idea of a completely germ-free animal as an extension of the pure cultures used in bacteriology; the idea, they suggest, “presumes that the animal may live as a

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

59

pure culture free from contaminants” (p.  231). A pure culture is an uncontaminated medium with which to work: it contains only a single species of bacteria, for example, the subject of the experiment. Underlying this project is the seemingly obvious notion that a pure body is one that contains only the cells of that particular organism. However, it had long been debated since whether such a “tabula rasa” was a desirable biological state; notably Pasteur thought micro-organisms were necessary for life (Kirk 2012b, 242). Today, of course, there is little doubt that we depend on other micro-organisms for our health, and the microbiome project is testament to this understanding (Turnbaugh et al. 2007).26 Eschewing biological interconnectedness, Reyniers and Trexler viewed germ-free animals as an ideal form of life that might eventually be achieved for all living beings, including humans (Kirk 2012b). They took their isolated organisms to represent a perfect biological state, believing that “the germ-free animal, as a form of life isolated from all other life, was literally a pure form of life” (Kirk 2012a, 64). SPF animals are, in short, a derivative of this imagined “pure” form of life. And within the context of the 100% Pure campaign, LCT invokes the connections between SPF and purity, referring to the Auckland Island as a pathogen-­ free facility. As in the national narratives I have already explored, the status of germ-free and SPF animals revolves around spatial isolation and a conception of nature as originally pristine. Animals are assumed to be in an uncontaminated state in the womb, but subsequently polluted by contact with other creatures and circulating microbes after birth. Interestingly, however, Auckland Island was not as effective a “pathogen-­free facility” as it appears in LCT’s imaginings. The Auckland Island pigs were held in quarantine when they first arrived in Invercargill and screened extensively. And, while the progeny of the transported pigs were allowed into the community proper, the original pigs were detained in partial quarantine indefinitely because they were infected with a Trichinella parasite, probably from contact with seals (Stone 2002). Further, despite the claim of LCT that they are “null” or noninfectious pigs (Garkavenko et al. 2012), the Auckland Island pig genes do contain the porcine retrovirus (PERV) that caused concern in the 1990s, although at lower levels than some other pigs. While the Auckland Island pigs may have been exposed to fewer microbes than pigs around the world,

60 

R. Carr

including mainland New Zealand, scientific testing showed them to be less “pure” than LCT’s narrative of isolation and cold suggests. The technology of quarantine, to which LCT also refers (although not in relation to the actual quarantining of their original pigs), implies a quite different working of time and space from that of SPF, although it too operates through isolation. Gensini et al. (2004) argue that the “modern” conception of quarantine emerged during the fourteenth-century plague, in response to an observed delay in visible plague symptoms after being infected (Gensini et al. 2004). Quarantine was a largely transitory condition, in most cases at least. During the fourteenth century, isolation was applied at the border of a territory, to those entering from outside, with the intention of suspending entry long enough to reveal infections.27 Travellers on foot were detained for a period of 40 days; and it is from the Italian word for 40, “quaranta”, that the term “quarantine” originates (Gensini et al. 2004, 258). Clearly, national plant and non-human animal quarantine today remains continuous with this concept. Historically, islands have provided an ideal “natural” quarantine facility, and the notoriety of Angel and Ellis Islands in particular makes this connection part of the public imagination. LCT’s application of the trope to Auckland Island therefore seems quite natural, even self-evident. Quarantine then, in reverse to SPF, involves isolation of a suspicious individual to protect a pure community from contamination. Quarantine constructs the community as pure, and it can render a suspicious individual clean or dirty, depending on the outcome of the quarantine period. This public health technology, at this basic level, I suggest, can act as a kind of mechanism for revealing “truth” of cleanliness or dirtiness. In contrast, SPF or pathogen-free facilities are designed to produce and maintain pristine bodies in the absence of external contaminants. In LCT’s marketing materials, Auckland Island is figured as both SPF and as quarantine facility, and the company’s claims about the pigs combine these two understandings: a long isolation on the Island indicates the “truth” of the purity of the pigs, and also materially produces them as such. The whole Island is imagined as a pathogen-free area, and as quarantine, which designates it as microbiologically empty space capable of producing truthfully clean bodies. The logic here presupposes and supports the national rhetoric of purity by virtue of isolation.28

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

61

Agriculture and Geopolitics of Purity We are the ultimate place in the world to build an industry out of turning pigs and other animals into medical grade use… We have an opportunity to build a multibillion-dollar industry and it’s sitting there, it’s not like it’s a dream, it’s a real reality now. (David Collinson, co-founder of LCT) (Hembry 2008)

LCT aims to create a niche, nation-branded medical product. However, the company’s xenotransplantation products in one sense straddle agricultural and medical industries. I have argued that both the New Zealand nation-branding strategy of 100% Pure and LCT’s pig origin story depend on a geographical and temporal mapping of purity. In agricultural terms, this entails a microbiological consequence: New Zealand is also, relatively, disease free. The connections between LCT’s products and agricultural imaginaries emerge as the company responds to the New Zealand regulatory requirements. Here I explore how LCT figures New Zealand as less afflicted by diseases through the place-based focus of the regulation of xenotransplantation. I indicated above that microbiological safety is central to the frameworks developed in recent years to regulate xenotransplantation. In New Zealand, xenotransplantation is governed by the Gene Technology Advisory Committee, a sub-committee of the Health Research Council (HRC), and by the Minister for Health. In applying to conduct clinical trials of xenotransplantation, sponsors are asked to provide details of the microbiological safety measures in place to limit the possibility of disease transfer into the population (Health Research Council Gene Technology Advisory Committee 2007). Further, the sponsor’s methods for characterising the microbiology of source animals and maintaining them to be free of certain infections assume an important role here.29 Two features of the New Zealand guidelines and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines, which inform the New Zealand regulatory process, focus specifically on geography: the HRC Gene Technology Advisory Committee (GTAC) asks applicants to account for the geographical origin and movements of the source pigs; and the

62 

R. Carr

USFDA guidelines stipulate that the infections that source animals are monitored for “should be tailored to specific geographical areas” (Garkavenko et  al. 2012, 12). Thus the clinical trial approval process provides ample scope for, even requires, a geographical mapping of purity—LCT has embraced this opportunity, dovetailing as it does with their preference to emphasise their pigs’ geographical origins above all else. The requirement to trace the geographic movements of source animals includes an obligation to provide both a recent history of their location and a genetic analysis delving into the historical origin of the breed. The GTAC guidelines specify that the sponsor is to “[d]ocument the geographic origin, species, strain, and genealogy of the source animal(s) and herd(s) [and d]escribe any factors relating to origin that may pose risks to recipients” (HRC Gene Technology Advisory Committee 2007, 7). This provides an opportunity for LCT to recount the origin story of their Auckland Island pigs, which I have discussed in depth. LCT also analysed the genetic origin of the pigs, finding that the “pigs consistently clustered with European lineages and were distinct from Chinese indigenous pigs” (Fan et al. 2005, 248). Pigs can, genetically, only be traced to either an Asian or European heritage, as these are the two main lineages. LCT uncovered the Auckland Island Pigs’ European heritage, affirming the narrative that they were abandoned by British explorers on the Island. While this genetic origin tracing plays into problematic racialised imaginaries of relative Asian and European cleanliness, LCT’s response to the subsequent criteria more clearly maps New Zealand in an imaginary of global disease distribution. In the report Developing Xenostandards for Microbiological Safety: New Zealand Experience (Garkavenko et al. 2012), LCT describes the process of deciding which microbiological tests are necessary to monitor the health and safety of their source herd. Following the FDA recommendation, they first developed a profile of infections in local pigs. In the report they describe their findings, taking the opportunity to affirm the positive attributes of New Zealand’s agricultural animals: The health status of the NZ pig population is considered to be favourable thanks largely to its geographic remoteness and strict animal health control

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

63

policies. Unlike many countries NZ remains free from infectious vesicular diseases such as foot and mouth, vesicular stomatitis and vesicular exanthema. Notable infections like rabies, Brucella suis, swine fever, pseudorabies and spongiform encephalopathy are also absent. (Garkavenko et al. 2012)

New Zealand, in this description, is posed as advantageously free of certain pathogens. Here, as LCT references a range of diseases inflicting agricultural sources, the continuities between the agricultural export industry and LCT’s xenotransplantation products become evident. As Sarah Franklin’s (2007) analysis of the UK foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 demonstrates, the global market in meat calculates the economic value of its products according to the presence of certain diseases in the geographic area of origin, in particular the presence of foot and mouth disease (FMD). The world market, Franklin (2007, 174) observes, “is divided between countries where foot and mouth is endemic and those designated as disease free”. Although FMD is no more harmful to sheep than a cold, and is very rarely transmitted and not harmful to humans, in 2001 the UK government culled millions of (infected and uninfected) sheep in order to maintain the superior—and economically lucrative—status of FMD free (S.  Franklin 2007, 174). A geographic area designated as disease free, thus, adds value to meat products, regardless of the real impact of the disease on actual humans and other animals, and this kind of regional disease purity is typically scaled to national territories. The determination of “disease free” countries pivots on a conception that countries, especially islands, can be sealed off as protected units, precisely the kind of imaginary enabled by quarantine (which I discuss further in Chap. 3). New Zealand’s agricultural industry prides itself on being free from many of the diseases found in other countries. Indeed, as I’ve suggested above, the agricultural economy often capitalises on the conception of the country as clean and green, and marketing discourses incorporate microbiological cleanliness into the broader, slippery, category of purity. For example, as the Government’s international business development agency, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), concatenates these various notions of purity as it claims:

64 

R. Carr

New Zealand has an almost exclusively free-range grass feed production system producing tender, appetising and healthy products … And, with strict biosecurity and quality control processes, our animals produce not only tasty but extremely healthy and safe meat. (New Zealand Trade and Enterprise n.d.)30

The NZTE further claims that the same qualities described above make New Zealand an ideal location for production of medical products derived from non-human animals, claiming: “[a]nimal derived raw materials from New Zealand are also sought after by the pharmaceutical and natural medicine industries” (New Zealand Trade and Enterprise n.d.). The industry argues that very strict quarantine laws safeguard the health of animals, and, along with other biosecurity controls, quality control processes and geographic isolation “have resulted in an animal disease-free status” (New Zealand Trade and Enterprise n.d.). Just as the historical isolation of New Zealand ostensibly endows products with a kind of naturalness, geographical remoteness is also mobilised to imagine the safety of New Zealand’s agricultural products.31 A media statement released by LCT during the H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak reiterates the same geopolitics of purity, reassuring stakeholders of the safety of their pigs. The release assured investors and clients that both the New Zealand pigs broadly, and LCT’s Auckland Island pig herd, were unaffected by swine flu, or by other disease: Living Cell Technologies Limited … today emphasized that its pig cell product, DIABECELL … is free of pig viruses, bacteria and parasites … New Zealand’s geographical isolation, historical biosecurity, and strict animal quarantine practice have kept the country free from a number of pig pathogens including swine influenza. LCT’s pig herd is derived from the Sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands and bred in bird-proof pathogen free facilities … As swine influenza infection has not been endemic in New Zealand, there has been no opportunity for pig, bird and human viruses to recombine as has occurred naturally elsewhere. (Living Cells Technologies 2009)

An understanding of the “cleanliness” of New Zealand pigs’ bodies, at a microbiological level, is channelled through images of the national territory, allowing them to be more easily integrated into the nation brand.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

65

LCT’s response to the regulatory requirements has similarly scaled the issue of microbiological cleanliness to the nation, reaffirming the rhetorics of New Zealand purity. While LCT’s representation of the Auckland Island pigs leverages the narrative of New Zealand as pristine, their marketing and regulatory strategy also reaffirms and co-produces this geographic imaginary, particularly as New Zealand seeks to adapt and expand its highly marketable “clean and green” reputation into the technology sector.

Conclusion Like the 100% Pure New Zealand narrative, the clean pig story also involves the erasure of certain perspectives, including their status as invasive pests, and the realities of their biological interconnections with others. The existence of the pigs on Auckland Island is connected with European colonialism (which is problematically elided in national narratives of purity), and, as the New Zealand Department of Conservation suggests, their presence, along with other species, has changed the island flora and fauna. For example, the pigs living on Auckland Island are destructive to rare species of native birds including the iconic White-­ capped mollymawk or albatross (Department of Conservation n.d.).32 Also, rather than being completely isolated from all land mammals, cats, rats, rabbits, and sheep have inhabited the island, and humans have had an intermittent presence. Indeed, the pigs were carrying parasites that they most likely picked up from eating dead seals (Stone 2002), which makes clear that the pigs have infectious relations with other species too. They are also severely inbred and will need careful interbreeding with other pig populations to maintain their health.33 Thus, the image of the pigs as clean and biologically disconnected involves the elision of interspecies connections and interrelations to create a myth of purity and of the desirability of purity in animals. I argued above that the concern over pigs transmitting diseases to humans may be exacerbated by an anxiety over the stability of the boundary between human and animal in xenotransplantation. The pig origin story focuses on the separation and potential contagion of pigs and

66 

R. Carr

humans; in doing so, it underscores the fact that humans are different in kind from the “natural” Auckland Island pigs. Their separation, or purification, is exemplified in the image of remote and isolated Auckland Island which defines the boundaries of the population of pigs spatially, and also stands as a clear image of their categorical isolation: marking out the population as a self-contained entity, physically and ontologically separate from humans. Yet, in concert with the New Zealand imaginary, and the understanding of SPF, their isolation also renders them clean, a pure community. The stories and images of isolation, purity, and cleanliness at work reaffirm both pig-human difference and, as I outlined above, a nature/culture binary. The pigs’ historical segregation ironically enables subsequent mixing together of these pigs and humans: the narrative of isolation (re)affirms the naturalness of species boundaries at the very moment they are about to be crossed. Transgression of boundaries, in this context, calls for a simultaneous reassertion of absolute difference.

Notes 1. Coyle and Fairweather (2005) argue that although Pākehā people may critique this reputation, the image often informs identity and attitudes towards the nation, and mobilises political action. 2. On the longer connection between Pākehā identity and the environment see Bell (1996) or Belich (1997). 3. The clean-green image was originally based partly on policies around resource management and nuclear energy in the 1990s; however, the ­reputation as environmentally friendly has been critiqued (Coyle and Fairweather 2005; Motavalli 2003). 4. For the year ending March 2016, international tourist expenditure accounted for NZ$14.5b or 20.7% of New Zealand total export earnings. Tourism directly contributes 5.6% of NZ gross domestic product and directly employs 188,136 people—7.5% of total employment (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment 2017). 5. This TNZ advertisement poses the ordinary things in New Zealand as magical—“where sea creatures walk on land”, “where you can dine above the clouds”, and “where wizards turn water into wine”.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

67

6. Underwriting these links are discourses of organic farming, free range farming, and, in wine commerce, the concept of Terroir (Lewis 2011). These also draw on New Zealand’s strict biosecurity practices. 7. Purity is understood broadly as that which is unmixed, clean, or uncontaminated, especially from outside sources. Mary Douglas (2002) argues in her seminal work on purity that cleanliness and pollution (purity and impurity), and attendant pollution rituals, are connected with the maintenance of the social order. Julia Kristeva (1982) similarly links impurity with identity construction and maintenance of the social order especially in processes of abjection. For a more contemporary performative account of purity, see Duschinsky (2013). 8. The report, in 2001, estimated that the loss of the New Zealand clean-­ green image would equate to a loss of between NZ$800m and NZ$1.5b in export and tourism industries. 9. Sustainability is becoming one of the major aspects of the clean-green brand and has been adding value to export products for some time. For example, the Ministry for Environment highlighted in 2001 the fact that the market for higher-priced environmentally sustainable products was increasing (Ministry for Environment 2001). 10. Note that conservation efforts need not always follow a dualistic model or be fixated on a pure nature outside of human intervention. Thom van Dooren (2015) suggests a third route which is a balance of intervention and distance:“[o]utside of essentialism, however, what emerges is the possibility that conservation might become a practice grounded in an effort to cultivate and support diverse forms of becoming for a changing world” (p. 15). Of course there is no conservation/preservation that does not involve forms of entanglement with humans; the categories of nature/wilderness and the human are always (co-)constructed. 11. Note that the connection between “wilderness” and Eden dates from the nineteenth century onwards. Previously, Cronon (1996) argues, cultivated gardens were seen as Edenic, and wilderness was dangerous and to be conquered. With the sway of romanticism, in the context of a modernising world, the wild eventually came to be seen as an important space to experience the sacred. 12. In the same way that in the campaign involving Middle Earth is located as an imagined past-time and yet as existing within present time in New Zealand.

68 

R. Carr

13. Additionally, it often ignores the work of Indigenous peoples in producing ecologies (van Dooren 2011, 289). Māori people and culture also feature in these advertisements as part of the experience of purity, and are problematically used to affirm the authenticity of New Zealand purity (Gurevitch 2010). 14. Plumwood (2002) argues this is typical of the nature/culture binary even in romanticism. 15. Broadly, following Anderson and others, I understand national imaginaries to be a set of collectively held or circulating stories and administrative processes that enrol the population into a sense of a nation-based community (Anderson 2006; Bashford 2004). 16. The prelapsarian mythical purity referenced in the 100% Pure campaign is specifically a Pākehā, not Māori, conception of nature (Ginn 2008). 17. Despite contemporary representations of New Zealand as bicultural, racial purity was an issue for the emerging nation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a “colonial demand for racial homogeneity” (Belich 1997, 18). Nan Seuffert (2006) argues that a foundational myth of mutual Aryanism—which figured Māori people  as earlier explorers of the Aryan descent—relieved anxieties over racial mixing, but nonetheless enabled Pākehā domination of Māori people who were figured as less civilised or pre-modern versions of the same stock (p. 61). 18. In contrast to the progress made towards clinical trials in these cellular therapies, research directed toward using whole organs is distinctly experimental. 19. Epidemiologists and virologists sometimes consider non-human animals that are evolutionarily closer to humans, especially non-human primates, to be more infectious to humans (Cook 2006). I discuss this in Chap. 4. 20. Other scholars led the way in illustrating the connections between the cultivation of non-human animals, national identity, and economies, including pioneering work by Harriet Ritvo (1987), Sarah Franklin (2007), and Nicole Shukin (2009) (see also Gillespie and Narayanan 2020; Taussig 2004; Wadiwel 2002). 21. During World War II there were coast watchers positioned on the Island, but this was usually a lone soldier (see Turbott 2002). 22. In part achieved precisely through processes of othering and killing nonnative species. 23. In response to disease concerns, the New Zealand government placed a hold on xenotransplantation trials in 1997, while they developed a regulatory standpoint. In 2007, following expert and public consultation,

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

69

New Zealand produced guidelines similar to the USFDA guidelines, allowing xenotransplantation to go ahead, with the approval of the Health Minister (HRC Gene Technology Advisory Committee 2007). It is important to note that LCT has undergone changes in approach since this chapter was written, see the concluding chapter. 24. “The process of engineering biology and machine began by removing intact uteruses from near-to-full-term pregnant animals within a purpose-­built germ-free ‘surgical isolator.’ The uterus was subsequently passed through various disinfection procedures, involving total immersion in germicide-filled ‘dunk tanks,’ before the progeny were surgically released and hand reared within a second microbially sterile isolator” (Kirk 2012b, 248). 25. Germ-free animals are still used in research, mostly to understand the relationship between health and microbes; for instance, they are now a critical tool in the study of the microbiome (Al-Asmakh and Zadjali 2015). 26. Indeed, modern studies suggest that not only do we need microbes to live, they are intimately intertwined with our particular state of health and many diseases, as exemplified in the microbiome project. Contemporary virology also suggests that we cannot produce fully germfree organisms because viruses are integrated into our very genes. 27. Although at other times within a town, as Foucault’s famous description of quarantine in the plague town demonstrates (Foucault 2003, 44–46). 28. Auckland Island has the added “virtue” of being extremely cold, which is linked to sterility. LCT plays up this fact, ignoring the fact that, unlike an actual SPF facility, there are actually numerous other critters on the island: “It’s so cold, not many viruses survive anyway, and no one really wants to go there” (Living Cell Technologies 2017). 29. Measures put in place also involve the sponsor conducting recipient monitoring and storing samples (Garkavenko et al. 2012). 30. The marketing focus of the meat industry often follows two interrelated aspects of cleanliness: the “naturalness” of the products, for instance, being raised in a free-range setting, and the microbiological safety of the products. 31. Ironically, when the Auckland Island pigs were first bought to New Zealand, the country’s fierce quarantine practices were applied to them, on the basis that they were potentially polluting to commercial pig herds, and indeed they were infected with a parasite, as discussed above. 32. The mollymawks are now limited to breeding on the cliffs of Auckland Island, and pigs are said to push them off the cliffs and eat their eggs; however mollymawks, also breed elsewhere and are not threatened by

70 

R. Carr

extinction (Moore 2004). LCT plays down this aspect, saying that the pigs eat “rare native herbs” (Living Cell Technologies 2017). 33. Problematically for LCT’s narrative of purification, genetic diseases are sometimes enhanced, rather than eliminated, in isolated populations.

References 100% Pure New Zealand. 2012. “Welcome to the Youngest Country on Earth: Forever Young.” YouTube. September 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1kJPMcW1vK8. ———. 2013. “100% Middle-Earth, 100% Pure New Zealand (Extended Edition).” YouTube. August 21, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NhnSsM40loA. Al-Asmakh, Maha, and Fahad Zadjali. 2015. Use of Germ-Free Animal Models in Microbiota-Related Research. Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology 25 (10): 1583–1588. https://doi.org/10.4014/jmb.1501.01039. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anholt, Simon. 1998. Nation-Brands of the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Brand Management 5 (6): 395–406. https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.1998.30. Bakhtin, M.M. 2010. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Bashford, Alison. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Belich, J. 1997. Myth, Race and Identity in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of History 31 (1): 9–22. Bell, Claudia. 1996. Inventing New Zealand: Everyday Myths of Pakeha Identity. Auckland: Penguin Books. Cerny, Philip G. 1997. Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization. Government and Opposition 32 (2): 251–274. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-­7053.1997.tb00161.x. Chance, Jane. 2001. Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Collignon, Peter, and Laura Purdy. 2001. Xenografts: Are the Risks so Great That We Should Not Proceed? Microbes and Infection 3 (4): 341–348. https:// doi.org/10.1016/S1286-­4579(01)01388-­0.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

71

Cook, Peta S. 2006. “Science Stories: Selecting the Source Animal for Xenotransplantation.” In Social Change in the 21st Century Conference, edited by Carly Hall and Chanel Hopkinson. Brisbane, Australia: Centre for Social Change Research, School of Humanities and Human Services, QUT. http:// eprints.qut.edu.au/5977/. Coyle, Fiona, and John Fairweather. 2005. Challenging a Place Myth: New Zealand’s Clean Green Image Meets the Biotechnology Revolution. Area 37 (2): 148–158. Cronon, William. 1996. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. D’arcy, John. 2011. “Guinea Pigs.” Web. Transcript. Sunday Night. Sydney Australia: Seven. https://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-­night/transcripts/a/ 9356738/guinea-­pigs/. David White and Paul Wedel. 2012. The Cleanest Pig. Focus Forward Films. http://vimeo.com/54278405. Department of Conservation. n.d.-a “Introduced Species: New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands.” Accessed July 4, 2014a. http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/land-­and-­freshwater/offshore-­islands/new-­zealands-­subantarctic-­ islands/plants-­and-­animals/introduced-­species/. ———. n.d.-b “Restoring the Auckland Islands: Eradicating Pigs and Cats.” New Zealand’s Subantarctic Islands. Accessed July 4, 2014b. http://www. doc.govt.nz/conservation/land-­a nd-­f reshwater/offshore-­i slands/new-­ zealands-­s ubantarctic-­i slands/auckland-­i slands/restoring-­t he-­a uckland-­ islands/. Van Dooren, Thom. 2011. Invasive Species in Penguin Worlds: An Ethical Taxonomy of Killing for Conservation. Conservation and Society 9 (4): 286–298. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-­4923.92140. ———. 2015. Authentic Crows: Identity, Captivity and Emergent Forms of Life. Theory, Culture & Society 33 (2): 29–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263276415571941. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Dürr, Eveline. 2008. Arcadia in the Antipodes: Tourist’s Reflections on New Zealand as Nature Experience. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 4 (2): 57–82. https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-­vol4iss2id74. Duschinsky, Robbie. 2013. The Politics of Purity: When, Actually, Is Dirt Matter out of Place? Thesis Eleven 119 (1): 63–77. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0725513613511321.

72 

R. Carr

Elliott, Bob. 2012. “This Little Pig Went to Market: Trialling Porcine Cell Transplants.” Issues, 2012. Fan, Bin, Jaime Gongora, Yizhou Chen, Olga Garkavenko, Kui Li, and Chris Moran. 2005. Population Genetic Variability and Origin of Auckland Island Feral Pigs. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 35 (3): 279–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/03014223.2005.9517784. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Franklin, Adrian. 2006. Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia. Sydney, Australia: UNSW Press. Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke University Press. Garkavenko, O., S.  Wynyard, D.  Nathu, and R.  Elliott. 2012. “Developing Xenostandards for Microbiological Safety: New Zealand Experience.” In Xenotransplantation, edited by Shuji Miyagawa. InTech Open Access Books. h t t p : / / w w w. i n t e c h o p e n . c o m / b o o k s / x e n o t r a n s p l a n t a t i o n / developing-­x enostandards-­f or-­m icrobiological-­s afety-­n ew-­z ealand-­ experience. Gensini, Gian Franco, Magdi H.  Yacoub, and Andrea A.  Conti. 2004. The Concept of Quarantine in History: From Plague to SARS. The Journal of Infection 49 (4): 257–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinf.2004.03.002. Gillespie, Kathryn, and Yamini Narayanan. 2020. Animal Nationalisms: Multispecies Cultural Politics, Race, and the (Un)Making of the Settler Nation-State. Journal of Intercultural Studies 41 (January): 1–7. https://doi. org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1704379. Ginn, Franklin. 2008. Extension, Subversion, Containment: Eco-Nationalism and (Post)Colonial Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (3): 335–353. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-­5661.2008.00307.x. Gurevitch, Leon. 2010. 100% Pure Imperial Ecology: Marketing the Environment in Antipodean Film and Advertising. New Zealand Journal of Media Studies 12 (1): 58–78. https://doi.org/10.11157/medianz-­vol12iss1id47. Hall, C.  Michael. 2010. “Tourism Destination Branding and Its Effects on National Branding Strategies: Brand New Zealand, Clean and Green but Is It Smart?” http://iconline.ipleiria.pt/handle/10400.8/427. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

73

Heeney, J.L., A.G. Dalgleish, and R.A. Weiss. 2006. Origins of HIV and the Evolution of Resistance to AIDS. Science 313: 462–466. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1123016. Helleiner, Eric, and Andreas Pickel. 2005. Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hembry, Owen. 2008. “Transplant Approval Is Dream Come True.” New Zealand Herald, October 22, 2008, sec. Business. http://www.nzherald.co. nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10538729. Holm, Nicholas. 2015. Consider the Possum: Foes, Anti-Animals, and Colonists in Paradise. Animal Studies Journal 4 (1): 32–56. HRC Gene Technology Advisory Committee. 2007. “Guidelines for Preparation of Applications Involving Clinical Trials of Xenotransplantation in New Zealand.” http://www.hrc.govt.nz/sites/default/files/GTAC%20 Guidelines%20for%20Preparation%20of%20Applications%20 Involving%20Clinical%20Trials%20of%20Xenotransplantation%20 in%20NZ.pdf. Jessop, Bob. 1993. Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist Political Economy. Studies in Political Economy 40 (1): 7–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/19187033.1993.11675409. Kirk, Robert G.W. 2012a. ‘Standardization through Mechanization’: Germ-­ Free Life and the Engineering of the Ideal Laboratory Animal. Technology and Culture 53 (1): 61–93. ———. 2012b. ‘Life in a Germ-Free World’: Isolating Life from the Laboratory Animal to the Bubble Boy. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86 (2): 237–275. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2012.0028. Lewis, Nick. 2011. Packaging Political Projects in Geographical Imaginaries: The Rise of Nation Branding. In Brands and Branding Geographies, 264–288. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Living Cell Technologies. 2017. “Cells from a Unique Breed of Pigs.” Biotechnology Learning Hub. November 9, 2017. http://www.biotechlearn. org.nz/focus_stories/pig_cell_transplants/video_clips/cells_from_a_unique_ breed_of_pigs/%28size%29/small. Living Cells Technologies. 2009. “LCT`s New Zealand Pigs Free of Viruses.” http://www.lctglobal.com/html/blob.php/090427%20LCT%60s%20 New%20Zealand%20Pigs%20Free%20of%20Viruses_FINAL.pdf?attach= 0&documentCode=3309&elementId=20084.

74 

R. Carr

———. 2010. “Living Cell Technologies: Annual Report 2009-10.” http:// www.lctglobal.com/upload/reports/annual-­reports/LCT%202010%20 Annual%20Report.pdf. Mathijs, Ernest, and Murray Pomerance. 2006. From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi. McLean, Sheila, and Laura Williamson. 2005. Xenotransplantation: Law and Ethics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Merchant, Carolyn. 2013. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. London: Routledge. Ministry for Environment. 2001. “Our Clean Green Image: What’s It Worth?” Wellington, N.Z. https://www.mfe.govt.nz/sites/default/files/clean-­green-­ aug01-­final.pdf. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. 2017. “Key Tourism Statistics.” http://www.mbie.govt.nz/info-­services/sectors-­industries/tourism/documents-­image-­library/key-­tourism-­statistics.pdf. Moore, P.J. 2004. Abundance and Population Trends of Mollymawks on Campbell Island. Wellington, NZ: Department of Conservation. Morgan, Nigel J., Annette Pritchard, and Rachel Piggott. 2003. Destination Branding and the Role of the Stakeholders: The Case of New Zealand. Journal of Vacation Marketing 9 (3): 285. Morgan, Nigel, Annette Pritchard, and Rachel Piggott. 2002. New Zealand, 100% Pure. The Creation of a Powerful Niche Destination Brand. Journal of Brand Management 9 (4/5): 335–354. Morris, Paul, and Deborah Sawyer. 1992. A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Motavalli, Jim. 2003. “Clean and Green: New Zealand Is a Study in Environmental Contrasts.” E: The Environmental Magazine, June 2003. Murray, Dr Mary. 2006. Lazarus [ ], Liminality, and Animality: Xenotransplantation, Zoonosis, and the Space and Place of Humans and Animals in Late Modern Society. Mortality 11 (1): 45–56. https://doi. org/10.1080/13576270500453580. New Zealand AngusPure. n.d. “About AngusPure.” New Zealand AngusPure. http://www.anguspure.co.nz/about.php. Accessed August 21, 2015. New Zealand Dairy Brands Ltd. n.d. “Premium New Zealand Natural Foods.” http://www.nzdairybrands.com/New++Zealand.html. Accessed August 21, 2015.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

75

New Zealand Tourism. n.d. “National Parks in New Zealand: Things to See and Do in New Zealand.” http://www.newzealand.com/int/national-­parks/. Accessed May 22, 2015. New Zealand Tourism Guide. 2017. “New Zealand Nature.” New Zealand Tourism Guide. 2017. http://www.tourism.net.nz/new-­zealand/about-­new-­ zealand/nature.html. New Zealand Trade & Enterprise. n.d. “Meat.” https://www.nzte.govt.nz/en/ buy/our-­sectors/food-­and-­beverage/meat/. Accessed August 21, 2015. Patience, Clive, Yasuhiro Takeuchi, and Robin A.  Weiss. 1997. Infection of Human Cells by an Endogenous Retrovirus of Pigs. Nature Medicine 3 (3): 282–286. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0397-­282. PharmaVentures. 2010. “Living Cell Technologies: New Technologies and Clinical Trials.” PharmaTelevision News Review. January 20, 2010. http:// www.pharmatelevision.com/Video/439-­P aul-­Tan-­L iving-­C ell-­ Technologies.aspx. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Taylor & Francis. Potts, Annie, Philip Armstrong, and Deidre Brown. 2013. A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in Our Culture, History and Everyday Life. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press. Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand. 2014. “Auckland Island Pigs: A Rare Breed of New Zealand Origin.” July 4, 2014. http://www.rarebreeds.co.nz/aucklandpigs.html. Reyniers, J.A., and P.C.  Trexler. 1955. Germfree Research: A Basic Study in Host-Contaminant Relationship. I. General and Theoretical Aspects of the Problem. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 31 (3): 231–235. Reyniers, James A., and Miriam R.  Sacksteder. 1958. The Use of Germfree Animals and Techniques in the Search for Unknown Etiological Agents. Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 73 (1): 344–356. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-­6632.1959.tb40807.x. Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Robins, Judith H., Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, and Howard A. Ross. 2003. The Origins of the Feral Pigs on the Auckland Islands. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 33 (2): 561–569. https://doi.org/10.1080/0301422 3.2003.9517744.

76 

R. Carr

Rosengarten, Marsha. 2001. A Pig’s Tale: Porcine Viruses and Species Boundaries. In Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, ed. Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker. London; New York: Routledge. Seuffert, Nan. 2006. Jurisprudence of National Identity: Kaleidoscopes of Imperialism and Globalisation from Aotearoa New Zealand. Aldershot: Ashgate. Shapiro, Michael. 2017. The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Springer. Sharp, Lesley A. 2011. Imagining Transpecies Kinship in Xenotransplantation. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 8 (1): 12–39. https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-­vol8iss1id149. Shildrick, Margrit. 2002. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Stone, Mathew. 2002. Managing Health Risks during Transfer of Feral Pigs from Auckland Islands to Mainland New Zealand. Surveillance 29 (4): 6–9. Taussig, Karen-Sue. 2004. Bovine Abominations: Genetic Culture and Politics in the Netherlands. Cultural Anthropology; Washington 19 (3): 305–336. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/10.1525/can.2004.19.3.305. Tourism New Zealand. 2009. “Pure as: Celebrating 10 Years of 100% Pure New Zealand.” Wellington, NZ. http://www.tourismnewzealand.com/media/ 1544/pure-­as-­celebrating-­10-­years-­of-­100-­pure-­new-­zealand.pdf. Turbott, E.G. 2002. Year Away: Wartime Coastwatching on the Auckland Islands, 1944. Wellington, NZ: Dept. of Conservation. Turnbaugh, Peter J., Ruth E. Ley, Micah Hamady, Claire Fraser-Liggett, Rob Knight, and Jeffrey I.  Gordon. 2007. The Human Microbiome Project: Exploring the Microbial Part of Ourselves in a Changing World. Nature 449 (7164): 804–810. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06244. UNESCO. n.d. “New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/877. Accessed July 4, 2014. Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. 2002. Cows and Sovereignty: Biopower and Animal Life. Borderlands 1 (2): 1. Waldby, Catherine. 1996. Aids and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge. Wolfe, Nathan D., Claire Panosian Dunavan, and Jared Diamond. 2007. Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases. Nature 447 (7142): 279–283. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1038/nature05775.

2  100% Pure Pigs: New Zealand and the Cultivation of Pure… 

77

Wood, James C., Gary Quinn, Kristen M.  Suling, Beth A.  Oldmixon, Brian A. Van Tine, Robert Cina, Scott Arn, et al. 2004. Identification of Exogenous Forms of Human-Tropic Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus in Miniature Swine. Journal of Virology 78 (5): 2494–2501. https://doi.org/10.1128/ JVI.78.5.2494-­2501.2004. World Health Organisation. 2011. “Second WHO Global Consultation on Regulatory Requirements for Xenotransplantation Clinical Trials.” http:// www.who.int/transplantation/xeno/report2nd_global_consultation_xtx.pdf.

3 Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates in UK Bioethics

The UK xenotransplantation industry suffered an early death. In the mid-1990s, Imutran claimed to be on the verge of human clinical trials of pig organ transplants. The UK government leapt into action to develop a regulatory framework, yet within a few years most funding had been withdrawn from the UK and research relocated overseas. What brought about the rapid end to this period of research in the UK? In the early 2000s, employees at Imutran leaked company documents, which were revealed in an expose, Diaries of Despair, painting a tragic picture of nonhuman primate suffering and death in the research labs (Uncaged n.d.). The expose focused on the baboon research subjects that were receiving pig organ transplants, procedures that were unsettling to the public, activists, and scientists alike.1 Following full exposure of the leaked documents in public, the company shut down its UK operations and relocated elsewhere. Scientists and regulators have suggested that the suffering of baboons made visible in the expose soured public relations and most likely led xenotransplantation companies to look for a more favourable environment in which to pursue their research (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011; Sharp 2013). Alongside the funding exodus, the UK regulatory © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_3

79

80 

R. Carr

framework suffered a subsequent ‘demise’ (McLean and Williamson 2007) as xenotransplantation looked unlikely to fulfil its promise in the UK. The cause of rapid decamping of xenotransplantation companies in the UK was not the concerns about zoonotic disease that I have addressed in this book so far; rather, it was baboon welfare. The same level of concern, however, was not exhibited for pigs from whom the organs were removed. Pigs and primates are subject to stark differences in treatment in xenotransplantation. UK regulation prohibited research with primates as tissue sources, following recommendations of bioethics committees, but ultimately favoured the progress of xenotransplantation clinical trials with pig tissues, under regulatory oversight (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011). This policy is consistent with the overall direction of research ethics since the late 1990s and early 2000s. It has become the norm to accept that neither apes nor their close relatives monkeys are ethically appropriate or valuable as source tissues for xenotransplantation, for several reasons. The International Xenotransplantation Association (IXA), a key international body of xenotransplantation researchers, sets out these considerations clearly: Non-human primates such as baboons have complex social behaviors, and there are many ethical concerns about their use, including the fact that those closest in size to humans are protected species. In addition to these ethical issues, financial and practical problems, relating to the breeding of large numbers of these animals in captivity for use as organ-source animals, and increased safety concerns about viral transmission, which is more likely to occur between closely related species, essentially rule out non-human primates as useable organ sources. (Sykes et al. 2003, 199)

The 1990s ushered in to the xenotransplantation research field what anthropologist Lesley Sharp (2013, 52) has called the “age of the pig”. Current researchers are determined to produce human-compatible pig tissues, for transplantation replacing an earlier focus on research with non-human primate sources (Bailey et  al. 1985; Michaels et  al. 2004; Starzl et al. 1993). In comparison to non-human primates, UK bioethics

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

81

discourses have framed pigs as a relatively uncontroversial source of tissues for humans, in part because they are already a primary food source for many people, and, significantly, because they are deemed less capable of suffering than more human-like primates (Department of Health 1997, 65; Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1996, 52). Unlike monkeys, pigs breed quickly and are available in large numbers. As Sharp notes, the emergence of pigs as the premium source of biocapital in xenotransplantation, replacing non-human primates, has also hinged on the contemporary biotechnological promise to transform their biology: achieving “(re) domestication” through genetic engineering (Sharp 2011, 61). Meanwhile, monkeys, remain only “experimentally valued as human-­ recipient proxies” (Sharp 2011, 60). Current pre-clinical trials usually involve pig transplants into baboons or macaques, and the success of transplantation of the pig tissue into the non-human primates is used as an indication of potential success and compatibility for humans. Different species of non-human animals, then, are not positioned uniformly in xenotransplantation research; they occupy a multiplicity of ethical and biopolitical positions. Fish and mice, in contrast to pigs and non-human primates, do not even appear in the bioethical discourses, although research and development of xenotransplantation technologies has depended on them too.2 As such, a hierarchy of animals (including humans), implying distinct judgements about the harm to which they may be subjected, emerges quite clearly in the practice of xenotransplantation, with radically different outcomes for different species. In what follows, I am interested in this positioning of different species in xenotransplantation research within bioethics discourses, and, subsequently, the kinds of harm to which they are made available. The aim of this chapter is to explore the social context in which these differing positions of species within UK bioethical frameworks make sense. I begin by more fully outlining the positioning of different species in the UK bioethical debates and policy. I then explore two key social contexts that make these contemporary bioethical standpoints on the regulation of xenotransplantation intelligible: ethics and advocacy discourses on non-human animals (particularly non-human primates), and science disciplines which produce knowledge about the sentience, and cognitive and emotional characteristics of non-human animals. I argue

82 

R. Carr

that the current regulation in the UK, which excludes the use of non-­ human primates as tissue sources, while endorsing the use of pigs, is underwritten by a bioethical rationality of utilitarian liberalism. Differences between pigs and monkeys and apes in bioethical reports come to be figured through an exceptionalist positioning of the human and personhood. Through what Roberto Esposito (2012, 92) calls the “dispositif of the person”, they have been made available to different kinds of harm in xenotransplantation research. High-profile accounts of apes, such as The Great Ape Project, have rendered them more human-like, and argued for their case as persons. Animal studies scholars, such as Francione and Weil, have argued that contemporary notions of personhood tend to be anthropocentric; while aiming to extend rights to great apes, the rationality of The Great Ape Project and related liberal bioethics discourses justifies the exclusion of less human-like animals from protection and care (see Gary Lawrence Francione 2008; Weil 2010). As Marie Fox (2005, 158) writes, “The main problem with this tactic is that it fails to destabilize the boundary itself, and runs the risk of entrenching it more firmly, by bringing privileged animals within its moral compass, effectively as honorary humans”. Building on this observation, in this chapter I argue that in xenotransplantation research, pigs are not only excluded from protection but also subject to new forms of harm as a result of the ethical elevation of non-­ human primates. Pigs and non-human primates are not independent but are figured together and their lives are materially co-produced.

 K Xenotransplantation Ethics Discourses U and Regulation The UK has a long history of anti-vivisection movements; it has animal experimentation regulation stretching back to the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 (Murphy 2014), and a reputation for high ethical standards ((Dan Lyons 2016). Fittingly, UK was one of the earliest countries to engage in developing xenotransplantation regulation and has produced some of the most detailed bioethical discourses on non-human animal

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

83

use in xenotransplantation anywhere in the world. In 1996, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a landmark report on ethical issues in xenotransplantation (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1996). This followed a decision by the Secretary of State for Health in 1995 to set up an Advisory Group to “review the acceptability of an ethical framework within which xenotransplantation may be undertaken and to make recommendations” (p. x). In 1996, the advisory group published its own report, Animal Tissues into Humans: A Report by the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation (henceforth the “Kennedy report”), the recommendations of which were accepted by the government in 1997.3 Both reports dealt in some detail with the questions of animal ethics and welfare, and concluded similarly to the International Xenotransplantation Association (above), that it was unethical to use non-human primates as source animals because of the suffering they would endure. However, both also concluded that it was acceptable to use pigs as source animals and non-human primates as recipients in pre-­ clinical research, so long as the number of the non-human primates was minimised. How did they justify this differential treatment of pigs and non-human primates? Informing the report’s conclusions are several assumptions, about both ethical decision making and the value of non-human animals. The reports follow regulation of non-human animal research in the UK more generally by adopting a quasi-utilitarian cost-benefit approach to minimising suffering (Lyons 2016, p.  158), with the implication that non-human animal suffering counts for something in the cost-benefit calculation. While assuming that non-humans can and do suffer, both reports take the position that some suffer more than others. They single out primates as having a higher capacity for suffering than other species, as a result of being most similar to humans: As a first step, we have already indicated that animals vary a great deal in their complexity and presumably in their capacity for suffering. Primates, including chimpanzees and baboons, are at the higher end of this scale, and have close affinities with humans. We consider that these animals can be distinguished from other animals not least by virtue of their greater self-­ awareness and mental capacity. We consider that these features increase

84 

R. Carr

their capacity for suffering, particularly given the conditions under which source animals would be kept in order to ensure proper controls (e.g. Biosecure and isolated accommodation). (Department of Health 1997, 65)

As I will discuss in further detail below, the ranking of different species by their assumed capacity to suffer, evident in the bioethics reports, resonates with the arguments advanced by utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Suffering, in both cases, is linked to specific capacities which are assumed to vary among animals and individuals. The recommendations of the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation hinge on scalar vision of capacity for suffering—viewed as existing on a continuum. As stated in the report: They [non-human animals] have a right to consideration. The extent of this right will vary according to the capacity which the animal has for suffering, and clearly higher primates have greater capacity than lower animals, and human beings have greatest capacity of all. (Department of Health 1997, 64)

On this basis the committee then concluded that “it would be ethically unacceptable to use primates as source animals for xenotransplantation, not least because they would be exposed to too much suffering” (Department of Health 1997, 65). As for pigs, their capacity for suffering and cognition is figured as less significant in relation to possible utilitarian human benefits: While the pig may be exposed to harm, we do not regard it as so unjustifiable as to make the use of the pig unacceptable in principle … The ethical acceptability of the use of the pig then becomes a matter of balancing potential benefits, which we have already outlined, against the harm involved, particularly, in using the pig, and reaching a view … We conclude that the use of the pig for xenotransplantation may be ethically acceptable. (Department of Health 1997, 65–66)

We can see, then, that the British bioethical discourse positions pigs and non-human primates (including apes and monkeys together in one group) quite differently, although it provides no evidence for the

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

85

assumptions that it makes.4 Non-human primates are thought of as complex, thinking, and human-like, and thus extended a degree of protection on this basis. Pigs, on the other hand, are assumed to be less capable of suffering, justifying their exposure to routine harms as source animals.5

Apes, Ethics, and Science How should we interpret the exceptional status that is accorded to non-­ human primates within the category of experimental animals, and why are pigs so routinely relegated to a lower level on the scale of human-like animals? Since the 1970s we have seen the emergence of modern animal rights and welfare movements, often attributed to the influence of Peter Singer. These philosophical debates and activism have frequently centred on nonhuman primates; their claims overlapped with primatological research which has increasingly personalised great apes. Apes have become emblematic of non-humans that feel and think, and they have been extended improved welfare and treatment standards in some research contexts. Primatological accounts have done much to ennoble the great apes. For example, Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees in Gombe, since 1960, foregrounded their social complexity and individual personalities, as she detailed her personal relationships with the community of chimpanzees (Goodall 2000). She was the first to document chimpanzees making and using tools, at the time challenging one of the perceived essential differences between humans and other animals. Similarly, Dian Fossey and Birutė Galdikas’ personal accounts of gorillas and orangutans highlighted their social complexity, and emotional and cognitive capacities. More recently, Frans de Waal has published several accessible and widely read accounts of the social lives of chimpanzees and bonobos living in research institutions, which illustrate their aptitude for planning, strategy, problem solving, empathy, and “pre-morality” (de Waal 1982, 1996, 2006).6 De Waal continues the tradition pioneered by Goodall and other, mainly female, primatologists, of writing about apes as individuals with personality, intentions, and emotions.7 Beginning in the 1930s, ape enculturation projects have run alongside primatology. These projects have challenged the boundaries between

86 

R. Carr

humans and animals by raising apes as humans, often in human homes or home-like settings, and, in a number of cases, successfully teaching them sign language. These researchers demonstrated that apes could learn language, undermining another constructed border between humans and animals. Enculturation projects also provided opportunities to investigate and demonstrate ape sentience, rationality, and a range of emotions and behavioural potentialities.8 In recent years, these research developments have coincided with changes in the social and legal status of apes. The Great Ape Project, for example, is a high-profile civil organisation that seeks the inclusion of apes within the “community of equals”: a community that, they argue, is governed by basic moral principles and rights, including the right to life, protection of individual liberty, and prohibition of torture (Cavalieri and Singer 1993, 4). The project has arguably been very successful in bringing the plight of apes to public attention and arguing their case for better welfare and protections (Oliver 2010, 35).9 Similarly, in the United States, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) has sought (but failed to gain) habeas corpus writs for four chimpanzees since 2000 (Nonhuman Rights Project n.d.) which, had they been accepted, would have by default recognised chimpanzees as legal persons. In Argentina one chimpanzee has been freed from captivity through a claim to habeas corpus (Pedro A. Ynterian 2017).10 Such projects to improve the rights and welfare of apes routinely hinge on the notion that apes are persons who should therefore be recognised as legal persons, based on the evolutionary closeness to humans and human-likeness, illustrated in a range of (human-like) characteristics thought critical to personhood. As I will discuss below, The Great Ape Project regularly deploys stories of encultured sign-language-using apes to point to capacities in great apes that are critical to bioethical notions of personhood and suffering. Despite the lack of success in efforts to claim legal rights or personhood for apes, many countries have now banned or strictly limited research on great apes.11 While monkeys (and occasionally apes) are still used in medical research, non-human primates and especially great apes now tend to attract special welfare policies in scientific research (see for example Medical Research Council 2017). Some other species such as

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

87

dogs and those that are native or endangered are also frequently singled out for protection. Most other species are lumped together under basic tenets of welfare in research (the three Rs in the UK—replacement, reduction, and refinement). As a consequence, it is unlikely that apes would ever be used as xenotransplantation source animals or as clinical trial subjects (recipients of pig tissues). The Old-World Monkeys, including baboons, macaques, and colobuses, are the evolutionary closest primates to apes and are often used in research because they not as protected as apes. It is these species that have been considered for xenotransplantation research. However, monkeys too have benefitted from the moral elevation of great apes, and increasing protection, evidenced in the UK Kennedy report (above), which insists on a higher standard of treatment for all non-human primates in question, and excuses them from use as tissue sources. Pigs, however, do not seem to have benefitted yet from shifts in public opinion. The recent changes in the treatment and perception of apes and other non-human primates sit at the intersection of animal sciences (including ethology and lab-based sciences) and animal ethics and welfare movements.12 In what follows, I examine the philosophy of non-human animal ethics and welfare, by focusing on Peter Singer’s work from the 1990s. As well as being one of the most influential bioethicists addressing non-human animal lives, Singer’s work is indicative of a particular type of liberal-utilitarian rationality that dominates contemporary bioethical thinking and regulation (Esposito 2012). I then turn to the limited field of pig behavioural and cognitive science, to compare the scientific construction of pigs, as (non)persons, to that of primates. These fields, I argue, construct non-human primates, especially apes, but also baboons and macaques, as more worthy of respect than pigs.

Liberal Bioethics and Non-human Animals Peter Singer is often held up as one of contemporary society’s most eminent defenders of non-human animals. He is reputed to be the “father” of modern animal welfare movements. His various works, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, present the case for non-human

88 

R. Carr

animal inclusion in utilitarian ethical practices. Singer invokes Jeremy Bentham, one of utilitarianisms earliest proponents, with the principle of “equal consideration”. The maxim of “equal consideration” demands that each individual in the community should count equally and pain should be distributed so as to minimise overall suffering and to increase the overall amount of pleasure within the community.13 As Bentham himself presages, Singer’s work attempts to extend equal consideration to sentient non-human animals. Unlike many philosophers, Singer begins from the position that at least some non-human animals feel pain and other kinds of suffering, as well as pleasure. In the 1990s, Singer’s takes on a “preference utilitarianism” concerned with maximising the satisfaction of interests and minimising the frustration of interests of those in the population under consideration. “Interests” might refer to carrying out complex future plans or simply the embodied experience of pleasure and avoiding pain.14 All sentient beings, he argued, have interests, underwritten by the capacity to feel pain and pleasure (Singer 1993, 57). Following a utilitarian calculus, moral decisions require “weigh[ing] up all these interests and adopt[ing] the course of action most likely to maximise the interests of those affected” (Singer 1993, 13).15 However, and this is the catch: according to Singer, treatment should vary for different individuals because not all sentient beings have the same kinds of interests or an equal capacity to have interests. As such not all animals are equal. In the contemporary biopolitical moment, characterised by the imperative to cultivate life, a key question in bioethics has become: What are the conditions in which life can be killed? To address the ethics of killing, Singer makes a key distinction between different kinds of beings: persons and non-persons. He defines persons as “rational and self-conscious beings, aware of themselves as distinct entities with a past and a future” (Singer 1993, pp. 110–111). For such beings, he argues, killing them creates a frustration of future interests (Singer 1993, 84).16 On the other hand, from Singer’s perspective, killing non-persons do not produce this particular form of future suffering. The utility of killing, then, is determined at least partly on the basis of speculative future interests which otherwise might have been met. In Singer’s corpus, personhood becomes the criterion that determines how one is accounted for within the

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

89

utilitarian calculus of suffering. According to Singer (1993), personhood is not defined by human-ness, but by each individual’s capacity for self-­ awareness, sense of past and future, and reasoning. Some non-humans may be persons, he argues, if they have these qualities; and similarly, some humans may not be persons, if they lack these capacities. Singer routinely invokes apes as the model non-human animals that can be persons. Washoe, a chimpanzee who has learnt sign language, provides evidence that other animals can be self-aware: “Washoe does not hesitate, when shown her own image in a mirror and asked ‘Who is that?’ to reply ‘Me, Washoe’ ” (Singer 1993, 111). Similarly, signing apes are deployed to convince the reader that non-human animals might also maintain a sense of identity that is continuous through time; being able to plan for the future and remember the past (Singer 1993, 112). He cites an example from The Great Ape Project in which Tatu, a chimpanzee who has learned sign language, seems to remember and anticipate Christmas.17 Singer draws on the anecdotes of chimpanzees observed in research facilities and semi-natural conditions, reported by Franz de Waal and Jane Goodall, who solve problems, co-operate to achieve goals, deceive others, and plan ahead (Singer 1993, 114–17). From these and other anecdotes mainly about apes, Singer argues that non-humans can have the qualities required to be considered persons. “Great apes”, he suggests, “may be the clearest cases of non-human persons, but there are almost certainly others” (Singer 1993, 118).18 Notably, in the 2011 edition of his book, Singer includes pigs among those who probably have the requisite capacities for personhood. While Singer’s objective is to demonstrate that other species are worthy of consideration in utilitarian calculations, he ranks species by their assumed capacity to experience suffering, and through the figure of the “person”. Together with the utilitarian desire to economise suffering, this opens up the possibility that the suffering of one species might be exchanged for that of another in the name of reducing net suffering.19 One might notice that utilitarianism deals with security, the aggregate wellbeing of populations, rather than individuals. Indeed, Foucault argues that utilitarianism and political economy were two sides of the new governmental reason established in the nineteenth century, united in their concern with the “complex interplay between collective and

90 

R. Carr

individual interests” (Foucault 2008, 44). However, as I will argue below, Singer’s utilitarianism is also intimately tied to sovereign power. For Singer, personhood is not a binary category: it is not the case that one simply is or isn’t a person—one may also have a greater or a lesser degree of the qualities required for personhood. He imagines personhood on a continuum: with varying levels or intensity. An individual’s position on the continuum depends on the degree to which they possess the relevant cognitive capacities, and is dynamic throughout their life.20 Singer thus imagines a scale of individuals, human and non-human, who are ranked by the degree to which they have capacities he deems necessary for personhood (and suffering). These living beings are rendered as an intensity of personhood. The level or intensity of personhood attributed to each individual or species, in this account, makes them available for different kinds of harm or death. Within a utilitarian calculus, each individual’s suffering is morally interdependent because of the principle that suffering should be distributed across the community in such a way that it minimises overall suffering. By which I mean, causing harm to one individual is not an independently wrong or right (as it would be in a rights/sovereign perspective), but will be dependent on the effect on the others in the situation. Contemporary bioethics tries to distribute harm across animals with varying capacities in order to minimise (ostensibly at least) the suffering experienced. In medical research this is sometimes practically achieved by shifting painful experiences onto those who are apparently less able to experience pain. The three Rs (Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement), a guiding principle of non-human animal research ethics, embed this concept in policy in the UK (NC3Rs n.d.). We can see this logic in Singer’s own discussion of xenotransplantation: Suppose that we need a heart for a child who is, apart from the heart defect, healthy and much loved by her parents. … Suppose it is a question of killing a baboon and taking her heart, or allowing the child to die? … As I have already suggested, it is not speciesist to prefer the life of a being who is self-aware, and sees herself as existing over time, and who is capable of having complex future desires, to the life of a being who lacks these capacities. And it may be that a child does have these capacities and a baboon

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

91

does not, or does not have them to nearly as high a degree. It may also be true that the family of the child will suffer more intensely and for a longer period if she dies than any of the baboon’s family will suffer if it dies. So considering the hypothetical choice from this perspective alone, it seems defensible to kill the baboon to save the child. (Singer 1999, 417; my emphasis)

Although in the end Singer does not condone xenotransplantation because he feels it may further entrench human exploitation of non-­ human animals as mere resources (Singer 1999, 417), the quoted passage reveals a sacrificial logic. A life from one species may be sacrificed for another, if their degree of personhood is lower. The UK’s Kennedy report also points to such an imaginary scale of capacity for suffering, which dictates how to treat various animals in xenotransplantation research. The report contends that level of “consideration” an animal deserves depends on the “capacity which the animal has for suffering” (Department of Health 1997, 64). Non-human primates are higher up on this scale because of their human-likeness and “their greater capacity for self-awareness and mental capacity” (Department of Health 1997, xi). Pigs are assumed to be far lower down the scale: While unquestionably intelligent and sociable animals, there is less evidence that pigs share capacities with human beings to the extent that primates do. As such, the adverse effects suffered by the pigs used to supply organs for xenotransplantation would not outweigh the potential benefits to human beings. (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1996, 52)

This passage indicates the human-centrism in the notion of capacity for suffering: sharing “capacities” with humans is deemed necessary for the ability to suffer. How bioethicists decide whether other species suffer, or if they have self-awareness, sense of existence through time and rationality? Putting aside for a moment that valuing these particular qualities may exhibit a human-centric, indeed, a colonial-white-male-able-bodied, perspective.21 Singer’s argument (like the Kennedy report) draws on scientific research

92 

R. Carr

to identify the capacities of particular animals and position them on a continuum of ethical treatment. However, Singer (1993) himself admits that apes have benefitted from far more research than other creatures (p.  118). Mainstream animal science tends to generate and support a hierarchy of animals, and bioethical reasoning draws on this already hierarchical research for evidence of animal capacities.22

Pigs, Personhood, and Knowledge Practices Scientific engagement with pigs has taken a quite different course to primatology, unsurprisingly, given the different historical relationships humans have had with pigs. Research enquiring into the minds of pigs, and their social and emotional behaviour, usually occurs within an agricultural context in which the aim is to improve the production of pork and other products for human consumption. Laboratory research on pig cognition, for example, has largely been directed at managing behaviour and outcomes in intensive farming, in order to improve and sustain the agricultural industry (Marino and Colvin 2015).23 This research contexts is not likely to prioritise revealing pig personhood. Nonetheless, researchers have published some interesting findings about pigs and their cognitive, emotional, and social attributes. Some of this work has been developed only since the 2000s, after the period of xenotransplantation bioethical discourse I have mapped above. My purpose here is to lay out some of the findings that suggest that pigs, too, are self-aware, thinking, beings; and to point to the differences in how pigs and non-human primates (especially apes) are constructed in scientific research.

Thinking and Language Pigs are increasingly reported to be intelligent. Research has shown that they learn quickly to do tasks, are good at navigating mazes and remembering the where and how much food is stored in different places (S. Held et al. 2005; Mendl et al. 1997). Not surprisingly, they are able to tell the difference between different objects, and can discriminate between

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

93

humans and distinguish individual pigs on the basis of both sight and smell (McLeman et  al. 2008; Mendl et  al. 2002; Tanida and Nagano 1998). There is evidence to suggest that each pig has their own voice, identifiable by others (Illmann et al. 2002). Pigs even demonstrate some linguistic potential. In one study, researchers showed that Vietnamese potbellied pigs learnt to respond correctly to their handler asking them with words, or gestures, to do set tasks. The handler would ask them, for example, to collect a particular object: frisbee, ball, or dumbbell; or perform the particular action: sit, fetch, or jump. Responding to these linguistic requests correctly means that the pigs mentally created a symbolic representation of these objects and actions (Cerbulis 1994). They also succeeded in what is called a “three-­ object, one action combination” task. In this complicated sounding challenge, they also respond correctly to the handler’s instructions made with words or gestures. However, in this test they need to apply the correct action to the correct object. For example, they might be asked to fetch the ball, or sit next to the frisbee, or jump over the dumbbell, while ignoring the other objects or possible actions. Marino and Colvin (2015 n.p.) argue that success in this latter task points to them having learnt the beginnings of symbolic language.

Self-awareness In the 1960s psychologist Gordon Gallup questioned the long-held assumption that self-awareness is a purely human attribute, and conducted a series of experiments to see whether other animals were also self-aware. His assessment method, called the mirror test, has become the standard test for self-awareness. To pass the test, an individual needs to notice a coloured dot (painted on them while asleep) in a mirror image, and then search for it or rub it off on her actual body, indicating she comprehends that the image in the mirror represents her own self. Individuals from each of the ape species have passed the mirror test—so too have some dolphins, elephants, and birds (Anderson and Gallup Jr 1999; Plotnik et al. 2006; Reiss and Marino 2001). Signing apes have gone further, identifying themselves in the mirror using personal

94 

R. Carr

pronouns (Patterson and Gordon 1993, 73), and demonstrating embarrassment, self-reflection, and lying—all of which paint a rich understanding of self-awareness (Patterson and Gordon 1993). Pigs have not passed the mirror test. However, pigs also don’t treat a mirror as a glass pane with objects on the other side. In front of a mirror, some pigs make “weaving movements” (Broom et al. 2009, 1039), such as moving forwards and backwards, and approaching from different angles. Marino and Colvin (2015) propose that they may be trying to assess whether it is themselves they see in the mirror, especially given that these movements are similar to those made by other species that have passed the mirror test. Pigs also interpreted mirror images to find items that were otherwise out of sight, hidden behind a barrier (Broom et al. 2009). These findings suggest that pigs very likely do recognise themselves in the mirrors, but are just not very interested in coloured dots.24 Marino and Colvin (2015) propose that pigs demonstrate self-­ awareness in their success (and apparent enjoyment) of playing computer games. Researchers record them engaging repeatedly a game in which they must move a cursor around on the screen to land in a target. Pigs manipulate the joystick with their mouth to move the cursor on the screen, and are rewarded with a treat when successful.25 Marino and Colvin (2015) argue the pigs must have a sense of self agency in order to understand that when I move the joystick, the dot on the screen moves (p. 12). Self-agency implies the existence of that self-concept crucial to Singer’s personhood. Other researchers provide evidence that pigs have an awareness of the perspective of others: what is known as a “theory of mind”. A series of experiments performed by Held and colleagues assessed how pigs relate to each other when they have differing sets of knowledge about where food is stored (Suzanne Held et al. 2000, 2002). In these experiments, two pigs entered a room in which there are several upside-down buckets. Under one bucket is a stash of food, but only one pig knows where. The second pig however, is larger than the first. Although the larger and “ignorant” pig initially searches random buckets looking for food, after several rounds she begins instead to follow the “informed” pig, and push her aside after the more knowledgeable pig has led her to the food. In short, the ignorant pig realises that the other had some knowledge that she

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

95

herself does not. This means she imputed a mental state (knowledge) to her competitor: she has a theory about what is going on in the mind of the other pig. This “theory of mind” (Premack and Woodruff 1978) is held as one of the standard indicators of self-awareness. Furthermore, after being pushed aside multiple times, the smaller, informed, pig changed her behaviour too: instead of going straight for the food bucket, she instead began to weave around miscellaneously, seemingly to try to deceive the larger pig, and went towards the food only when the larger pig was further away. Deception, it is generally understood within the theory of mind discipline, also indicates having a sense of another’s perspective. One can only deceive another if one realises that others have limited sets of knowledge from which they work; this capacity relies on awareness of one’s own self (Mendl et al. 2010). These experiments, then, also present evidence that pigs may have that all important sense of self.

Episodic Memory Psychologists have claimed that humans alone are capable of what is dubbed “mental time travel”: mentally recalling or reliving past events, or imagining and anticipating future experiences or states (Suddendorf and Corballis 1997). From this human exceptionalist perspective, other animals are only capable of semantic memory: remembering reduced information about an event: for example, remembering only the location of a bone they had buried, rather than the full event in which they found a bone and dug a hole. Although other species clearly engage in future-­ directed activities such as nest-building and migration, these are cast as biological drives or “instincts”, not conscious planning efforts since they do not, apparently, involve mental time travel, thinking about or imagining a future. This assumption repeats a questionable hierarchical distinction, allocating the ability to act or respond to humans alone, and to other animals only the ability to “react” through instinct (Derrida 2003; D.  Haraway 2008).26 Such reductive accounts of non-human animal experience serve to justify their treatment in agricultural practices because, in this perspective, they do not anticipate or relive past suffering, or have attachments to future events and existence.

96 

R. Carr

Clayton, Bussey, and Dickinson argue that it is virtually impossible to “demonstrate episodic memory in non-human animals, because they cannot speak, and there are no agreed non-linguistic behavioural markers of conscious experience” (Clayton et  al. 2003, 21; my emphasis). The concept of episodic memory is constructed (by humans) in such a way that it is exceedingly difficult for non-humans to demonstrate. Linguistic apes provide one exception to the usual challenge (Clayton et al. 2003, 686), as depicted in the example used by Singer above. By asking about the “CANDY TREE” (Christmas tree), the chimpanzee Tatu seems to be able to communicate to researchers, through sign language, that her mind was reviewing past events and anticipating what will happen next. Researchers have, nonetheless, made some progress in demonstrating episodic memory in experimental conditions with apes, scrub jays, meadow voles, zebra-fish, and pigs (Hamilton et al. 2016; Kouwenberg et al. 2009). As Clayton and colleagues hint, however, the methodologies researchers have arrived at have been complicated (Clayton et al. 2003). Kouwenberg and colleagues, for instance, tested whether pigs could remember the context in which an event occurred, as this would indicate they had full memory of an event rather than only part of the information (Kouwenberg et al. 2009). In their experiment, pigs were given time to explore anchors, baskets, and balls chained to the floor, either at the front of the room or at the back of the room. They found that the pigs spent more time playing with objects if they were in a new room, even if they had encountered the same object before in another room, or in a different location in the same room. Given that pigs tend to be more interested in new experiences and explore unfamiliar over familiar objects, this meant the pigs had remembered the full context of their last encounter with the object. While these experiment results seemed to suggest that pigs had “episodic” memory, the complexity of the experiment does not inspire a vision of a pig as a person-like.

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

97

 uman Exceptionalism, Persons, H and Laboratory Research All these examples point to the possibility that pigs might have some of the qualities that liberal bioethical discourses value and link to personhood. Published research also paints a starkly less person-like picture of pigs than the primates constructed in the ape enculturation projects and the work of primatologists. For Singer, the examples in The Great Ape Project mean that Koko, Chantek, Washoe, and Tatu have the inherent qualities necessary for personhood. The Great Ape Project presents encultured apes as effectively communicating a complex inner world of thought, of self-identity, reasoning, memory, emotion, deception, and self-reflection.27 They have ostensibly revealed their inner persons through speaking. However, personhood is best understood not as an individual characteristic, but as a performatively enacted in interaction.28 Following Karen Barad (Barad 2003) and Vinciane Despret (Despret 2004), we might argue that in these projects apes and humans produce or performatively enact a particular form of human-like ape personhood.29 I should be clear here that I do not want to suggest that apes are not persons, but personhood, as understood in bioethics, is produced by and with humans, rather than pre-existing within an individual. This is true for humans and other animals. Important here has been the willingness of the researchers to “authorise” apes to become persons, to use Despret’s (2004) term. Humans had to provide the apes with the material and emotional context in which they could perform in human-like ways. Further, demonstrating personhood in these settings has involved allocating huge resources, including labs for raising apes and students and researchers funded to look after them. Many thousands of hours of work have gone into ennobling apes (D. J. Haraway 1989).30 In comparison to non-human primates, few resources are directed to pig research apart from in agricultural science contexts. In contrast to some scientific engagements with non-human primates, the lab science genre of writing and scientific academic practice, dominant in research

98 

R. Carr

about pigs, deliberately strives to provide “objective” (or objectifying) accounts. As Eileen Crist observes: “The epistemological constitution of animals as objects is agnostic and often inimical toward the idea that animals have an experiential perspective” (Crist 2010). It is sometimes difficult to make sense of the experiments on pig cognition and, quite deliberately, as “objective” accounts they do not represent pigs as having layers of intention, emotion, or personality. However, apes have typically only been authorised as persons insofar as they exhibit human-like characteristics. Their personhood is often illustrated in examples of in which they behave in especially human-like ways, such as playing with dolls, mirrors, and engaging in Christmas celebrations. As Francione writes: “Efforts like GAP … are problematic because they suggest that a certain species of non-humans is ‘special’ based on similarity to humans. That does not challenge the speciesist hierarchy—it reinforces it” (Gary L. Francione 2006). Infantilising portrayals of apes as human children frame them as less sophisticated, and ultimately subordinate to (most) human beings. This human-centric framework promotes seeing other, less human-like animals, such as pigs, fish, or mice, as even more inferior. Within this imaginary, other animals can only ever hope to find a place further down the hierarchy. In this anthropocentric framework, apes’ human-like hands are crucial, for example, in demonstrating thought. Hands are also necessary for touching, dressing, holding, and playing with objects like dolls, and for performing other human-like actions. Pigs’ lack of fingers and a human-­ like body mean that even if pigs exhibit the same level of understanding, their embodiment and movement, possibilities of action, create a different impression. Dressing dolls, and, of course, communicating with human sign language are simply not possible for pigs. Research on other apes may also frequently fail to validate the aspects of their being that are not human-like. Conducting research on the assumption that apes are “hairier, stronger versions of human children” (Andrews and Gruen 2014) limits the visibility of other capacities. Tom Tyler (2009) argues that “by focusing on that which the animal shares with the human we are in danger of missing all that is peculiar and proper to it” (16). As animal scholars have noted, each species likely evolves skills differently within its own social-material environment and distinctive

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

99

embodiment (see for example White 2007). Accordingly, pig sentience, rationality, emotion, or social complexity may manifest in different ways to humans and other primates. To understand pig reasoning or self-awareness, it might be important, for instance, to take account of the fact that olfactory perception is their strongest sense. In keeping with this primacy of smell, pigs tend to produce masses of scents from multiple glands in and around the hooves, forelimbs, body, chin, mouth, tusks, teeth, and eyes—which they use for various forms of communication (Watson 2004, 70–71). Unlike humans, for whom the hands and eyes are the primary means of negotiating the world, ethologist and anthropologist Lyall Watson writes that for pigs the snout is the most sensitive, articulate, and communicative part of the body: “[t]he snout is at the same time arm, hand, spade and primary sense organ: a probe that makes it possible to travel, feed, drink and interact with others, even in the dark” (Watson 2004, 67). Pig sense of self and other characteristics are likely to be shaped by this specific embodiment and olfactory dominance, among other things. Their articulation and communication may revolve around smells, grunts, snout movements, and facial expressions that we do not easily interpret or even perceive. Our own embodiment, in other words, fundamentally limits our understanding of pigs and their abilities. This matters if, as I have suggested above, the concept of non-human personhood is structured in terms of human-likeness, as it is in the liberal bioethical reasoning that has informed xenotransplantation regulation. In contrast to the reductive accounts of pigs in cognitive science, Watson’s popular science book The Whole Hog (2004) provides a rich and lively account of pigs. Watson argues that a sounder (a group of pigs) in non-domestic conditions has a communal identity that is maintained via multiple modes of communication: olfaction, sight, sound. The members of a sounder keep in constant contact as they move across the land via grunts and smells that they disperse liberally. As he explains: Pig society is smell-bound. Almost everything pigs do is determined in some way by odour. Scent-marking and scent reading help to define these limits and to cement social communication … The fact is that pigs are not really territorial at all, but they operate movable home ranges, shifting

100 

R. Carr

these as they adapt to the seasons. They are generous with their secretions for a different reason, one that has more to do with identity than property. They are protecting themselves, rather than their surroundings, finding security in society instead of territory, laying down olfactory perimeters that are flexible. (Watson 2004, 69)

And, as suggested by Watson, a pig’s sense of identity and self within a pig social body might be imagined or experienced through smell as much as sight, or via a combination of senses. Ape enculturation projects have portrayed chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas not only as thinking beings, but also as having a complex social and emotional existence, along human lines. The same cannot be said for pigs in most pig research.31 Furthermore, taking primates as a benchmark of personhood, based on their human-likeness, makes it difficult to construct pigs as similarly person-like. Pig personhood, self-­ awareness, and rationality would inevitably be demonstrated in less human ways, if only because they are differently embodied to humans and other apes.

Xenotransplantation and Liberal Bioethics Liberal bioethics discourses and endeavours like The Great Ape Project generate a hierarchical imaginary of species through the apparatus of the person. Rather than producing a binary classification of persons and non-­ persons, these discourses imagine a continuous scale of animals (including humans), each with varying levels of personhood. Liberal bioethics brings these intensities of personhood into a utilitarian calculus of suffering that justifies the substitution of some species’ suffering for that of others. The Nuffield report claims that there is “less evidence” that pigs have “human-like” capacities, and thus, pigs have a lower capacity for suffering. As I have shown, however, the “evidence” relating to each species is incommensurable (and was even less so in the 1990s when the discussion occurred). Given the very kinds of scientific and activist engagement with pigs and primates there is little to warrant the ethical hierarchy assumed

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

101

in the Nuffield and Kennedy reports. The presumption that other animals should “share capacities with human beings” indicates the “human exceptionalism” (D. Haraway 2008, 11) at work in these xenotransplantation ethics frameworks. Bioethics discourses pertaining to xenotransplantation sustain a hierarchy of non-human animal personhood constructed not out of essential differences but rather from epistemic inequalities and human centrism. The Kennedy report, and less explicitly the IOM report, both situate suffering at the centre of ethical treatment; and ostensibly balance the benefit versus cost (harm), over an aggregate of individuals from different species. For instance, the UK Advisory Group stated that their aim was to “identify the benefits which xenotransplantation could bring and to weigh them against the possible harms, whether to animals, patients or the wider population” (p. x).32 In the calculus of suffering, as it was applied by the Advisory group, different species were allocated a different values because of their different status on the scale of capacity for suffering—which, as I have argued, is implicitly based on human-likeness. In their utilitarian analysis, the Advisory Group found that it was ethically justifiable to kill and harm many pigs to save or improve a single human life. This would be the case with cellular transplants for diabetes that require at least six piglets for one human transplant, not to mention those necessary for research. In contrast, they found that it was justifiable to harm and kill non-human primates only if it would benefit many humans. For example, they decided researchers could acceptably utilise primates as transplant recipients in preclinical trials, because in this role a single non-­ human primate might benefit more than one human. If non-human primates were developed as a source for tissues or organs, each primate would only benefit “one or at best a very small number of humans” (p. xi), in that case the benefit would be outweighed by the cost of primate suffering. Hence, in this imaginary, a primate life is not exchangeable for a single human life but is able to be sacrificed for the benefit of many human lives. The ethical calculus used in the UK bioethical discourses binds together the fate of primates and pigs even as it differentiates them. Their position in a species hierarchy imaginary are also positions in a sacrificial hierarchy. Pigs are implicitly compared to primates in attempts to understand

102 

R. Carr

how person-like they are and how much they can suffer. Their fate is entangled with that of primates within the utilitarian calculus of suffering. If there is change in our understanding of how much animals of one species suffer, within a utilitarian logic this entails a new distribution of suffering, with the option that pain can be shifted onto those considered to be lower down in the constructed scale. We can see that as bioethical discourse has elevated primate suffering, harmful research has been redistributed onto others. Although primates were initially conceived as ideal organ sources in xenotransplantation because of their closeness to humans, they are now partially protected because of ethical considerations arising precisely from that closeness (along with related issues of infection) and pigs are targeted as source animals instead.33 The shift from primates to pigs reflects in practice the relationality of utilitarian thinking, as it intersects with a hierarchical scale of personhood. The attribution of partial personhood to primates has a flow-on effect in the treatment of others, opening them up to new forms of exploitation and harm as substitutes for primates.34 Thus, in the context of xenotransplantation, knowledge practices and their differences in producing knowledge about non-human animal cognition (as or as not persons) have very real material, harmful implications. Here bioethical rationalities and discourses on animal personhood serve to make pigs available to humans as a source of tissues, while at the same time providing a partial protection to non-human primates.

 overeignty, Biopolitics, and the Apparatus S of the Person How is it that the concept of personhood is so embroiled in the death and harm of non-human animals? For Roberto Esposito (2012, 92), the concept of personhood, in Singer’s bioethics, enacts both a personalisation and depersonalisation of the individual human in one move: in the process of identifying personhood with the rational and self-aware part of existence, the body of an individual is rendered a mere thing. The biopolitical apparatus of the person, Esposito argues, cleaves the individual into two parts: the “thing” and “person”.35 In in contemporary liberal

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

103

bioethical imagination, the extra layer of self-awareness is portrayed as dynamic throughout the life of a human being and under different circumstances. For example, personhood, on this account, does not yet exist in the embryo, inevitably wanes in old age, and disappears in the event of brain death. Consequently, every human being is vulnerable to the possibility of becoming a mere thing that can be put to death, reactivating the sovereign power to kill, Esposito argues, with the apparatus of the person. Less discussed by Esposito, however, Singer also extends the potential for personhood to those historically rendered as things—non-human species. Yet, if bioethics enacts an increasing personness for some non-­ humans this apparatus of personhood retains the internal split Esposito observes. The potential inclusion of some non-humans as persons also reaffirms that others who lack, or have too thin, a layer of personhood are available for death and use for others. From a regulatory and legal perspective, while some non-humans are recognised as person-like none are yet held to be full persons (as discussed above, not even apes), contra Singer’s claim. For Singer, and the xenotransplantation bioethics committees, the variation in person-likeness is the variable according to which suffering is to be distributed. If the depth of self-awareness and rationality of one animal is perceived as shallower than another animal then they may be substituted for the latter into harmful situations to reduce overall suffering. The allocation of non-human animals to different roles in xenotransplantation, then, combines both the sovereign distinction within each individual and between species allowing some life to be sacrificed for the biopolitical drive to increase speculative overall wellbeing/life (by increasing the wellbeing of those that suffer more). Human relationships with non-human animals, Dinesh Wadiwel (2015) argues, have been characterised by humans holding sovereignty, domination, over non-humans; or, exclusion of non-human animals from political life, as “bare life” (Agamben 1998). However, non-humans are also enrolled in biopolitical relations, among other places, in agriculture, ecology, veterinary practice, and the zoo (see for example Blue and Rock 2011; Matthew Chrulew 2011; Shukin 2009). As Matthew Chrulew writes, “whether profiting from flesh or protecting biodiversity,

104 

R. Carr

it is through the knowledge of species-specific capacities, behaviours and modes of experience, through communicating with animals as sentient and responsive beings, that power over animals is most effectively enabled. In factory farming not only the bodies but the personalities, emotional states and behavioural traits of animals are measured to maximise both productivity and ‘welfare’ ” (Chrulew and Wadiwel 2016, 234). As others have observed, biopolitical processes can also kill in the name of improving life and (securing) populations (see Foucault’s discussion of racism for example [Foucault and Ewald 2003, 256]). Furthermore, as Agamben (1998, 123) points to, it is in the space of “bare life” that biopolitics acts in its most “absolute” and brutal form. When excluded from protection (as non-persons), non-human animals may be given over completely to utility—to the cultivation or perfection of life itself, or to the maximisation of biovalue, at the expense of individual wellbeing. On the one hand, we could see the utilitarianism expressed in Singer’s philosophy and animal welfare regulation in the UK as a biopolitical apparatus that challenges human sovereignty over non-human animals, by taking account of non-human interests. On the other hand, this form of utilitarianism exposes non-humans to a calculations of utility for aggregate populations, while systematically undermining some animal’s interests in those outcomes being recognised. As Esposito identifies, the apparatus of the person, in bioethics, has become a “deciding machine” enabling life to be put to death. This decision avails some forms of life to extreme forms of bio/thanatopolitics. Accordingly, here sovereignty and biopolitics work hand in hand to make xenotransplantation possible.

Conclusion In the bioethical framework for xenotransplantation in the UK, different species are assumed to have a capacity to suffer relational to their person-­ likeness, which justifies making them available to different kinds of harm. I have argued in this chapter that the construction of non-human

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

105

primates in primatological research and animal ethics discourses influences the way that other (non-primate) species are positioned in bioethical calculations. Signing apes figure as persons, in Peter Singer’s work, some primatology research, and The Great Ape Project. In other words they are constructed as “rational and self-conscious beings, aware of themselves as distinct entities with a past and a future” (Singer 1993, 110–11). While these discourses, and others, have contributed to improved welfare for apes and also for other non-human primate species (including baboons), they may have further entrenched a view that suffering depends on human-likeness. Meanwhile, other non-human animals that are less human-like, particularly pigs, are rarely constructed as persons in research and activism, despite the fact that they may well be sentient and rational beings with a sense of identity. Their different bodies and phenomenology likely inhibit human potential and willingness to construct them as persons. Engagements with pigs and non-human primates in scientific research predetermine their possibilities for exhibiting personhood yet are fundamentally incommensurable. These unequal epistemological engagements with pigs and non-human primates accordingly influence their exposure to harm/utility in medical research.36 We might more productively think about the apparatus of the person, as it functions in the UK bioethics discourses and regulation, then, as a biopolitical and sovereign apparatus for deciding who will live and who will die in the name of cultivating life.37 Because of the underlying relationality of utilitarian concepts (where my pain and pleasure is always weighed up against that of others), elevating some species (such as nonhuman primates) on the scale of personhood may require reallocating suffering. This reallocation can pull other species that are considered less person-like into harmful situations as replacements. As such, advancing some primates the status of near persons may have had a deleterious effect on pigs, as primate suffering is redistributed on to them. Through the apparatus of the person, pigs have replaced non-human primates as a tissue source in xenotransplantation research, their interests minimised and subjected to more radical forms of biological utility.

106 

R. Carr

Notes 1. As Lesley Sharp (2013) uncovers, these experiments on baboons were also unsettling to some of the scientists involved, inspiring more than one researcher to leave the project. 2. Mice and fish are effectively excluded from any level of protection or welfare in medical research in the United States (Science, Medicine, and Animals and National Research Council (US) Committee to Update Science, Medicine, and Animals 2004). 3. “The Government is advised on these issues by the United Kingdom Xenotransplantation Interim Regulatory Authority (UKXIRA), established in 1997 following the Government's acceptance of the recommendations made in Animal Tissue into Human, the report of the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation (the Kennedy report)” (Department of Health 2003). 4. While the report itself did not give substantial evidence for its conclusions regarding the status of different animals, it drew on a report from the Institute of Medical Ethics, Lives in the Balance: The Ethics of Using Animals in Biomedical Research (1991) (Smith and Boyd 1991), which considered the scientific evidence on animal ethics issues such as pain, self-awareness, and complexity. However, from the evidence in this report it is very unclear that pigs and non-human primates should be regarded as having different capacities to suffer. 5. The United Kingdom Xenotransplantation Interim Regulatory Authority (UKXIRA) was disbanded in 2006 (McLean and Williamson 2007) and proposed clinical trials in xenotransplantation are now approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. It takes its lead from international guidance, where similar attitudes prevail, although the Council of Europe highlights the ethical issues with pigs as well as primates (Council of Europe Working Party on Xenotransplantation 2003). 6. In recent times, primatologists, such as Franz de Waal, talk of bonobos as one of the closest relatives to humans, along with chimpanzees, celebrating bonobos for resolving social tensions with sex rather than conflict (de Waal 1996). 7. While others have argued that describing non-humans like this is “anthropomorphic”, this term itself is problematic because it assumes that capacities like emotions properly belong to humans and not to others (Tyler 2009). While I point to certain capacities as being figured as

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

107

human-like here, I mean that the way these capacities are figured is through a human lens, rather than suggesting these capacities are specifically human. For an account of the longer history of viewing apes as human-like, in other ways, see Corbey (2005). 8. Note that gorillas and orangutans have been observed to use hand signals without having been taught—both in non-domesticated contexts and in zoos (Parker et al. 2006). 9. Although thus far only the Balearic Islands have enshrined legal rights for apes. 10. In another example, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) tried to argue that a macaque was the legal copyright owner of a “selfie” photograph (Toliver 2017). 11. Invasive research on great apes has been outlawed in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, and the European Union; and there are policies that severely limit the use of apes in research in Australia and the UK. The United States and Japan have policies banning the use of chimpanzees in invasive research (Frey 2011, p. 214). 12. This intersection is epitomised in The Great Ape Project, which is framed as “an encounter between ethology and ethics” (Cavalieri and Singer 1993, p.  2), drawing on scientific engagement with apes to argue for their inclusion in the category of persons. 13. As opposed to Tom Regan for example, another influential animal ethicist, who takes a rights approach rather than utilitarianism. The regulation tends to reflect the utilitarian position more than a rights-based approach. 14. Note that he changes his version of utilitarianism over time. I draw here mainly from the second edition of Practical Ethics, written in the early 1990s, around the time of the xenotransplantation bioethical ­discourse, and a period in which Singer held the version of preference utilitarianism (outlined here). 15. Unlike other prominent ethical frameworks such as social contract theory, utilitarianism does not require that other animals be able to make moral decisions themselves in order to be entitled to moral treatment: all that is required is that they have interests and suffer. 16. Killing beings without self-awareness and sense of themselves existing can also be wrong according to Singer but not because it frustrates their future interests, but rather because it reduces the amount of pleasure in the world (Singer 1993, 88).

108 

R. Carr

17. Every year, in the research centre where Tatu lives, the researchers set up to a Christmas tree with “ornaments” made of dried fruits and other edible goodies, which the signing chimpanzees have named the tree “CANDY TREE”. One year, after Thanksgiving, Tatu spontaneously asked the human researchers about the CANDY TREE when it began snowing. She “not only remembered the Christmas tree but also knew that this was the season for it, which is a temporal perception” (Fouts and Fouts 1993, p. 38). 18. Most of the examples of non-human personhood offered in the second edition of Practical Ethics (1993) to justify his allegedly non-speciesist ethics are of apes, although later editions include examples of several other species. 19. Singer does not reject the possibility that non-human animal research may be ethical in some cases. 20. In the third edition of Practical Ethics, Singer makes this explicit: [W]e could see the wrongness of killing, not as a black and white matter, dependent on whether the being killed is or is not a person, but as a matter of degree, dependent upon, among other things, whether the being killed was fully a person or was a near-person or had no self-­awareness at all, the extent to which, by our best estimate, the being had future directed desires, and how central those desires were to the being’s life … [T]he morally relevant considerations suggest a continuum. (Singer 2011, p. 104) 21. Singer’s argument of course assumes a hierarchical framework where the human, or rather the “normal” adult human, is taken as the benchmark for a normative conception of personhood, to which others are compared. Singer elevates human-centric characteristics and contingent notions of rationality and individuality that are valued in Western ­philosophy and liberalism. That is, his philosophy validates a particular and exclusionary version of personhood: an ideal based a white-male able-­bodied perspective. This notion of personhood is constructed and normative rather than simply descriptive. 22. Although not necessarily in other streams of animal research such as cognitive ethology (see Allen and Bekoff 1999). Ethology research on pigs, that is, observing pig behaviour in their “natural” environments, has been undertaken mainly in the context of pest management, and a

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

109

small quantity of work in this particular genre has been undertaken in comparison to ethology on primates and some other critters. 23. Although pigs are increasingly seen as good models for humans and are also being used for research about human mental and physical wellbeing. 24. The mirror test has been critiqued from within and beyond the field (Bekoff, 2002; Bekoff & Sherman, 2004). As Bekoff and Sherman point out, the visual information from the mirror does not have the same meaning for all human and non-human animals; for example, for some species sight may not be the dominant sense, and, others may be reluctant to make eye contact and engage with the image long enough to realise it is a reflection (Marc Bekoff and Sherman 2004). In short, the test makes some reductive assumptions about what image, body, and coloured marks may signify for other animals, based on human meanings that are socially contingent. The experiment therefore potentially favours species that are similar to humans, and may fail to capture “selfawareness” in species that have a more radically different embodied experience of the world. 25. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpzpUeJ9HA8. 26. Animal studies scholars have critiqued this claim. See Thom van Dooren (2014) for an account of albatrosses lives as future oriented, with future interests. 27. The Great Ape Project book contains the group manifesto for ape rights and essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy and ethology. 28. Or what Barad usefully calls “intra-actions” to indicate that both humans and non-humans are produced through their engagements rather than pre-existing them (Barad 2007). 29. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues have a more complex understanding of apes as becoming within human-ape contexts: that being enculturated and learning language does not simply reveal what was already there, but rather produces new kinds of subjectivity in bonobos (SavageRumbaugh et al. 2005). 30. See Haraway (1989) for an extended discussion. 31. This is not to suggest that we should present animals as person-like in human ways, or at all. The focus on the capacities outlined by liberal bioethics and some animal science is inadequate for understanding animal worlds and experiences. Many within animal studies have critiqued the ways animal scientists approach research on capacities such as self-­

110 

R. Carr

awareness and argue for focusing on alternative behaviours such as play and empathy (Bekoff 1997; Gruen 2015). 32. Dan Lyons (2016) argues that a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis has underpinned the wider animal welfare legislation in the UK from 1986. 33. In some ways pig suffering actually holds open the possibility of the limited protection provided to primates. This point is made clear by the Council of Europe: “The situation will be even more difficult should xenotransplantation using transgenic pig organs fail. The urgent need for human organs will steadily increase and the question of whether and under what conditions the use of non-human primate xenotransplants would be appropriate and acceptable will be raised again with increased urgency” (Council of Europe Working Party on Xenotransplantation 2003, 47). 34. I am not suggesting that it would necessarily always be the case that preventing research on primates would shift the suffering to another species. This analysis is in the context of a utilitarianism rationality, and the imagined species hierarchy, as Francione (2006) puts it, the “ ‘X suffers more than Y’ game” (para. 8). 35. While this is similar to the Christian perspective, as Esposito (2015, 41) remarks, “While the Christian conception of the dispositif of the person divides the living being into flesh and spirit, in modern philosophy it penetrates into the very consciousness of the individual”. 36. Not all research on apes is not located in a hierarchical human centric framework; see for instance Lori Gruen (2015). 37. As Esposito also notes in The Third Person (Esposito 2012, 13).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff. 1999. Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Anderson, James R., and Gordon G.  Gallup Jr. 1999. Self-Recognition in Nonhuman Primates: Past and Future Challenges. In Animal Models of

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

111

Human Emotion and Cognition, ed. M. Haug and R.E. Whalen, 175–194. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Bailey, L.L., S.L. Nehlsen-Cannarella, W. Concepcion, and W.B. Jolley. 1985. Baboon-to-Human Cardiac Xenotransplantation in a Neonate. JAMA 254 (23): 3321–3329. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1985.03360230053022. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28: 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321. ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bekoff, Marc. 1997. Deep Ethology, Animal Rights, and the Great Ape/Animal Project: Resisting Speciesism and Expanding the Community of Equals. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 10 (3): 269–296. https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1007726525969. Beynon-Jones, Siân M., and Nik Brown. 2011. Time, Timing and Narrative at the Interface between UK Technoscience and Policy. Science and Public Policy 38 (8): 639–648. https://doi.org/10.3152/030234211X13111546663331. Blue, Gwendolyn, and Melanie Rock. 2011. Trans-Biopolitics: Complexity in Interspecies Relations. Health 15 (4): 353–368. https://doi. org/10.1177/1363459310376299. Broom, Donald M., Hilana Sena, and Kiera L.  Moynihan. 2009. Pigs Learn What a Mirror Image Represents and Use It to Obtain Information. Animal Behaviour 78 (5): 1037–1041. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. anbehav.2009.07.027. Cavalieri, Paola, and Peter Singer. 1993. The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity. London: Fourth Estate. Cerbulis, Inga G. 1994. “Cognitive Abilities of the Domestic Pig (Sus Scrofa).” Master’s thesis, Ohio State University. Chrulew, Matthew. 2011. “Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation.” Australian Humanities Review, no. 50 (May). Chrulew, Matthew, and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel. 2016. Foucault and Animals. Leiden, NETHERLANDS, THE: BRILL. http://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=4731130. Clayton, Nicola S., Timothy J.  Bussey, and Anthony Dickinson. 2003. Can Animals Recall the Past and Plan for the Future? Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 4 (8): 685–691. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1180.

112 

R. Carr

Corbey, Raymond. 2005. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-­ Human Boundary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Council of Europe Working Party on Xenotransplantation. 2003. “Report on the State of the Art in the Field of Xenotransplantation.” Strasbourg. http:// www.coe.int/t/dg3/healthbioethic/Activities/06_Xenotransplantation_en/ XENO(2003)1_SAR.pdf. Crist, Eileen. 2010. Images of Animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Department of Health. 1997. Animal Tissue into Humans: A Report by the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation. London: HMSO. ———. 2003. “Memorandum by the Department of Health on Xenotransplantation and Infection.” https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ ld200203/ldselect/ldsctech/138/138w05.htm. Derrida, Jacques. 2003. “And Say the Animal Responded.” In Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe, and Trans. David Wills, 121–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Despret, Vinciane. 2004. The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-­ Genesis. Body & Society 10 (2–3): 111–134. https://doi.org/10.117 7/1357034X04042938. Dooren, Thom Van. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2012. The Third Person. Cambridge, MA: Polity. ———. 2015. Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. Senellart, Michel and Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Foucault, Michel, and François Ewald. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. London: Allen Lane. Fox, Marie. 2005. Reconfiguring the Animal/Human Boundary: The Impact of Xeno Technologies. Liverpool Law Review 26: 149–167. Francione, Gary L. 2006. “The Great Ape Project: Not so Great.” Animal Right: The Abolitionist Approach (blog). December 20, 2006. http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/the-­great-­ape-­project-­not-­so-­great/. Francione, Gary Lawrence. 2008. Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Goodall, Jane. 2000. In the Shadow of Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gruen, Lori. 2015. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York, NY: Lantern Books.

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

113

Hamilton, Trevor J., Allison Myggland, Erika Duperreault, Zacnicte May, Joshua Gallup, Russell A.  Powell, Melike Schalomon, and Shannon M. Digweed. 2016. Episodic-like Memory in Zebrafish. Animal Cognition 19 (6): 1071–1079. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-­016-­1014-­1. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Held, Suzanne, Michael Mendl, Claire Devereux, and Richard W. Byrne. 2000. Social Tactics of Pigs in a Competitive Foraging Task: The ‘Informed Forager’ Paradigm. Animal Behaviour 59 (3): 569–576. https://doi.org/10.1006/ anbe.1999.1322. ———. 2002. Foraging Pigs Alter Their Behaviour in Response to Exploitation. Animal Behaviour 64 (2): 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2002.3044. Held, S., J.  Baumgartner, A.  Kilbride, R.W.  Byrne, and M.  Mendl. 2005. Foraging Behaviour in Domestic Pigs (Sus Scrofa): Remembering and Prioritizing Food Sites of Different Value. Animal Cognition 8 (2): 114–121. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-­004-­0242-­y. Illmann, Gudrun, Lars Schrader, Marek Špinka, and Pavel Šustr. 2002. Acoustical Mother-Offspring Recognition in Pigs (Sus Scrofa Domestica). Behaviour 139 (4): 487–505. https://doi.org/10.2307/4535934. Kouwenberg, Amy-Lee, Carolyn J.  Walsh, Bethany E.  Morgan, and Gerard M. Martin. 2009. Episodic-like Memory in Crossbred Yucatan Minipigs (Sus Scrofa). Applied Animal Behaviour Science 117 (3): 165–172. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.applanim.2009.01.005. Lyons, Dan. 2016. Animal Protection Policy in the United Kingdom: From Symbolic Reassurance to Democratic Representation. In The Political Turn in Animal Ethics, ed. Robert Garner and Siobhan O’Sullivan. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. http://www.rowmaninternational.com/buy-­ books/product-­details/. Marino, Lori, and Christina M. Colvin. 2015. Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus Domesticus. International Journal of Comparative Psychology 28 (1): 1. http://escholarship. org/uc/item/8sx4s79c. McLean, Sheila, and Laura Williamson. 2007. The Demise of UKXIRA and the Regulation of Solid-Organ Xenotransplantation in the UK. Journal of Medical Ethics 33: 373–375. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2007.020768.

114 

R. Carr

McLeman, Morven A., Michael T.  Mendl, R.  Bryan Jones, and Christopher M. Wathes. 2008. Social Discrimination of Familiar Conspecifics by Juvenile Pigs, Sus Scrofa: Development of a Non-Invasive Method to Study the Transmission of Unimodal and Bimodal Cues between Live Stimuli. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 115 (3): 123–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. applanim.2008.06.010. Medical Research Council. 2017. “Research Involving Animals: Regulation and Policy.” 2017. https://www.mrc.ac.uk/research/research-­involving-­animals/ regulation-­and-­policy/. Mendl, Michael, Kirsty Laughlin, and David Hitchcock. 1997. Pigs in Space: Spatial Memory and Its Susceptibility to Interference. Animal Behaviour 54 (6): 1491–1508. https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1997.0564. Mendl, Michael, Kate Randle, and Stuart Pope. 2002. Young Female Pigs Can Discriminate Individual Differences in Odours from Conspecific Urine. Animal Behaviour 64 (1): 97–101. https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2002.3040. Mendl, Michael, Suzanne Held, and Richard W. Byrne. 2010. Pig Cognition. Current Biology 20 (18): R796–R798. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cub.2010.07.018. Michaels, Marian G., Christina Kaufman, Paul A. Volberding, Phalguni Gupta, William M. Switzer, Walid Heneine, Paul Sandstrom, et al. 2004. Baboon Bone-Marrow Xenotransplant in a Patient with Advanced HIV Disease: Case Report and 8-Year Follow-Up. Transplantation 78 (11): 1582–1589. Murphy, Sara. 2014. Heart, Science, and Regulation: Victorian Antivivisection Discourse and the Human. Law & Literature 26 (3): 365–387. https://doi. org/10.1080/1535685X.2014.928507. NC3Rs. n.d. “The 3Rs | NC3Rs.” The 3Rs | NC3Rs. Accessed February 26, 2021. https://nc3rs.org.uk/the-­3rs. Nonhuman Rights Project. n.d. “Litigation.” Nonhuman Rights Project. https:// www.nonhumanrights.org/litigation/. Accessed September 3, 2017. Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 1996. Animal-to-human Transplants: The Ethics of Xenotransplantation. London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Oliver, Kelly. 2010. Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness. Research in Phenomenology 40 (2): 267–280. Parker, Sue Taylor, Robert W. Mitchell, and H. Lyn Miles. 2006. The Mentalities of Gorillas and Orangutans: Comparative Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3  Hierarchies of Valuable Life: Positioning Pigs and Primates… 

115

Patterson, Francine, and Wendy Gordon. 1993. The Case for Personhood of Gorillas. In The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity, ed. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, 58–78. London: Fourth Estate. Plotnik, Joshua M., Frans B.M. de Waal, and Diana Reiss. 2006. Self-Recognition in an Asian Elephant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (45): 17053–17057. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0608062103. Premack, David, and G. Woodruff. 1978. Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (4): 515–629. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0140525X00076512. Reiss, Diana, and Lori Marino. 2001. Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98 (10): 5937–5942. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.101086398. Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, William M. Fields, and Par Segerdahl. 2005. Culture Prefigures Cognition in Pan/Homo Bonobos. THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 20 (3): 311–328. https://doi.org/10.1387/theoria.565. Science, Medicine, and Animals and National Research Council (US) Committee to Update Science, Medicine, and Animals. 2004. Science, Medicine, and Animals. Washington, DC: National Academies Press (US). https://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK24650/. Sharp, Lesley A. 2011. Monkey Business: Interspecies Longing and Scientific Prophecy in Experimental Xenotransplantation. Social Text 29 (1): 43–69. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-­1210265. ———. 2013. The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science. California: University of California Press. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Singer, Peter. 1993. Practical Ethics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Xenotransplantation and Speciesism. In Bioethics: An Anthology, ed. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Smith, Jane A., and Kenneth M. Boyd, eds. 1991. Lives in the Balance: The Ethics of Using Animals in Biomedical Research: The Report of a Working Party of the Institute of Medical Ethics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

116 

R. Carr

Starzl, T.E., J. Fung, A. Tzakis, S. Todo, A.J. Demetris, I.R. Marino, H. Doyle, et al. 1993. Baboon-to-Human Liver Transplantation. The Lancet 341 (8837): 65–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-­6736(93)92553-­6. Suddendorf, T., and M.C.  Corballis. 1997. Mental Time Travel and the Evolution of the Human Mind. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 123 (2): 133–167. Sykes, Megan, Anthony D’Apice, and Mauro Sandrin. 2003. Position Paper of the Ethics Committee of the International Xenotransplantation Association. Xenotransplantation 10 (3): 194–203. https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1399-­3089. 2003.00067.x. Tanida, H., and Y. Nagano. 1998. The Ability of Miniature Pigs to Discriminate between a Stranger and Their Familiar Handler. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 56 (2): 149–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-­1591(97)00095-­6. Toliver, Zachary. 2017. “Settlement Reached: ‘Monkey Selfie’ Case Broke New Ground for Animal Rights.” PETA (blog). September 11, 2017. https:// www.peta.org/blog/settlement-­reached-­m onkey-­s elfie-­c ase-­b roke-­n ew­ground-­animal-­rights/. Uncaged. n.d. “Diaries of Despair: The Secret History of Pig-to-Primate Transplantation.” Xenodiaries. https://www.xenodiaries.org/summary.htm. Accessed February 26, 2021. de Waal, F.B.M. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. ———. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2006. Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature. London: Granta Books. Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2015. The War against Animals. Leiden: Brill. Watson, Lyall. 2004. The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs. Washington: Smithsonian Books. Weil, Kari. 2010. A Report on the Animal Turn. Differences 21 (2): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-­2010-­001. White, Thomas I. 2007. In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ynterian, Pedro A.. 2017. “Cecilia, First Chimpanzee Released by Habeas Corpus.” GAP Project: News (blog). March 30, 2017. http://projetogap.org. br/en/noticia/cecilia-­first-­chimpanzee-­released-­by-­habeas-­corpus/.

4 Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation and Security in the United States

In 1998, scientists from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cultured human cells with pig cells, in a deliberate attempt to infect the human cells with the pig endogenous retrovirus (Wilson et al. 1998). The experiments were designed to confirm whether a porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) could activate and reproduce in human cells, potentially causing disease if pig tissues were transplanted into human bodies in new xenotransplantation therapies. PERV is a retrovirus, just like HIV, although, unlike HIV, over time it has become embedded in pig DNA and is passed vertically into offspring, no longer actively infecting its pig companions. The FDA experiments followed from expert conjecture that a new AIDS-like pandemic might emerge among human populations if xenotransplantation research progressed to human clinical trials and new viruses or other microbes hitched a ride into human bodies and populations. In their experimental efforts to incite PERV infection in human cells, the US FDA scientists found that some strains of PERV did indeed transmit to human cells and multiply, confirming the findings of researchers in England and Germany (Martin et al. 1998; Patience et al. 1997). A second experiment by the FDA researchers showed that after infecting the culture of human cells the virus particles became more infectious © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_4

117

118 

R. Carr

when subsequently exposed to a new set of “naive” human cells (Wilson et al. 2000). Contact with the initial human cells provided a selection pressure to enhance the infectiveness of PERV. In 2001, the FDA and several other government agencies co-­operatively finalised guidelines for animal-to-human transplantation clinical trials, a framework which they had begun to develop in 1996. In addition to an expectation that researchers would use microbiologically clean pigs, and institute surveillance of human recipients, the guidelines recommended the development of diagnostic tools to identify PERV infections in humans, and anticipatory mitigation strategies (US Food and Drug Administration 2003, 24). Regulation calls to secure human populations by actively mixing and remaking species at the cellular and genetic levels. These experimental and pre-emptive interventions in the biology of humans, pigs, and viruses, in response to an imagined future AIDS-like pandemic, are indicative of new “object of power” evident in contemporary politics and sciences, of “posthumanist proliferation: constant intervention and adjustment” (Ahuja 2016). This chapter asks how the invocation of an imagined future pandemic came to be a key part of the xenotransplantation research and regulatory landscape. It asks how envisioning a catastrophe incited a regulatory process in the United States which did not actively prohibit xenotransplantation, but rather tried to anticipate and pre-empt its consequences. This logic locates the development of US xenotransplantation regulation and industry within a contemporary biopolitics of preparedness and resilience (Evans and Reid 2014; J. Walker and Cooper 2011; Zebrowski 2012). What does the field of xenotransplantation reveal to us about contemporary biopolitics, in the United States, and ways in which humans and non-humans are governed in relation to emergence and emergency? The contemporary story of regulation of xenotransplantation arguably begins in the 1990s. In January 1995, researchers in the United States conducted a series of unprecedented experiments in xenotransplantation: grafting bone marrow from a baboon into an AIDS patient in an attempt to refigure his immune system response to HIV (Exner et  al. 1997; M. G. Michaels et al. 2004; Mueller et al. 1999). These experiments generated a considerable amount of unease given the closeness of humans to baboons and the suspicion, at the time, that HIV originally came from

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

119

chimpanzees (Jonathan S.  Allan 1998). In response, several scientific experts pointed the potential for catastrophic disease events to follow from this kind of experimentation, prompting US government departments to agree on a pressing need to develop regulatory guidelines for xenotransplantation (US Food and Drug Administration 1999a). While xenotransplantation research had not previously been subject to specific government policies, a debate now emerged among transplant surgeons, infectious disease specialists, and public health experts as to the role of government in managing the public health concerns arising from xenotransplantation technologies. In 1996, the US Public Health Services (PHS) published a set of draft guidelines for xenotransplantation clinical trials in humans (US Public Health Services 2001). The guidelines were developed by several working groups, as a joint effort between the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other governmental bodies. Despite the serious concerns voiced by some, these original guidelines took a relatively permissive approach to regulating xenotransplantation. The guidelines indefinitely banned the use of non-human primate tissues for xenotransplants; however, they did not prevent xenotransplantation with other species, encouraging researchers to experiment with pig tissues instead of those from non-human primates. The guidelines aimed to “help minimize public health risks associated with xenotransplantation while not restricting access to promising therapies for individuals with life-­ threatening and chronic debilitating illnesses” (US Food and Drug Administration 1999a). While acknowledging the possibility of disease emergence, the draft guidelines left the task of regulation to local institutions and only provided advice on ways to minimise and detect this outcome. They highlighted “the need for appropriate clinical and scientific expertise on the xenotransplantation research team, adequate protocol review, thorough health surveillance plans, and comprehensive informed consent and education processes” (US Public Health Services 2001, 2). When the government circulated their initial draft guidelines for comment they were much criticised. A lengthy evaluation, consultation, and redrafting process ensued, resulting in the 2001 PHS Guidelines on Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation, which still allowed xenotransplantation clinical trials but intensified the level of regulation. The

120 

R. Carr

length of this process was due in part to the eruption of further controversies in 1997. Most of the original apprehensions voiced by virologists concerned the use of non-human primates tissues for transplants (e.g. Jonathan S. Allan 1995).1 However, in 1997 controversy over transplanting pig tissues into humans heightened when researcher Clive Patience and colleagues managed to infect human cells with PERV (Patience et al. 1997; Le Tissier et  al. 1997).2 As detailed above, the US FDA subsequently confirmed, in their own experiments, that some strains of PERV (found in all pig cells) can infect human cells in vitro. The revised PHS Guidelines (2001) and subsequent FDA guidelines (2003) altered the original recommendations in a number of ways. They increased the level of federal intervention, specifying that oversight of clinical trials should be centrally regulated by the FDA and a special Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Xenotransplantation (SACX). The guidelines also placed more onerous requirements on the sponsor of the clinical trial to produce microbiologically safe source animals, to develop new diagnostic tools, and to monitor human recipients. Despite the “high economic burdens” that would be incurred by xenotransplant producers, the PHS advised “strict control of animal husbandry and health surveillance practices” to “reduce the potential public health risks posed by xenotransplantation” (US Public Health Services 2001, 8). The guidelines stipulated that source animals should be “procured from closed herds or colonies raised in facilities that have appropriate barriers to effectively preclude the introduction or spread of infectious agents”, and ideally be delivered by caesarean birth (US Public Health Services 2001, 8). And, where the original draft had only suggested that recipients should not donate blood or tissues, the final guidelines recommended that recipients be actively excluded from donation (US Public Health Services 2001, 5).3 As per the PHS guidelines, the SACX advisory committee was constituted to oversee applications for human clinical trials in xenotransplantation. However, this committee was disbanded in 2005 and administration handed over to the Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee (part of the US FDA), which in effect reduced the level of attention to, and oversight of, xenotransplantation (Fovargue 2011, 132). The PHS and FDA clearly prioritised the progress of xenotransplantation research, and while the requirements placed on the research institution

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

121

were demanding, the risks were regulated in a way that would allow animal tissues to be transplanted into humans. The question articulated by US regulators was largely as follows: How are we to mitigate against unintended and potentially untoward microbial transfers occurring in xenotransplantation, while not preventing xenotransplantation altogether. Increasingly, in the broader sciences of infectious disease, microbial flows are understood to be irrepressible, and it is not considered possible, nor desirable, to separate humans prophylactically from microbes and other animal species. The idea of xenotransplantation involves a quintessentially liberal approach to borders and value: xenotransplantation seeks to circulate value across traditional boundaries between species. The value that is created by this act of border-crossing is what Catherine Waldby calls “biovalue”: “a surplus value of vitality and instrumental knowledge which can be placed at the disposal of the human subject” (Waldby 2000, 18). Ideally, xenotransplantation aims to transfer vitality in the form of human compatible cells, organs, or other tissues from other animals to human individuals. In his lecture series Security, Territory, Population, Foucault asks whether we are becoming societies of security. By this he means societies in which the dominant mode of power is governmentality, characterised by liberal or laissez-faire mechanisms that tend to increase freedom of circulation and movement, encouraging self-regulation of systems. Indeed, a rapidly growing body of literature on biosecurity in the United States suggests that, in recent decades, we have seen a shift towards security-­ type apparatuses targeting various aspects of life, including emerging infectious disease.4 Recent scholarship, however, has significantly revised Foucault’s concept of security apparatuses to explain power structures in the contemporary context. Foucault outlined security apparatuses that dealt with risks of a calculable probability occurring among populations and within a series of events, by redistributing and normalising risks. New security apparatuses, scholars tell us, are fundamentally speculative; they target uncertain and incalculable future emergence and emergencies with a range of imaginative, pre-emptive, and future invocative tools (Caduff 2015; M.  Cooper 2006; Dillon 2007; Evans and Reid 2014; Lakoff 2008, 2017). Indeed, while xenotransplantation procedures are based on

122 

R. Carr

circulation of non-human biovalue, in the United States, the industry is particularly prone to what Sunder Rajan calls biocapital (Sunder Rajan 2006): including speculative investment in biotechnology based on a credibly imagined future. While the xenotransplantation industry investment well exceeds two billion US dollars,5 amidst promises to create a limitless supply of human compatible organs, as yet in the United States no xenotransplantation treatments are available. In this chapter, I examine the US government regulation and industry practices of xenotransplantation in relation to potential for xenotransplantation to produce novel infections among human populations. Public health fears over a possible zoonotic outbreak have been raised within a specific context of the new paradigm of emerging infectious disease which understands microbial life as dynamic and unpredictable, and imagines an imminent global pandemic of unknown origin and nature. Contemporary public health strategies have responded to speculative apprehension of looming disease threats by increasing surveillance, innovation, and circulation of biological fragments, to pre-empt and prepare for fundamentally unpredictable pandemics. Experiences of new zoonotic disease, particularly HIV, have refigured the process of xenotransplantation within the problematic of emerging infectious disease. I first discuss the new paradigm of emerging infectious disease, followed by a brief outline of Foucault’s security apparatuses. Drawing on Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper (2011), I argue that contemporary forms of security have evolved in concert with the emergence of complex systems theory. From this perspective, I argue, the US regulation of xenotransplantation is paradigmatic of contemporary security apparatuses: it takes a liberal and transformative approach to species boundaries as it attempts to pre-empt future epidemiological disaster, remake life and in the face of an ostensible “organ shortage” crisis.

Emerging Infectious Disease Attempts to transplant animal tissues into humans have a long experimental history, dating back to the sixteenth century (Deschamps et al. 2005). Since the 1960s, scientists have made several unsuccessful and

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

123

controversial attempts at transplanting non-human primate organs into human recipients (e.g. Bailey et al. 1985; Starzl et al. 1993). Despite the consistent failure of these experiments to keep xenografts alive and to prevent human patients becoming extremely vulnerable to infection, the 1990s witnessed a renewed interest in xenotransplantation along with the arrival of new immunosuppressant drugs and genetic engineering techniques. Researchers, optimistic about novel methods of circumventing xenograft rejection, began to investigate further human clinical trials, including experiments performed by Suzanne Ildstad and colleagues, who grafted bone marrow from a baboon into an HIV/AIDS patient in an attempt to confer baboon resistance to HIV (Exner et  al. 1997; M. G. Michaels et al. 2004; Mueller et al. 1999). At the same time, infectious disease specialists, transplant surgeons, and public health officials expressed concern about the possibility of infectious disease transfer in xenotransplantation, addressing it as a public health issue (J.  S. Allan 1994; Chapman 1999; Fishman 1994; Smith 1993). Drawing on a range of recent human experiences of disease transmission from other animals to human populations, such as HIV, hepatitis B, influenza, hantavirus, and Nipah virus, they reasoned that xenotransplantation would place human populations at risk from what they termed xenozoonosis, or xenosis: a novel virus, of animal origin, emerging among humans through xenotransplantation (Fishman 1994; M. Michaels and Simmons 1994).6 Concerned experts also cited experiences of infectious disease transfer in human-to-human (allo)transplantation, including hepatitis B virus, cytomegalovirus, rabies virus, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS which were all inadvertently transferred through transplantation at one point. For example, in the early 1980s approximately 12,000 blood transfusion recipients were tragically infected with HIV (Jonathan S.  Allan 1995, 40). These experiences demonstrated that transplantation could provide a novel opportunity for the spread of disease. Indeed, transplantation is figured by some (N. Wolfe 2011, 164) as constituting a uniquely efficient way of spreading disease because of the intimacy created between biological parts and because the recipient’s immune system is compromised with immunosuppressive drugs. Infectious disease experts and public health officials, however, voiced concerns that not only the individual transplant recipient would become infected with a novel animal virus or other

124 

R. Carr

disease, but that society at large was at risk. Xenotransplantation might be the cause of a “new disease entering the human population” (Bach et al. 1998, 141). Furthermore, researchers had encountered endogenous retroviruses that are embedded in DNA of all mammals (including humans) and, while they no longer cause disease in the host population, could be reactivated and cause infection in a new species.7 As described above, all pigs were shown to have PERV in their genome, in most cells, which could not be treated or removed with standard medical tools (Jonathan S. Allan 1995; M. J. Weiss et al. 2006). The anxieties about the potential public health threat of xenozoonosis are in some ways continuous with the more general concerns arising from the field of emerging infectious disease. This new understanding of infectious disease as emerging and re-emerging arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s and diverged sharply from the attitude prevalent since the mid-twentieth century that we might conquer infectious disease, and that the “war was almost over” (M. Cooper 2006, 114). In contrast, proponents of the emerging infectious disease perspective, including infectious disease experts and the media, argued that microbes posed “ever greater threats to humanity” (Garrett 1994, 6) (see also King 2002); it was only a matter of time before “the coming plague” struck. Recent experiences and “reasoned speculation” (Chapman 1999, 69) added credibility to the rapidly growing idea that a new epidemic among humans was inevitable (Garrett 1994). Informing this new conceptualisation was the fact that several new diseases had emerged, while old ones had resurfaced or changed their geographic distribution, including HIV, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, SARS, and Ebola. Experts linked the changing disease distributions to a combination of social, technological, and environmental change, and microbial characteristics (Fidler et al. 1997; Institute of Medicine 1992; Morens and Fauci 2012; Morse 1995). For example, urbanisation was producing heightened contact between humans and some microbes, while poverty and overpopulation resulted in environments in which diseases could flourish. Similarly, environmental changes, including those brought about by development and climate change, transformed the habitats encouraging new forms of contact between microbes, humans, and other animals. At

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

125

the same time “global inter-connectedness” (King 2002, 770) created new vulnerabilities to global spread of disease as it increased the speed and volume of travel of all kinds of entities, including microbes. Microbiology and molecular biology offered a new vision of viruses characterised by their rapid evolution, demonstrating that some could genetically combine with one another, and selectively mutate in relation to changes in their host and environment (E. Domingo et al. 1996). For instance, it was increasingly recognised that microbes could adapt to antibiotics, under some circumstances, and resist medical treatments (called AMR, or antimicrobial resistance).8 In this understanding of microbial emergence, new global movements and contact could also be seen as opportunities for viral evolution and adaptation, potentially leading to the emergence of new human disease. Disease-causing microbes were now seen as radically contingent and dynamic, with the capacity to develop into newly infectious or more virulent entities. The epidemiological stories we tell, of course, about the origin and spread of disease, the “outbreak narrative” (Wald 2008), are not objective or neutral, but socially and politically productive (Leach and Scoones 2013).9 The vision of microbial emergence assigned a specific role to non-­ human animals in the generation of new diseases. Most recent emerging disease events, experts argued, were zoonotic in nature, deriving from non-human animal sources (N. D. Wolfe et al. 2007). The field figured non-humans as the vectors and reservoirs of microbes and infectious disease threats, conduits for the spread of disease into human populations, as well as mixing vessels for viruses and the emergence of new strains. Non-human animals are viewed as potentially gestating new deadly disease, whether situated within wet markets in the global south, or increasing wild dog populations, and capable of circulating via the changing migratory habits of birds and bats, or the international trade in non-­ human animals.10 Not only could non-humans generate new disease, under contemporary conditions of intense global interconnection this capacity poses a catastrophic potential for humans. As Christos Lynteris (2019, 1) remarks, “non-human animals are today conceived as the incubators of existential risk for humanity”. Similarly, Lynteris argues that these discourses “configure areas of the world or types of environments into the breeding grounds of viral ontogenesis” allocating

126 

R. Carr

epidemiological blame to certain places and practices within an emerging geopolitics (see also King 2002). Emerging infectious disease discourses are intensely focused on the concept microbes changing host species (or crossing species barriers) from other animals to human hosts. Understanding viral capacities to alternate species has infused population genetics and evolutionary theory into virology, in addition to ecological thinking that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century and has recently been revitalised (Anderson 2004). Central to allocating blame for infectious disease emergence to non-humans is an imaginary of human and non-human bodies as ecological. In contrast to the representation of bodies as firmly bounded in the organismic body politics, which I discuss in Chap. 5, the contemporary field of emerging infectious disease often figures bodies as viral habitats that form parts of interrelated and partially open systems, what we might call ecological bodies. The field of virology figures the insides of bodies as environments with species-specific climates and microscopic species interactions. As microbiologist Nathan Wolfe (2011) describes it: “from the perspective of viruses and other microbes, our bodies are habitats” (p. 27). Here it becomes clear that the emerging disease perspective does include a notion of viruses having “natural” host species that they are partially contained within and for whom they are not particularly problematic. Viruses that regularly infect a particular host species are thought to be adapted to particular species’ internal environment. Different internal environments within  other organisms may present a challenge to viruses moving to a new host. Immune system reactions make up a significant part of this “environment”, but, in addition, a whole range of cellular and molecular interactions facilitate or inhibit viral transmission and replication, “including receptor binding, entry or fusion, trafficking within the cell, genome replication, and gene expression” (Parrish et al. 2008, p. 460). Within this emerging infectious disease perspective, however, the factors that may limit microbes from changing host species are unstable in a number of ways. Viruses are understood to have a uniquely variable spread of genetics available to assist adaptation, and, combined with quick replication time (the viral equivalent of reproduction), this genetic

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

127

variation allows rapid evolution. Accordingly their genetic makeup may rapidly transform in relationship with the host internal environment, which acts as a selection pressure for change (Esteban Domingo et  al. 2012). Viruses have many clever ways of altering their genetic makeup, for example, mutating through “errors in copying”, reassorting segments of genomes, and recombining with other viruses. Several emerging viruses, including HIV and SARS CoV, have developed via viral recombination, a process in which sections of two different viruses combine into a new form (Heeney et al. 2006). From the perspective of a viral population, however, the environment is not constituted by a single body, but, rather, multiple bodies. Needing more than one host to survive in the long term, viruses must be transmitted between bodies. The interactions between host bodies (i.e. humans with other humans) thus are key factors in their environment, and the long-term survival of a virus. Temporal and spatial contact across multiple bodies and species needs to reach a threshold for a new virus to establish itself in a new species population, to “jump species barriers”. While viruses can overcome barriers to establishing an infection in a new host by evolving or mutating, barriers are also broken down with increasing contact between organisms for example due to globalisation, urbanisation, contemporary agriculture, transportation, travel, migration, ecological and environmental change, and medical practices like transfusions, organ transplants, contamination of medical apparatus, food processing technologies (Institute of Medicine 1992; Morse 1995). Despite the difficulties that some viruses may face in infecting humans, the emerging infectious disease framework figures microbes as unstable, and humans as vulnerable to constant and unpredictable change. As Bruce Braun (2007) writes, what we find in the medical and political discourse of “emerging infectious diseases” is a body that is radically open to the world, thrown into the flux of an inherently mutable molecular life. (p. 17, my emphasis)

Neither individual nor collective bodies are understood as enclosed units, but as always embedded in environments and interrelationships which continue to be transformed. In short, viral skills for emergence and openness to new kinds of “carnal interdependence” (Kelley and Hayward

128 

R. Carr

2013, 114) with new partners open up a view of an ecological body in which species, humans included, are partially permeable to flows of micro-organisms from within and without. It is within this logic that infectious disease and public health experts have generally understood the problem of xenozoonosis.

Xenotransplantation and Emergence US-based infectious disease specialists raised concerns about the public health risks of xenozoonosis in the mid-1990s. Drawing on the shifts in understanding public health already developing in the emerging infectious disease field, they called on xenotransplantation researchers and regulatory bodies to imagine the scenario of a new and unknown AIDS-­ like pandemic resulting from xenotransplantation technologies (Allan 1995; Fishman 1994; Michaels and Simmons 1994; Smith 1993). They focused on the possibility of a viral agent emerging in the process of xenotransplantation. These infectious disease experts understood xenozoonosis as a problem of disease emergence: they were concerned not simply with the transfer of existing microbes, but with the transformative potential of xenotransplantation practices. Most importantly, they were concerned with the possibility that a virus might mutate or adapt in the bodies of xenotransplantation source animals or recipients so as to better infect human populations. The imagined scenario of xenozoonosis drew on an understanding of viruses as having distinct capacities to mutate or evolve quickly, and commentators pointed to possible ways xenotransplantation technologies might enhance this potential. While the notion of a “healthy carrier” had been central to bacteriology and understanding the ways that disease passes through human networks (Wald 2008), the emerging disease framework has refigured humans, and animals, as not simply vessels for transporting and passing on viruses, but also as sites of microbial transformation, intensification, and evolution. In transplanting live cells or tissues from non-humans into a human body, flesh and microbes from different species are intimately brought within the microcosm of the human body—which itself

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

129

is often understood as a kind of internal micro ecosystem (as I described above). Imagining interactions at the cellular and molecular level within the human recipient body, Onions et al. (2000) argued that the embodied intimacy across species, in xenotransplantation, could stimulate viral evolution, as pig viruses encountered the new cellular environment of a recipient body and adapted in response to it, improving their fitness for infecting others in human populations: “xenotransplantation could provide the milieu for selection of variants that may infect the human population efficiently” (p. 151). Given that viral evolution works in relation to its environment, the human body or human-like cells likely serve as the best context for a new virus to adapt and become more infectious to human populations (Onions et al. 2000; R. A. Weiss 1998). With xenotransplantation, microbes that might be carried along with the transplanted tissues would achieve direct access to cells within the human body without having to negotiate skin, or distance, that might normally separate them. Furthermore, imagining a microscopic drama in human recipient cells, experts argued the human recipient body and cells could be environments in which viruses from different species collaboratively transform one another. RNA viruses have a peculiar cooperative skill for reproducing parts of their own RNA with genetic fragments from other segmented RNA viruses that co-infect a cell, called “reassortment”. Boneva and colleagues, researchers with the CDC, figure the human xenotransplant recipient as a petri dish for the creation of new forms of viral life: “[a] process may occur whereby the human xenotransplantation product recipient (who now contains living tissue from both humans and pigs) may serve as an efficient ‘mixing vessel’ for viral reassortment” (Boneva et al. 2001, 8). If pig viruses were transplanted into a human recipient along with the pig tissues, and they happen to infect the same cell as a human RNA virus, those viruses may be able to combine, reproducing by incorporating fragments of one another. Onions and colleagues, likewise, argued that if mixed with genetic segments from human viruses, which are already adapted to infecting human populations, a pig virus could transform into a human-transmissible virus to which we are relatively immununologically naïve (Onions et  al. 2000). As discussed earlier,

130 

R. Carr

porcine endogenous retroviruses, RNA viruses, were of particular concern as they were found to be endemic to all pigs (Boneva et al. 2001). In addition, pig xenografts are generally rapidly rejected by the human recipient, and most researchers developing xenotransplantation technologies intend to either treat the recipient with immunosuppressant drugs or use genetically engineered pigs, or both, to help the transplants survive.11 Experts argued that the potential for viral emergence would be enhanced with these technologies. In the first instance, if the xenograft recipient is under a regime of immunosuppressants, viruses transplanted with pig tissues would be given access to a human body without the usual immune system challenges, enabling the virus to adapt to the environment (human cells) with fewer restraints. Virologist Nathan Wolfe argues: in an immunocompromised host, quickly evolving microbes can often gain precious time, free of immune pressure, to go through a few more generations of reproduction, increasing the probability that they will come upon the right suite of adaptations necessary to take hold in a new species. (N. Wolfe 2011, 164)

The emerging infectious disease field already figures immunocompromised populations as vulnerable points for viral emergence in a human population (Fishman 2003; N.  Wolfe 2011). But when immunosuppressed individuals also have intimate contact with live non-human tissues and possibly unfamiliar microbes, as in xenotransplantation, this could exacerbate the potential for new human viruses to emerge. Experts similarly imagined pigs as problematic “mixing vessels” for the development new human viruses. Xenotransplantation researchers are experimenting with genetically altering pigs to be more immunologically acceptable to the human body, using genetic engineering and cloning techniques. By changing the proteins expressed on the surface of their cells, either removing particularly reactive pig molecules or adding protective human molecules (i.e. inserting human genes into the pig genome), scientists hope to help xenografts avoid immune rejection (D. K. C. Cooper et al. 2016). Virologists have argued that changes to cell surfaces that include human molecules are especially concerning for

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

131

viral emergence. The molecules on the surfaces of cells, to which the immune system responds, are also the routes by which viruses can infect cells: they are the doorways through which viruses gain access to cells where they will replicate (Weiss 1998). The presence of human receptors on the pig cells might stimulate viruses already in pig tissues to adapt to routinely use human receptors, thereby making them more readily able to infect human cells. Adding human molecules, which are also human virus receptors, to pig cells may also provide more opportunities for pig and human viruses to infect the same cell, in pig bodies, and recombine (R.  A. Weiss 1998). In both cases, if a new variant develops during a clinical trial, researchers could inadvertently transfer it to the transplant recipient who would most likely be immunosuppressed. The new virus might then spread from the recipient into the global human population. Furthermore, if pig cells are genetically modified to be more human-­ like, experts argued, this may help viruses contained in the pig tissues to evade the human immune system. RNA viruses do not have a specific cell encapsulation, but instead construct one using the DNA of the cell they infect, usually containing molecules of that cell. On the outside such viruses appear like cells of the host species they replicated (i.e. reproduced) within. Under usual circumstances if the human immune system encounters a virus from a pig it will recognise and destroy it—in the same way that it rejects, destroys pig transplants—because the virus, coming from a pig, looks like a pig cell. But, if a virus replicates in pig cells that are modified to be more human, then the virus may also have a modified cell encapsulation that is more human-like, and the recipient immune system might respond to it as if it were a human cell. In short, helping pig tissues to survive in humans may also aid viruses to go unnoticed (R. A. Weiss 2004). We can see then that from the perspective of infectious disease experts, xenografts produce new possibilities for dangerous microbial transformation as well as the beneficial exchange of biological functioning. In this imaginary, the transfer of genes and tissues across species also changes components of interconnected systems—these transfers affect not only the body of the recipient but also alter environments for viruses and viral evolution, and indeed the interconnected networks of human and non-­human animals and their microbes. The adaptable interrelational aspects of cellular

132 

R. Carr

and molecular life are critical to the speculative narrative of an xenozoonosis: both its promises and threats. These understandings of disease and xenozoonosis as emergent, however, are also indicative of a new politics of security/emergency, which I begin to examine in the next section.

Societies of Security In his lecture series of 1978, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault describes the development of security apparatuses around the middle of the eighteenth century (p.  64). Security apparatuses belong to a larger category of liberal power which Foucault (2007) refers to as “governmentality” (p. 108) and which he contrasts with the two other forms of power he has discussed at length elsewhere: discipline and sovereignty. Security apparatuses are a form of biopolitics in that they take the biological population as their object and subject of intervention (Foucault 2007, 43). In contrast to the power of life and death at work in sovereignty and the control of the individual body at work in discipline, governmentality seeks to act on the population, often through modulation of its “milieu” (environment) rather than by direct intervention: “having a hold on things that seem far removed from the population, but which, through calculation, analysis, and reflection, one knows can really have an effect on it” (Foucault 2007, 72). It relies on ways of knowing the population associated with the emerging discipline of “political economy”, which takes population events as a part of a contingent series understood through statistical analysis and notions of risk. While Foucault (2007) draws on classical political economy to outline his understanding of security apparatuses, he argues that the same rationality, forms of knowledge and strategies were incorporated outside economics into governance of other areas of life in the eighteenth century, including infectious disease management. Foucault (2007) characterises security mechanisms in several ways that are of relevance to my discussion of xenotransplantation and the field of emerging infectious disease. Security apparatuses are directed towards population-level events (Foucault 2007, p. 42); they are hence tied to ways of knowing the population not as a collection of individuals with rights but rather as a “thick

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

133

natural phenomenon” (Foucault 2007, 71) that can be characterised by certain predictable features (such as rates of accidents, birth, and mortality), but which also vary in accordance with different contexts (such as the built environment, means of subsistence, access to clean water). The social, material, and political contexts that affect populations are the medium through which security apparatuses will work to alter the likelihood of events occurring in the population. Foucault (2007) observes that these mechanisms are concerned with the contingent, describing the “space” of security mechanisms as a “series of possible events” (Foucault 2007, p.  20). Possible events here might include the spread of disease, rates of criminal activity, accidents, population increase, and so on. Statistical techniques, therefore, are central to these mechanisms, because this series of events are understood in terms of probability, estimation, and risk (Foucault 2007, p. 20). Security practices, Foucault argues, aim to alter the milieu to change the likelihood of events, at the population level. Empirical research, statistics, and probability establish rates of events for a given population and a normal or acceptable range in which events, such as deaths, births, or thefts, should occur. Security apparatuses will work to “normalize” parts of the population, “acting to bring those most unfavorable in line with the more favorable” (Foucault 2007, 63), or to regulate the levels of events in the population so that they remain in an optimal range or equilibrium state. In contrast with the enclosing and controlling techniques of sovereignty and discipline, security apparatuses assume a fundamental need for freedom: they work to regulate, adjust, and utilise movement, contact, and circulations, rather than prohibit them. It would be easy at this point to assume that Foucault’s concept of “security” takes the classical liberal maxim of “laissez-faire” completely literally: all freedom of movement is good, everything is permitted. Nonetheless, not all circulations are considered productive to liberal security projects, and as Foucault stresses, some are even considered dangerous. The aim is: no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out. (Foucault 2007, p. 65)

134 

R. Carr

While ensuring that things continue to flow, security apparatuses also seek to cancel out dangerous and unproductive flows. To better understand the regulation of xenotransplantation infectious disease risks, it is useful to examine how security apparatuses treat disease. Foucault uses the example of eighteenth-century inoculations for smallpox to demonstrate security apparatuses. He stresses that variolisation techniques, which were similar to, but pre-dated, vaccination, emerged in concert with quantitative research on disease in the population.12 The justification for using these strange new procedures, in the eighteenth century, was based less on an understanding of the disease process from medicine (this came later with Pasteur), and more on statistical rationalisation. As proponents of variolisation collected quantitative data on populations that they treated against smallpox, it became possible to view the rates of success and failure for different segments of the population and to justify the value of the new technique, not for the individual but for the population. In concert with this new rationalisation, a new stochastic understanding of disease also emerged, and the population was imagined as a natural entity that public health practices could transform to change the probability of outcomes. The statistical quantification of disease as distribution enabled a new set of regulatory practices to emerge. Rather than targeting every sick individual and attempting to isolate and cure them, as in the prevailing disciplinary approach, these new practices targeted the sub-populations with lower health status, aiming to alter the rate of sickness in these groups, and, through them, the whole. The eighteenth-century security approach to disease using variolisation (Foucault 2007, 61) took the population, rather than individuals, as its object. Contagion itself was mobilised to “nullify” the emergence of a crisis. Variolisations worked by deliberately infecting individuals in a controlled fashion: “[w]ith the support of this kind of first small, artificially inoculated disease, one could prevent other possible attacks of smallpox” (Foucault 2007, p.  59). By contrast, both disciplinary and juridico-legal mechanisms, Foucault argues (2007, p. 62), seek to manage disease by preventing infection and rigidly partitioning groups. What Foucault’s work reveals here is that contagion can be understood quite differently according to specific rationalities of power. From the

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

135

point of view of sovereign power, contagion is understood as deconstructing and undermining otherwise inviolable boundaries and identity. It is fair to say that much feminist scholarship has developed a critique of the sovereign concept of power: with respect to contagion, feminist theorists have shown how anxiety over contagion can correspond to threatened boundaries of the self or state and express a construction of self and other in terms of reasserted boundaries (Shildrick 2002; Waldby 1996). By contrast, apparatuses of security do not offer the same understanding of disease transmission since they presuppose the need for freedom of circulation as the premise of all production and economic maximisation. This is not to suggest that these two understandings of contagion cannot be made to work productively together, but ultimately each belongs to a different rationality and mode of power. The fear of novel infections, in the United States, however, needs to be understood in the context of a distinctly new understanding of contagion, one that is associated with the concept of emerging infectious disease. At the same time that xenotransplantation research was resurging, new sets of knowledge were being circulated regarding the ongoing microbiological exchanges occurring across bodies and populations. As I outlined above, these discourses of emerging infectious disease recognise that viruses are dynamic, capable of crossing species boundaries and emerging in new forms. New strategies to respond to possible disease are addressed less to circulation and population level events, and more to emergence (non-linear transformation and adaptation) and crises and emergency within complex systems. Having established the relevance of Foucault’s notion of the security apparatus for understanding the governance of xenotransplantation in the liberal regulatory context of the United States, it is important to recognise that the task of controlling or regulating populations can take different forms and has evolved in significant ways. Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper (2011) have demonstrated that contemporary practices of security, including those focused on economy, infectious disease, and environment, are shaped by the paradigm of complex adaptive systems which exist in far-from-equilibrium conditions (J. R. Walker 2007). Foucault’s description of security apparatuses suggests they were informed by concepts from Newtonian physics or classical mechanics

136 

R. Carr

that assume a tendency of systems to equilibrium. An understanding of populations and markets as tending towards a state of equilibrium could also be found in neoclassical economics in the late nineteenth century, in ecology in the early to mid-twentieth century, and is similar to concepts of homeostasis in classical systems theory and Cold War cybernetics (J.  R. Walker 2007). However, towards the 1960s and 1970s, a new understanding of complex systems dynamics begins to emerge. This understanding of systems as complex and adaptive was first developed by ecologists in the 1970s and was proposed as an alternative to the equilibrium-­ based models that had dominated the field until then (Holling 1973). It was subsequently adopted by theorists seeking to understand the complex systems dynamics of markets, societies, and disease. In this perspective, adaptive systems inevitably and repeatedly move through moments of growth, stability, crisis, and reorganisation. Complex systems are characteristically emergent: the relationship between parts of systems is non-hierarchical, and events are non-linear, not able to be predicted from an understanding of the individual parts. This shift in focus from equilibrium to far-from-equilibrium systems has entailed the development of new forms of security. In recent decades, the shift towards new models of complex systems in scientific fields ranging from environmental science to economics and public health has led to a corresponding change in security practices to respond to uncertain futures. Just as new understandings of systems assume the inevitability of crises, so too do new security practices increasingly target unpredictable crises, being concerned with “the event whose probability cannot be calculated, but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic” (Lakoff 2008, 36). They tend to be focused on developing a system’s ability to adapt or respond to the next crisis whether that be environmental disaster, financial crises, terrorism, or global pandemic. Future potential crises are not discerned through detailed empirical research or statistical data but rather through an apprehension of a credible, but nonetheless invented, scenario; they are fundamentally speculative and imagined (M.  Cooper 2006). Where Foucault highlights the statistically descriptive forms of knowledge tied to security apparatuses, these potential future events cannot be predicted with any certainty and must therefore be constructed through a range of imaginative and future

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

137

invocative practices.13 For example, Lakoff (2008) illustrates how invented scenarios are used to identify possible vulnerabilities in existing systems. Melinda Cooper (2006) has argued that the process of imaginatively constructing a possible future crisis produces an emotional response to an unpredictable and fundamentally insecure future, specifically “a state of alertness, without foreseeable end” (p.  120). This emotionally charged construction of possible future events exhorts us to respond to what we suspect without being able to discern; to prepare for the emergent, long before we can predict how and when it will be actualized; to counter the unknowable, before it is even realized. (M. Cooper 2006, 120)

On the basis of this anxiety, the “new discourse of catastrophe risk” (M. Cooper 2008, 83) thus requires a response that pre-empts, prepares for, or intervenes in an event before it even happens. Emerging infectious disease perspectives, in the 1990s, emphasised the uncertainty inherent in an impending disease crisis. There was no way of knowing how microbe(s) might evolve to infect the human population, and disease could emerge at any time and place regardless of, or even because of, our attempts to eradicate microbes. Accordingly, it wasn’t only specific, identifiable diseases that public health strategies sought to address, but “emergence itself ” (M. Cooper 2006, 118). This perspective, as Cooper articulates, “defines infectious disease as emerging and emergent—not incidentally, but in essence”. Lakoff (2008) argues that during the 1990s, the US government, specifically the Department of Defense, became convinced that it was ill-­ equipped to deal with the imminent pandemic: whether it occurred through “natural” processes or originated in deliberate bioterrorism, an increasing concern for the United States.14 The apprehension of an impending disaster called for the immediate development of strategies to prepare for the next pandemic. Yet despite the foregrounding of the dangers of global interconnections and non-human animal contact, official recognition of the threat of a looming pandemic did not result in efforts to rigidly partition national space or restrict movements, in part due to the imbrication of disease routes with those of “goods and people”

138 

R. Carr

(Stephenson 2011, 622). In the words of Nicholas King (2002), “the emerging diseases world-view identifies globalization as an irrepressible source of geographic transgression, rendering the ideal of territoriality moot” (p. 772). Instead, newly militarised US countermeasures responded to the threat of a possible pandemic (Davies 2008; Fidler et  al. 1997; King 2002), including both nationally based and “extraterritorial” activities (Braun 2007, 22). Extraterritorial practices attempted to intervene “at the source” of infectious disease outbreaks in other territories so as to pre-empt and contain an outbreak before they arrived in the United States. With the approach that “the fight must be taken ‘over there’ before it reaches ‘here’ ” (Braun 2007, 22), the United States cultivated knowledge about infectious disease events, globally, through surveillance, and developed the ability to respond to these events quickly.15 For example, the United States positioned infectious disease laboratories around the globe and provided extensive funding to WHO’s Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network (GOARN) (Davies 2008). These mobile services would inform US agencies early on of an international infectious disease outbreak, but also build the capacity for US workers to be immediately on the ground to “contain and prevent the spread of the disease” (King 2002, 774).16 Importantly, these deterritorialising interventions also strategically target integration into global markets, dominated by the United States: The ideology of the civilizing mission is being replaced by one of international development; the goal is no longer to bring modern Western medicine to primitive cultures, but rather to furnish them with Western medical technologies in an effort to foster the integration of underdeveloped nations into the world capitalist economy. (King 2002, 780)

Bruce Braun (2007) observes that global surveillance and intervention techniques began to be applied to non-human populations, figured as reservoirs of disease or “biohazards”. Proponents of One Health argued that non-human animal disease could also “serve as early warning signs of potential human illness”, making it imperative to track movements of microbes within and between human and other animal populations

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

139

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2017).17 For example, the US Department of the Interior samples influenza viruses from birds migrating on the Pacific Flyway to increase its bank of influenza genes, and thus enhance its capacities to respond to novel influenza outbreaks. Similarly, the UN has launched a project to track bird migrations by outfitting birds with “tiny backpacks carrying communication technologies linked to a system of radio beacons and satellites” (Braun 2007, 21). This intensive data collection, Braun suggests, “represents both the capacity and desire to extend the unending examination of global populations across the animal kingdom in order to govern the ‘global biological’ as a single, integrated system containing emergent risks” (Braun 2007, 21). Beyond surveillance, the United States actively tried to counter speculative threats, by first actualising or simulating the feared event.18 For instance, Cooper (2006) highlights the efforts of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to create vaccines against viruses that did not yet exist, by first producing novel viruses with a new technique of randomly recombining viral genetic segments, a kind of “anticipatory evolution” (p. 126). This approach actively harnessed emergence and adaptation itself.19 Yet, Cooper (2006) points to the self-perpetuating nature of such pre-emptive strategies: they mobilise new techniques of intervening and remaking life, ostensibly entailing increased security, but these interventions may also engender their own uncertainties, which in turn may need securing against. Strategies in response to complex systems emergence and emergency, then, display a shift from the security apparatuses characterised by Foucault. Whereas in Foucault’s descriptions of security, population outcomes were understood within a series of events thought to have calculable likelihoods, now life itself was constructed as fundamentally contingent, with incalculable catastrophic future events apprehended through speculation, simulation, and imagination. Pre-emptive strategies actively intervene and produce a particular reality—sometimes very reality that is the source of anxiety—unlike those security apparatuses described by Foucault that indirectly influence a chain of events via the milieu. Xenozoonosis is precisely the kind of catastrophe that is characteristic of contemporary security discourses. Similarly, the “solution” to the

140 

R. Carr

problem is likewise sought in the transformative, resilient, adaptive potential of bodies and biosocial systems. In response to the portrayal of a potential xenozoonosis pandemic, government did not ban xenotransplantation, but instead recommended a series of pre-emptive practices including high-level surveillance across species, designed to anticipate and act quickly in the face of emerging viruses. Likewise, the industry in the United States has engaged in a range of anticipatory practices, in some cases an all-out pre-emptive warfare against PERV.

Laika: Cultivating Animal Capital Imagine a world where patients who suffer from liver failure can be saved with a new liver without having to wait for a donation or another human to die. Imagine a world where people with diabetes do not have to rely on insulin after every meal because we can provide them with good pancreatic cells that can produce insulin on their own. And imagine a world where patients with kidney failure do not have to face the burden of dialysis. We are striving to create that world, a world without organ shortage. (eGenesis cofounder Luhan Yang)20

In 2017, US company eGenesis created Laika, the first PERV-free pig. The modifications were achieved with CRISPR-Cas9, the controversial and now-famous genome-editing tool, inactivating all 62 copies of PERV in her genome. Laika is the starting point to the company’s plan to develop pigs for xenotransplantation, and ultimately “create a world with no shortage of human transplantable organs”.21 Removing PERV pre-­ empts any possibility of its replication and infection in the human recipients of their tailor-made pig organs. In addition to stripping out the endogenous retrovirus, eGenesis expects to make at least 12 genetic alterations to pigs to render their organs more compatible with human recipients,22 including the addition of human genes to counter immunological rejection.23 In removing 62 PERV copies from Laika’s genome, eGenesis not only created a new form of life, but also “broke the record”, at the time, on the number of genetic modifications carried out within a single

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

141

cell. In 2001, co-founder Yang claimed that Laika “may be the most advanced geno-modified animal living on earth”.24 CRISPR-Cas9, a clever, but highly controversial, genetic engineering tool, mobilises the genome-cutting skills of bacteria and archaea,25 to precisely cut out and/or add in sections of DNA. The technology is also supported by a cell’s own ability to “self-repair” the DNA after it has been cut (Doudna and Charpentier 2014).26 The bacteria is used to snip the DNA and strategically deliver a new piece of DNA to the site—in this case a bit of helpful human DNA—but the cell itself does the work of integrating the new “donor” strand of DNA into the genome. eGenesis’ approach to xenotransplantation hinges off vital capacities for regeneration and mutation, not reproduction in its traditional form. Rather than basing research on a special living herd, like LCT (discussed in Chap. 2) eGenesis draws from a primary porcine cell line—cells taken from an organism and manipulated to produce continuous cellular growth. In order to create their PERV-free pigs for transplantation, the researchers “treated” a population of these cells with a CRISPR system and guide RNA—which ideally would target and inactivate the PERVs from the cell genome. The treatment was varyingly effective, with some cells achieving little PERV inactivation, and some achieving more than 90% (Niu et al. 2017). However, the researchers found in the first attempt that those cells which had been successfully edited died—possibly, they hypothesised, from damage in conducting such widespread genome changes. The researchers found greater success when they fed the newly CRISPR’d cells with an “optimized cocktail” of chemicals to facilitate growth (Niu et al. 2017). In subsequent efforts, eight cells were successfully inactivated of PERV, five of these sustained abnormalities in other areas of the genome (off target changes) and were of no value, but in three cells the changes effected by CRISPR treatment were only those intended. These successful cells were cultivated and cloned, using Single Cell Nuclear Transfer, and transformed into around 4000 pig embryos by using enucleated oocytes provided by pig donors. These 4000 embryos were implanted into 17 sows (over time), gestated with their reproductive labour. At the time of Yang’s publication, these had resulted in just 37 live piglets, 22 of whom were killed to assess the health of their organs.27 The 15 remaining (adorable) piglets became the poster children for CRISPR

142 

R. Carr

and eGenesis in 2017, symbols of a new world “where no one dies waiting for a transplant”.28 eGenesis named the first successful PERV-free cloned pig Laika, after the famous Russian dog who was the first living animal to orbit the earth in 1957. In a TED talk, Yang says, “We hope Laika and her siblings can lead us into a new frontier of science and medicine”. Her name, Laika, arguably references that eGenesis, Church and Yang, are hoping that genetic modification of pigs for xenotransplantation will pave the way to genetic modification of humans29—much like Laika’s journey into space led the way for many subsequent human expeditions once it was found to be safe. Laika is appropriately named, considering that her namesake was launched into space without a plan for her survival. The Soviet scientists had planned that Laika—a stray dog from the streets of Russia trained for space travel—would be euthanised by poisoning several days into the flight, but she died after around six hours from overheating and panic. Unlike the original Laika who died only once, however, the new post-modern version, as a clone, is made available for repeated deaths. A regenerable resource, Laika is created over and over again in various forms, with new mutations, doomed to suffer and die from one thing or another—failure to thrive, experimental research and testing, and eventually, perhaps, as human spare parts. The company has gone on to further genetically engineer pigs to “eliminate three xenoantigens and to express nine human transgenes” (Yue et  al. 2021). They are currently undertaking pre-clinical trials in their US and China locations. So far, while some of the baboons into whom they transplanted modified pig organs survived for more than six months, others have not, and without clear reason.30 eGenesis’ strategy to confront the potential for PERV to infect humans from xenotransplantation (potentially mutating or combining with other viruses first) is to re-engineer life, changing the future before it occurs by inactivating PERV through genetic engineering. “The best way to predict the future”, says co-founder George Church, “is to change it”, fully embracing a pre-emptive logic in his practice.31 Church is a giant in the US biotech landscape, Professor at Harvard and MIT, and founder of more than ten biotechnology companies, and one of the first to map the human genome. The xenotransplantation research is only a small part of

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

143

a much larger set of projects to improve human biology, re-engineer life and save the planet. Church does not want to stop at engineering pigs to provide ordinary organs for xenotransplantation; he wants enhance them further: “Cells and organs that are resistant to cancers, pathogens and senescence could be better in a preventive sense than the normal human organs that are being replaced”.32 While the apprehension of potential xenozoonosis requires imagination, so too does organ xenotransplantation, as indicated by the opening quote to this section. After more than 20 years of research, and promises of billion-dollar industries, the research has yet to deliver a marketable organ product. However, eGenesis are clearly successful in stimulating imagination and capital. In 2019, following from their success in creating Laika, eGenesis generated $100 million in venture funding (in addition to the $38 million prior to this) for their xenotransplantation platform.33 Church’s early ambitious targets of human compatible pig organs by 2018 have been replaced by a more modest proposal of success in the next decade. Overstated expectations are typical of the US biotech industry. The promise, imagined future, and dependence on venture capital in eGenesis’ xenotransplantation development program display all the hallmarks of Sunder Rajan’s (2006) “biocapital”. In his seminal account of political economy and the life sciences, Sunder Rajan points to the speculative form of capitalism evident in contemporary US biotechnology industry. Investment in this domain, he argues, relies on companies being able to paint a particular “vision” of the future, and investors accepting high levels of risk (Sunder Rajan 2006, 11). “Hype”, he argues, intersects with scientific fact production, so that the production of biotechnology and life sciences (in the United States) can no longer be separated from imagined futures it depends on for venture funding and growth. Indeed, as others have noted, life sciences research and industry, in the United States particularly, is increasingly geared towards generating capital from speculative investment rather than commodity sales (M. Cooper 2008). Investment, in this economy, is frequently based on the “credibility” rather than truth (Sunder Rajan 2006, 115). A future world of personalised medicine—built on genomic technologies—is one of those most clearly articulated (credible) visions in contemporary biotechnology

144 

R. Carr

landscape. This mode of capital accumulation (biocapital) is inherently future oriented. Hype, according to Sunder Rajan (2006), “is a discursive mode of calling on the future to account for the present” (p.  116). Accordingly, the industry, like contemporary security apparatuses, is driven not by “rational expectations, but rather the essentially speculative but nonetheless productive movements of collective belief, faith, and apprehension” (M. Cooper 2008, 10). While earlier researchers sought to understand the profile of different strains of PERV and minimise the chances of infection in xenotransplantation through choice of pig breed, eGenesis seeks to literally remake pigs instead. Citing the organ crisis as its drive for surplus creation, eGenesis promises a future without organ shortage engendered through biotechnological innovation. Laika, an embodied living pig, contributes to the credibility of eGenesis’ vision of a future organ surplus, engendering faith in the science of genetic engineering.34 Biotechnology’s promissory discourses are not the only future-oriented narratives shaping the xenotransplantation field, as alongside these (not necessarily in conflict) is the future painted of a potential catastrophic zoonotic outbreak associated with the technologies. Both are affective apprehensions, one characterised by hope and the other by anxiety. The affective vision of future catastrophe of PERV or another unknown disease agent emerging through xenotransplantation, however, has provoked not only regulatory restrictions (i.e. the moratoria in some countries), but also generative life sciences research, and speculative investment. This is clearly demonstrated in the financial interest in eGenesis xenotransplantation research following their genetic engineered pigs with inactivated PERV. Indeed, eGenesis does well at capitalising simultaneously on an uncertain future xenozoonosis emergency and a discourse of organ scarcity. However, the widely publicised organ “scarcity” has been critiqued by social studies scholars who argue that it is produced by the very technologies and social policies that make transplantation possible and acceptable for a large range of recipients (Cohen 2001; Lock 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2002). While socio-political conditions producing organ “shortages” differ across countries (see Hogle 1999), swelling waiting lists may reflect the fact that governments have broadened the eligibility criteria for

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

145

receiving a transplant (Lock 2003; Scheper-Hughes 2002) or changed organ donation consent policies. At the same time, among ageing (privileged) populations, the incidence of chronic conditions has been increasing, and mortality in accidents becoming less frequent (Lock 2003). As Rémy (2009) argues, success with allografts generated “a demand for grafts that was impossible to satisfy which, in turn, created an incentive to revive experiments in xenografts” (412).

Conclusion The US regulation xenotransplantation guidelines facilitate innovation and development of biocapital in response to the possible disease emergence. Rather than banning xenotransplantation to prevent a PERV infection in an individual recipient, the approach outlined by the FDA was to put its faith in scientists to prepare for and pre-empt an occurrence before it became a public health issue, through innovations in screening, intervention, and surveillance. In particular, they encourage novel ways of removing infectious agents such as PERV: “Whenever possible, … we encourage you to develop and incorporate validated procedures for inactivation or removal of adventitious agents, infectious agents, or other microbiological contaminants into the manufacture of the xenotransplantation product” (US Food and Drug Administration 2003, 24). Foucault (2007) argues that “an apparatus of security … cannot operate well except on condition that it is given freedom … the possibility of movement, and processes of circulation of both people and things” (48–49). Far more than simply enabling circulations, contemporary security apparatuses take on pre-emptive and world-invoking measures in the face of speculative crises or catastrophe. Whereas in sovereigntist understandings of disease, contagion threatens sacrosanct boundaries, in the context of contemporary security apparatuses, infection appears in an altogether different light: it becomes an event, driver, and means of adaptation. Not concerned with protecting a territory or status quo, contemporary security apparatuses respond to potential contagious threats by generating new forms of life and bringing forth a particular future. For humans, such speculative economies may produce a continuous state of

146 

R. Carr

anxiety and, as Evans and Reid (2014) argue, demand them to internalise uncertainties by developing resilience. But for non-human animals do security apparatuses foretell of the deepening integration of disposable non-human life in the life sciences, as a source for adaptation and development of resilient systems? “Animal capitalism”, Nicole Shukin explains, “invests in a world in which species boundaries can be radically crossed” (2009, 11). Allocating non-humans as a source of (speculative) human disease does not, in US xenotransplantation landscape, result in abject exclusion of other animals (as in some cases it does), but becomes the justification of intervention in nonhuman biology. Far from implying a more evolved response to infectious disease or relationships with non-human animals, these changes represent new species of power and inequality associated with emerging forms of capitalism. While innovative life sciences research epitomised by eGenesis targets the health of human populations, repeatedly deferred into the future, at the same time its capital-generating visions rely on non-human life in the present. The lack of a saleable commodity from eGenesis and other xenotransplantation companies is indicative of the economy which is about capturing investment capital based on a promise of (biological) future surplus. “Henceforth, profits will depend on the accumulation of biological futures rather than on the extraction of non-renewable resources and the mass production of tangible commodities” (M. Cooper 2008, 24). Yet as eGenesis and other companies generate profit from the promise of the regenerative ability of vital mechanisms they leave a trail of non-human death and discarded vitality. In this necropolitical quality, capital accumulation, with a radical commitment to deterritorialisation of the human animal boundary, also bears the trace of the sovereign human/animal binary.

Notes 1. In 1999, the FDA produced a draft of specific guidelines on the use of non-human primates as source animals that indicated primates posed a greater risk of infection to humans than other animals. They postponed the use of primates as source animals: “clinical protocols proposing the

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

147

use of nonhuman primate xenografts should not be submitted to the FDA until sufficient scientific information exists addressing the risks posed by nonhuman primate xenotransplants” (US Food and Drug Administration 1999b). This position has not yet been revised. 2. In October 1997 the FDA blocked previously approved clinical trials (ten studies) involving porcine transplants until the responsible institutions could prove that they were able to test for PERV in source animals and recipients and developed informed consent documents that made participants aware of the risks and consequences of PERV (US Public Health Services 2001, 7). 3. The FDA Guidance has remained largely consistent with these PHS guidelines (US Food and Drug Administration 2003). 4. However, although borders may well be breaking down in the age of globalisation, as several theorists have noted, there has also been a proliferation of new techniques aimed at policing borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Sassen 2014). 5. https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/06/crispr-­pig-­organs-­transplant-­ luhan-­yang/. 6. They illustrated their concerns with reference to these broader experiences of zoonotic disease outbreaks, as there were no instances of public health incidents, or zoonotic infections, in xenotransplantation research itself at that point. However, in 2014 a report linked Q fever with unregulated live cell therapies using sheep cells in Germany (Robyn et al. 2015). 7. A retrovirus is an RNA virus, consisting in a single strand of RNA. As part of the process of infecting and replicating in a cell, retroviruses integrate themselves permanently into the cell genome, and co-opt the cell DNA to reproduce themselves (Stoye et al. 1998). If the cell is a germline cell this results in the retrovirus being integrated not only into the cell, but the host genome and subsequent generations. Over the course of evolution every vertebrate species has acquired a set of retroviruses thus embedded in their genome. These are called endogenous retroviruses, and they represent approximately 8% of the human genome (R. A. Weiss 2004, 287). Many of these retroviruses are no longer functional, but some are still coherent viruses able to infect cells, although generally not cells of their host species. 8. Similar debates have arisen around the use of antibiotics to those I explore in this thesis, for example, around the security of the population, understandings of immunity, and othering the sources of the threat of antimicrobial resistance (see Brown and Nettleton 2017).

148 

R. Carr

9. For instance, epidemiologists speculate that the SIV virus (the HIV precursor) probably originated in rural Africa, where it passed from chimpanzees to humans many times prior to its emergence in global populations in the 1980s, but because the infected human population was small and isolated the virus was unable to sustain itself (Parrish et al. 2008). Timberg and Halperin (2012) narrate a story in which HIV/ AIDS emerged as a pandemic in humans only when colonisation, trade routes, and air travel connected the rural parts of Africa to a larger population, and in particular to a population of hosts with a certain kinds of sexual interaction. As many scholars have argued, the construction of the origin of HIV and public health management of AIDS have been deeply intertwined with the normalisation of gender, sexuality, and family relations, as well as further instituting racism and xenophobia (M. Cooper 2017; Geary 2014; Patton 2002; Wald 2008; Waldby 1996). 10. This understanding has resulted, for example, in attempts to alter backyard agricultural practices in particular countries through investment in “creating professional and paraprofessional workers charged with ‘modernizing’ agricultural practices” (Braun 2007, 23). 11. There are some exceptions. For instance, as discussed in Chap. 2, New Zealand company Living Cell Technologies encapsulates pig cells in an alginate substance to protect them from the human immune system, rather than genetically engineering the pigs (Matsumoto et al. 2016). 12. Variolisation is more commonly called variolation. This practice involved placing fresh material from a small-pox pustule into an incision, usually on the arm. The material was taken from a person infected with smallpox, unlike Jenner’s later vaccination techniques which used cowpox. It usually resulted in a local reaction of a rash and smallpox pustules, much smaller than the usual smallpox infection, and conferred some immunity to smallpox infection proper. However, occasionally it resulted in a severe reaction and death (Fenner et al. 1988). 13. For example, Lakoff (2008) describes techniques of “imaginative enactment” mainly used in the US military to define a space of new problems and action within the vulnerabilities of complex systems. These include simulated scenarios of possible events of bioterrorism, disease outbreak, or other catastrophes. Indeed, Lakoff (2008) traces the connections between the early discourses on emerging infectious disease and imaginative enactment scenarios carried out by US defence in the 1990s.

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

149

14. As many scholars have pointed to, government and defence forces have increasingly militarised infectious disease concerns, bringing them under the umbrella of defence activities and funding (M. Cooper 2006; Fidler et al. 1997; Lakoff 2008). 15. Stephenson (2011) highlights that the ideal of circulating information isn’t always achieved, and is sometimes resisted. 16. More locally focused, the United States developed a set of techniques for responding to emerging infectious disease: preparing for pandemic events with what Lakoff (2008) calls “vital systems security”. In contrast with public health practices targeting human populations (as with Foucault’s security apparatuses), these efforts were concerned with ensuring the functioning of power and water systems in the event of catastrophe, as well as developing new processes for responding to crises, such as those for managing the distribution of medical and other services, therapeutics, and information (Lakoff 2008). 17. A new paradigm of One Health stressed the connection between human and animal health within shared environmental contexts. One Health understands humans and other animals exist in fragile interconnected systems, in which disturbances can affect the health of the whole. In its most elaborate form, scholars advocate in favour of using complex systems analysis to situate human health in interconnected non-human animal, human, and environmental systems, and within social and political contexts Zinsstag et al. Zinsstag and colleagues argue this sits in a broader understanding that also includes “resilience, adaptive management and sustainability studies”. Their understanding is tightly linked to the work of the Resilience Alliance, an organisation formed by complex systems theorist Crawford S. Holling. 18. In the United States strategies against climate change, for example, exemplify active pre-emption: using “aggressive counter proliferation, where the point is no longer to halt innovation on the mere suspicion of its incalculable effects but precisely to mobilize innovation in order to pre-­empt its potential fall out” (M. Cooper 2006, 121). 19. Passive pre-emption takes a precautionary stance of prohibiting the source of potential catastrophe such as dangerous actions or technologies. 20. https://www.ted.com/talks/luhan_yang_how_to_create_a_world_ where_no_one_dies_waiting_for_a_transplant/transcript?language=en.

150 

R. Carr

21. https://www.egenesisbio.com/. 22. https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/06/crispr-­pig-­organs-­transplant-­ luhan-­yang/. 23. https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/pig-­o rgans-­f or-­h uman-­p atients-­a -­ challenge-­fit-­for-­crispr/. 24. https://www.ted.com/talks/luhan_yang_how_to_create_a_world_ where_no_one_dies_waiting_for_a_transplant/transcript?language=en. 25. Ironically, in bacteria and archaea CRISPR systems function as adaptive immune systems (Mali et al. 2013), incorporating aspects of infecting phages into their own RNA to be used for future protection. 26. At times the cellular repair function uses suitable available strands of DNA to join the break, thus opening the potential to recombine its own DNA with “donor DNA” deliberately provided. 27. Since then the eGenesis research lab located in China has reputedly created at least 2000 pigs, with further genetic modifications. https:// futurehuman.medium.com/a-­startup-­is-­making-­thousands-­of-­gene-­ edited-­pigs-­because-­humans-­need-­their-­organs-­348a9db9a18b. 28. https://www.ted.com/talks/luhan_yang_how_to_create_a_world_ where_no_one_dies_waiting_for_a_transplant/transcript?language=en. 29. https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/06/crispr-­pig-­organs-­transplant-­ luhan-­yang/. 30. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/12/239014/crispr-­pig-­ organs-­a re-­b eing-­i mplanted-­i n-­m onkeys-­t o-­s ee-­i f-­t heyre-­s afe-­ for-­humans/. 31. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140602-­george-­ church-­innovation-­biology-­science-­genetics-­de-­extinction. 32. https://time.com/5159889/why-­pig-­organs-­could-­be-­the-­future-­of-­ transplants/. 33. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-­release/2019/11/07/1942929/0/ en/eGenesis-­Announces-­100-­Million-­Series-­B-­Financing.html. 34. https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/pig-­o rgans-­f or-­h uman-­p atients-­a -­ challenge-­fit-­for-­crispr/.

References Ahuja, Neel. 2016. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Duke University Press.

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

151

Allan, J.S. 1994. Primates and New Viruses. Science 265 (5177): 1345–1346. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8073267. Allan, Jonathan S. 1995. Xenograft Transplantation of the Infectious Disease Conundrum. ILAR Journal 37: 37–48. ———. 1998. The Risk of Using Baboons as Transplant Donors: Exogenous and Endogenous Viruses. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 862 (1): 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-­6632.1998.tb09120.x. Anderson, Warwick. 2004. Natural Histories of Infectious Disease: Ecological Vision in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Science. Osiris 19 (1): 39–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/649393. Bach, F.H., J.A. Fishman, N. Daniels, J. Proimos, B. Anderson, C.B. Carpenter, L.  Forrow, S.C.  Robson, and H.V.  Fineberg. 1998. Uncertainty in Xenotransplantation: Individual Benefit Versus Collective Risk. Nature Medicine 4 (2): 141–144. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0298-­141. Bailey, L.L., S.L. Nehlsen-Cannarella, W. Concepcion, and W.B. Jolley. 1985. Baboon-to-Human Cardiac Xenotransplantation in a Neonate. JAMA 254 (23): 3321–3329. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1985.03360230053022. Boneva, Roumiana S., Thomas M.  Folks, and Louisa E.  Chapman. 2001. Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 14 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1128/CMR.14.1.1-­14.2001. Braun, Bruce. 2007. Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life. Cultural Geographies 14 (1): 6–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007072817. Brown, Nik, and Sarah Nettleton. 2017. Bugs in the Blog: Immunitary Moralism in Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). Social Theory & Health 15 (3): 302–322. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-­017-­0030-­9. Caduff, Carlo. 2015. The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger. University of California Press. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2017. One Health: One Health Basics. August 4. https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/index.html. Chapman, L. 1999. Speculation, Stringent Reasoning, and Science. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 77 (1): 68–70. Cohen, Lawrence. 2001. The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition. Body & Society 7: 20. Cooper, Melinda. 2006. Pre-Empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (4): 113–135. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276406065121. ———. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. University of Washington Press.

152 

R. Carr

———. 2017. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Princeton University Press. Cooper, David K.C., Burcin Ekser, Jagdeece Ramsoondar, Carol Phelps, and David Ayares. 2016. The Role of Genetically-Engineered Pigs in Xenotransplantation Research. The Journal of Pathology 238 (2): 288. https:// doi.org/10.1002/path.4635. Davies, Sara E. 2008. Securitizing Infectious Disease. International Affairs 84 (2): 295–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-­2346.2008.00704.x. Deschamps, Jack-Yves, Françoise A.  Roux, Pierre Saï, and Edouard Gouin. 2005. History of Xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation 12 (2): 91–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-­3089.2004.00199.x. Dillon, M. 2007. Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence. International Political Sociology 1: 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1749-­5687.2007.00002.x. Domingo, E., C. Escarmís, N. Sevilla, A. Moya, S.F. Elena, J. Quer, I.S. Novella, and J.J.  Holland. 1996. Basic Concepts in RNA Virus Evolution. FASEB Journal: Official Publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 10 (8): 859–864. Domingo, Esteban, Julie Sheldon, and Celia Perales. 2012. Viral Quasispecies Evolution. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 76 (2): 159–216. https://doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.05023-­11. Doudna, Jennifer A., and Emmanuelle Charpentier. 2014. The New Frontier of Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9. Science 346 (6213). https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1258096. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. 2014. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. John Wiley & Sons. Exner, Beate G., Michael Neipp, and Suzanne T. Ildstad. 1997. Baboon Bone Marrow Transplantation in Humans: Application of Cross-Species Disease Resistance. World Journal of Surgery 21 (9): 962–967. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s002689900334. Fenner, Frank, Donald A. Henderson, Isao Arita, Zdenek Jezek, Ivan Danilovich Ladnyi, and World Health Organization. 1988. Smallpox and Its Eradication. Geneva: World Health Organization. http://www.who.int/iris/ handle/10665/39485. Fidler, David P., David L. Heymann, Stephen M. Ostroff, and Terry P. O’Brien. 1997. Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Challenges for International, National, and State Law. International Lawyer (ABA) 31: 773.

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

153

Fishman, Jay A. 1994. Miniature Swine as Organ Donors for Man: Strategies for Prevention of Xenotransplant-Associated Infections. Xenotransplantation 1 (1): 47–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-­3089.1994.tb00049.x. ———. 2003. SARS, Xenotransplantation and Bioterrorism: Preventing the next Epidemic. American Journal of Transplantation 3 (8): 909–912. https:// doi.org/10.1034/j.1600-­6143.2003.00213.x. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fovargue, Sara. 2011. Xenotransplantation and Risk: Regulating a Developing Biotechnology. Cambridge University Press. Garrett, Laurie. 1994. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Geary, A. 2014. Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic: State Intimacies. Springer. Heeney, J.L., A.G. Dalgleish, and R.A. Weiss. 2006. Origins of HIV and the Evolution of Resistance to AIDS. Science 313: 462–466. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1123016. Hogle, Linda F. 1999. Recovering the Nation’s Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption. Rutgers University Press. Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev.es.04.110173.000245. Institute of Medicine. 1992. Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States. Ed. Joshua Lederberg, Robert E.  Shope, and Stanley C. Oaks, Jr. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Kelley, Lindsay, and Eva Hayward. 2013. Carnal Light. Parallax 19 (1): 114–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2013.743297. King, Nicholas B. 2002. Security, Disease, Commerce Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health. Social Studies of Science 32 (5–6): 763–789. https://doi. org/10.1177/030631270203200507. Lakoff, Andrew. 2008. From Population to Vital Systems. In Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health & Security in Question, ed. Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2017. Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. University of California Press. Le Tissier, Paul, Jonathan P. Stoye, Yasuhiro Takeuchi, Clive Patience, and Robin A. Weiss. 1997. Two Sets of Human-Tropic Pig Retrovirus. Nature 389 (6652): 681–682. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1038/39489.

154 

R. Carr

Leach, Melissa, and Ian Scoones. 2013. The Social and Political Lives of Zoonotic Disease Models: Narratives, Science and Policy. Social Science & Medicine (1982) 88: 10–17. Lock, Margaret M. 2002. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. University of California Press. Lock, Margaret M. 2003. On Making up the Good-as-Dead in a Utilitarian World. In Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, eds. Sarah Franklin and Margaret M.  Lock. Santa Fe: Oxford: School for Advanced Research Press. Lynteris, Christos, ed. 2019. Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains: Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­26795-­7. Mali, Prashant, Kevin M.  Esvelt, and George M.  Church. 2013. Cas9 as a Versatile Tool for Engineering Biology. Nature Methods 10 (10): 957–963. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2649. Martin, U., V. Kiessig, J.H. Blusch, A. Haverich, K. von der Helm, T. Herden, and G. Steinhoff. 1998. Expression of Pig Endogenous Retrovirus by Primary Porcine Endothelial Cells and Infection of Human Cells. Lancet (London, England) 352 (9129): 692–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140­6736(98)07144-­X. Matsumoto, Shinichi, Adrian Abalovich, Carlos Wechsler, Shaun Wynyard, and Robert B. Elliott. 2016. Clinical Benefit of Islet Xenotransplantation for the Treatment of Type 1 Diabetes. eBioMedicine 12: 255–262. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.08.034. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Michaels, Marian, and Richard Simmons. 1994. Xenotransplant-Associated Zoonoses: Strategies for Prevention. Transplantation 57: 1–7. Michaels, Marian G., Christina Kaufman, Paul A. Volberding, Phalguni Gupta, William M. Switzer, Walid Heneine, Paul Sandstrom, et al. 2004. Baboon Bone-Marrow Xenotransplant in a Patient with Advanced HIV Disease: Case Report and 8-Year Follow-Up. Transplantation 78 (11): 1582–1589. Morens, David M., and Anthony S. Fauci. 2012. Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2012: 20 Years After the Institute of Medicine Report. MBio 3 (6): e00494–e00412. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00494-­12. Morse, S.S. 1995. Factors in the Emergence of Infectious Diseases. Emerging Infectious Diseases 1 (1): 7–15. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid0101.950102.

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

155

Mueller, Y.M., C.  Davenport, and S.T.  Ildstad. 1999. Xenotransplantation: Application of Disease Resistance. Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology & Physiology 26 (12): 1009–1012. Niu, Dong, Hong-Jiang Wei, Lin Lin, Haydy George, Tao Wang, I-Hsiu Lee, Hong-Ye Zhao, et al. 2017. Inactivation of Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus in Pigs Using CRISPR-Cas9. Science 357 (6357): 1303–1307. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.aan4187. Onions, D., D.K.C.  Cooper, T.J.L.  Alexander, C.  Brown, E.  Claassen, J.E.  Foweraker, D.L.  Harris, et  al. 2000. An Approach to the Control of Disease Transmission in Pig-to-Human Xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation 7 (2): 143–155. https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1399-­ 3089.2000.00047.x. Parrish, Colin R., Edward C.  Holmes, David M.  Morens, Eun-Chung Park, Donald S. Burke, Charles H. Calisher, Catherine A. Laughlin, Linda J. Saif, and Peter Daszak. 2008. Cross-Species Virus Transmission and the Emergence of New Epidemic Diseases. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 72 (3): 457–470. https://doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.00004-­08. Patience, Clive, Yasuhiro Takeuchi, and Robin A.  Weiss. 1997. Infection of Human Cells by an Endogenous Retrovirus of Pigs. Nature Medicine 3 (3): 282–286. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0397-­282. Patton, Cindy. 2002. Globalizing AIDS. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=310580. Rémy, Catherine. 2009. The Animal Issue in Xenotransplantation: Controversies in France and the United States. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31 (3/4): 405–28. Robyn, Mp, M. Ap Newman, M. Walawander Amato, C. Kothe, J.D. Nerone, C. Pomerantz, et al. 2015. Q Fever Outbreak among Travelers to Germany Associated with Live Cell Therapy—United States and Canada, 2014: A Co-Publication. Canada Communicable Disease Report 41 (10): 223–226. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs. SAIS Review 22 (1): 61–80. https://doi. org/10.1353/sais.2002.0022. Shildrick, Margrit. 2002. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. University of Minnesota Press.

156 

R. Carr

Smith, Douglas M. 1993. Endogenous Retroviruses in Xenografts. New England  Journal of Medicine 328: 142–143. https://doi.org/10.1056/ NEJM199301143280218. Starzl, T.E., J. Fung, A. Tzakis, S. Todo, A.J. Demetris, I.R. Marino, H. Doyle, et al. 1993. Baboon-to-Human Liver Transplantation. The Lancet 341 (8837): 65–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-­6736(93)92553-­6. Stephenson, Niamh. 2011. Emerging Infectious Disease/Emerging Forms of Biological Sovereignty. Science, Technology & Human Values 36 (5): 616–637. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910388023. Stoye, J.P., P.  Le Tissier, Y.  Takeuchi, C.  Patience, and R.A.  Weiss. 1998. Endogenous Retroviruses: A Potential Problem for Xenotransplantation? Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 862: 67–74. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-­6632.1998.tb09118.x. Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Timberg, Craig, and Daniel Halperin. 2012. Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It. 1st ed. New York, NY: Penguin. US Food and Drug Administration. 1999a. FDA—Fact Sheet on Xenotransplantation. www.fda.gov/opacom/backgrounders/xeno.htm. ———. 1999b. Guidance for Industry: Public Health Issues Posed by the Use of Nonhuman Primate Xenografts in Humans. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/GuidanceComplianceRegulator y Information/Guidances/Xenotransplantation/ucm092866.pdf. ———. 2003. Guidance for Industry: Source Animal, Product, Preclinical, and Clinical Issues Concerning the Use of Xenotransplantation Products in Humans. https://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Guidance ComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidances/Xenotransplantation/ UCM533036.pdf. US Public Health Services. 2001. PHS Guidelines on Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBlood Vaccines/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ Xenotransplantation/UCM092858.pdf. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Waldby, Catherine. 1996. Aids and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge.

4  Circulating Non-human Tissues: Xenotransplantation… 

157

———. 2000. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge. Walker, Jeremy R. 2007. Economy of Nature: A Genealogy of the Concepts ‘Growth’ and ‘Equilibrium’ as Artefacts of Metaphorical Exchange Between the Natural and the Social Sciences. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. 2011. Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation. Security Dialogue 42 (2): 143–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010611399616. Weiss, Robin A. 1998. Transgenic Pigs and Virus Adaptation. Nature 391 (6665): 327–328. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu. au/10.1038/34772. ———. 2004. Circe, Cassandra, and the Trojan Pigs: Xenotransplantation. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 148: 281–295. Weiss, Matthew J., Choo Y.  Ng, and Joren C.  Madsen. 2006. Tolerance, Xenotransplantation: Future Therapies. Surgical Clinics of North America 86 (5): 1277–1296. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.suc.2006.06.016. Wilson, Carolyn A., Susan Wong, Jacqueline Muller, Cynthia E.  Davidson, Timothy M. Rose, and Parris Burd. 1998. Type C Retrovirus Released from Porcine Primary Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells Infects Human Cells. Journal of Virology 72 (4): 3082–3087. https://doi.org/10.1128/ JVI.72.4.3082-­3087.1998. Wilson, Carolyn A., Susan Wong, Matthew VanBrocklin, and Mark J. Federspiel. 2000. Extended Analysis of the In Vitro Tropism of Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus. Journal of Virology 74 (1): 49–56. https://doi.org/10.1128/ JVI.74.1.49-­56.2000. Wolfe, Nathan. 2011. The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age. London: Penguin. Wolfe, Nathan D., Claire Panosian Dunavan, and Jared Diamond. 2007. Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases. Nature 447 (7142): 279–283. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1038/nature05775. Yue, Yanan, Xu Weihong, Yinan Kan, Hong-Ye Zhao, Yixuan Zhou, Xiaobin Song, Wu Jiajia, et  al. 2021. Extensive Germline Genome Engineering in Pigs. Nature Biomedical Engineering 5 (2): 134–143. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41551-­020-­00613-­9. Zebrowski, Chris. 2012. The Biopolitics of Resilience. Ph.D., Keele University. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/3827/.

5 Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium on Xenotransplantation in Australia

In 2004, the Australian government placed a five-year moratorium on xenotransplantation because of the risk that a new disease would spread out from the transplant and into the human population. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) was not sure how much risk of infection was posed to the community by non-human animal transplants and, erring on the side of caution, it prohibited this intimate form of contact between humans and other animals. While the moratorium ended in 2009 and was not reinstated, it wasn’t until almost a decade later that a framework was in place for human clinical trials. In contrast, by 2004, many other jurisdictions had lifted moratoria on xenotransplantation clinical research, including the UK and the United States, and established a framework.1,2 The ban in Australia was also straightforwardly restrictive rather than enabling the development of infrastructure as did the moratorium in the United States.3 It was only after the five-year period (and a change in government and restructuring of the NHMRC) that it would be possible to establish research guidelines.4 My focus in this chapter is on the meaning of the 2004 moratorium. I argued in the last chapter that the infectious disease risk posed by xenotransplantation is speculative: an apprehension of an imagined © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_5

159

160 

R. Carr

future, and as such felt affectively, rather than calculated. As Massumi writes, “Fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter” (Massumi 2010, 54). The surveillance and preparedness approach taken by the United States, which has also informed other jurisdictions (Schuurman 2008), took an active pre-­ emptive approach in response to this “anticipatory reality”. However, the Australian public health authorities, at least temporarily, swung to the alternative response, taking precautionary approach. The Australian moratorium, in 2004, dismissed much of the contemporary public health repertoire in favour of an older public health tool, that which Foucault associates with the treatment of people with leprosy in the eighteenth-­ century: prohibition of contact, or the division of pure from impure. Initially it looked as though Australia would take a more liberal approach to xenotransplantation. In 2000, the NHMRC set out to establish a position on clinical trials involving these technologies. It set up a working party: a group of experts charged with exploring the “scientific, ethical and technical issues” associated with xenotransplantation, producing draft guidelines for research and consulting with the public (NHMRC 2005). The working party held a number of public meetings, allowing the public to voice their opinions on the matter. The draft guidelines offered by the working party were in line with international precedents; they noted the disease risks of xenotransplantation and suggested that Australia should establish a regulatory framework, including a national committee, for managing applications to perform clinical research.5 Human clinical trials in xenotransplantation could proceed with cellular transplants if appropriate frameworks were in place to manage the disease risks including screening source animals, monitoring recipients, and protocols in the case of infection.6 However, the Council itself rejected the recommendations of the working party. After meeting for two sittings, the Council committee unanimously agreed that the risks of xenotransplantation were not yet “adequately resolved” (NHMRC 2009, 2). Instead of a cautious go-ahead, Australia prohibited xenotransplantation until such time as the risks could be better understood, implementing a five-year moratorium.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

161

What shaped this peculiarly cautious drive to protect society, in Australia, at a time when other similar countries had already moved to open up clinical research? Where others prioritised the economic and technological development that xenotransplantation might produce, Australia, made a move to actively protect its population through enclosure. This distinctive stance brings to mind a similar situation in the early twentieth century, at the point at which Australia formed as a nation. At this time, the effectiveness of quarantine was beginning to be deeply questioned in Europe. In favour of increasing trade and given the dubious usefulness of quarantine, Britain, for example, had all but discontinued quarantine and instead prioritised sanitary reform (Maglen 2005).7 Australia, just emerging as its own nation at this point, took the entirely opposite approach to most of Europe. As other countries moved away from quarantine, it more vehemently took on the practice, applying stricter and longer quarantine practices (Bashford 2004; Maglen 2005). The health and purity of the country took priority over international trade. As is well known, this attitude was connected with a driving national imperative, that of racial purity or a White Australia. In 2003, the Australian regulatory body similarly chose to forgo the (speculative) technological and economic benefits of xenotransplantation rather than risk contaminating the population by mixing species and opening up individuals and the population to infectious foreign biological fragments; after all, the term “xeno” means foreign. Foreign infectiousness has often been constituted as an existential threat to the imagined homogenous community of Australia, intertwining politics and epidemiology.8 Crucial to the formative border-control activities at Federation were the medical and epidemiological understandings of infection that were beginning to emerge from germ theory, and which bolstered the Australian use of exclusion as a key public health technique. At Federation, these medical knowledges supported the concept and ideal of a future pure white community. An appreciation of these epidemiological-social interconnections in the construction of national imaginaries helps us to understand Australian policy on xenotransplantation.

162 

R. Carr

My aim in this chapter is to draw out the connections between a highly territorialised imaginary of the body politic, the bounded body, and Australian nationalism with the moratorium on xenotransplantation clinical research. Although the field of infectious disease research offers an array of tools for disease management, representing less rigid and more complex forms of power, Australia persisted in an older form of public health intervention for much of the twentieth century and seems to have returned to this with xenotransplantation. While the emerging infectious field frames xenotransplantation as problem of “emergence”, it has been translated into a problem of bodily integrity in the local Australian response. In this chapter, I seek to resolve this puzzle of how Australia’s local response to xenotransplantation has come about, by looking backwards in time, to the formative moments of an imagined community at Australian Federation. These are both social-­ epidemiological imaginaries in the sense that they combine understandings of infection and of social order. I focus particularly on how these social-epidemiological imaginaries figure bodies and boundaries, given that the breached boundaries of the prospective transplant recipient stimulate this precautious national response. However, the degree to which ruptured boundaries elicit concern at the regulatory level will depend on the attachment to a model of bodily integrity. In the moratorium, I argue, sovereign power, and a model of health based on the prophylactically contained subject/body, are asserted over a framing of xenozoonosis as a security issue within the complex more-than-human systems. The analysis suggests that the moratorium may be read as another instance of a persistent desire for a clean, sealed-off, and homogenous body, a vital “set piece” (Perera 2009) in the Australian imaginary. Next, in order to frame this analysis, I sketch out the concept of an organismic body politics, building on a well-developed corpus of scholarship that explains the co-construction of individual and social bodies and highlights their symbolic and material interconnections. This discussion sets the stage by explaining how the boundaries and integrity of the xenotransplantation recipient’s body may become an issue of national boundaries and identity.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

163

Organismic Body Politics The term “body politics” indicates a generative interplay between individual organisms and social or political institutions (societies, state, nation). From as early as Plato, medical and political discourses have drawn comparisons between these two bodily forms used to legitimate one another (Thacker 2011). Up until the late eighteenth century, accounts of “healthy” political order proceeded by analogy with the organisation of the body and its functioning in terms of health and illness.9 The sovereign was cast as the head of the political order, while the various components of the ruling classes, subjects, and political processes were imagined as organs, blood, nerves, and even the tongue (Harris 1998). These accounts serve to naturalise and justify political arrangements. Hobbes’ use of a (mechanical) body metaphor in Leviathan is exemplary, incorporating of the magistrates, officers, punishment, wealth, laws as functions of the body (Hobbes 2005, 9). The figure of the giant man, the Leviathan, is “a personification of the Sovereign and a representation of the unity of all citizens within its body” (Fabbrizi 2018, 10) and symbolises the duty to protect the citizens. In Hobbes, the body politic naturalises sovereign power, but the images work both ways. Canguilhem demonstrates, for instance, that cellular understandings of the body emerging in the nineteenth century were informed by, or co-produced with, politics. Early proponents of cell theory such as Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Haeckel argued against the dominant monarchical model of the body and of society, proposing in its place a republican model of body and society made up of autonomous individuals and each integral to the functioning of the body politic (see Esposito 2011, pp. 128–133). As Canguilhem remarks of Haeckel: “Who could tell whether one is a republican because one is partisan of cell theory, or rather a partisan of cell theory because one is a republican?” (Canguilhem 2008, 48). Similarly, the twentieth-century science of immunology frequently imagined the organisation and function of the body’s defences in political/military terms as a system for the protection of national borders (Cohen 2009; Haraway 1991b; Martin 1994; Waldby 1996). Of

164 

R. Carr

particular interest with respect to xenotransplantation, infection in the social body readily translates as invasion or “sociopolitical threat” and vice versa (Waldby 1996, 91). Examples include representations of HIV/ AIDS as the “gay plague” threatening to destabilise heteronormativity, or enemies of totalitarian societies framed as “parasites” in the social body (Waldby 1996, 91). Thus biological and medical discourses often interplay with political representations of societies. This “dialectical circuit” (Esposito 2011, 130) reflects the need to imagine individual bodies and societies in similar ways. Catherine Waldby (1996) argues that both subjects and societies are impelled to imagine themselves in terms of unity and integrity: all national formations, all “societies” must imagine their conditions of unity, their boundaries, internal structures and the relationship between parts, in much the same way that … subjects must imagine their body’s conditions of unity. (p. 88)

Similarly, but with a different emphasis, Esposito (2011) argues that it is because of the drive to immunise both bodies and societies (to secure form against death or dissolution) that these imaginaries co-produce one another. It is commonplace to note that the prevalence of metaphors of the body in political theory has decreased during the twentieth century (Harris 1998). Both Esposito and Thacker argue that the metaphorical figure of the body politic is surpassed and made redundant in what Foucault calls the biopolitical era—a period beginning in the late eighteenth century when states begin to actively take an interest in the wellbeing and biological productivity of the population. However, Thacker (2011) argues that disappearance of the metaphor from explicit use in political discourse only indicates its increased power. Likewise, Esposito, building on Foucault, argues that in the biopolitical era the political body takes on newly materialised meaning, as the state becomes directly invested in the regulation of individual bodies composing the body politic:

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

165

From this point of view, rather than viewing the shift from the sovereign to the biopolitical as a further development of the organismic metaphor, it actually signals the effective realization of the body-politic metaphor in the material body of the individuals who constitute the population. It is as if the metaphor of the body finally took on its own body. (Esposito 2011, 137)

In biopolitics, as Esposito (2011) continues: the issue of public health—understood in its widest and most general sense as the “welfare” of the nation—clearly became the pivot around which the entire economic, administrative, and political affairs of the state revolved. (p. 137)

As such, the population understood as an integrated “body”, an aggregate of individual biological bodies, functions as a contemporary form of body politics (Waldby 1996). One of the main functions of the body politic metaphor was to represent or model the health and wellbeing of the political body; with the advent of population as a distinct category, this is accomplished less by analogy than through statistics and epidemiology. These help to imagine the nation as a singular entity with a state of health: Epidemiology as a knowledge and a technology occupies a central place in the imagining of a national body politic. It is the biomedical sub-discipline specifically concerned with the monitoring and maintenance of “the public health”, the study of disease not in the individual body as in clinical medicine, but its incidence and distribution in the composite body of the population. (Waldby 1996, 94)

As Foucault (2008, 25) argues, public health as a vision of the body politic rests on ways of knowing and producing this (composite) body, in terms of birth-rates, sub-populations, infection rates, population growth, and so on. In the biopolitical era, then, the body politic imaginary shifts from the field of politics to the practices of epidemiology and public health. Where political discourses were inclined to naturalise the organisation of political structures based on images of the body, today the practices of public health and biomedicine actively target the organic body as

166 

R. Carr

the object of political intervention. However, Shildrick’s (1997) work suggests that this biopolitics of the population is still informed by Western imaginaries of the sovereign subject. Body politics can take many forms: those that offer accounts of bodies in terms of unity and integrity of boundaries are most pertinent to the moratorium in Australia. I refer to such instances as an “organismic body politics” to contrast them with an “ecological body politics” of emerging infectious disease which I outline later in the chapter. Early germ theory is an exemplary medical discourse of enclosure and boundaries which, as Laura Otis (2000) argues, was mobilised alongside social and political discourses of boundaries and transgression. Germ theory, as it emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, locates the cause of disease in micro-organisms: small individualised units of life that generally lie outside the body, but, when penetrating the surface of the body or cells, produce disease. The distinction between an inside and an outside of the body was central to the germ theory of disease and as such marked a break with earlier concepts of miasma which held a much more interconnected understanding of bodies and environment.10 Typically, early “germ hunters” such as Koch and Pasteur focused their epidemiological practice on identifying the particular microbe responsible for a disease, the individualised external agent.11 The aim was to identify and destroy these tiny units of life, purifying spaces and bodies of their presence. Through the process of individualising and externalising disease in microbial agents, germ theory simultaneously figured the body as an independent and closed unit. Boundary maintenance was imperative. As Otis (2000) writes, “Pasteur associated health with the maintenance of just such a barrier, writing in 1879 that ‘the human body in a state of health is closed to all these organisms’ ” (p. 27). Germ theory led to an increasingly neurotic drive to protect the integrity of the human body from these microscopic agents.12 Thus, germ theory, building on cell theory, refigured a world of enigmatic bodily interconnections with the environment and miasmas into a world of enclosed entities and dangerous penetrations of organismic surfaces. Along with identifying external microbes responsible for disease and seeking to eliminate germs in the immediate environment, germ theory and its attendant practices also figured people as vessels of these germs,

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

167

especially in light of Koch’s concept of the “healthy carrier”. The environment (city, house, graveyard, or swamp, for example) and miasmatic gases had once been the focus of hygiene practices; now individuals also became agents of disease. Epidemiologists worked to identify the people responsible for carrying germs, and “outsiders” or “foreigners” often became the focus of concern as the assumed reservoirs of disease. Otis (2000) observes that the advent of germ theory occurred at the very moment imperial expansion brought new cultures and bodies into contact, stimulating concerns about the fragility of European identity. In some contexts, germ theory became the perfect language to understand and represent the risk of boundaries being crossed. Fear of movement from the colonies “back toward their imperial cell bodies” (Otis 2000, 5) perversely rendered the colonised (invaded) people as the invading germs.13 As Emily Martin (1994) highlights, popular images of germs dangerously penetrating the skin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sometimes drew on military metaphors of the city under siege from invaders, linking infection to threatened territory. These early depictions of germs focused on the protective surface of the body fortified with hygiene: in one popular medical source, the body is imagined as a castle, protected by high walls (Martin 1994, 25). As the existence of germs became widely accepted, around the turn of the twentieth century, hygiene practices were put to work to manage the inside/outside boundaries that germ theory highlighted, mobilising efforts to sterilise surfaces and implement personal hygiene disciplines. As Bashford (2004) writes, these practices might be understood as forms of border control: Signaling the constant need for purification from the ever-present contaminating threat over the border, however imagined, hygiene became a primary means of signification by which those borders were maintained, threats were specified, and internal weaknesses managed. (p. 5)

Hygiene, in the service of germ theory, drew attention to dangerous bodies and interconnections, and served to mark out boundaries of a social body and a social order. In particular, immigrants, women, and poor or uneducated groups were often subject to increased surveillance and

168 

R. Carr

hygiene intervention to protect the health of the (white/masculine) social body.14 As has been much discussed, the development of immunology initially furthered the metaphor of boundary protection with the immune system mobilised as a (national) defence of the self against other, presenting life as “a ceaseless problem of boundary maintenance” (Cohen 2009, 8).15 However, later versions of immunology and auto-immunity have complicated the inside/outside distinction.16 Nonetheless, different bodies are figured as more or less firmly bounded and thus varyingly open to infection. Margrit Shildrick has pointed to the ways that women’s bodies have long been troubling to Western constructions of singular bounded self in the ways they are perceived to “leak” (e.g. menstrual blood and breast milk), embody multiplicity (e.g. pregnancy), or otherwise exhibit a “lack of closure” (e.g. are sexually penetrable) (Shildrick 2015, 34). These bodily forms, within a masculine Western imaginary, are threatening. Thus, as Waldby (1996) suggests, the term “body politics” is not simply a metaphor or “heuristic device” but “carries serious and continuing repercussions for the particular bodies of the society’s members” (p. 88). Waldby (1996) and Shildrick (1997) argue that in the public health discourses and practices women and gay men are in various ways figured as compromised bodies, dangerous to public health by not conforming to the social/individual (masculine) bodily ideal of clean singularity (see also Grosz 1994).17 In rendering women and gay men infectious and the target of public health interventions, public health practices also affirmed a sexual hierarchy in which male heterosexual bodies were positioned as both the ideal representation of the body politic and that which was most valued (Waldby 1996). If the “leakiness” of women’s’ bodies mark them as threatening to the bodily politic in this sovereign masculine logic (Shildrick 1997), then how might the putatively hybrid embodiment of a xenotransplant recipient figure? As we can see then, the model of an individual bodily health can have implications for representations of a healthy national community, and vice versa. Each figure can be mobilised to affirm the other. I have pointed to a particular “organismic body politics”, linked to germ theory, that has taken a model of the body as singular contained entity, with disease caused by transgression of those firm outer boundaries.18 “What is at

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

169

stake in traditional health care practices”, Shildrick (1997, 11) explains, “is that the material boundaries of the body should be secure and that otherness be excluded”. In contrast to this organismic body politics, the field of emerging infectious disease generates an understanding of the bodies as ecological. On the one hand, the field of virology figures the insides of bodies as viral habitats: environments with species-specific climates and microscopic species interactions, understood in ecological and evolutionary terms. Viruses must traverse these environments across multiple bodies in order to live, negotiating relationships with cells, the immune system, and other microbes. Yet, “survival in these environments presents a range of challenges” (N. Wolfe 2011, 27). For example, once inside a body, a virus needs to enter cells and replicate and shed to infect other individuals; and it might be restricted at several points in interaction with cells (Parrish et al. 2008, 460).19 New understandings from virology foreground viruses as “viral clouds” or “quasi-species”: characterised by an accelerated version of natural selection whereby a viral population rapidly mutates and changes in relationship with the host internal environment, which acts as a selection pressure (Domingo et al. 2012).20 As Bruce Braun (2007) writes, what we find in the medical and political discourse of “emerging infectious diseases” is a body that is radically open to the world, thrown into the flux of an inherently mutable molecular life. (p. 17, my emphasis)

In addition, disease in human bodies, and pandemics among human (and non-human) communities, are situated within broader ecologies: including interrelationships with multiple species, changing environments, social structures, and technologies including transport, agriculture, and medicine (Institute of Medicine 1992; Morse 1995). Within this imaginary, pandemics are increasingly understood as emergent events within complex adaptive systems incorporating all these social, biological, and environmental components (Wilcox and Colwell 2005; Xia et al. 2017). Likewise, public health and epidemiological practice are progressively becoming focused on making these more-than-human systems adaptive or resilient, as a model of health (Parkes et  al. 2005). In this frame, disease “events” are processes of emergence conditional on

170 

R. Carr

intensities and temporalities of multiple interrelations between and within bodies and systems, rather than penetration of a pure space (Hinchliffe et al. 2013). As such, this perspective does not present the borders of the body or nation as necessarily needing enclosure or protection. Indeed, as I argued in the previous chapter, this perspective presents the need for alternative forms of security, as it presupposes that one cannot easily prevent disease emergence, similarly to other contemporary political concerns with planetary emergencies, financial crises, and terrorism (Cooper 2006; Evans and Reid 2014; Lakoff 2017; Lakoff and Collier 2008).21 I refer to this ecologically informed, systems-based, and emergent rendering of bodies, society, and health as an “ecological body politics”. The speculative risks of emerging infectious disease can be articulated alongside the promissory economy of biocapital, at least in the United States. Porter, for example, discusses the promissory value of viruses in what she calls “viral economies” (Porter 2019). Internationally, experts have framed xenotransplantation risks from the perspective of emerging infectious disease that figures pandemics as unknown events within systems, and where they cannot easily be located and prevented at any particular “border”. It is this understanding of disease threat that shaped the surveillance and preparedness and counter-­ active response to xenozoonosis, in the United States, that I discussed in Chap. 4. I argued there that the surveillance, preparedness, and counter-­ active strategies in which the US government and researchers are engaged might be understood as an evolution of Foucault’s security apparatuses, and linked to the development of promissory biocapital (Sunder Rajan 2006). In the next section I describe how these two perspectives on disease and society—ecological and organismic—feature in two different positions on regulating xenotransplantation clinical research in Australia: those expressed by the Xenotransplantation Working Party and the NHMRC Council. I then go on to contextualise the prominence of the organismic perspective in Australian regulation by examining the persistence of this model in Australian public health history.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

171

Australian Moratorium In 1999–2000, five years before the Australian moratorium was put in place, Bernie Tuch was on the verge of conducting clinical trials in xenotransplantation: preparing to transplant pig foetal islet cells to humans to treat diabetes. The proposed research, however, “got knocked on the head a week before we were due to go” (interview, 2010). Despite the fact that the research group had approval for their safety management from the local ethics committee, an insurance company, the State government, and the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the NHMRC intervened to prevent the trial from going ahead. When the NHMRC cited the lack of Australian regulation, Tuch went so far as to develop a safety protocol based on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) xenotransplantation guidelines. The NHMRC, however, continued to reject his applications for clinical research.22 Tuch had been partnering with a New Zealand xenotransplantation company which later became Living Cell Technologies (LCT, then called Diatranz) (discussed in Chap. 2), which was supplying the pigs for the trials, and which went on to conduct trials in Mexico and Russia (P. S. Cook et al. 2011), before the moratorium in New Zealand was lifted in 2006.23 Others I interviewed figured early research proposals as trying to push too quickly, where more expert advice and public consultation were needed. Dominic Dwyer, who was on the committee that intervened in early research, described the NHMRC’s role at the time as “just slowing the pace of what people wanted to do, scientifically, until more discussion had been had of it”. Indeed, unlike the United States and the UK, Australia was one of the places where wide public consultation took place (Tallacchini 2011).24 An expert in raising programs  of cutting-edge research, during our conversation Tuch skilfully presented his “promissory vision” (Sunder Rajan 2006) of porcine islet cellular therapy, neatly incorporating infectious disease concerns. Although his own research had shifted focus to stem cells, when I spoke to him, he was on the board of directors for Living Cell Technologies. He explained how we desperately need tools to treat diabetes type 1 and how xenotransplantation technologies could

172 

R. Carr

relieve the suffering of thousands with a large supply of tissues. In the late 1990s Tuch’s research team had studied whether porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) could infect mouse or pig recipients (Deng et  al. 2000), finding  there were no active reinfections from the virus. Fears about PERVs producing a new AIDS-like pandemic had defined this period after Robin Weiss and colleagues had brought them to global attention (Patience et al. 1997). Tuch drew on his and other studies to support his vision for porcine islet treatments. He presented the disease risks as comparable to those involving human transplants, given the procedures in place to manage them. According to Tuch the NHMRC eventually agreed to develop a formal regulatory position, establishing a Xenotransplantation Working Party (XWP) in late 2000 to investigate how “Australia should proceed” (Xenotransplantation Working Party 2002). Australia’s regulatory development was certainly not the “knee jerk” anticipatory regulatory response to industry hype that Brown and Beynon-Jones (2012) describe as occurring in the UK; it was far more reluctant. Yet both countries responded to industry pressures, and to speculative concerns over disease emergence. Among the 13 experts on the XWP, spanning expertise in medical ethics, transplantation, epidemiology, virology, and non-human animal welfare, was Dominic Dwyer whom I interviewed during my research. The infectious disease issue, which later generated the moratorium on xenotransplantation clinical research in Australia, was a key focus of the XWP’s investigation.25 The potential catastrophic future of a new HIV/ AIDS-like pandemic, possibly engendered by xenotransplantation, had already been articulated in the international field by experts and policy makers. The comments of participants in public consultations reflected wider policy concerns, as they expressed fears of xenografts “causing a possibly deadly new disease epidemic” (NHMRC 2005, 13). Increasingly, in contemporary political regimes the point of focus is future events that are inherently imagined and unknowable, as argued by Melinda Cooper (2006): the new discourse of catastrophe risk establishes our affective relation to the future as the only available basis for decision-making, even while it recognizes the inherently speculative nature of this enterprise. (p. 120)

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

173

In Australia, individual policy makers, members of the public, and experts expressed different views on the potential for an infectious disease disaster. Their opinions swung between active and passive pre-emptive responses to “emergent” threats (Cooper 2006): positive counter-action in the form of preparedness and counter-proliferation, or negative counter-­ action in the form of precaution.26 The XWP delivered a final report in 2004 which settled on the “active” register of pre-emption: preparedness and/or counter-proliferation (as with the US and UK regulation at that time). The XWP recommended that cellular xenotransplantation clinical trials could go ahead given the research application established minimal risks compared with potential benefit, and that “the trial protocol meets all the requirements in the guidelines for information sharing consent, monitoring, indemnity insurance and follow-up” (NHMRC 2005, 28).27 That is, they aimed to go forward while putting in place early warning and other preparedness systems to minimise the chances of a disease outbreak and help and manage, should it occur. In the original XWP guidelines, the working party stipulated that a special national committee on xenotransplantation be established to oversee clinical trial applications, as well as preparing guidelines that covered consent, monitoring and surveillance, data and tissue storage, and management of public health risks: all in place to identify and respond early to any emerging disease. Experts on the XWP agreed that “transfer of infection from animals to humans could not be completely ruled out” (NHMRC 2005, 17). Yet, they expressed confidence in the government’s growing ability to respond to disease events if they occurred, particularly referencing the management of SARS in 2003 (NHMRC 2005, 17).28 In my interview with him in 2012, XWP member Dominic Dwyer, a virologist, pointed to the increasing speed at which scientists identified new pathogens and developed diagnosis tools: “With AIDS, it was years, with SARS it was weeks in, and you’re even getting to days and so on. So, so all that sort of stuff’s way, way better”. When I asked Dwyer how one handles an unknown disease risk, he replied, with the “principles of handling emerging infection”. The principles, he suggested, “worked”: “Each time there’s a pandemic of flu or bird flu or SARS or whatever, or HIV, you know, you learn how to sort of handle it. And so I think you take those principles

174 

R. Carr

and apply it to something you don’t yet know about”. Dwyer points to improvements, then, in public health agencies’ ability to respond (adapt) to unknown disease events, rather than needing—or being able—to prevent them from occurring wholesale. The XWP report, however, did recommend excluding xenografts of non-human primate tissues and whole organs of any species, which were considered to carry too great a risk compared with the potential benefits.29 As Dominic Dwyer expressed it: “the type of transplant”, “the type of animal”, “the type of person receiving the transplant” all indicate different risks because of the nature and degree of contact between biotic components. Dwyer explained that not only are “wilder” non-human primates more likely to carry (immunologically) unfamiliar viruses, viruses that infect non-human primates were more likely to infect humans because of our evolutionary biological similarity: similarity in the internal ecologies I described above (see N. Wolfe 2011). The XWP’s differentiation of risk categories incorporated a non-binary perspective that disease emergence, while fundamentally uncertain and incalculable, is related to many complex interactions: including the relationships within viruses, cells, and bodies across the same and multiple species, each dependent on their recent and evolutionary histories and environments. The “risk” categories (“highest”, “intermediate”, and “lowest”) the XWP identified (NHMRC 2005, 25–26), however, effectively represent categories of imaginative and affective apprehension, not statistical calculation.30 Nor were they developed in order to normalise or redistribute risk; rather, they suggest different kinds of action required in anticipation of hypothetical futures. Such categories of risks might be read as a speculation. As xenozoonosis is a hypothetical and imagined future, the risk of this future cannot be calculated, it can only be rendered credible or incredible.31 In the XWP  speculation it is not only important  whether or not the transplanted tissues or individual recipient is infected: because of the many relational factors that need to come together systemically for disease emergence to occur in broader populations, and because our preparedness for that possibility. This contrasts with the precautious accounts I discuss below.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

175

Since LCT/Diatranz and another xenotransplantation company, BresaGen, exited, the landscape of Australian xenotransplantation research is mostly academic, government- or non-profit-funded. The field is not currently characterised by the level of hype, driven by venture capital, evident in other areas of biotech, especially in the United States (Sharp 2013; Sunder Rajan 2006). However, at the time of this study, one Australian research approach  folded the infectious disease issue within the their academic research. Collaborators across Australian academic institutions had been continuing the cultivation of the Westran Pigs (kept at a Sydney hospital) which they hoped to use for xenotransplantation. Similar to the Auckland Island Pigs (Chap. 2), they are the progeny of a pair originally left on Kangaroo Island in 1803, and thus highly isolated and inbred (O’Connell et al. 2005). Their value is posed, however, less in terms of their purity (as LCT’s pigs, discussed in Chap. 2), than in their standardisation. Studies since the 1990s have indicated that recombinant forms of PERV A and PERV C strains are most highly replicating and able to infect human cells (Bartosch et  al. 2004; Wood et  al. 2004), and the International Xenotransplantation Association recommends using pigs, like the Westran Pigs, that are free from PERV C (Cozzi et al. 2016). The fact that these pigs are highly inbred and thus genetically very similar, O’Connell et al. (2005) suggest means that the level of PERV expressed is similar across generations and individuals, as PERVs are embedded in the genome. This would make PERV easier to monitor, predict, and calculate (O’Connell et  al. 2005). This research group, then, might  have leveraged their potential products of research as more predictable.32 The active preparedness approach advocated by the XWP and its members (although not endorsed, as I will discuss below), and researchers (e.g. Tuch), reflects a productive relationship to the speculative dangers: a differentiation of risk categories, the development of possible approaches to manage them, and the proliferation of committees, research investigating disease agents, development of screening tests, and insurance, for example. That is, a whole set of productive processes or positive relations emerge around this uncertain risk that are designed not so much to secure against it completely, but to prepare for, counteract, and leverage off it. The approach reflects a more ecological framework in that the focus is on

176 

R. Carr

pandemics which emerge among multiple relationships within and between bodies; and towards which the population health is becoming progressively more flexible and responsive. Our historical, evolutionary, and ecological relationships with pigs and non-human primates, for example, make a difference to the potential for biological intimacy to generate infectious disease emergence.

The Sovereign Moratorium The conflict among experts and policy makers in their preferences for “active” or “passive” forms of pre-emption (Cooper 2006) became clear when the NHMRC Council rejected, or declined to endorse, the recommendations of their own working party. After discussing the XWP recommendations, the Council instead imposed a five-year moratorium on clinical research. They opted for precaution instead of preparedness: Council concluded that the risks of transmission of non-human animal viruses to transplant recipients and the wider community have not as yet been adequately resolved. In addition, xenotransplantation research is at an early stage and clinical trials in the foreseeable future are unlikely to be of significant benefit to the research participants. (NHMRC 2005)

Both the council and XWP figure a future xenozoonosis—an emerging infectious disease pandemic from xenotransplantation—as fundamentally uncertain, but the Council decision reflects a move to protect society against these dangers, to prevent them from occurring. One way to look at the different mechanisms of power that Foucault points to, and I am interested in this book, is by looking at the differences in each perspective in their approach to risk or danger (Cooper 2004; Ewald 2002; Foucault 2007). Sovereignty attempts to exorcise dangers, protect against those threats which are rendered as outside law and order; that is, law and order is imposed as a method of preventing danger or locating blame in the one who trespasses the law. Security, by contrast, attempts to secure through risk, not against it; by enabling, circulating, and distributing or moderating risks (while not seeking to categorically expunge danger). In certain contemporary liberal apparatuses, Cooper’s

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

177

work suggests, security no longer tries to secure, but makes risk—or rather uncertainty—productive in new ways: placing speculation at the “heart of production” (in political economy and beyond [Cooper 2008]). As Ewald argues, and is demonstrated here, “precaution, properly understood, reintroduces the true, sovereign decision in public policy and in the practices of responsibility” (Ewald, 298). I argue that what is going on in this specific precautionary approach is a form of organismic body politics (described above), where a model of health as enclosure is articulated with the sovereign decision. The individual body stands metonymically for society, and health is represented as protection of the borders of the organismic/social body against outside threats. In my research I sought the personal views of Peter Sainsbury, an public health physician and a member of the NHMRC Council at the time the moratorium was established. For him, xenozoonosis presented new threat, in that it opened wider (uninfected) human populations to dangers of infectious disease they otherwise would not experience, “all these people who aren’t at risk are now going to be exposed to this, what potentially might be a terrible risk”. Sainsbury emphasises concern for exposing the population at large: in actual fact the people that are likely to, if this risk eventuates, the people that are going to suffer aren’t the person who’s had the xenotransplant … But it is in the immediate future their close contacts, whether they be staff, relatives, people they live with, and then potentially the population at large. And so, it isn’t clear to me why we would take, why we, the population, would take that risk … why would you expose the whole world to this potential risk.

As a converse, a moratorium on clinical research protects the population from the vulnerability these xenografts would “expose”. Peter Collignon, a high-profile Australian pathologist who I interviewed, who had been outspoken in the media against clinical trials with xenografts, similarly framed the risks as preventable exposures to “animal” viruses: “if you look at a track record … we’re not very good once they’re established in the population. So you just need to not establish it in the first place” (Cook 324). In both these accounts a division is made between the human community as inherently uninfected by these viruses  and an outside,

178 

R. Carr

elsewhere where viruses are established. In contrast to the optimism, or heroic vision of science, expressed in the XWP, both Collignon and Sainsbury gave HIV/AIDS and SARS (2003) as examples of failure. The solution to the problem of potential disease emergence in xenotransplantation, presented by both Sainsbury and Collignon, is thus the “enclosure of healthy life” (Hinchliffe et al. 2013, 537), a kind of marking out, and defending, the uninfected or healthy human population against an infectious outside threat. This enclosure would be achieved by banning xenotransplantation: by preventing non-human animal tissues from breaching the protective border of hypothetical patient recipient’s skin. As Collignon emphasised, xenografts would be “transplanted directly into normally sterile sites, bypassing important barriers in humans that protect us from non-human animal viruses (e.g., intact skin and intestinal mucosal surfaces)” (Collignon and Purdy 2001, 6).33 The moratorium thus shores up these skin borders against xenografts. A desire for enclosure, as I discussed in the introduction to this book, for Foucault, reflects an essentially negative form of power that exerts itself through binary definitions (self/other; inside/outside; healthy/unhealthy), and prohibitions, typified in the exile-enclosure of the people with leprosy in the eighteenth century (Foucault 2003). The “right to kill”, Foucault (2003, 44) remarks, includes “exclusion, disqualification, exile, rejection, deprivation, refusal, and incomprehension; that is to say, an entire arsenal of negative concepts or mechanisms of exclusion”. In the moratorium, we see the desire for exclusion of non-human tissues, reaffirming a division between human and non-human. In this precautionary perspective, the individual recipient’s body is sometimes rendered as a synecdoche for entire populations. As Sainsbury intimates (above), exposing the individual recipient to infection exposes “the whole world”. Similarly, in an academic article, Collignon raises the potential for infection in one or a small number of recipients to then spread seamlessly (and invisibly) among global populations:34 Suppose, for instance, that xenotransplantation comes to be accepted, and just a few individuals are eventually infected with an AIDS-like disease that spreads silently in the population until it erupts as a major threat (perhaps untraceable to its original source) dozens or perhaps hundreds of years later. (Collignon and Purdy 2001, 4)

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

179

Collignon depicts the global spread of a speculative xenozoonosis, framed in terms of HIV. It doesn’t matter, from Collignon’s perspective, that the likelihood of a virus infecting a recipient with a novel virus may be very small, because all it takes is one infection of the right type of virus to potentially spread to the globe. As Wald (2008) suggests, an imaginary of global species connectedness, and a “shrinking world”, sometimes surfaces in media depictions of new disease, such as HIV, spreading from patient zero to global pandemic as part of the “outbreak narrative”.35 In accounts of SARS, Wald explains, “superspreaders and worldwide interdependence turned the simplest interactions potentially fatal on a global scale” (Wald 2008, 5). Hinchliffe et al. (2013) and Leach et al. (2010) argue that these global network accounts of pandemics reduce the complexity of emerging infectious disease models, reasserting a territorial view of disease as the contagion of a pure space. I argue that they may invoke a body politics by imagining the human population as a single body, ranged against a threatening outside, other. Likewise, Collignon points to the various attempts to work around the immune system as “one of the worst parts of xenotransplants”. For him, it is highly problematic to modify non-human animal sources “so they look more human on the outside so they’re less likely to be rejected” and then transplant them into immunosuppressed recipients “so even if it did recognise it [a virus] it couldn’t knock it off” (Collignon, November 15, 2010). Given our global interconnectedness, the lack of a functioning immune system in this context is not only a problem for the individual recipient, it is threatening to society at large: to me, interfering with what is a basic mechanism to protect us is fraught with a lot of potentially significant dangers, … but, the difference with microbes is not only to the individual … The problem is, it’s everybody else around them, that potentially is at risk, plus society as a whole. (Collignon, interview)

Compromising the individual’s protection mechanism, in this context of intimacy with non-human tissues, for Collignon, puts all of society in danger. Once an endogenous retrovirus successfully replicates within one human being, it may become less identifiable to others, as it may

180 

R. Carr

construct an outer coating that “looks” human (discussed below).36 The immune system, the mechanism which protects the individual (and society)—conventionally figured the biological ability to recognise self and other (Haraway 1991a)—ought not be undermined. Collignon invokes a model of health—both of the organism and the social body— in which the body crucially has an intact defence system against foreign germs, where the virus and the non-human animal are also closely interconnected. At the same time that the individual recipient is figured as an entry point into entire populations, when I spoke to Collignon, he discursively connected the biology of non-human animal tissues with pathogens. As he explained to me why human bodies so dramatically reject pig tissues,37 he hypothesised that “we’ve got these innate mechanisms that reject this stuff [pig tissues] so quickly, which one would presume is to prevent us picking up microbes from those animals”. The way that the immune system identifies some microbes, in the normal course immunological defence, is by recognising the molecules in their encapsulating envelope that are specific to non-human animals. These markers are incorporated by the viruses into their temporary cellular envelope, as “viruses in particular pick up often some of the, what we call the antigens or outer coats, of the cells they multiply in”, and they stimulate the human immunological response. The immune system, he suggests, identifies viruses via molecules (antigens) which are not from the virus itself, but from the non-human animal tissues they originate from. It is for this reason that the immune system rejects pig tissues—because it responds to it as if it were a virus. What is  implied here is that our most innate protection mechanism works by associating (coupling) microbes with their non-­ human hosts: from the perspective of the human immune system, the virus and non-human animal are one and the same thing.38 Indeed, this ability for some viruses to assume the appearance of the tissues in which they replicate prompted Robin Weiss to call tissue transplants from genetically modified non-human pigs “Trojan pigs” (Weiss 2004). In an organismic body politics, I suggested above that the ideal of a homogenous social body is co-produced with a bio-medical or public health account of the organic body as “ideally closed and invulnerable” (Shildrick 2002, 71). The precautionary approach invokes such a body

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

181

politics in which the body and society are ideally closed, the power to establish self and other maintained. In this perspective, xenografts (particularly genetically engineered ones) are posed as  threatening to the health of society. In Australia, it seems a sovereign form of power was invoked against the framing of xenotransplantation within an emerging infectious disease paradigm of interconnected more-than-human life, secured through preparedness or counter-proliferation. Instead, it provoked the NHMRC to reassert a different model: a vision of biological distinctions; life as enclosed or enclosable.39 In seeking to understand the fact that Australian policy makers mobilised this response, later and longer than many others, it is significant that a form of organismic body politics was critical in defining Australia at its very birth as a nation. We can perhaps understand the moratorium as an example of what Anna Tsing refers to as “friction”: when local imaginaries and patterns intersected with a global emerging infectious disease discourse it produced a peculiarly Australian treatment of the xenotransplantation problem. In the next section, I explore how, at the very beginning of the Australian nation, public health practices implemented an Australian imaginary wrought in terms of an organismic body politics. Drawing on insights from the work of historian Alison Bashford (2004), I outline the way that quarantine marked the borders of the Australian geo-body, synonymous with the imagined community, and regulated it by excluding “foreigners” rendered as infectious agents. This powerful performative practice of a bounded body politics gave Australia its first mode of existence, laying the groundwork for a recurring model of a prophylactically contained pure body animated in the xenotransplantation moratorium.

Australian Imaginary Australia the nation was officially born in 1901, with the federation of the six British colonies ranging over the continent. As historian Warwick Anderson observes, in the transition from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the focus for government and medicine shifted from the health of individual colonies to the problem of producing and

182 

R. Carr

maintaining a “white nation” (W.  Anderson 2002, 76). A new sociotechnical imaginary was emerging, one which figured the prospective nation as made up of strong, healthy, white bodies (Reynolds 2007). One of the problems for medical experts and the state was how to work, secure and populate the vast and partly torrid land, and after the turn of the century, this increasingly depended on the exclusion of “infectious foreigners”. By the time of Federation, Asian populations were increasingly figured as a danger to the identity of the colonies and nation. Media and government discourses repeatedly constructed Asia as an invasive threat, with an emphasis on the lack of population in Australia as against the surrounding countries. Meanwhile, political and popular discourses also figured Asian immigrants as immoral, unhygienic, and uncivilised (see Walker 1999; Bashford 2004). These xenophobic discourses mobilised a language and logic of epidemiology and infection. As Bashford (2004) highlights, “over and over again in dominant representations of the future of the colonies and the new nation, fear of unrestricted immigration and even of invasion was enunciated as fear of disease, of smallpox and especially … of leprosy” (p.  148). Asian and “coloured” populations were figured as an epidemiological threat to Australia. Simultaneously, Australia was constructed as “pure” through an emphasis on the absence of certain diseases endemic in Asia and Europe, and through the violent erasure supporting the claim of Terra Nullius. This, and its geographic isolation, justified the continued use of quarantine as a key technology for public health when other Western nations were abandoning it (Bashford 2004; Maglen 2005). Tellingly, the first Act of the new federal Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. This Act and the Pacific Islands Labourers Act constituted what was later known as the White Australia policy: policies that contributed to the realisation of an imagined white Australian community. Although Britain prevented Australia from explicitly excluding immigrants by race, immigration and quarantine officials selectively deployed a dictation test to prevent non-Europeans from entering, by administering the test in a language unknown to unwanted migrants, given they could use any European language for the test (Bashford 2004, 145). In addition, a diseases clause enabled rejection of potential migrants

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

183

on the basis of health. And, it became well known early on that Australia would not admit “coloured” migrants (Jupp 2002, 9).40 Further supporting a mentality of insularity, in 1908 a new Quarantine Act gave the first, and for a while the only, public health power to the new Federal Government: quarantine. From this Act, the Government established the Federal Quarantine Service and a national quarantine border encircling the continent like a protective membrane.41 Unlike today, the early-twentieth-century Australian quarantine regime mainly regulated movements of people, rather than that of plants or other animals. The quarantine border functioned in practice as an exclusionary means of preventing (or at least delaying) entry to those who were unwell or deemed undesirable or infectious to the body politic; and given the racial association with disease, this functioned as a “racialised immigration restriction line” (Bashford 2004, 137).42 Quarantine stations were a point at which immigration restriction took place with the dictation test administered by either quarantine or immigration officials, and where immigration or quarantine officials also policed the health of potential immigrants. Indicating this double role of the quarantine line. Dr J.  H. L.  Cumpston, Head of the Quarantine Services, wrote that the object of quarantine was: the keeping of our continent free from certain deadly diseases at present unknown amongst us. And secondly, the strict prohibition against the entrance into our country of certain races of aliens whose uncleanly customs and absolute lack of sanitary conscience form a standing menace to the health of any community. (Cumpston, cited in Bashford 2004, 150)

The membrane of the racialised quarantine line thus worked to regulate entry into the national territory and restrict entry of foreigners who were sometimes “conflated” with germs; “irrespective of any infective status, they [Asian immigrants] were ‘foreign bodies’ to the Australian nation imagined as white and pure” (Bashford 1998, 399).43 Bashford argues that this enclosing, border-policing quarantine activity was critical to imagining and bringing into being the new nation. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”

184 

R. Carr

(B.  Anderson 2006a, 146). In addition, Thongchai Winichakul highlights the importance of the cartographically constructed territory to the performativity of a nation. He argues that the territory as a “geo-body” can function as a symbol for the community, as a bounded natural whole, different in essence from outsiders (Winichakul 1997). Bashford (2004) and Perera (2009) have argued that mapping and regulating the territory of Australia were central to how the imagined community was constructed at Federation. By figuring the land as a single space, as an island continent “girt by sea”, the national community was also imagined as a coherent community. The quarantine line “concretised” an outline of the Australian Nation, as a “net” stretching from one quarantine station to the next around the nation. It “outlined the new island nation, enclosed it, segregated it, and integrated it” (Bashford 2004, 124–25) enabling it to be visualised as singular body, as a singular nation. At a time when it was critical to imagine the nation as a whole, the quarantine line provided the means of distinguishing the pure inside from a potentially infectious outside. The line not only marked out the territory of the nation visually on maps, but also outlined it administratively, serving as the point at which the social body, the population, was contained and entry was regulated. The actions of the Federal Quarantine Services thus helped to imagine and administer the integrity of the new nation through exclusion. In the late nineteenth century, leading up to Federation, changes in understandings of disease through germ theory supported the conflation of the germ and the immigrant. In the early phases of Australian colonisation, medical science figured the environment as a cause of disease, and in particular the hot northern zones were considered dangerous to British health.44 However, as Warwick Anderson (2002) highlights, germ theory brought about an “anthropogenic mobilisation of disease agency” (p. 112). Other human bodies could now be understood to be “agents of disease” as microbiologists began to identify germs responsible for tropical diseases and realised that healthy bodies could be “carriers”. Via germ theory, “coloured” bodies, including Chinese immigrants, Hawaiian labourers, and sometimes Aboriginal Australians, were constructed as storing, cultivating, and distributing disease, especially in the tropical

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

185

areas of Australia. As Anderson (2002) explains, native populations were construed with the power to be invisible carriers: By the late 1890s, microbiological investigation was amplifying even further the dangers of racial contact in the tropics. Increasingly, it appeared that native resistance to local germs was rarely absolute. Rather, nature had produced in equatorial races, so it seemed, only a partial immunity, enough to ensure that in normal conditions they did not become manifestly diseased, but not sufficient to prevent occult carriage of tropical pathogens. Bacteriologists began to refer to “native reservoirs” of disease organisms, fashioned over thousands of years of immunological adaptation and filled to the brim by promiscuous and irresponsible behaviour. (p. 96)

Long-held prejudices representing Asian immigrants as unhygienic, in particular regarding “defecation and eating” (W. Anderson 2002, 111), were re-written, and given new force, with understandings of germ theory: lack of hygiene allowed germs to accumulate in partially immune bodies, and these reservoirs of germs could be devastating to immunologically naïve, hygienic, white bodies. Correspondingly, the exclusion of coloured immigrant bodies through quarantine “by 1920 had come to appear a microbiological necessity” (W. Anderson 2002, 112).45 While arguably not subject to as intense pathologisation as Asian immigrants (W. Anderson 2002), Indigenous Australians were at times also understood as conduits or reservoirs for the spread of disease (W.  Anderson 2002; Parsons 2009). Indigenous populations typically were not, however, figured in public health discourses in the same way as Asian populations, as overwhelmingly threatening to the Australian nation at large (Bashford 2000): the small and dispersed communities remaining after colonial genocide struggled to thrive given the violent disruption to their forms of life. During the early twentieth century Indigenous Australians were frequently figured as a benign and dying race. Bashford argues that Indigenous bodies were made “absent” rather than rendered as diseased in most Australian public health texts on tropical medicine (Bashford 2000), conveniently consistent with the conceptualisation of the continent as terra nullius.46

186 

R. Carr

Nonetheless, for public health and political figures, it was considered important to manage contact and movements, and ensure purity of both settler and Indigenous populations; at times with racial segregation drives converging with public health practices aimed at protecting white communities. In particular Raphael Cilento, a highly influential public health administrator, was determined to find Aboriginals as a source of disease (W. Anderson 2002, 222) and argued for isolating Aboriginals suspected of leprosy, which he reframed as an Aboriginal problem in the period after Federation (Parsons 2009; Saunders 1990). In the first half of the twentieth century, while other countries were moving away from treating leprosy with isolation, in Queensland and Western Australia, Indigenous leprosy suspects were aggressively hunted down, chained, and forcibly relocated into separate and generally neglected leprosarium, often located on islands (Parsons 2010; Saunders 1990). The “protective” and public health segregation practices were in tension with the Indigenous assimilation policies growing in much of the country by the second half of the twentieth century; however, they were especially pernicious in the north, where leprosarium treatment for Aboriginal people remained active until the 1980s (Parsons 2009, 2010). The edges of the country demanded close attention and protection in federal public health policy (Bashford 1998). If the immigrant people of colour became synonymous with the germ, the territory linked to the imagined community was synonymous with a pure geo-body, at risk of penetration by foreign bodies. Practices of quarantine inspection were like hygiene rituals played out on the surface of the body, marking out its boundaries, and “it is profitable to think of quarantine in this Australian context as a ritual of pollution and cleanliness happening on, and drawing attention to, the thresholds of the new nation” (Bashford 1998, 390).47 Public health and immigration practices of strict boundaries and exclusion managed the racial purity at the heart of the Australian imagined community. Nothing was so important to the emerging nation’s identity or administration as these boundaries (Reynolds 2007). Furthermore, the heavily policed maritime quarantine line helped imagine the community as a pure “geo-body”, protecting it from “polluting foreigners” conflated with germs.48 This was one of the crucial ways in which Australia first imagined and performed itself as a nation. The logic

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

187

of quarantine thus helped to forge the new Australian nation at Federation, embedding national identity in an organismic body politics. In  some respects  the Australian decision to place a moratorium on xenotransplantation can be read as a logical continuation of Australia’s historical attachment to a radical form of biological border-policing quarantine. The moratorium in effect draws an exclusionary line between potentially infectious animals and uninfected humans. If xenotransplantation involves the transplantation of non-human tissues “across protective barriers”, then the moratorium conversely sought to prevent the skin and immune system of prospective recipients from being breached by infectious biological fragments from non-human animals; bolstering protective boundaries. But the aim of the moratorium was to protect not only the individual, but more importantly broader population, for whom the individual recipient forms a gateway. Like quarantine-immigration restriction nexus, it reflects a desire to maintain the purity and the integrity of the boundaries of individual Australian bodies and the biological population  as a form of protection. Both are instances of “organismic body politics”, in which the idea of a unified national/social body and an individualised and contained organic body tends to naturalise and support one another.

Conclusion In 2009, with little fanfare, the NHMRC overturned the moratorium. The decision was based on a workshop with international experts on xenotransplantation (predominantly researchers engaged in xenotransplantation research) and a discussion paper on the current progress and evidence. The discussion paper, Xenotransplantation: A Review of the Parameters, Risks and Benefits, argued that Australia must engage in “anticipatory regulation”: It is important that regulatory and surveillance frameworks are developed to ensure Australia is equipped to manage the progression of xenotransplantation. It is not feasible to wait for efficacy data to be adequate for specific technologies before developing an appropriate framework; rather it

188 

R. Carr

is necessary to anticipate the regulatory processes which would be required. (p. 10)

Participants at the workshop agreed that the “potential risks to individuals and the community were not sufficient to justify a continuing ban on clinical trials in Australia” (NHMRC 2009, 9). The discussion paper also foregrounded researchers’ complaints that the moratorium had “delayed development of infrastructure” (NHMRC 2009, 9), impacting on Australian research development (Hawthorne and Cowan 2020). Furthermore, it pointed to a need for global regulatory harmonisation given “public health risks of xenotransplantation have the potential to transcend sovereign borders” (NHMRC 2009, 28). The predominance of researcher views in this decision reflects the reorganisation of the NHMRC to streamline governance to be “more effective at both acquisition and implementation of new knowledge” (W. P. Anderson 2006b). The moratorium was a return of an insular model, which I have argued has historically characterised Australian public health administration and indeed Australian identity (Perera). This sovereign reassertion in the xenotransplantation moratorium, however, has a particularly contemporary tint: it responds to a speculative risk of a global emergency (as discussed in Chap. 4). The valiant attempt to protect the community against the dangers of xenotransplantation, in Australia, was subsequently overturned in favour of a more productive form of preparedness: one which enables researchers to fold the uncertainty of xenozoonosis within the promissory value of xenotransplantation product development. Australia has ended up with a framework that is more liberal than the one the XWP initially proposed (and was rejected by the NHMRC), in that it theoretically would now allow organ transplantation (Cheng 2015). In the current framework all applications for clinical trials must be approved by local human research ethics committees (HRECs) and the Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA); the TGA will assess the application for safety based on European Medical Association guidelines for xenotransplantation. Applicants for research involving genetically modified source animals must notify the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR); however, the OGTR do not have the power to

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

189

approve/reject an application, only provide advice. While the XWP and the 2009 discussion paper recommended a national committee to oversee applications, this does not appear to have eventuated—similar to the UK and the United States where national committees were disbanded in the early 2000s (McLean and Williamson 2007). Furthermore, the decision in 2009 to lift the moratorium and subsequent framework development were made with far less public engagement and transparency than the XWP recommendations in 2004. The exception, however, is the chapter in the NHMRC Human Research Ethics Guide providing advice to local HRECs for assessing applications for xenotransplantation clinical trials, which was made available for public comment in 2017, and makes a strong case for (pre)caution. In the introduction to this book, I proposed that hybridity—or recombination—is not always associated with pollution. However, the moratorium clearly defines human and non-human animal in a prophylactic move that divorces human and non-human tissues from one another, preventing intimate contact across traditional species boundaries. The temporary ban sought enclosure of human society/body against potentially infectious non-human animal tissues: marking out several binaries, human/animal, healthy/unhealthy, self/other. The moratorium represents a negative power apparatus, responding to danger by ordering the world, and in which contact that confuses categories becomes contagious, or polluting. Historically, racial politics have interplayed with public health in the desire to produce a White Australia, marking out particularly Asian bodies as threatening to Australian territory, identity, and health. The moratorium can similarly be read as an organismic body politics, in which the individual and social body is protected from threatening foreign animal bodies. We can see the moratorium as part of a persistent patterning in Australia reflecting the desire for the image of homogeneity and boundedness that structured its very birth as a nation. This contrasts with the emerging infectious disease paradigm more broadly, in which neither the skin of the human body, nor the borders of human societies, have a privileged status in disease emergence. Health, of both individual and society, in this broader field is increasingly figured in terms of adaptive complex systems, rather than enclosed purity.

190 

R. Carr

Michel Foucault (2007, 9) argues sovereignty does not disappear with the development of biopolitics; we see the coming together of different mechanisms, or strategies. In the second chapter of this book, I demonstrated how the reassertion of boundaries was folded within a more liberal project of tissue circulations in New Zealand, to make purity productive in the accumulation of biovalue. The internal isolation of pig source animals, in that case, rendered them safe to enter the human body, simultaneously marking out human/non-human difference while enabling their interconnection. In the moratorium, however, binaries dominate, rather than being internalised; it works at the border to protect human society against speculative dangers. It excludes xenotransplantation recipients, non-human animal tissues, and viruses, marking out the territory of the self as categorically human. In this chapter, I have examined the logic of a precautionary approach to biotechnology: arguing that in this case the sovereign decision leverages off an organismic body politics—which depicts a species body at risk from outside, non-human, threats. In this Australian context, precaution strives towards a pure community through the exclusion of otherness (nonhuman animals). However, I have also pointed to the failure of precaution to achieve closure in the face of speculative risks. The essentially negative pre-emptive response of enclosure against dangers, evident in the moratorium, eventually succumbed to the powerful drive in contemporary biotechnological political economies to make uncertainty productive. I do not suggest that this more liberal approach is better. It marks a move in the field towards a speculative political economy in which we may not always attempt to prevent catastrophe or equitably distribute harm and compensation. The desire to make uncertainty productive and systems adaptive may limit care for those that fail to become sufficiently resilient (Evans and Reid 2014), or the lives lost in adapting to new circumstances. We know that infectious disease impacts on those more vulnerable in society: disproportionately affecting those populations who are already marginalised, on both local and global scales. Xenozoonosis, if it did occur, like COVID-19 and AIDS, would likely further existing inequalities.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

191

Notes 1. In fact by 2000, when Australia was only beginning its examination of the issue, the UK had was already “concluding that it was ‘never’ going to happen” (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011, 646). Beynon-Jones and Brown argue, however, that the UK regulatory process was temporally “compressed” (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011). They importantly point to the significance of time and timing in the establishment of regulatory practices and their meaning. 2. Although the TGA did start to consider how it might include xenotransplantation in regulation prior to the NHMRC lifting the moratorium (NHMRC 2009, 10). An earlier moratorium in the UK (until 1992) responded not to infectious disease concerns but to questions about value of the research and non-human animal welfare (Haddow et  al. 2010). While the United States and the UK had issued a ban or moratorium during the 1990s, both had arguably done so with the intention (explicit or not) of developing guidelines and oversight mechanisms for clinical trials and further understanding the risks (Beynon-Jones and Brown 2011; McLean and Williamson 2005; Schuurman 2008). The mechanism of the moratorium was used for a slightly different purpose in Australia, as there was no intention of developing a framework or other regulatory activity during this period when the ban was set. 3. Although the government in Canada did not implement a formal ban, only a “de facto moratorium” (Cheng 2015), it has, like Australia, been slow to provide clear guidelines for clinical trials (Einsiedel et al. 2011); and the Dutch government similarly arrived at a ban only in 2002. 4. “The resulting Discussion Paper, ‘Xenotransplantation: A Review of the Parameters, Risks and Benefits,’ noted that the moratorium had impeded preclinical xenotransplantation research and stifled funding for such research work, and had delayed the development of regulatory guidelines and further support for research infrastructure” (Hawthorne and Cowan 2020). 5. At this point primates were already excluded as tissue sources, and pigs were assumed to be the likely source animal. 6. For a detailed account of this process see Cook (2008) and Cheng (2015). 7. In the British system, ships were only briefly held at port so they could be checked and disinfected. Sick passengers were taken to hospital (and isolated there) and their (apparently) healthy travel companions were

192 

R. Carr

allowed to go into the community, although their details were held for future surveillance if there was an outbreak (Maglen 2005). 8. These ongoing connections have become sadly clearer during the COVID-19  in Australia, as racism towards Asian Australians, in ­particular, increased: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-­11-­02/asian-­ australians-­suffer-­covid-­19-­discrimination-­anu-­survey/12834324. 9. On theories of the decline of the body politic metaphor see Neocleous (2003). 10. See Corbin (1986) on this, for instance. 11. However, Pasteur and Koch were not necessarily as reductive as often thought; see Mendelsohn (2002). 12. Vaccines, developed around the same time, troubled the inside/outside distinction and while they were eventually widely adopted they were very controversial (Bashford 2004). 13. As Haraway articulates this clearly: “This approach to disease involved a stunning reversal: the colonized was perceived as the invader. In the face of the disease genocides accompanying European ‘penetration’ of the globe, the ‘coloured’ body of the colonized was constructed as the dark source of infection, pollution, disorder, and so on, that threatened to overwhelm white manhood (cities, civilization, the family, the white personal body) with its decadent emanations” (Haraway 1991b, 223). 14. For example, Anderson highlights the intense surveillance of Filipino bodies by the United States (Anderson 1996). 15. See also Martin (1994); Waldby (1996). 16. See Haraway (1991b) or Esposito (2011) for instance. 17. In the case of people with AIDS, their imagined “receptivity” to penetrations and bodily excretions (at both the bodily and cellular level). This was effected through “homologies” across cells, bodies, and the social body found in the public health scientific discourses, mainly epidemiology (Waldby 1996). In Australia in the 1990s, Waldby argues, female and gay male bodies and health were less the concern of public health than the threat, and the point at which the more important heterosexual male body could be protected. 18. Esposito (2011) has a slightly more complicated account of these processes of individualisation and enclosure. 19. However, adapting to a new host may require many changes, and producing lasting variants in a viral cloud and evolving into a fit new virus is complicated, and rare (Domingo et al. 2012; Holmes 2009). On the other hand, it is clear that viral evolution tends to increase in the event

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

193

of changes in the environment, such as a host change or use of drugs. So, for example, part of the difficulty with successfully treating HIV/AIDS is that the virus evolves in response to antiviral drugs (Holmes 2009). 20. Viruses have various ways of producing variation in the genome: mutating through “errors in copying”, reassorting segments of genomes, and recombining with other viruses. Several emerging viruses, including HIV and SARS CoV, have developed via viral recombination, a process in which sections of two different viruses combine together to form a new one. 21. In practice, however, these older prioritisations of borders and boundaries can certainly be re-invigorated, (see for example Hinchliffe et al. 2013). 22. Tuch was Senior Staff Specialist and Director of the Diabetes Transplant Unit at the Prince of Wales Hospital as well as a Professor of Medicine at the University of New South Wales at the time. His team was trying to undertake the transplantation of insulin-producing pig cells into immunosuppressed diabetic humans. 23. Diatranz (LCT) had conducted clinical trials in New Zealand from 1995 to 1997 but voluntary halted clinical research amid PERV concerns. They applied again for a clinical trial in New Zealand in 2001, but were rejected. Subsequently the New Zealand government placed a two-year moratorium on clinical research, which was then extended until 2006. Note that during this period New Zealand conducted public consultation and at the end of consultation lifted the strict controls—in contrast to Australia, where the moratorium followed public consultation. 24. Also including New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (Loeber et al. 2011; Tallacchini 2011; Bellucci et al. 1998). 25. This is unlike in the UK, for instance, where human ethics and non-­ human animal welfare were more central to regulatory process and the industry’s departure from the country (see Chap. 3). 26. While preparedness for a future event may seem passive, it requires a constant and active “state of alertness” and the proliferation of new tools to foster adaptiveness or resilience in the face of the unknown (Cooper 2006). 27. “Researchers agree that nonhuman primates would not be suitable source animals for animal-to-human transplantation because of the risk of infections to the transplant recipient and the wider community” (NHMRC 2005, 24). 28. “Although some respondents highlighted the HIV/AIDS epidemic as an example of how health authorities have been unable to manage emerging

194 

R. Carr

infectious diseases in the past, the XWP noted that since the initial outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, international health authorities have become better organised to manage some incidents, as was shown by the response to the recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)”. 29. In contrast, again, to the case in UK where, in the regulatory development, the ethical concerns with using non-human primates overshadowed the disease concerns. 30. These differentiations of riskiness are fundamentally speculative rather than calculative. There is no way to assess such a risk; they can only be apprehended imaginatively (with some indirect support from data and from a rational position), and, as such, represent different categories of affect rather than risk as a statistical calculation. This is not to say such assessments are false—they are neither able to be verifiable nor falsifiable. 31. Sunder Rajan describes speculative statements made in United States biotech industries as “fabricating the truth” (2006, 129): not a lie, but hypothetical. 32. Sharp (2013) notes a surprising openness among researchers in sharing source animals, particularly in academic research. She sees among xeno researchers “an emergent commons, marked by a nonproprietary handling or open sharing of specially bred animals” (163). Note that these approaches to PERV described here are potentially surpassed by more contemporary approaches which seek to inactivate PERV using genetic engineering, as discussed in the previous chapter. 33. Of course human transplants breach the skin too, and many other procedures too, and can be a source of novel infections, but have not been subject to the same kind of public controversy—see Cheng (2015). 34. Similarly to Fritz Bach et al. (1998) in the United States (discussed in Chap. 4)—who used the HIV/AIDS as our crystal ball metaphor. This not to suggest that Collignon sees each individual xenograft as necessarily infecting the population, but, as transplants occur in the “hundreds and thousands”, “it becomes a much higher chance that something will actually occur” (Collignon). 35. For example, in accounts such as Laurie Garrets’ popular science book The Coming Plague and Nathan Wolfe’s Viral Storm humans globally can be read as intimately connected into a singular body because of their biological similarities and susceptibility to the same viruses, and the

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

195

dense networks of contemporary globalisation, making us especially vulnerable to the undetectable unknown viruses. 36. As discussed in Chap. 4 a virus may also better adapt to infect human populations while occupying an immunocompromised host. 37. The emerging infectious disease field in general, and several people I interviewed, represent non-human animals as the source of most, if not all, new human infections (Wolfe et al. 2007). However, the field does not simply equate “the animal” with “the germ”; it generally acknowledges the other factors involved in emergence of new disease, including environmental, social and economic factors (for example Fidler et  al. 1997; Wilcox and Colwell 2005). 38. Indeed, this ability for viruses to assume the appearance of the tissues in which they replicate is why Weiss depicted tissue transplants from genetically modified non-human animals as a “Trojan horse” in the 1990s, because if the non-human animal cells are “humanised” it is likely the envelope of any viruses replicating in those cells will also be humanised and able to evade the immune system upon transplantation. 39. There are other areas of public health and security in which Australia has embraced preparedness strategies associated with the field of emerging infectious diseases (see Diprose et al. 2008; Wraith and Stephenson 2009). 40. At the same time, the Island Labourers Act was used to deport Islanders living in Australia, many of whom had previously been brought, willingly and unwillingly, to Australia for labour, particularly to support the sugar and pearling industries (Megarrity 2006). Furthermore, as Perera (2009) highlights, the quarantine/immigration laws also excluded Macassan peoples who had lived in north-west Australia seasonally for centuries. 41. The Commonwealth Department of Health later emerged from within the Quarantine Service in 1921, its origins firmly enmeshed in the logic of quarantine. And, indeed, Dr J. H. L. Cumpston, the first Head of the Quarantine Services, later became the Director General of the first federal Department of Health and Chairman of the original National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). The initial phase of the NHMRC, captained by Cumpston, was also heavily influenced by eugenics-like ideologies. These of course constituted a pervading philosophy at the time, in Australia as well as elsewhere (Gillespie 2002). 42. Note that this contrasts with Foucault’s (2007, 10) description of plague quarantine technologies from the Middle Ages up till the eighteenth

196 

R. Carr

century, in which the sick were included and monitored within the community. 43. This is not to suggest that it always functioned as a complete barrier to the movements of non-British travellers (Bashford and Hobbins 2015). 44. Initially, labourers were brought from the Pacific Islands, mainly Melanesia (Megarrity 2006) because it was thought impossible for Europeans to work in the torrid zone, an “exhausting, depleting environment” causing disease and degeneration in Europeans (Anderson 2002, 5). 45. As Anderson argues, colonial regulatory bodies around the globe responded differently to this new construction of disease causation, from increased surveillance of personal conduct and contacts (in the Philippines), to fierce segregation (South Africa). In Australia, avoidance of disease was paramount, and this strengthened the call for quarantine, immigration restriction, and the deportation of Islanders: “Exposure to the Aboriginal inhabitants of the north presented few problems as they were a dispersed and apparently doomed race; Pacific Islanders were to be repatriated; and immigration restrictions should keep out most Asians … Thus, in maintaining the purity of the white race, the new nation was also seeking to ensure its health, especially in the tropics” (Anderson 2002, 112). 46. Meg Parsons (2010), however, argues that local Australians did associate indigenous people with disease in a similar way to Chinese, despite this not being politicised or institutionalised in the same way in public health texts. 47. If, as Grosz (1994) suggests, “[r]ituals and practices designed to cleanse and purify the body may serve as metaphors for processes of cultural homogeneity” (p. 192), then quarantine rituals were both metaphors for cultural homogeneity and processes of biologically policing “White Australia”. 48. One might point to the continuation of these logics during Australia’s initial response to COVID-19, in which returning Australians from Wuhan were placed in quarantine on Christmas Island—in contrast to later returning travellers from other (mainly non-Asian) countries who were quarantined on the mainland. See https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-­australia-­51352145. The xenotransplantation moratorium, however, did not perform or support racial exclusion. 

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

197

References Anderson, Warwick. 1996. Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1): 94–118. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.1996.0002. ———. 2002. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia. Carlton South, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006a. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Warwick P. 2006b. Working to Build a Healthy Australia: A New Era for the NHMRC. The Medical Journal of Australia 185 (11–12): 613–615. Bach, F.H., J.A. Fishman, N. Daniels, J. Proimos, B. Anderson, C.B. Carpenter, L.  Forrow, S.C.  Robson, and H.V.  Fineberg. 1998. Uncertainty in Xenotransplantation: Individual Benefit versus Collective Risk. Nature Medicine 4 (2): 141–144. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0298-­141. Bartosch, Birke, Dimitrios Stefanidis, Richard Myers, Robin Weiss, Clive Patience, and Yasuhiro Takeuchi. 2004. Evidence and Consequence of Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus Recombination. Journal of Virology 78 (24): 13880–13890. https://doi.org/10.1128/JVI.78.24.13880-­13890.2004. Bashford, Alison. 1998. Quarantine and the Imagining of the Australian Nation. Health 2 (4): 387–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/136345939800200406. ———. 2000. ‘Is White Australia Possible?’ Race, Colonialism and Tropical Medicine. Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (2): 248–271. https://doi. org/10.1080/014198700329042. ———. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bashford, Alison, and Peter Hobbins. 2015. Rewriting Quarantine: Pacific History at Australia’s Edge. Australian Historical Studies 46 (3): 392–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2015.1071860. Bellucci, Sergio, Alberto Bondolfi, Bärbel Hüsing, and Adrian Rüegsegger. 1998. The Swiss Technology Assessment Project on Xenotransplantation. Annals of the New  York Academy of Sciences 862 (1): 155–165. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-­6632.1998.tb09130.x. Beynon-Jones, Siân M., and Nik Brown. 2011. Time, Timing and Narrative at the Interface between UK Technoscience and Policy. Science and Public Policy 38 (8): 639–648. https://doi.org/10.3152/030234211X13111546663331. Braun, Bruce. 2007. Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life. Cultural Geographies 14 (1): 6–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007072817.

198 

R. Carr

Brown, Nik, and Siân M. Beynon-Jones. 2012. ‘Reflex Regulation’: An Anatomy of Promissory Science Governance. Health, Risk & Society 14 (3): 223–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2012.662633. Canguilhem, Georges. 2008. Knowledge of Life. Trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. 1st ed. New York: Fordham University Press. Cheng, Myra. 2015. Islet Xeno/Transplantation and the Risk of Contagion: Local Responses from Canada and Australia to an Emerging Global Technoscience. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 11 (October). https://doi. org/10.1186/s40504-­015-­0030-­2. Cohen, Ed. 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press. Collignon, Peter, and Laura Purdy. 2001. Xenografts: Are the Risks so Great That We Should Not Proceed? Microbes and Infection 3 (4): 341–348. https:// doi.org/10.1016/S1286-­4579(01)01388-­0. Cook, Peta. 2008. Constructing and Fracturing Alliances: Actant Stories and the Australian Xenotransplantation Network. Doctoral Dissertation, Queensland University of Technology, Queensland. Cook, Peta S., Gavin Kendall, Mike Michael, and Nik Brown. 2011. The Textures of Globalization: Biopolitics and the Closure of Xenotourism. New Genetics & Society 30 (1): 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/1463677 8.2011.552303. Cooper, Melinda. 2004. Insecure Times, Tough Decisions: The Nomos of Neoliberalism. Alternatives 29 (5): 515–533. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 030437540402900503. ———. 2006. Pre-Empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (4): 113–135. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276406065121. ———. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. University of Washington Press. Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cozzi, Emanuele, Ralf R. Tönjes, Pierre Gianello, Léo H. Bühler, Gina R. Rayat, Shinichi Matsumoto, Chung-Gyu Park, et  al. 2016. First Update of the International Xenotransplantation Association Consensus Statement on Conditions for Undertaking Clinical Trials of Porcine Islet Products in Type 1 Diabetes—Chapter 1: Update on National Regulatory Frameworks Pertinent to Clinical Islet Xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation 23 (1): 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/xen.12222.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

199

Deng, Y.M., B.E. Tuch, and W.D. Rawlinson. 2000. Transmission of Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses in Severe Combined Immunodeficient Mice Xenotransplanted with Fetal Porcine Pancreatic Cells. Transplantation 70 (7): 1010–1016. https://doi.org/10.1097/00007890-­200010150-­00004. Diprose, Rosalyn, Niamh Stephenson, Catherine Mills, Kane Race, and Gay Hawkins. 2008. Governing the Future: The Paradigm of Prudence in Political Technologies of Risk Management. Security Dialogue 39 (2–3): 267–288. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010608088778. Domingo, Esteban, Julie Sheldon, and Celia Perales. 2012. Viral Quasispecies Evolution. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 76 (2): 159–216. https://doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.05023-­11. Einsiedel, Edna F., Mavis Jones, and Meaghan Brierley. 2011. Cultures, Contexts and Commitments in the Governance of Controversial Technologies: US, UK and Canadian Publics and Xenotransplantation Policy Development. Science and Public Policy 38 (8): 619–628. https://doi.org/10.315 2/030234211X13092649606440. Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. 2014. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. John Wiley & Sons. Ewald, François. 2002. The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution. In Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, trans. Stephen Utz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=496609. Fabbrizi, Valerio. 2018. Theory of Sovereignty and the Body Politic in Modern and Contemporary Political Thought. Philosophica Critica 4 (1): 3–19. Fidler, David P., David L. Heymann, Stephen M. Ostroff, and Terry P. O’Brien. 1997. Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Challenges for International, National, and State Law. International Lawyer (ABA) 31: 773. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2008. The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: The Will to Knowledge. Camberwell, VIC: Penguin.

200 

R. Carr

Gillespie, James A. 2002. The Price of Health: Australian Governments and Medical Politics 1910–1960. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Grosz, E.A. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haddow, Gill, Ann Bruce, Jane Calvert, Shawn H.E.  Harmon, and Wendy Marsden. 2010. Not ‘Human’ Enough to Be Human but Not ‘Animal’ Enough to Be Animal—The Case of the HFEA, Cybrids and Xenotransplantation in the UK. New Genetics and Society 29 (1): 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636770903561182. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991a. Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. ———. 1991b. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harris, Jonathan Gil. 1998. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Hawthorne, Wayne J., and Peter J.  Cowan. 2020. Xenotransplantation in Australia: Development of the Regulatory Process. Xenotransplantation 27 (3): e12603. https://doi.org/10.1111/xen.12603. Hinchliffe, Steve, John Allen, Stephanie Lavau, Nick Bingham, and Simon Carter. 2013. Biosecurity and the Topologies of Infected Life: From Borderlines to Borderlands. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (4): 531–543. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­5661.2012.00538.x. Hobbes, Thomas. 2005. Leviathan, Parts I and II. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Holmes, Edward C. 2009. The Evolutionary Genetics of Emerging Viruses. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 40 (1): 353–372. https:// doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.110308.120248. Institute of Medicine. 1992. Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States. Ed. Joshua Lederberg, Robert E.  Shope, and Stanley C. Oaks, Jr. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Jupp, James. 2002. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, Andrew. 2017. Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. University of California Press. Lakoff, Andrew, and Stephen J. Collier. 2008. Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health & Security in Question. New York: Columbia University Press. Leach, Melissa, Ian Scoones, and Andrew Stirling. 2010. Governing Epidemics in an Age of Complexity: Narratives, Politics and Pathways to Sustainability. Global Environmental Change 20 (3): 369–377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. gloenvcha.2009.11.008.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

201

Loeber, Anne, Erich Griessler, and Wytske Versteeg. 2011. Stop Looking up the Ladder: Analyzing the Impact of Participatory Technology Assessment from a Process Perspective. Science & Public Policy (SPP) 38 (8): 599–608. https:// doi.org/10.3152/030234211X13111546663296. Maglen, Krista. 2005. A World Apart: Geography, Australian Quarantine, and the Mother Country. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60 (2): 196–217. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jri023. Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Bostson, MA: Beacon Press. McLean, Sheila, and Laura Williamson. 2005. Xenotransplantation: Law and Ethics. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007. The Demise of UKXIRA and the Regulation of Solid-Organ Xenotransplantation in the UK. Journal of Medical Ethics 33: 373–375. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2007.020768. Megarrity, Lyndon. 2006. ‘White Queensland’: The Queensland Government’s Ideological Position on the Use of Pacific Island Labourers in the Sugar Sector 1880–1901. Australian Journal of Politics & History 52 (1): 1–12. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-­8497.2006.00404a.x. Mendelsohn, J.  Andrew. 2002. ‘Like All That Lives’: Biology, Medicine and Bacteria in the Age of Pasteur and Koch. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24 (1): 3–36. Morse, S.S. 1995. Factors in the Emergence of Infectious Diseases. Emerging Infectious Diseases 1 (1): 7–15. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid0101.950102. Neocleous, Mark. 2003. Imagining the State. Maidenhead: Open University Press. NHMRC. 2005. National Health and Medical Research Council Statement on Animal-to-Human Transplantation (Xenotransplantation) Research. National Health and Medical Research Council. http://www.nhmrc.gov. au/_files_nhmrc/file/about/committeess/expert/gtrap/xenotrans.pdf. ———. 2009. Xenotransplantation: A Review of the Parameters, Risks, and Benefits. http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/about/committees/ expert/gtrap/nhmrc_xeno_discussion_paper_website.pdf. O’Connell, Philip J., Wayne J.  Hawthorne, Denbigh Simond, Jeremy R. Chapman, Yizhou Chen, Anita T. Patel, Stacey N. Walters, et al. 2005. Genetic and Functional Evaluation of the Level of Inbreeding of the Westran Pig: A Herd with Potential for Use in Xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation 12 (4): 308–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-­3089.2005.00230.x. Otis, Laura. 2000. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

202 

R. Carr

Parkes, Margot W., Leslie Bienen, Jaime Breilh, Lee-Nah Hsu, Marian McDonald, Jonathan A. Patz, Joshua P. Rosenthal, et al. 2005. All Hands on Deck: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Emerging Infectious Disease. EcoHealth 2 (4): 258–272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-­005-­8387-­y. Parrish, Colin R., Edward C.  Holmes, David M.  Morens, Eun-Chung Park, Donald S. Burke, Charles H. Calisher, Catherine A. Laughlin, Linda J. Saif, and Peter Daszak. 2008. Cross-Species Virus Transmission and the Emergence of New Epidemic Diseases. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 72 (3): 457–470. https://doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.00004-­08. Parsons, Meg. 2009. Spaces of Disease: The Creation and Management of Aboriginal Health and Disease in Queensland 1900–1970. ———. 2010. Defining Disease, Segregating Race: Sir Raphael Cilento, Aboriginal Health and Leprosy Management in Twentieth Century Queensland. Aboriginal History 34: 85–114. Patience, Clive, Yasuhiro Takeuchi, and Robin A.  Weiss. 1997. Infection of Human Cells by an Endogenous Retrovirus of Pigs. Nature Medicine 3 (3): 282–286. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0397-­282. Perera, Suvendrini. 2009. Australia and the Insular Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. University of Chicago Press. Reynolds, Henry. 2007. Part of a Continent for Something Less than a Nation? The Limits of Australian Sovereignty. In Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera, 61–73. Perth: Network Books. Saunders, Suzanne. 1990. Isolation: The Development of Leprosy Prophylaxis in Australia. Aboriginal History 14 (1/2): 168–181. Schuurman, Henk-Jan. 2008. Regulatory Aspects of Pig-to-Human Islet Transplantation. Xenotransplantation 15 (2): 116–120. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1399-­3089.2008.00467.x. Sharp, Lesley A. 2013. The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science. University of California Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 1997. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics. Psychology Press. ———. 2002. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage. ———. 2015. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio) Ethics. Routledge.

5  Ecological and Organismic Body Politics: The Moratorium… 

203

Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Tallacchini, Mariachiara. 2011. Risks and Rights in Xenotransplantation. In Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age, 169–192. MIT Press. Thacker, Eugene. 2011. Necrologies; Or, the Death of the Body Politic. In Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, ed. Patricia Clough and Craig Willse. Durham: Duke University Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Waldby, Catherine. 1996. Aids and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge. Walker, David Robert. 1999. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939. Queensland: University of Queensland Press. Weiss, Robin A. 2004. Circe, Cassandra, and the Trojan Pigs: Xenotransplantation. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 148: 281–295. Wilcox, Bruce A., and Rita R.  Colwell. 2005. Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Biocomplexity as an Interdisciplinary Paradigm. EcoHealth 2 (4): 244–257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-­005-­8961-­3. Winichakul, Thongchai. 1997. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Wolfe, Nathan. 2011. The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age. London: Penguin. Wolfe, Nathan D., Claire Panosian Dunavan, and Jared Diamond. 2007. Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases. Nature 447 (7142): 279–283. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1038/nature05775. Wood, James C., Gary Quinn, Kristen M.  Suling, Beth A.  Oldmixon, Brian A. Van Tine, Robert Cina, Scott Arn, et al. 2004. Identification of Exogenous Forms of Human-Tropic Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus in Miniature Swine. Journal of Virology 78 (5): 2494–2501. https://doi.org/10.1128/ JVI.78.5.2494-­2501.2004. Wraith, Caroline, and Niamh Stephenson. 2009. Risk, Insurance, Preparedness and the Disappearance of the Population: The Case of Pandemic Influenza. Health Sociology Review 18 (3): 220–233. Xenotransplantation Working Party. 2002. Draft Guidelines and Discussion Paper on Xenotransplantation. National Health and Medical Research Council. http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/about/committees/expert/ gtrap/xeno.pdf.

204 

R. Carr

Xia, Shang, Xiao-Nong Zhou, and Jiming Liu. 2017. Systems Thinking in Combating Infectious Diseases. Infectious Diseases of Poverty 6. https://doi. org/10.1186/s40249-­017-­0339-­6. Massumi, Brian. 2010. The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat. In The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 52–70. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

6 Conclusion

In 2004, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) placed a five-year moratorium on animal-to-human transplantation clinical trials, because of the infection risk to the broader human population. The high-profile Australian infectious disease specialist Peter Collignon, along with legal scholar Leanne Purdy, articulated the problem of xenotransplantation as follows: Suppose, for instance, that xenotransplantation comes to be accepted, and just a few individuals are eventually infected with an AIDS-like disease that spreads silently in the population until it erupts as a major threat (perhaps untraceable to its original source) dozens or perhaps hundreds of years later. (Collignon and Purdy 2001, 4)

In short, xenotransplantation engenders a risk of contagion from other animals. The moratorium prevented a medical practice that, if successful, would lead to the hybrid embodiment of human recipients living with viable animal tissues in their bodies. The initial Australian response to the hypothetical risk of contagion was to draw a firm boundary between human and other animal bodies. As I have detailed in this book, regulators, members of committees, and industry players have taken differing approaches to the problem of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6_6

205

206 

R. Carr

potential disease transmission in xenotransplantation. Understandings of zoonotic infection, hybridity, and contagion, in the xenotransplantation context, as I have detailed, also entangle national imaginaries, and social and political strategies such as those responding to immigration, or facilitating tourism, which likewise deal with movement of bodies and contact across borders. The approaches to managing xenotransplantation represent differing forms of power and understandings of disease, exhibiting the contrasting tendencies of sovereignty and security (Foucault 2007). These two forms of power and their relationship to infectious disease have become all too familiar in the COVID-19 pandemic: among other things, in the political tensions between lock down and economic continuity. Throughout this book, I have traced the impact of these two perspectives in the xenotransplantation field, in empirical and discursive domains ranging from governmental regulation to animal ethics, showing how these modes of power coexist, intersect, and sometimes contradict each other. Retroviruses are central characters in the multispecies landscape of xenotransplantation research and regulation. These microbes, the scientists who study them, and companion species (mice, pigs, and human and non-human primates) have shaped the regulation of this medical technology. Retroviruses are RNA viruses: they take the form of a strand of RNA, enclosed in a viral envelope. A retrovirus is characterised by its ability to integrate itself into the genome of the cell it infects. When the term endogenous is added to retrovirus, it signals that the retrovirus has been inactivated over time but remains incorporated into the genome of their host. These old companionships between retroviruses and animals are evident in what is known as junk DNA; they are part of the multispecies makeup of the bodies of all mammals, including humans. Despite being generally inactive in their usual hosts, scientists have found that some retroviruses can awaken under particular circumstances and become infectious again. During the 1990s scientists demonstrated the presence of such a dormant virus in all pigs, called porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV). PERV is a relative of retroviruses found in koalas, and leukaemia viruses in cats and apes (Denner 2008; Łopata et al. 2018). They have had a long intimate relationship with mammals, estimated to be 7.4–8.3 million years old (Tönjes and Niebert 2003).

6 Conclusion 

207

Scientists in several countries subsequently demonstrated that some strains of PERV were able to infect human cells in a lab setting (Martin et al. 1998; Patience et al. 1997; Wilson et al. 1998). Whether or not PERV is able to infect human bodies in vivo (in organism), or in xenotransplantation, is as yet unknown, let alone whether it would be contagious or pathogenic. However, as detailed throughout this book, commentators have held HIV/AIDS as an example of how such a virus might affect human beings. While HIV is also a retrovirus, it is exogenous, meaning still active in its hosts. In addition to their ability to integrate into host genomes, retroviruses also have a tremendous knack for evolving and are masters of genetic exchange for survival—a strategy of increasing interest to humans. Not only do retroviruses mutate by error in copying (which is the usual way for many species), they are also well versed in sharing genetic sequences with other viruses and potentially their host (Denner 2008; Mikkelsen and Pedersen 2000; Negroni and Buc 2001). Retroviruses can exchange large segments of their RNA with other segmented RNA viruses (recombination) quickly making drastic changes to their genetic makeup. Accordingly, porcine endogenous retroviruses have been figured as more than just a trojan horse, ready to emerge from pig tissues transplanted into humans. In addition, they are thought of as unpredictably emergent: able to rapidly evolve in new environments, drawing resources from local (human infective) viruses, co-operating with viruses from other species (e.g. birds) to form novel pathogens and improve their chances of transmission among human populations (Boneva et al. 2001, 8; Onions et al. 2000; Patience et al. 1997). Much of the contemporary xenotransplantation research and regulatory landscape is infected with a speculative imaginary of a global pandemic arising from xenografting, and particularly emerging from this highly adaptable critter: PERV.  At the same time, the xenotransplantation research field is also driven by various imaginaries of humans with nonhuman organs, improved by various forms of genetic exchange to provide not only survival but increased resilience. Across different countries, industry and regulators have engaged with a range of practices mobilising different understandings of disease, from the initial embrace of borders in

208 

R. Carr

Australia, to a mixed approach to borders and circulation in New Zealand, and relatively liberal approach in the United States. In an isolated town in the South Island of New Zealand, a biosecure lab houses the Auckland Island pigs, bred and maintained for over ten years in a state of purity, for development into xenotransplantation products. Having been left by sailors on an isolated island 200 years ago, represented as a natural quarantine, the xenotransplantation company LCT claimed that the pigs were purified of many modern viruses—including most PERV expression (see Chap. 2). The so-called purity of these pigs was maintained by LCT through barriers and boundaries. The breeding facility is enclosed against outside environments, entry available to only a select few through a sterilising enclave. The boundaries of the lab, like the boundaries of Auckland Island—as discussed in Chap. 2—provide a metaphor for the boundaries of the pigs’ bodies, but also the binary distinction between human and animal, and nature and culture. These binaries are repeatedly affirmed in the company’s marketing rhetoric and practices, despite—or indeed because of—the boundary-­crossing nature of the therapy. Reaffirming boundaries is one way of addressing the social and epidemiological concerns raised by xenotransplantation procedures. The rhetoric of LCT redeployed a strategy taken by NZ repeatedly to approach problematic movements of people and goods, from colonial to contemporary moments, constructing New Zealand as “pure nature” due to its isolation from other places and strong quarantine practices. Martine Rothblatt (2012), CEO of US biotech company United Therapeutics, has in contrast provocatively stated that “borders are not always boundaries” (p. 379). In 2012, United Therapeutics set out a plan to build a high-tech breeding facility in Maryland (US) for xenotransplantation pigs, which would produce 1000 pairs of XenoLungs (pig lungs for human transplants) each year. It was envisaged that the pathogen-­free breeding facility, designed to hold up to 1000 pigs, would include six breeding modules connected to a central “surgical hub”. A helicopter pad is positioned on top of the centralised surgery so that lungs removed from source pigs could be swiftly circulated to surrounding hospitals and awaiting recipients. Rothblatt’s end goal is to “democratise” lung transplants for humans, making them available for all those in need.1 While the imagined breeding facility organises the tissues

6 Conclusion 

209

logistically for ideal distribution into the human community, genetic engineering would adjust the biological elements that interrupt the seamless transfer of tissues and their biological functionality across species. The pigs are likely to have multiple genetic modifications to reduce immune rejection in the recipient; some of these alterations will re-engineer pigs to incorporate human genes. United Therapeutics aims to secure health through circulation across species. In 2020, United Therapeutics achieved a milestone towards this vision with the FDA approval for the GalSafe pigs—pigs genetically engineered to remove the alpha gal epitope expressed on their cells. Unlike many biotech companies in the United States, however, Rothblatt’s business model is built at least partly on profits from sale of previously developed products, rather than exclusively on venture capital. In contrast, George Church and Luhan Yang’s startup eGenesis builds on pure speculation. This company has taken the adaptive and fluid approach to species further. They have genetically modified pigs to inactivate the problematic PERV viruses in their genomes, as well as adding human genes (Yue et al. 2021). While Rothblatt’s intention is to democratise organ transplants, eGenesis imagines a world with a limitless supply of organs and other human parts. Not content to transplant functional organs, either, Church wants to enhance the pig organs destined for human recipients (see Chap. 4). There is no doubt that xenotransplantation research is contributing to the contemporary moment of transbiology (Franklin 2006). Xenotransplantation procedures, as I have demonstrated, foster exchange across species boundaries, in some cases, further proliferating these exchanges in response to potential viral emergence. However, the circulation of biological fragments across species has also provoked the reassertion of boundaries—for example, the moratorium in Australia and LCT’s marketing strategy and technologies. Such approaches follow from a long history in which the metaphor of contagion has been productive in policing racial, nation, class, or other boundaries, particularly in the face of new movement and contact (as discussed in Chap. 5). Even as I wrote this book, however, the approach taken by LCT has evolved. The New Zealand–owned company sold it’s share in the joint company Diatranz Otsuka Limited, to which they have outlicenced their

210 

R. Carr

primary product DIABECELL, and  who have given up the breeding facility in New Zealand and the Auckland Island pigs. Some previous researchers from LCT have reincarnated aspects of the research with a new company named NZeno, obtaining some of the remaining Auckland Island pigs and raising funding for a research program to genetically engineer them for whole organ transplants.2 While leveraging on some of the same features as the original LCT platform (the safe pigs), NZeno’s plan for genetically engineering radically alters the original approach which was premised on the naturalness of the pigs. The original technologies aimed to leave species differences intact, as well as the human immune system fully functional (see the introduction to this book), whereas genetic engineering will inevitably involve hybridisation of biologies. Similarly, in 2009 the moratorium in Australia was lifted, and a framework is now in place to (at least theoretically) allow xenotransplantation clinical trials, no longer preventing this intimate human-non-human contact. I do not want to suggest that this movement towards more liberal approach to species biologies and boundaries has led to greater non-­ human liberation or equality between species. This could hardly be the case when the industry ambition is to cultivate and kill pigs for human parts on a massive scale. It is only to suggest that our relationships with non-human animals continue to be transformed and are marked by a multiplicity of power relations. I take Nicole Shukin’s lead in quoting Hardt and Negri: “The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively through essential identities, binary divisions and stable oppositions” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 142). As Shukin intimates, our relationships with other animals are evolving, particularly in concert with emerging forms of capitalism. “Animal Capitalism” defined by Shukin (2009, 11) captures “the paradox of an anthropocentric order of capitalism whose means and effects can be all too posthuman, that is, one that ideologically grants and materially invests in a world in which species boundaries can be radically crossed (as well as reinscribed) in the genetic and aesthetic pursuit of new markets”. How is value derived from pigs in the xenotransplantation industry, in the face of potential zoonotic disease? Both LCT and eGenesis have productively utilised the speculative “crisis” or risk of PERV infection to

6 Conclusion 

211

capture a market slice. Xenotransplantation and discourses on xenozoonosis relentlessly funnel value from non-human species to human populations, deftly mobilising both sovereign binaries and security apparatuses. The value of the Auckland Island pigs, I have argued, was linked both to their embodied historical isolation and to their capacity to leverage off broader geographical imaginaries of purity to address social and epidemiological concerns with xenotransplantation. Where isolation was the key to marketing LCT’s pure pigs to investors and government alike, it relied upon ongoing embodiment of containment—enduring isolation of the pigs through a continuous genealogical line—maintained with traditional forms of reproduction. LCT reproduced the “purity” of the pigs—derived from their historical quarantine on the Auckland Islands— with isolation in biosecure labs. In addition, the researchers patented methods of interbreeding the pigs to further purify them of PERV copies and maintain herd health.3 The value of the pigs is, however, fundamentally embodied, and vulnerable to the maintenance or loss of those living expressions of containment and genealogical purity. The lives of the breeding members of the Auckland Island pig herd have also, conversely, been vulnerable to the movements of capital. The piglets they produce face a different fate altogether, being killed at a young age to source islet cells for research and clinical trials: multiple piglets are killed to cultivate enough cells for one treatment for a human with diabetes—in addition to those non-human lives lost to the process of developing the technologies. eGenesis’ approach to xenotransplantation takes a completely different approach. For them, value hinges off cloning and mutation, not reproduction in its traditional form. eGenesis’ approach marries a pre-emptive security approach to PERV, remaking life in response to an entirely speculative PERV pandemic, while capitalising on its innovative potential. Their business model most clearly manifests Sunder Rajan’s (2006) biocapital and Melinda Cooper’s (2008) account of “life as surplus”. “What is new in the contemporary biosciences”, Cooper writes, “is not so much the commodification of biological life—this is a foregone conclusion— but rather its transmutation into speculative surplus value” (148). Biocapital accumulates value from the (speculative) potential of life in the future, particularly from capturing (e.g. in patents) life’s own capacity

212 

R. Carr

to transform and generate itself (e.g. in stem cells), on the promise that such generation will be valuable (see Cooper 2008, p. 147). What gives Laika—the first pig genetically engineered to inactivate PERV—and her siblings value to eGenesis, in a thoroughly queer form of reproduction, is her ability to capture the potential for vital transformation and self-regeneration. After the publicisation of Laika, as indicative of the potential success of xenotransplantation, the company generated US$100  million. However, this approach is not without significant impact of life disposed of as waste, as discussed in Chap. 4, as thousands of porcine cells, embryos, and organisms have been created and disposed of in generating faith (investment) in PERV-free pigs for xenotransplants. If new markets are opened up “in a world in which species boundaries can be radically crossed” (Shukin 2009, 11), such markets rely on the generation, bodies, and death of non-human life. What commonly justifies the use of pigs as experimental subjects or medical products, in many highly regulated countries, is a constructed hierarchy of differing species and their capacities to suffer. That is, this exploitation is premised on an assumption of a continuity of species, which explicitly recognises humans as one among a number of animals, yet nonetheless hierarchically ranks animals according to their ostensibly varying capacities to suffer, in turn dictating different care practices. I argued (in Chap. 3) that utilitarian bioethics in UK bioethics discourse is inherently anthropocentric not only in the positioning of humans at the pinnacle of capacity for suffering, but also in the placement of other animals on the basis of their explicit human-likeness. Driving the justification of non-human suffering and death, in the case of xenotransplantation, is the premise of a critical organ shortage; however, scholars have argued this is constructed by the very technologies that enable transplantation (Cohen 2001; Lock 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2002) (see Chap. 4). The speculative disease crisis (PERV) further supports the intervention within non-human life and creation of new markets. As we humans and other species become more entangled in a political economy marked by discourses of emergence and emergency, how will this alter our relationships with non-human animals? Within the optics of contemporary security, circulation and diversity are the keys to resilience and adaptation. Resilience is increasingly the name of the game for

6 Conclusion 

213

contemporary human species, and beyond (Evans and Reid 2014)—in adaptation to climate, emerging disease, and other emergencies. Will non-humans continue to be called upon to provide the resource for such speculative improvisation, for “posthumanist proliferation: constant intervention and adjustment” (Ahuja 2016), and the capital it generates? Donna Haraway (2016) calls for alternative future invocations: “speculative fabulations”, countering these hopeful, anthropocentric, and heroic stories of scientific innovation with stories more attentive to our non-human partners, and the ongoing trouble of living together well. In addition, we need to continue to critically evaluate the discourses of emergency which stimulate the development contemporary biocapital and animal capital. Yet sovereignty, too, is never far from the scene, as binaries are frequently mobilised or reinscribed even as boundaries are crossed. Foucault’s work reveals that contagion can be understood quite differently according to specific rationalities of power, and accordingly we need to continue to examine both sovereignty and security as they mutate and recombine in new forms, constructing new species of contagion.

Notes 1. XenoLungs is targeted to provide for people with pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, and other lung diseases. Currently, due to the “scarcity” of donated organs, many people are excluded from the lung transplant list because of a likelihood of transplant failure. 2. http://nzeno.nz/. 3. https://patents.google.com/patent/AU2006234774B2/en.

References Ahuja, Neel. 2016. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Duke University Press. Boneva, Roumiana S., Thomas M.  Folks, and Louisa E.  Chapman. 2001. Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 14 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1128/CMR.14.1.1-­14.2001.

214 

R. Carr

Cohen, Lawrence. 2001. The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition. Body & Society 7: 20. Collignon, Peter, and Laura Purdy. 2001. Xenografts: Are the Risks so Great That We Should Not Proceed? Microbes and Infection 3 (4): 341–348. https:// doi.org/10.1016/S1286-­4579(01)01388-­0. Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. University of Washington Press. Denner, Joachim. 2008. Recombinant Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses (PERV-A/C): A New Risk for Xenotransplantation? Archives of Virology 153 (8): 1421–1426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00705-­008-­0141-­7. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. 2014. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. 1st ed. Cambridge: Polity. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Franklin, Sarah. 2006. The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (7–8): 167–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632 76406069230. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Harvard University Press. Lock, Margaret M. 2002. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. University of California Press. Łopata, Krzysztof, Emilia Wojdas, Roman Nowak, Paweł Łopata, and Urszula Mazurek. 2018. Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus (PERV)—Molecular Structure and Replication Strategy in the Context of Retroviral Infection Risk of Human Cells. Frontiers in Microbiology 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fmicb.2018.00730. Martin, U., V. Kiessig, J.H. Blusch, A. Haverich, K. von der Helm, T. Herden, and G. Steinhoff. 1998. Expression of Pig Endogenous Retrovirus by Primary Porcine Endothelial Cells and Infection of Human Cells. Lancet (London, England) 352 (9129): 692–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(98) 07144-­X. Mikkelsen, J.G., and F.S.  Pedersen. 2000. Genetic Reassortment and Patch Repair by Recombination in Retroviruses. Journal of Biomedical Science 7 (2): 77–99.

6 Conclusion 

215

Negroni, M., and H.  Buc. 2001. Mechanisms of Retroviral Recombination. Annual Review of Genetics 35: 275–302. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev. genet.35.102401.090551. Onions, D., D.K.C.  Cooper, T.J.L.  Alexander, C.  Brown, E.  Claassen, J.E.  Foweraker, D.L.  Harris, et  al. 2000. An Approach to the Control of Disease Transmission in Pig-to-Human Xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation 7 (2): 143–155. https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1399-­3089. 2000.00047.x. Patience, Clive, Yasuhiro Takeuchi, and Robin A.  Weiss. 1997. Infection of Human Cells by an Endogenous Retrovirus of Pigs. Nature Medicine 3 (3): 282–286. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0397-­282. Rothblatt, Martine. 2012. Borders Are Not Always Boundaries: Are Genetically Engineered XenoLungs from Pigs Feasible before the End of This Decade? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 156 (4): 379–387. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs. SAIS Review 22 (1): 61–80. https://doi. org/10.1353/sais.2002.0022. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. University of Minnesota Press. Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Tönjes, Ralf R., and Marcus Niebert. 2003. Relative Age of Proviral Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus Sequences in Sus Scrofa Based on the Molecular Clock Hypothesis. Journal of Virology 77 (22): 12363–12368. https://doi. org/10.1128/JVI.77.22.12363-­12368.2003. Wilson, Carolyn A., Susan Wong, Jacqueline Muller, Cynthia E.  Davidson, Timothy M. Rose, and Parris Burd. 1998. Type C Retrovirus Released from Porcine Primary Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells Infects Human Cells. Journal of Virology 72 (4): 3082–3087. Yue, Yanan, Xu Weihong, Yinan Kan, Hong-Ye Zhao, Yixuan Zhou, Xiaobin Song, Wu Jiajia, et  al. 2021. Extensive Germline Genome Engineering in Pigs. Nature Biomedical Engineering 5 (2): 134–143. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41551-­020-­00613-­9.

Index

A

Adaptation, 126 Animal capitalism, 146, 210 Anthropocentric framework, 98 Asian immigrants, 185 Auckland Island, 39, 54, 55 Auckland Island pigs, 54, 208 Australia, 161, 181 B

Baby Fae, 11 Biocapital, 18, 143, 211 Bioethical discourses, 22 Bioethics, 80, 90 Biopolitical apparatus, 104 Biopolitics, 132 Bodies as ecological, 169 Body politic(s), 163, 164, 166, 168, 179

Boundaries, 13, 166 Boundary-making, 15 C

Catastrophe, 139 Chimeric immune system, 8 Chronotopes, 49 Church, George M., 142 Cleanliness, 40, 56 Cloned, 141 Cloning, 211 Complex adaptive systems, 135 Complex systems, 136 Conservation, 48 Constitutive other, 14 Contagion, 53, 57, 134, 209 Containment, 211 Cooper, Melinda, 16, 135, 137, 139 Crisis, 137

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Carr, Species of Contagion, Health, Technology and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8289-6

217

218 Index

CRISPR, 140, 141 Cross-species, 18 Cross-species exchanges, 10 D

“Destination branding,” 43 Deterritorialising, 138 Diaries of Despair, 79 Diseases, 51 Douglas, Mary, 13 E

Ecological bodies, 126 Ecological body politics, 170 Ecologies, 169 Economy, 45, 47 EGenesis, 140, 142, 209 Embodiment, 99 Emergence, 128, 169 Emergent, 136 Emerging infectious disease, 124, 127, 135 Encapsulation, 5 Environment, 127 Episodic memory, 95–96 Esposito, Roberto, 102, 104 Evolve, 128 Existential risk, 125 F

Feminist, 135 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 117 Foot and mouth, 63 Foucault, Michel, 121, 132–134, 139 Franklin, Sarah, 63

G

Genetically engineer, 142 Genetic engineered, 144 Genetic engineering, 141 Geo-body, 181, 184 Germ, 186 Germ-free animals, 59 Germ-free organisms, 58 Germ theory, 166, 184 Global market, 63 Goodall, Jane, 85 Governmentality, 15 Great Ape Project, 82, 86 Great apes, 89 Guidelines, 119, 120 H

Hands, 98 HIV/AIDS, 12, 123, 179 Human/animal binary, 14 100% Pure, 45, 46, 49, 56 100% Pure NZ, 42 Hybridity, 9, 18 Hygiene, 167 I

Imagination, 143 Immigration Restriction Act, 182 Immune system, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 131, 180 Immunological chimerism, 5 Immunological self, 2, 5 Immunological system, 8 Immunology, 2 Immunosuppressant drugs, 11 Immunosuppressant(s), 130 Immunosuppression, 4

 Index 

Imperial expansion, 167 Indigenous Australians, 185 Industry, 64 Insular model, 188 Intelligent, 92 Invasive possums, 50 Isolation, 48, 56, 59, 211 K

Kennedy report, 91, 101

219

National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), 159, 160, 171, 172 Nation branding, 44–46 Nationhood, 21 Nature, 42, 48, 208 Nature/culture, 49 Nature/culture binary, 56 New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), 63 Non-human primates, 85, 101 Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 83 Nuffield report, 100

L

Language, 92–93 Leprosarium, 186 Liberal approach, 121 Liberal bioethics, 100 Living Cell Technologies (LCT), 40, 54, 208 Lord of the Rings, 43

O

Old-World Monkeys, 87 One Health, 138 Organismic body politics, 168, 180 Organ “scarcity,” 17, 144 Origin story, 62

M

P

Martin, Emily, 167 Masculine, 168 Metaphor, 164 Metaphors of the body, 164 Microbial transformation, 131 Mirror test, 93 Mixing vessels, 130 Moratorium, 13, 159, 160, 166, 187, 188

Performatively, 97 Personhood, 90, 97, 102 Persons, 88, 89 Pig personhood, 100 Pigs, 53, 92, 96, 98 Pollution, 13, 15 Porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs), 40, 51, 59, 117, 120, 175, 206 Precautionary approach, 180, 190 Precautionary perspective, 178 Pre-emptive strategies, 139 Prelapsarian purity, 49 Preparedness, 174

N

Nation, 181 National “imaginaries,” 20

220 Index

Primatology, 85 Promissory, 144, 171 Purification, 21, 66 Purity, 4, 41, 42, 44, 47 Q

Quarantine, 60, 161, 182–184, 186 R

Racial politics, 189 Racialised immigration, 183 Racialised quarantine line, 183 Rajan, Sunder, 18 Rare Breeds Conservation Society, 54 Reassortment, 129 Recombination, 207 Regulation, 82 Regulatory mechanisms, 18 Reservoirs, 125 Retrovirus(es), 40, 179, 206 Rights, 86 Risk, 174

Self-awareness, 94 Sentience, 99 Settlement, 50 Settler, 50 Sharp, Lesley A, 80 Shildrick, Margrit, 52 Signing apes, 89 Singer, Peter, 84, 87–89, 91, 103 Smell, 99 Sovereign power, 52 Sovereignty, 13, 103, 176, 190 Species barriers, 126 Species boundaries, 52 “Specific pathogen free” (SPF), 58 Speculation, 174 Speculative, 136, 143, 175, 211 Suffering, 83, 102, 103 T

Territory, 64, 167 Theory of mind, 94 Tolerance, 6, 7 Trans-biology, 17

S

U

Sailors, 53 Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Xenotransplantation (SACX), 120 Security, 16, 19, 136, 170 Security apparatuses, 134 Security mechanisms, 15, 132 Security, Territory, Population, 121, 132 Self, 8 Self-adjust, 15 Self and other, 4, 8

Uncertainty, 137 United Therapeutics, 208 US Public Health Services (PHS), 119 Utilitarian, 90, 101, 102, 212 Utilitarian calculus, 22 Utilitarianism, 88 V

Value, 46 Variolisation, 134

 Index 

Venture funding, 18 Viruses, 127 W

Waldby, Catherine, 164 White Australia, 189 WHO’s Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network (GOARN), 138

X

Xenotransplantation government regulation, 12 Xenotransplantation Working Party (XWP), 170, 172–175, 188 Xenozoonosis/xenosis, 3, 40, 52, 123, 124, 128, 176, 179, 190

221