Technoscience and the Future of Milk: Case Studies in a Biomedical Mode of Reproduction

• In Event: 2212 - Section on Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Capitalism, Bodies and Reproduction of Difference

Abstract

This paper offers case studies in the contemporary technoscience of human milk. These examples offer new economic forms in a biomedical mode of reproduction (Thompson 2005) where human milk may be put to work in an industrial sense. I follow ethnographically the making of a human milk based fortifier (Prolacta Biosciences), the extraction of stem cells from breast milk and their banking (Bennett Research Group) and the use of human milk in the development of antibiotics (Hakansson Lab). These case studies demonstrate the co-construction of technologies/knowledges and economic forms alongside often innovative ontological/moral understandings about things (e.g., breast milk) and subjects (e.g., lactating mothers, scientists and investors). Here I offer these case studies as visions for possible futures of breast milk that require financial, technoscientific and material (i.e., breast milk) investments that may pose challenges to (or a symbiosis with) the coexisting non-profit human milk-banking model.

Author

• Krista Mary Smith Sigurdson, Stanford University