I cyborg...Kevin Warwick and Stelarc

Last year I read I, cyborg by Kevin Warwick, published by the University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago in 2002. I was interested in whether there were affinities between Warwick's project and some of Stelarc's. I am aware that there is much research to do here, but offer the following as some preliminary ideas.

In 1998 Professor Kevin Warwick, British scientist and Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, underwent an operation to have a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted into his forearm. This experiment allowed a computer to monitor Warwick as he moved through halls and offices of the Department of Cybernetics at the University, using a unique identifying signal emitted by the implanted chip. He could operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.

Warwick explains:

In Spring 1998, the building was being wired up so that at different points the central computer could detect the presence, at a certain time, or devices such as the radio-frequency identification device (RFID)...at the Cybernetics lab at Reading we had in our possession a relatively small radio-frequency identification device (RFID) in a small glass capsule, which, under certain circumstances, might be used as an implant. (63)

Strangely enough the program they intended to use was supposed to  'emit the code 666, which…is the mark of the beast from the 'Book of Revelation' in the Bible. For some reason, though, when 666 was tried nothing worked. The code for the implant was therefore changed to 161. (78)

After a local anaesthetic, the surgeon, George Boulos ‘...burrowed a hole...through the fascia, the outer layer of the skin, down to the muscle’ (80). The implant was pushed into then stitched into place, so that it wouldn’t migrate to another part of Warwick’s body. It enabled Warwick to open doors and switch on and off lights in the laboratory. After this experiment he decided to become more cybernetic by having his nervous system connected to a computer via electrodes implanted into the median nerve in his arm.

According to Warwick the only thing that had been done that was remotely similar to what they were doing was the work of the artist Eduardo Kac who  'barcoded his ankle and read himself into the Internet to symbolize the human race being captive to technology’ (76). He maintained

Stelarc uses a technique called functional electrical simulation (FES) by means of surface electrodes. The same method is used to improve the quality of life of spinal-cord injured subjects, so that they can live a more independent, everyday life. (107)

Indeed,

It was found that the external stimulation method using electrodes on the skin surface, as in Stelarc’s case, didn’t provide the necessary precision for stimulating the individual muscles to grip and hold objects. Implants are therefore required for the accuracy necessary to achieve the coordinated movements for grasp and lift (117).

He was of course referring to some of Stelarc's earlier work with his Third Hand and muscle stimulation performances.  Warwick concluded, in terms of his own project that ‘An FES system, externally connected, such as that used by Stelarc would not get us very far as it would only allow for muscle stimulation’ (122). He said the main difference between the 1998 implant and the new experiment,

...was the connection that would be made with the nervous system, most likely using the Utah array. The main body of the implant would be a radio transmitter/receiver to send the signals from my nervous system by radio to the computer and to receive signals sent, again by radio, from the computer and play them on to my nervous system via my arm. (131)

A micro electrode array consisting of 100 individual electrodes was implanted into his median nerve.This technique would provide highly selective recording and stimulation of sensory and/or motor neurons with the nerve fascicles. (183)

Peter Teddy, the neurosurgeon who undertook Warwick’s second implant made an incision approximately two inches long below Warwick’s wrist. He inserted a bodger which tunneled up Warwick’s inner arm through the incision. This enabled the micro electrode array, with attached wires to be inserted. This implant enabled Warwick to change the colors on a computer monitor by moving his fingers. By flexing and closing his hand, he was able to directly affect the movements of Peter Kyberd’s articulated, metallic hand, which they had also connected to the computer. Warwick said that they had witnessed the first experiment to prove that the array in his median nerve was capable of transferring the signals from his brain to a computer and then on to a robot. He also managed to move a Lego robot with signals converted from his median nerve into infra-red signals into the computer, control the movements of a wheelchair and achieve a ’…direct electronic connection between his ’nervous system in New York and the Madlab in Reading’, via the Kyberd hand. (257) He explains:

As I closed my hand, we could see the hand in Reading follow my own movements exactly, with a slight time delay due to the distance involved; when I opened my hand, the articulated hand followed suit…We had shown how signals from my brain could be transmitted around the world, via the Internet, to operate a piece of technology...with the visual feedback received, I could control the technology as desired.(258)

Other experiments included changing the colors on a necklace devised by his wife Irena. Eventually Irena and Kevin decided that they would like their nervous systems to be connected to one another via electrodes and a computer. Needles half a millimeter in diameter and just over three centimeters in length, made of a composite of platinum and iridium, were inserted into Irena’s median nerve. They achieved the first direct nervous system to nervous system communication in June 2002. Warwick describes the event in this way:

After a period where Iain adjusted the tolerances that were being measured by the computer, we reached the stage where, when Irena closed her hand, a green light flashed on to the screen, and when her hand was open, the light changed to red. So we now had signals traveling from Irena’s brain, via her nervous system and the electrode, to the PC, which changed the light when she moved her hand. At another bench in the lab we were able to send a signal from a different PC through the stimulator unit, via the interface card on the gauntlet, down to the array, on to my nervous system and up to my brain. (281)

The differences between Warwick’s project and Stelarc’s various project are manifold. Whereas Stelarc uses current developments in technology to modify the human body in an aesthetic way, Warwick is interested in how technology will upgrade the human. Influenced by Hans Moravic’s ideas about uploading the human brain into silicon, expressed in his book Mind Children (1988) Warwick said:

As a result of the experiments carried out I have no doubts in my own mind that, by direct brain implants, it will be possible to upgrade the intellectual capabilities of humans, by turning them into cyborgs. Extra memory, clip-on maths abilities and multi-dimensional processing would all appear to be there for the taking, as indeed are numerous extra-sensory powers...When linked to the network, a cyborg has the potential for an intelligence way beyond that of a stand-alone human. (295)

Stelarc’s Ear on Arm may be compared to Warwick’s Cyborg 2.0 project because both are concerned with technological augmentation of the human body in order to expand human communication. However the primary difference is that Stelarc's extra ear, a construct that was implanted under the skin is mostly human, cells and skin, whereas Warwick's implant was solely technological.  Although Stelarc intended the Ear on Arm to be capable of being connected to blue tooth, wireless technology, it remains an incomplete shell awaiting some form of electronic connection. Warwick and Stelarc are similar in their philosophy, since both believe that humanity needs to incorporate technology into the body in order to enhance its capabilities, or if not that, then so that technology won't surpass the human. 'There is no way I want to stay a mere human' says Warwick. Both may be considered transhumanist, since transhumanism proposes the idea of an augmented, enhanced human enacting a kind of Nietzschean prophecy of the superman, a human that not only embraces but encourages technological development to enable greater human capabilities and possibilities for permanent physical and mental enhancement. Founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in 1998, the manifesto of transhumanism advocates:

The moral right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. We seek personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.

On the World Transhumanists’ website, under the banner of The Better Humans Newsletter, an article declares that James Watson, the person who along with Francis Crick discovered the shape of DNA in 1953, said, ‘Going for perfection was something I always thought you should do’ (Better humans Staff, 2002).  More recently the notion that technology could be used to create a more perfect, superior human being is echoed in Krishna R. Dronamraju’s statement:

Instead of merely developing technologies to correct or prevent genetic defects in human populations, one can go beyond such methods to higher goals of improving existing qualities such as intelligence, musical abilities and physical strength, etc. Furthermore, it may even be possible by applying redemptive technology to create whole new beings of ‘superior’ quality or add on new organs with multiple functions  (1998. Biological and Social Issues in Biotechnology Sharing, Aldershot, Brookfield, USA, England, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate Publishers, p.153).

We might ask: Who would decide which human beings would be chosen to be more intelligent and physically stronger and why are these characteristics are so important as opposed to others such as the ability to be empathetic or kind, and to whom do we owe this philosophical legacy?

Human?

Spent two hours yesterday afternoon assisting my student with her Anthropology essay on Cannibalism. It was fortuitous that Shannon Bell had mentioned in her book Fast Feminism that the Aghori tribe (Hindu sect) "...embrace pollution...live in cremation grounds, purify their body with ashes of corpses, ritually consume raw corpse flesh and drink excessive amounts of alcohol...they believe that the distinction between purity and impurity is deceptive" (Bell, 2010:155), so, I was able to pass on this information and also discuss how the word cannibalism, which means 'savage' also conflagrates the idea of the primitive and by association, the inhuman or non-human. In fact, cannibalism functions as an othering device. And, speaking about what is considered human or not, I was watching 'Great Ormond Street' on ABC2 last night, which documented premature babies in the intensive care unit of this major UK hospital. I found it rather disturbing that these tiny babies are subjected to multiple operations and intensive technological intervention just to keep them alive, even though by all accounts they are not expected to survive. Indeed, one of the surgeons raised the whole issue of what is human when he said that he believed that being human was about person-hood and quality of life, not just about being alive, or being kept alive. If someone is so brain damaged that they cannot hear, speak, feed themselves, walk and participate in our society should they be considered not human? This is a difficult one, because if it is your baby and you want it to survive then you would desire that the medical fraternity do all it can. But really, and this was raised in the documentary, how much of scarce medical resources should be spent on people who really can't be helped? What quality of life do these people have and do we have the right to determine whether they are happy or not in their limited experience? Perhaps the issue at state has less to do with how we define a person and more to do with us as people. Whether we can embrace and bring people into the fold? I, like others, continually struggle with the ethical issues that surround medical intervention and pervasive technology. For some reason here, I am drawn back to an image of a member of the Aghori sect, who, after burning a corpse, covered his rather dark-skinned body with the white/grey ashes of it, thus incorporating that person's body into his very being and transforming himself into something quite other.

FAST FEMINISM ~ Book review by Julie Clarke

FF is a post-gender provocateur, not so much a gender terrorist as a gender risk-taker going the distance with her body. FF's philosophy is lived. Actions count. One resists with one's body. (p.11)
Autonomedia, New York, has just published Fast Feminism the latest book by the performance philosopher and associate professor in Political Science at York University, Shannon Bell. The book contains 198 pages including thirty-one plates - six of which are close-up color photographs of Bell’s genitalia with or without strap-on dildo and harness or Magic Wand vibrator, taken during her masturbation/ejaculation performances. It may appear unusual that an academic is involved in public displays with highly charged, erotic content, however; Bell has been conducting workshops on the female phallus and instructing women on the art of female ejaculation for the past two decades.

Bell’s oeuvre follows a long tradition in performance art that includes: Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1971) in which he masturbated underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York as people walked by above him, Valie Export's film Mann & Frau & Animal (1973) that shows her pleasuring herself in a bathtub, Annie Sprinkles' ritual magic masturbation performances, Elke Krystufek's 1994 masturbation performance at Vienna Kunsthalle and a public performance in the mid nineties by the transgendered academic and performance artist, Allucquere Rosanne Stone who stimulated the palm of her hand to produce an organism. Moreover, Bell’s performance is '…embedded in praxis’, and, indeed, like Stelarc 'The "I" of the text is a post-identity recognized by gait, movement and speed' (p.14).

FF is a confessional and articulate text that straddles academic writing and colloquial language; it draws heavily on sexual expletives to stress the sub-cultural activity in which her performance praxis operates ~

When she wants, she has the phallus ~ a hard prosthetic cyborg cock. She is part woman, part silicone, part rubber. She straps on the phallus to jack in to fucking: up your ass, in your mouth, in your cunt. (p.34).
Initially the reader is aware that Shannon Bell is the fast feminist for there is a photo of her on page six with the letters FF branded on her forearm; however as we make our way through the text the multiple characters mapped onto her academic persona take over and appear as fictional fantasy avatars—cyborg, phallic mother, Sadean woman, little girl, female Don Juan (p.23). It is in this way that she not only engages with the genre of erotic literature and French philosophical theory, but also with current discourse that surrounds the digital matrix and avenues for constructing alternate personae which erode gender binaries. Move over Second Life with your virtual characters and fantastic scenarios Bell is doing it in real life!

Bell states that 'Fast Feminism is a work of speed philosophy, pornography and politics…which applies seven tendencies of Paul Virilio's work' (p.12), however she also '…implements Deleuze’s imperative of buggering…Virilio's work' (p.13) to produce a new offspring. She does this by deploying '…the female phallus, performative action and perverse aesthetics', rather than military history, architecture and aesthetics – Virilio's critical domain. As a performance artist she is extremely influenced by Stelarc 'who premises his theoretical claims and philosophical pronouncements on his practice'. Bell explains:

Fast feminism is a contribution of FF’s body to philosophy. It is a pragmatic gesture in which "the idea is always in the act" of owning the female phallus, female ejaculation, redoing Sharpe’s Boyabuse narratives on two adult bodies, doing and writing female Bataillean sex fables, making post-porn images and contemporizing Shiva (p.173)
FF’s text is definitely Deleuzian. One idea begins and is shattered, only to be taken up in the next already somewhere else, free-floating and circulating. However, rather than 'buggering' the texts and producing a bastard offspring ~ an activity that Bell states as her intention throughout the book, Fast Feminism appears at least on the surface as homage to masculine writers. Texts by George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade collide and intersect with Emmanuel Levinas ethics of the other; the latter used in her chapter on the perverse aesthetics of the homosexual, pedophile, child pornographer and writer, John Robin Sharpe. I must say that although I accept Sharpe's erotic writings are situated within an established and honored literary genre I was uncomfortable with this section because I have raised a child and believe that children should be protected from those who may hurt or abuse them, which is not to say that I believe that everyone who writes about a particular subject intends to act upon their fantasies and desires. However, we are constantly reminded of the extent to which children are abused not only in our own culture but in places like South Africa, where child rape is increasing at a shocking rate and those affected are treated like outcasts. I was not surprised, given the politics, style and content of Bell’s book that FF might argue '…the possibility of ethical and cultural acceptability for written and visual representations of sexualized youth' (p.87) since her oeuvre promotes sexual self-expression.

I was less interested in the practice of female ejaculation and Bell’s manual of how to achieve it (which forms much of the basis of chapter two), than the writing itself and the various references to philosophical theory, performance art and politics of the body ~ '...she was doing femme and the only position for a femme is to be 'invaded, penetrated, split, occupied…' (p.138). When FF is meditating at a wake for Horsey—a dog that died because he could not digest a bone, she asked one of the participants at the wake to reach inside her vagina and remove the package of money she'd placed there as a donation. This action evoked Carolee Schneemann's 1975 performance Interior Scroll in which she slowly extracted rolled up paper from inside her vagina, whilst reading from a text that reflected the subject positions of both genders. Moreover, FF draws attention to the relationship between currency, the female body and the way is has been abused by others throughout human history. By branding her body Bell has created a living, breathing commodity. Likewise, the tattoo clearly visible on FF’s mons venus and the Star of David she has tattooed on her upper body becomes more potent if we consider Marina Abramovic's 1975 Lips of Thomas performance in which she used a razor blade to cut into a star shape already traced on her stomach ~ an evocation of female victims in Nazi concentration camps who were stripped naked, humiliated, raped, tortured, prostituted and exposed to medical experimentation, including forced sterilization techniques.

Throughout the text, FF’s technologically augmented body - strident and showy with her strap-on dildo and high speed vibrator initially appears in antithesis to the other, quiet, spiritual body image that she projects when she embraced the mythical Hindu god Shiva, the cannibalistic Aghori sect of India and Gunter von Hagen’s lined, wrinkled and plastinated Skin Man. However strange these apparently discrete but complementary images of the human/not-human, dead/undead, animate/inanimate appear, they do reveal the range of her adopted persona's and her engagement with what may be perceived as hot and cold aesthetics. She gives more than a nod to Stelarc's work with prosthetics and robotics. In fact, cold, hard surfaces, decay, deterioration and death are the nodes that connect the blackened, charred remains of a human corpse that Bell encountered in Varanasi, the black 551 tattoo that Bell inscribed on her mons venus in respect for the cadaver whose uro-genital region she dissected, the multi-limbed statues of Shiva as well as Stelarc's not-human, six-legged, walking robot Exoskeleton that Bell pleasured herself upon:

FF’s fetish was steel. She slid under Stelarc’s 600-kilogram robot to check out its sex organ. Her phallus contracted and kept contracting; she came. (p.175)
I applaud Bell’s exhibitionism and loss of control against the sleek body of a machine usually associated with masculinity and control, but with all the emphasis on sex and death her text also references the several, rather than the one, '…multiple, complex and contradictory subjectivity's are acknowledged…' (p.16). Better to run with the pack, which is dispersed and deterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) than to remain the lone wolf. Take care of your self, but participate in the pack. Strangely enough, the machines that Bell fucks with can be dismantled and reassembled ~ they will not age, they will continue functioning; whereas, throughout the text she exposes and confronts the fragility of her own ageing flesh whilst entering ‘death time’ with her dying mother as well as in her latest performances in which the audience is confronted with Bell's 'old rag and ruin' (Bataille: Madame Edwarda, p.150):

When I do ejaculation demonstrations and nude public performances what meets the viewer’s eye is…an older, small, muscular femme body – a body that’s not supposed to be seen, nor up to until now to be sexual and sexualized. The obscenity is in the showing, the obscene seduction is in presenting a hypersexual older powerhouse femmly (female equivalent of a manly) body. Of course, one of my political commitments…is to queer the old female body, to fuck with the signs of aging while presenting them. Gesture, movement, style and body composition meet and meld with age spots, knee wrinkles, and sagging upper arm undercarriage. (p.21)
It is clear from this statement and from her photographs that FF is not an everyday example of an aging female body. Having never borne a child she does not posses drooping breasts, excess fat deposits, stretch marks, scars, sagging stomach muscles or the like. But she does underscore the fact that in our youth obsessed society, bodies that are old, diseased or less than perfect are generally encouraged to remain hidden from public view.

Indeed, a strategy against the aging body and diseased organs is the development within biomedicine of tissue engineered replacement body parts. Riding on the intrigue and possibility for experimentation as well as the resulting rarefied aesthetic that tissue-engineering offer, a number of artists have been motivated to move into the realm of creating bio-artificial artifacts. One example is Stelarc’s tissue-engineered quarter scale ear. Bell’s own foray into the laboratory also resulted in the construction and replication of particular body parts. Her tissue-engineered Two Phalluses and a Big Toe calls to mind Bataille’s text 'The Big Toe' in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. According to Bataille 'the big toe is the most human part of the human body' (20:1985) the big toe differentiates us from apes, since it enabled the human to walk upright or be erect. Bell’s tissue-engineered phallus invites us to think about human evolution in relation to the construction of sexuality and the immense impact that various technologies do and will have on the way we perceive ourselves and others in real and imaginary domains.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Fast Feminism and would recommend it to anyone interested in performance art, philosophy and sexuality. For more information about Shannon Bell and her book see:http://www.fastfeminism.net/

Finished reading Fast Feminism

Finished reading FF about an hour ago, but only because I've been at home most of the day struggling with the symptoms of a vestibular migraine; most likely brought on by coffee withdrawal. I ran out last night and didn't get my first caffeine hit until 11.30 am. By then I was already in the throws of nausea and slight vertigo. Of course, the symptoms might have been brought on by low barometric pressure. Fast Feminism was a fast read, beautifully articulate and at times extremely poetic. In Bell's words Fast feminism is a feminism of affect ~ of intensity and movement (p.174) and I appreciated this, but was grateful (in my migraine state) that the book took a spiritual turn.

FAST FEMINISM + For Shannon Bell

Julie Clarke ~ Hawthorn. Photo: David John Powell

This is for Shannon. I thought you might enjoy seeing the only photograph I have of me playing with androgyny. I'm wearing a pin-stripe man's suit-coat and my extremely long hair is pinned up inside my husband's Stetson. The photo was taken in the mid nineteen-eighties. I don't know that I could have been a Drag King ~ I was probably not Butch enough, but, I was certainly feminist! Like you say in your book, I have never been concerned ...with fighting men, but rather with fighting injustices (p.17).

I really enjoyed that very short section~pages 150-152 in your book in which you describe your spiritual experience of being at one with Horsey, a dog who had died after eating a bone that he could not digest. The photograph of you, naked and meditating in the garden (taken by Ionat Zurr) reveals a different side of you. You look older, less glamorous, calmer than you do in the highly charged performance photos. The old rag and ruin, which stares at us in some of the other photos is displaced here in the the raw, black-ink 551 tattoo clearly visible on your shaved mons venus ~ it is that which gapes and draws us into Bataille's Madam Edwarda ~ who, for all purposes ...is God (p.152), for it is here that you enter into that sacred space, a dark and silent abyss in which we can no longer say 'I'.

I have two chapters to read before I get to the postscript about the death of your mother, which I have already read (some 'othering' occured for me here, since I was absent when my own mother died). I am reminded of Bataille's words: And since, in death, being is taken away from us at the same time it is given us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us during these interludes, exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide. (Bataille, 1989, p.141)

FAST FEMINISM + today's thoughts...

There's a cinematic term ~ 'sutured into the text', which basically means that the film-maker uses a number of devices to draw the viewer into the narrative. Indeed, we become sutured ~ sewn into the text by identifying with different subject positions. Sometimes there is a delay on the part of the spectator and this may cause anxiety. Over the past few days I've been reading Shannon Bell's Fast Feminism and I must admit I felt like I was reading it from the outside, from the position of the 'other'; for unlike FF I could boast no obvious risk taking, drag-kinging, no swiftness of sexuality, amazing body contortions or bodily public displays. However, something strange occurred after reading page 133, the beginning of the fourth chapter: The Will to Laughter ~ A Fast-Feminist Bataillean Narration; I became totally sutured into the text. Was it because I was more familiar with George Bataille's writings than with the thoughts of John Robin Sharpe? Did I resist reading about a paedophile activist or the justifications that Bell and other's provided about Sharpe's transgressional texts or was it that I just couldn't identify with FF ~ this small, incredibly fit looking academic who goes to great lengths to describe female ejaculation. I must have needed some light relief and laughed out loud when I read her ironic remarks whilst visiting the Pussy Palace: ...she was doing femme and the only position for a femme is to be 'invaded, penetrated, split, occupied'. FF had read her MacKinnon and Dworkin (p.138). As Nietzsche said: Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun...! (Zarathustra). So far Bell's book is, like Nietzsche's quote, life affirming, energetic, it pulls no punches. I continue to read with the hope that I remain woven into the text.

FAST FEMINISM + some thoughts

Shannon Bell ~ performance philosopher and associate professor in Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada sent me her latest book ~ Fast Feminism (just released from Autonomedia, New York in June this year) to read and review.

Last night I read to page 47 and I'm already hearing names that have informed much of my own reading over the past few decades ~ Paul Virilio, Stelarc, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Sigmund Freud, Judith/Jack Halberstam. The post-porn graphic photos at the back of the book of Shannon's masturbation/female ejaculation/fast feminist/phallus performances were taken by Ionat Zurr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Annie Sprinkle, Monica Frommet, Shawn Bailey, Carolyn Lee Kane ~ artists who work substantially with the body.

Shannon Bell describes the fast feminist:

When she wants, she has the phallus ~ a hard prosthetic cyborg cock. She is part woman, part silicone, part rubber. She straps on the phallus to jack in to fucking: up your ass, in your mouth, in your cunt. (p.34).

This is the language she uses; it's not academic writing, but it's informed by academic theory. As she says, the fast feminist (FF):

is a post-gender provocateur, not so much a gender terrorist as a gender risk-taker going the distance with her body. FF's philosophy is lived. Actions count. One resists with one's body. (p.11)

I just know that I'm going to enjoy this ~ you've just got to love a book that was commissioned by a feminist press and then rejected ~ accepted by a university press and rejected, blocked by a Queer Studies series because they were too conservative and also by a Dutch publisher who was too traditional. It took a radical press to get it into print.

This post links with one I made on May 17, entitled Chic's with Dicks, or, Hypermasculinity: Shannon Bell. You may find the links on that post informative.

Donna Haraway + Modest_Witness@Second....

Short review of Rebecca Skloot's book 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'

There’s a short paragraph about three-quarter way through Rebecca Skloot’s book ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’, Crown Publishers, New York, 2009 that describes the autopsy carried out on Lacks's body after she died of cervical cancer in 1951. The description exemplifies the division between black and white within the Lacks family (there was a line of African American Lacks and Caucasian Lacks) and the segregation that occurred between the ‘white patients’ and the ‘colored ward’ at the John Hopkins Medical Centre where Lacks was treated for her disease.

The dead woman’s arms had been pulled up and back so that the pathologist could get at her chest…the body had been split down the middle and opened wide…grayish white tumor globules…filled the corpse. It looked as if the inside of the body was studded with pearls. Strings of them ran over the surfaces of the liver, diaphragm, intestine, appendix, rectum, and heart (p.212)
The writer of this autopsy report made it more poetic than scientific and appears to appreciate the preciousness of the immortal cancer cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks and utilized in many experiments over the past five decades or so to develop polio vaccine, and are continually used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping and other scientific research. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

HeLa are immortal cancer cells in that they will continue to live indefinitely if correctly nurtured. However, because they proliferate quickly in tissue culture they often contaminate other cell cultures. Indeed, ‘due to their ability to replicate indefinitely and their non-human number of chromosomes (HeLa have 84 rather than 46 chromosome)’the evolutionary biologist, Leigh M. Van Valen argued in 1991 that HeLa is the contemporary creation of a new species. I find this a little disturbing because for a long time African American’s were classified as other, sub-human or not human and his focus upon ‘contamination’ just fuels notions of the non-human infiltrating and taking over the human, almost always perceived as ‘white’.

Indeed, Skloot underscores in her book how many African Americans were used in experiments often without their consent or knowledge of the possible detrimental outcomes to their health or well-being, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment between 1932 and 1972, which recruited 339 impoverished people with syphilis, who were not treated with penicillin which could have cured their disease. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Skloot outlines the experience of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who lived in fear of being experimented upon in John Hopkins Medical Centre. Deborah’s fears grew out of urban myths associated with the medical centre as well as verifiable facts that attest to a history of medical experimentation on African Americans, inmates, women and children by various organizations, including Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners during WW2. See:

http://mrgreenbiz.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/vaccines-and-medical-experiments-on-children-minorities-woman-and-inmates-1845-2007/

Many may not be aware that many Australian children (Indigenous and non-indigenous) placed in orphanages between the years of 1945 – 1970 were used in medical experiments that involved vaccines. It was only late last year that an apology was given to what is now being called ‘The Forgotten Australians’ by the Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd and following that, an apology by Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne for the part that the University played in experiments on children, who were considered unworthy when removed from uneducated or poor parents considered by authorities as unfit.

As the Senate inquiry into the Forgotten Australians recorded in 2004, in the years after this War children were repeatedly struck down by outbreaks of polio, influenza, whooping cough and other diseases. Many died or were left disabled. In response, medical research institutions including the University of Melbourne worked urgently to develop vaccines. The report states: These vaccines needed trialing and children in orphanages were used as the ‘subjects’ for a range of speculated reasons, including that they were often the most susceptible to disease as an epidemic could sweep through an orphanage. 1
Exploitation of minority groups, the poor, the criminally insane often shows up in other ways, such as the illegal trade in human organs. In the affluent Western world we are encouraged by the rhetoric of technological humanism to believe that medicine and technology will improve our health and extend our lives. However, although medical technology enables organ transplantation there is a distinct lack of donated organs to cater for the worldwide demand. This has lead to a monetary value ascribed to, and a black-market trade in human organs (heart, kidney, liver, corneas), growing numbers of human organ brokers, and the potential for exploitation of the poor who can gain financially if they sell their bodily fluids (blood, sperm, ovum), tissue or organs. Nancy Scheper-Hughes explains:

In general, the flow of organs follows the modern routes of capital: from South to North, from Third to First World, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, and from female to male.2.
Indeed as Skloot points out the Lacks family has not benefited at all financially from the sale of Henrietta’s immortal cell line, even though they have been and are essential to a multi-billion dollar biomedical industry.

One single thing that comes through in this book (and this becomes evident in the various interviews Skloot undertook with Lacks family members) and that is, the marked contrast between the billions of dollars made by pharmaceutical and other biomedical companies through the use of HeLa and the abject poverty that the Lacks family experienced and continue to experience. Not only have they not benefited from the sale of their mother’s cancer cells, but they cannot afford health insurance or education. I personally find it abhorrent that some people have to consider selling a body part in order to survive. I am saddened by the fact that Deborah had so little in order to remember her mother– a bible, her mother’s medical record, a photo; and that Henrietta gave so much to the world. I sincerely hope that Skloot’s book will pave the way for the world not only recognizing, but applauding Henrietta Lacks’s legacy. If nothing else, Rebecca Skloot’s book will remind us that thousands of women every year die from cervical cancer and that many are alive today because of early screening and detection tests.

Rebecca assures me that she has:

…set up a Henrietta Lacks Foundation scholarship fund, which I'll help start with some of the proceeds from my book. Anyone will be able to donate to it. My hope with the scholarship fund is that it will provide money to help descendants of Henrietta Lacks.I write about the scholarship fund in the book, and there will be information on the book jacket about how to donate once it’s online. 3
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1. Glyn Davis, Vice-chancellor, The University of Melbourne 18 November 2009.
2. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. (2000) ‘The Global Traffic in Human Organs’, Current Anthropology, Volume 41, Number 2, April 2000m q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4102-0004, p.6.
3. Response to a facebook question that I asked Rebecca on Sunday, 27 December, 2009.