Plants, Patents and the Historian,
(Re)membering in the Age of Genetic Engineering
by Paolo Palladino
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002
250 pp., illus. b/w, paper,
ISBN: 0-8135-3238-8
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
It is not a small feat to combine critical
reflections on historiography, the history of plant genetic engineering
and medical genetic engineering in one narrative. But that is exactly
what Paolo Palladino, a senior lecturer in history at Lancaster University,
has done. The result is a complex and fascinating book that has to
be read at several equally important levels at a time.
For the reader who is mainly interested in the history of plant breeding
and genetic engineering, there is the story of the institutionalisation
of plant research in the UK. The struggle between 'applied' science
in agricultural practice and 'pure' scientific research in the laboratory
has dominated the development of genetics, finally resulting in the
privatisation of the main institute for genetic research under the
government of Margaret Thatcher. The sale of the Plant Breeding Institute
for £66 million to Unilever and the resale for the staggering amount
of £320 million to Monsanto ten years later can be understood in the
light of that struggle. Ironically, nationalisation of genetic research
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served the same
fundamental goals of control as privatisation in the late twentieth
century. This is the first thread.
An equally strange development took place in the field of cancer research,
where the search for proof for the role of genetics in familial adenomatous
polyposis, a form of cancer of the rectum and the colon, can best
be understood against the backdrop of the opposition between private
practitioners and institutional players like the National Health Service
and St Mark's Hospital. This is the second thread.
Both stories have in common that the historical agents -- the plants
and patients of the title -- appear to have all but disappeared in
the process. 'Wheat' has been transformed into "a F4 family of 20.000
plants - not one [...] homozygous." and the patient is now a case
of "FAP mutation of the APC locus on chromosome 5q21". Even the genetically
identical laboratory mice have turned into "FI". Palladino originally
set out to restore power to those agents, to give them the voice which
he thought they had the right to have, if only to be able to be heard
over the decennia. In doing so, from a social constructivist perspective,
he got entangled in the contradictions of his own position as an engineer
of historical evidence. Also, he was struck by the analogies between
the genome and the archive (meaning practically all written evidence
of historical events) as a record of past developments and consequently
by the analogy between the individual historian as an agent in the
development of historiography as a science and the plants and patients
he had been trying to restore to the scene. This is the third and
final thread.
Understandably, the book has been written from a first person perspective,
probably following "Aramis, ou l'amour du technique" (Aramis or the
love of the technical) the famous example by Bruno Latour, and the
critical, historiographical and personal levels are inextricably intertwined.
This makes it difficult to follow for the reader who is not well versed
in the controversies in the field of the history of science. On the
other hand, it allows Palladino to write history with a message for
the future or, after the dictum of Friedrich Nietszche 'history for
life'.