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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'.

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Updated 1st August 2003


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