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Zusatztext "Morgan has done a masterful and truly respectful job discerning what it is that embryos might tell us about the shifting organization and logic of collective life." Informationen zum Autor Lynn M. Morgan is Mary E. Woolley Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College and is coeditor (with Meredith W. Michaels) of Fetal Subjects! Feminist Positions. Klappentext "Fascinating! Icons of Life is an account of how we have come to know ourselves as ourselves, both a compelling human origin story and an engaging tale of intellectual curiosity, biological specimens, reproductive politics, and science. Morgan draws skillfully on her ethnographic toolkit to reveal the social context of embryology alongside the cultural and scientific work of crafting objective 'facts of life' from unremarkable flesh."—Monica J. Casper, author of The Making of the Unborn Patient "How do scientists convert people into things? Lynn Morgan's book takes the reader on a wonderfully eerie tour through the cultural history of a macabre science, that of collecting human embryos. Not only is it an immensely valuable contribution to the anthropology of science, but it represents at the same time an extended hand across the field of anthropology, where the remains of human beings are still commonly passed around tables of undergraduate students—inviting us to reconsider the nature of our own scientific specimens."—Jonathan Marks, author of Why I Am Not A Scientist Zusammenfassung Tells the story of an early 20th-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect embryos for scientific study. This work explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's career. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of Illustrations Preface 1 . A Skeleton in the Closet and Fetuses in the Basement 2 . Embryo Visions 3 . Building a Collection 4 . Inside the Embryo Production Factory 5 . Traffic in "Embryo Babies" 6 . Embryo Tales 7 . From Dead Embryos to Icons of Life 8 . The Demise of the Mount Holyoke Collection Notes References Index ...
