Sociology as Technology: A Toolkit for Studying In Vitro Gametogenesis
Résumé
In vitro gametogenesis (IVG) is an in-progress laboratory technique for studying the biological development of oocytes and spermatozoa. Biologists face a number of technical challenges to building this "in vitro system," acknowledging that reproductive and regenerative biomedical applications remain "quite a long way off." In the context of the contemporary focus on "translation" in the biosciences-i.e., the expectation that basic science has impact on society through technological and biomedical innovation-various reproductive imaginaries based on IVG have emerged. This chapter, based on fieldwork and a review of scholarship on IVG and artificial gametes, asks the following question: What does the gap between laboratory research and its media representions say about developing a new biotechnology? Efforts to address this question have yielded diverse understandings of IVG, some surprising, thus offering feminist social sciences an opportunity to contribute to this unfolding technology by deploying its methodological toolkit.
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