History Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
J Hist Biol. 2022 Mar;55(1):115-146. doi: 10.1007/s10739-022-09666-9. Epub 2022 Mar 1.
This essay argues that the racialized geopolitics of the rhesus monkey trade conditioned the trajectory of tissue culture in polio research. Rhesus monkeys from north India were important experimental organisms in the American "war against polio" between the 1930s and 1950s. During this period, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) expended considerable effort to secure the nonhuman primate for researchers' changing experimental agendas. The NFIP drew on transnational networks to export hundreds of thousands of rhesus monkeys from colonial and later postcolonial India amid the geopolitical upheavals of World War II, the 1947 Partition, and the Cold War. In this essay, I trace how NFIP officials' anxieties about the geopolitics of the monkey trade configured research imperatives in the war against polio. I show how their anxieties more specifically shaped investment in tissue culture techniques as a possible means of obviating dependence on the market in monkeys. I do so by offering a genealogy of the contingent convergence between the use of rhesus monkeys and HeLa cell cultures in the 1954 Salk vaccine trial evaluation. Through this genealogy, I emphasize the geopolitical dimensions of the search for the "right" experimental organisms, tissues, and cells for the "job" of scientific research. The technical transformation of polio research, I argue, relied on the convergence of disparate, racialized biomedical economies.
本文认为，恒河猴贸易的种族地缘政治塑造了脊髓灰质炎研究中组织培养的轨迹。来自印度北部的恒河猴在 20 世纪 30 年代至 50 年代美国的“脊髓灰质炎之战”中是重要的实验生物。在此期间，国家小儿麻痹基金会（NFIP）为研究人员不断变化的实验议程投入了大量精力，以确保非人类灵长类动物的供应。NFIP 利用跨国网络，在第二次世界大战、1947 年印巴分治和冷战期间的地缘政治动荡中，从殖民地和后来的后殖民印度出口了数十万只恒河猴。在本文中，我追溯了 NFIP 官员对猴贸易地缘政治的担忧如何影响了脊髓灰质炎之战中的研究重点。我展示了他们的担忧如何更具体地影响了对组织培养技术的投资，将其作为一种可能避免对猴子市场依赖的手段。我通过追溯恒河猴和海拉细胞培养物在 1954 年索尔克疫苗试验评估中偶然融合的历史来做到这一点。通过这一历史，我强调了为“科学研究”寻找“正确”实验生物、组织和细胞的地缘政治维度。我认为，脊髓灰质炎研究的技术转型依赖于不同的、种族化的生物医学经济的融合。
