Corps embryoïdes : biologie moléculaire et cellules vivantes

• Main Author: Noémie Merleau-Ponty
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative 2019-07-01
• Series: Ateliers d'Anthropologie
• Subjects: biology; cells; kinship; life; living; science
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/11031

The ethnography of a basic research technique in developmental biology—the production of embryoid bodies (EB)—shows how cells are the work materials for a scientific approach that is based on a molecular conception of life, and connects different species. However, these bodies, which are not embryos even if they resemble them, reflect conceptions of life that go beyond a simply molecular approach. The article shows how some biologists react with strong emotions that link the cells to a kind of autonomy. Furthermore, contextualising the fundamental research based on these interfaces with in vitro fertilisation shows how an embryo created and protected by a parental intent can change laboratories and become a mass of cells or laboratory material. The human embryo must first be inserted into a kinship—then detached from that kinship: one begins humanising it, then halts the humanising process to metamorphose it in a lineage of human embryonic stem cells. Embryoid bodies are constructed laboratory materials that are also steeped in emotions and profit margins, pasts and futures, in the recesses of which beats the organic pulse of the living.