CRYOSOCIETIES

Cryopreservation Practices: Transforming Temporal Horizons

Cryopreservation practices allow us to deep-freeze different types of organic material for potential future use, creating a liminal state between life and death. Professor Thomas Lemke and his team in the CRYOSOCIETIES project are investigating how this ‘suspended life’ is transforming temporal horizons and our understanding of health, fertility and biodiversity.

The ERC-funded CRYOSOCIETIES project investigates how the ability to freeze and thaw tissues and cells has fostered the development of cryobanks to store organic material for future use. The researchers explore how ‘suspended life’ is enacted in the fields of reproductive technologies, regenerative medicine and biodiversity conservation. “What needs to be stored in cryobanks and what may get lost or go extinct? What social and ethical values materialise in these cryopractices and how do they extend the present and delay change?”

Professor Lemke asks. The CRYOSOCIETIES team makes observations in medical labs, reproductive clinics and biobanks for animal conservation in different European countries, aiming to probe deeper into these issues.

“We want to empirically investigate how cryopreservation is done in different settings. We also analyse documents and conduct interviews, for example with researchers in the lab or women undergoing egg-freezing,” continues Professor Lemke.

Cryopreservation practices

This research feeds into the wider social science debate on cryopreservation, which can be thought of as producing a liminal state between life and death. The CRYOSOCIETIES’ team explores how this ‘suspended life’ opens up the prospect of interrupting and restarting biological processes in the future. One prominent example of this is egg freezing. Clinics around the world offer treatments to women to postpone their fertility. One of the leading markets in assisted reproduction in Europe is Spain, and that is why the CRYOSOCIETIES’ team is focussing on this country. “The Spanish case is important as it has developed a strong market in which cryopreservation has an increasingly important role” states Sara Lafuente-Funes, who is leading this subproject.

Other countries, such as Germany, have taken a more restrictive approach to regulating assisted reproduction, and these different developments are an area of great interest in the project. Women can now freeze their eggs to use them later in life but as LafuenteFunes says; “this is never a guarantee of

pregnancy in the future, just a possibility.” Her research has shown how the increasing use of cryopreservation in reproductive clinics “is linked to the accumulation of surplus embryos and oocytes whose future remains uncertain.”

The question of who owns the embryos and oocytes remaining in freezers is an important one. Most women freezing their eggs are not aware of the difficulties around discarding material once it has been frozen. As LafuenteFunes notes; “these women generally feel a sense of relief after freezing their eggs, but they also tend to agree that society should make it easier for women to have children, either earlier or with more support from men and the state.”

Cord blood banking is another example of how cryopreservation does not always fulfil

the promises and expectations that come with it. Private companies appeal to prospective parents to store the stem cells from the umbilical cord for a high fee. They present their services as a way of ensuring access to future innovative medical treatments. However, “the promises have remained the same for more than three decades, with little evidence that real clinical success will be achieved in the near future,” notes Ruzana Liburkina, a cultural anthropologist who is in charge of the study of frozen blood and stem cells in CRYOSOCIETIES.

She explains that a few big players still profit from the speculative value of cord blood while also “increasingly pursuing other business models.” Meanwhile, Liburkina says, public cord blood banks are struggling to stay

in business: storing anonymously donated cord blood for patients with serious blood disorders is a well-established practice, but hardly profitable. What she observed when she studied private and public cord blood banks in Germany and beyond, however, was not stagnation. Rather, the field is an important platform for vibrant research and development activities. It is in cord blood banks that some novel forms of cryopreserved life are imagined and created. “Often under economic pressure, cord blood banks are filling their liquid nitrogen tanks with new types of biological material,” says Liburkina.

The third sub-project focuses on the preservation of organic material from endangered or already extinct species. The collection of tissues, cells or DNA opens up the

Creating life?

Imagining a future in which we can effectively recreate or reanimate life forms may make current biodiversity concerns seem less pressing. But while this may be a superficially attractive vision, Braun believes it is misleading. “We should not assume that cryo-conservation will free us from the difficulties of preserving biodiversity today or tomorrow – it remains a long-term effort,” he stresses. The CRYOSOCIETIES’ project’s work is an important contribution to the wider social science debate on the application of cryopreservation techniques and the creation of suspended life, with Professor Lemke and his colleagues exploring how temporalities are changed by this deepfreezing process. “Cryopreservation opens

“What needs to be stored in cryobanks and what may get lost or go extinct? What social and ethical values materialise in these cryopractices and how do they extend the present and delay change?”

possibility of bringing certain forms of animal life that have gone extinct in the wild back to life. This is a very potent idea, which conflicts with the traditional logic of conservation and may be taken by some as justification for postponing urgent action on biodiversity loss. Yet the debate over using frozen animal cells for resurrecting species tends to overshadow their broader uses in biological research. “Wildlife conservation is most successful when cryopreservation is employed hand in hand with other strategies, such as long-term population studies and habitat restoration. But the singular focus on bringing species back ‘from the dead’ makes people forget that these techniques cannot work in isolation,” notes Veit Braun, a post-doc working in the subproject on animal biobanking.

up new temporal horizons by extending the present, seeking to keep options open, but it also privileges technical solutions to societal problems,” he says.

The empirical work of the project is now largely complete, with the researchers writing several articles and Professor Lemke working on a monograph. This research could have wider relevance for authorities as European countries seek to strike the right balance in regulating cryobanks. “We hope that our research will prove relevant to regulators and will stimulate public debate on the field of cryopreservation, as it raises issues of privacy, data protection, but also the prospect of patenting and commercialisation,” says Professor Lemke.

CRYOSOCIETIES

Suspended Life: Exploring Cryopreservation Practices in Contemporary Societies

Project Objectives

CRYOSOCIETIES is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) to study the implications of cryopreservation for temporalities and the concept of life. The project combines theoretical and empirical work to understand the role of cryotechnologies in different countries, mainly Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Project Funding

CRYOSOCIETIES is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) within the Advanced Grant scheme (Grant Agreement number: 788196).

Project Members

Prof. Dr. Thomas Lemke

Dr. Ruzana Liburkina

Dr. Sara Lafuente-Funes

Dr. Veit Braun

https://cryosocieties.uni-frankfurt.de/people/

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Thomas Lemke

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6

60323 Frankfurt am Main GERMANY

T: +49 (0)69 798-36664

E: cryosocieties@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

W: www.cryosocieties.eu

Braun, Veit, Lafuente-Funes, Sara, Lemke, Thomas, & Liburkina, Ruzana (2023). Making Futures by Freezing Life: Ambivalent Temporalities of Cryopreservation Practices. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 48(4), 693–699. https://doi. org/10.1177/01622439231170557

Professor Thomas Lemke

Thomas Lemke is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Biotechnologies, Nature and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the GoetheUniversity Frankfurt/Main in Germany. He has published extensively on the social implications of the life sciences and contributed to the debates on governmentality and biopolitics.

Cryopreserved samples in a biobank, photo by Veit Braun.

The Cryosocieties team, photo by Merielli Mafra.