Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms - Softcover

Rees, Tobias

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520288130 ISBN 13: 9780520288133

Publisher: University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

Throughout the twentieth century, neuronal researchers knew the adult human brain to be a thoroughly fixed and immutable cellular structure, devoid of any developmental potential. Plastic Reason is a study of the efforts of a few Parisian neurobiologists to overturn this rigid conception of the central nervous system by showing that basic embryogenetic processes—most spectacularly the emergence of new cellular tissue in the form of new neurons, axons, dendrites, and synapses—continue in the mature brain. Furthermore, these researchers sought to demonstrate that the new tissues are still unspecific and hence literally plastic, and that this cellular plasticity is constitutive of the possibility of the human. Plastic Reason, grounded in years of fieldwork and historical research, is an anthropologist’s account of what has arguably been one of the most sweeping events in the history of brain research—the highly contested effort to consider the adult brain in embryogenetic terms. A careful analysis of the disproving of an established truth, it reveals the turmoil that such a disruption brings about and the emergence of new possibilities of thinking and knowing.

About this title

About the Author

Tobias Rees is Associate Professor of Anthropology with a dual appointment in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University.

From the Back Cover

"Plastic Reason deftly tracks how the notion of 'plasticity' gathered persuasive force among a community of neuroscientists in France. Conducting and composing his ethnography through a series of conversational encounters with brain researchers, Tobias Rees elegantly illustrates how science is made in rhetoric, debate, and practice. In accounts of neural plasticity, he argues, novel notions of 'human nature' as unfixed, mobile, and open may be emerging."--Stefan Helmreich, Professor of Anthropology, MIT

From the Inside Flap

“Plastic Reason deftly tracks how the notion of ‘plasticity’ gathered persuasive force among a community of neuroscientists in France. Conducting and composing his ethnography through a series of conversational encounters with brain researchers, Tobias Rees elegantly illustrates how science is made in rhetoric, debate, and practice. In accounts of neural plasticity, he argues, novel notions of ‘human nature’ as unfixed, mobile, and open may be emerging.”—Stefan Helmreich, Professor of Anthropology, MIT

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Plastic Reason

An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms

By Tobias Rees

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28813-3

Contents

Illustrations, ix, 
The Ground of the Argument, xi, 
Note on Technical Terms, xv, 
Acknowledgments, xix, 
On Growth and Form, 1, 
1. ENTRY, 3, 
2. RELATIONAL, 15, 
3. CONCEPTUAL, 59, 
4. NOCTURNAL, 95, 
5. EXPERIMENTAL, 143, 
6. ETHICAL, 191, 
7. LETTING GO, 223, 
Coda: Plasticity after 2003, 231, 
Notes, 235, 
Bibliography, 281, 
Index, 315, 

CHAPTER 1

Entry

Il s'agit de prouver que les phénomènes du développement n existent pas seulement dans l'état embryonnaire, mais qu'ils se poursuivent dans l'état adulte.

CLAUDE BERNARD

The beauty of fieldwork is its unpredictability. What one will discover, if anything at all, cannot be known in advance. The challenge is to submit to the outside, to become part of a foreign milieu, to drown in it — and to stay alert to the unforeseen story that is gradually emerging.

The unforeseen story that has been emerging in the course of my fieldwork among Parisian neurobiologists, that intrigued me and involved me and carried me away in unexpected directions, was the story of what I came to call plastic reason — the story of the sometimes intensely contested effort by people such as Brigitte Lesaffre and Alain Prochiantz to prove that was a "silent embryogenesis" keeps the adult human brain plastic. In this introduction I trace how I became a part of this story, this effort, and to provide a first sketch of what is at stake in it.

UNFORESEEN

I had never planned to do work on the brain, let alone its retained embryogenetic plasticity. When I arrived in Paris in early 2002, I wanted to study French biology. To be more precise, I had prepared to inquire into the belated emergence of French — as compared to American or British — biotechnology. Why was there this delay in France? I had wondered whether it had something to do with the late and controversial French institutionalization of molecular cell biology. Could it be that the belated emergence of biotechnology was a reflection of the predominance, in France, of a different, a nonmolecular biology? Different not just in its conception of the living but also in its practice?

In addition, I hoped to explore the relationship between two things often said to have no relationship at all: life and science. "Science," Max Weber famously quoted Tolstoy in the early twentieth century, "is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: What shall we do? How shall we live?" What, I wondered, is the relationship between life and science a century later? How is life lived where life itself, in the form of biotechnology, has become the object of scientific knowledge and intervention? How do organisms living their life relate to new knowledge about living organisms?

Once I arrived in France, however, things developed in unforeseen ways. Gaining access to biotechnology centers turned out to be arduous and slow. Weeks passed, and I made little progress in securing a site for my research. But while my frustration with biotechnology labs grew, an unexpected opportunity opened up. I was offered the chance to work in the laboratory of Alain Prochiantz, located at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and concerned with the evolution and development of the nervous system.

In conversations with Alain, I learned that he had a plan. "Until September," he explained, "you will work in the lab and learn how to practice at the bench. From October onward, you will then participate in a DEA, a yearlong program in neuropharmacology, and conduct your own research under my supervision." I could thus gain a practical and conceptual understanding of neurobiology, he went on, and that would allow me, perhaps, to do better anthropological research. Was I interested?

I was overwhelmed by this unexpected opportunity — and felt ambivalent about it. Not only was I unsure if I actually wanted to learn how to dissect and experiment on brains, but more important, my visits to the lab made clear that the work of Prochiantz's group did not speak to the curiosity I had so carefully fostered. I wanted to learn about biology, about biotechnology, and about life and science in France. What would I do in a developmental neurobiology lab? I had never read any article, let alone any book, about the brain. I knew nothing about neuroscience.

If, despite my severe concerns, I soon began working in Alain's lab, it was because I quickly became enamored of the intensity that radiated from it — by the movement that seemed to grip everyone who came near it. I could not make sense of this movement, of this intensity, but it intrigued and engaged me, and it carried me further and further away from the questions I had set out to study.

I began, if still hesitantly, to do fieldwork in neurobiology.

AN UNLIKELY STORY

The lab was located on the seventh floor of the nine-story Science Building of the ENS, in the Rue d'Ulm, in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris. I began working in the lab in March 2002, and my first few months were dominated by practice. I learned how to dissect brains; how to distinguish shapes of neurons taken from diverse brain parts; how to grow neurons in cultures and how to feed them, infect them, and crash them with a centrifuge. In parallel, I began to make sense of the movement that had attracted me to the lab in the first place. Gradually, I could reconstruct the following, somewhat unlikely story.

In the late 1980s, Alain began experimenting with homeotic genes. At that time homeotic genes — and the proteins they code for, homeoproteins — were known to coordinate the formation of the basic body structure in animal development. Alain's idée fixe was that homeoproteins, transcription factors that regulate which part of DNA is activated and when, might also be involved in the cellular formation of the central nervous system. Perhaps homeoproteins determine whether a cell becomes part of the gut or of the brain? Perhaps they even coordinate whether a cell becomes a hippocampal, rather than, say, a striatal, neuron?

In experiments Alain Prochiantz conducted with Alain Joliot, a graduate student who had become a senior researcher in his unit by the time of my fieldwork, he made three observations: that homeoproteins, at least in vitro, appear to slide between cells; that this sliding seems to cause a powerful morphogenetic outgrowth even in already differentiated neurons; and that homeoproteins are found not only in the embryonic but also in the adult human brain.

To Prochiantz and Joliot these observations were exhilarating. Quickly they went public and informed their peers that they might have identified a not yet known developmental mechanism — the cell-to-cell migration of homeoproteins — that is active not just in the developing but also in the adult brain, where it appeared to engender embryogenetic-like processes.

Perhaps, they speculated, drunk by the possibilities opened up by their experiment, the adult human brain is the locus of a "silent embryogenesis."

To their colleagues, both suggestions were absurd. First, at the time, it was held that cells are strictly autonomous, that each cell acts according to the genetic information it carries in its nucleus. That there could be a protein-based, rather than a cell-based, organization of embryogenesis, that is, a non-cell-autonomous mechanism was at best fantastic. Second, it was a well-established experimental fact that transcription factors exist somewhat exclusively in the nucleus and that, should they ever travel across the cytoplasm and cell membrane, they would degenerate. That homeoproteins would slide from cell to cell, whether in the embryo or in the adult, was utterly absurd. Third, generations of histologists had shown that the birth, migration, and differentiation of neurons occur exclusively in the course of embryogenesis and that, once adulthood is reached, the myriad connections that build up between neurons during development hardly change. The adult human brain was known to be a fixed and immutable structure, with synaptic communication as the only true dynamic element. To claim, as Prochiantz and Joliot did, that homeoproteins would keep up basic embryogenetic processes in the adult was a ridiculous idea to be laughed at, the statement beyond the scope of (neuronal) reason.

Alain's reaction to the laughter of his colleagues was seriousness. With cool restraint he insisted that he and Joliot had indeed discovered a little-understood developmental mechanism — the cell-to-cell sliding of homeoproteins — that is critical for the embryogenesis of the nervous system as well as for a silent embryogenesis occurring in the adult. Plasticity, he maintained in talks, radio shows, articles, and popular science books, is the very perspective from which one has to think the brain.

With his staggering suggestions, Alain outraged his peers. In the eyes of many of his Parisian colleagues, he had gone too far, beyond what a good neuronal researcher could reasonably say about the brain. When, despite his colleague's severe protests, he decided to devote his lab exclusively to the role of homeoproteins in the developing and the adult brain, French neuroscience had its scandal, and its enfant terrible.

The consequences were severe. Alain — his lab — was increasingly isolated, with no collaborators to speak of. If he and his researchers had not been in France, where the budget for civically funded research is (almost) independent from the actual research being done, their lab would have disappeared.

And then the unexpected happened.

In the late 1990s, after Alain's lab had worked in isolation for almost a decade, two American groups published reports documenting the birth of new neurons in diverse parts of the adult primate (1997) and the adult human brain (1998). These reports established decisively that at least some embryogenetic processes continue in the adult human brain. And they reinforced the spectacular possibility that Prochiantz and his co-workers had sought to elaborate for almost a decade: that the adult human brain is a plastic organ.

For Alain's lab, the discovery that new neurons are born in adult brains marked a turning point in the reception of its work. It now seemed conceivable that he and Joliot had indeed made an important discovery — that homeoproteins are plastic forces active in the mature nervous system. For isn't it precisely the role of homeoproteins during embryogenesis to trigger and then organize the birth, differentiation, and migration of neurons? Could it not be, then, that this is also their task in the adult? Perhaps the cell-to-cell migration of homeoproteins is a kind of signal that regulates adult neurogenesis? Perhaps they provoke the birth of new cells, which they then shape and guide? Perhaps the adult human brain is plastic.

It was as if Alain and colleagues had elaborated an answer to a question that was only now becoming conceivable. What had seemed ridiculous had become avant-garde.

In France Alains sudden international recognition as an avant-garde thinker and most prominent voice of the newly emerging field of plasticity research caused an intense revival of the polemic that had surrounded his work since the late 1980s. Many of his colleagues angrily insisted that a transfer of homeoproteins is impossible, that plastic changes occur only in minor centers of the brain, that the brain, after all, is an immutable chemical machine, and that Alain was a postmodern out there to destroy science. At home, Alain was not a genius, but a provocateur, and his work on plasticity not a breakthrough, but a scandalous attack on science.

When I traveled to Paris in 2002, I arrived amid these debates about Alain and his work. Hence, the intense motion that surrounded him, his lab, and almost everyone who came close to it.

OF MOTION

Once I understood that the motion that surrounded the lab in which I had accidentally arrived was provoked by a possibly far-reaching metamorphosis of the neuronal conception of the brain, and once I understood that Alain's lab was an exemplary site for thinking about the brain from the perspective of its retained embryogenetic plasticity, I became incredibly excited by the possibility of an anthropology of knowledge — of thought — in motion.

The distinct beauty of the situation I found myself in, or so it seemed to me, was its openness, its no-longer-not-yet quality — after fixity, yet on the way to plasticity. I was thrilled by the idea that a new, not yet fully elaborated way of thinking and knowing the brain was emerging, one that would likely change what the brain "is." In addition, there was the clear sense, conveyed by countless conversations I had in the course of my fieldwork, that what was at stake in the turmoil surrounding me was less the brain per se than the brain as the locus of the human.

What was at stake was a shift from a conceptualization of the brain — the human — as a neurochemical machine largely determined in its basic design, fixed in its being, toward a conceptualization of the brain — the human — as a ceaselessly emerging cellular organ, an organ that never stands still, that is defined by an irreducible openness. At stake was a shift from neurochemistry to plasticity.

Gradually, I began to recognize the opportunity: as anthropologist of Alain's lab, a lab that many of my interlocutors held responsible for the scandalous advent of plasticity, I could study the conceptual and experimental work that goes into the formulation of a new way of thinking and knowing the brain (and the human). And as an anthropologist of the Parisian neuroscientific community, with its intense reactions to Alain's work, I could study the relational, conceptual, and institutional motion that paralleled the emergence of plasticity — the battles, the debates, the gossip, the affirmations, and eventually, if plasticity would stabilize, the gradual transformation of the institutional landscape, including the emergence of new grants for plasticity research and the subsequent establishment of new research groups, new journals, and new prizes. In short, it seemed to me as if there were the exhilarating possibility to document and analyze a profound metamorphosis in the neuronal order of knowledge while it was taking place, a metamorphosis in which the brain, and with it the human, was changing its form and becoming plastic.

And so I let go, if still hesitantly, of my preconceived questions about life and science (and about biology and biotechnology in France) and began to follow the story unfolding around me, which in many ways, if only in retrospect, turned out to be a story of life and science.

I wanted to be the anthropologist of the sweeping and multifaceted motion initiated by plasticity.

This book is the result of my endeavors. It is a fieldwork-based analysis composed of anecdotes, observations, and anthropological trouvailles, interspersed with historical excursions and philosophical reflections of the gradual, tentative, continuously contested effort by Alain and his colleagues to think and know the brain from the perspective of its retained embryogenetic, homeoprotein-induced plasticity. It is an anthropologist's account of the emergence of plastic reason.

ON FORM

Finally, a word on form. As I had never prepared to study neuroscience and hence had no concrete research question to guide me when I entered Alain's lab, my research assumed a somewhat curious form. Ultimately, my time in Paris was one long and at times frustratingly nonlinear discovery process. Literally everything about "my" lab's work, and about past and present brain research, came to me in the form of fieldwork-based discoveries. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that every day of fieldwork put things in a new light, changed my understanding, and added an insight or prompted a question that had never before occurred to me.

I initially found this contingent, emergent quality of my fieldwork rather disconcerting. All too frequently, my will to find a topic was undermined by yet another observation that changed my comprehension of what my fieldwork was or could be about. At one point, however, my perception of fieldwork began to change — when I first realized, about seven months after I had begun working in the lab, that plasticity was potentially a major event in the history of brain research and that Alain's lab was a key site of this event.

Was this my topic, plasticity?

Reading through my field notes, I realized that the overwhelming majority of the fairly dispersed and contextually unrelated observations and associations I had collected in my notebooks related in one way or another to Alain's effort to document that the brain is an organ undergoing a continuous, ceaseless morphogenesis. Gradually, I was gaining confidence. And the more confidence I gained, the more I fell in love with the idea that anthropology could be a radical field science. And by "field science" I not only mean that a kind of data production happens in the field. Rather, I mean a practice directed by the outside, a practice at the core of which are accidental encounters, chance observations, and contingent events that eventually give rise, as if by themselves, to an unforeseen, always tentative, emergent story.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Plastic Reason by Tobias Rees. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520288130
• ISBN 13: 9780520288133
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 348