Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood is a self-proclaimed story of “salvage and salvation” (p. xii). Author Joanna Radin borrows “salvage” from one of her subjects, Jacob Gruber, an anthropologist (p. 6). In 1970, Gruber critiqued as “salvage anthropology” the practice of studying “Stone Age” tribes before contaminating contact with modernity (pp. 115–16). Radin identifies the Cold War [End Page 219] collaborations between anthropologists and geneticists to collect and cryopreserve human blood as “salvage biology,” shifting “salvage” from the field to the laboratory (p. 6). Life on Ice uncovers “how and why” blood samples collected from so-called primitive people became a twenty-first-century biomedical resource (p. 2). First World scientists traveled from the Arctic to the Amazon seeking blood to serve as a baseline against which to measure the ravages of technoscience in “civilized” Atomic Age bodies. Radin’s intriguing narrative demonstrates how “salvage biology” resuscitated the Enlightenment noble savage, rejuvenating scientific racism. “Salvation” enters the story as the hope of collectors that the frozen blood not only was a relic of a common human past, but contained unknowable gifts for the future, to be unlocked by as-yet-developed technoscience. Radin embraces the religious overtones of “salvation,” seeking to use her tale that begins with a Catholic priest and ends with a Yanomami shaman to disrupt science and religion as “historically grounded binaries” (p. 5).

This compact book begins with an introduction to twentieth-century cryobiology, focusing on Basile Luyet, a scientist trained as a Catholic priest. Luyet and others sought to study life by slowing it almost to a standstill with cold, yet maintaining its viability. They developed technologies and protocols for preserving “latent” life, such as vacuum flasks and the use of glycerol, that made “salvage biology” possible. Emphasizing Luyet’s religious training, Radin argues that blood cryopreservation became “literally and figuratively intermingled with Christian salvation histories,” but the argument falters for lack of evidence that Luyet connected his religion to his science (p. 5). The brief discussion of blood preservation by means other than freezing suffers from some factual errors, such as the statement that until 1937, blood could be transfused only immediately after collection. As has been shown by other historians, the use of sodium citrate to stabilize blood began by 1915, enabling transfusion with preserved blood during World War I and the first days of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.¹

The heart of this book, however, lies in the following chapters, which analyze the work of later scientists who created and maintained frozen repositories of blood for laboratory, rather than clinical, use. These men, whose faith (as well as national origin, racial self-identification, and early training) is left unexplored, collected blood samples in colonial and newly postcolonial regions in a series of research projects between 1949 and 1977. Women participated as subjects, recruiters, and, in at least one instance, workers in metropole laboratories, but not as scientists in the field. Radin concludes by examining the recent past of these frozen archives as the arrival of an long-imagined future. In the 1990s, “salvation” was found, in part, with the use of thawed samples to track the emergence of HIV. Yet the biobanks also faced challenges, such as the Yanomami successfully demanding the return of samples. [End Page 220]

Life on Ice assumes a well-informed audience. Historical figures are given no introduction, with evolutionary theorist Alfred Russell Wallace, for example, mentioned by last name only, and those unfamiliar with the biological concept of “cline” left to look elsewhere for a definition (pp. 94, 98). The notes, too, are most useful to those already familiar with the secondary literature. For example, when Radin calls a freezer full of frozen blood a “secular reliquary,” citing the entirety of a book on medieval meanings of blood (p. 20), one gets the tantalizing impression that there are...