The Cryopolitics of Human Milk: Thermal Assemblages of Breast Milk in Donation, Banking, and Bioindustrial Research
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2023
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Sage
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Romero-Bachiller, C., & Santoro, P. (2023). The Cryopolitics of Human Milk: Thermal Assemblages of Breast Milk in Donation, Banking, and Bioindustrial Research. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 48(4), 805-831. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439221100868
Abstract
Cold is indispensable when preserving breast milk for later use in ordinary breastfeeding practices and, in addition to other devices such as the breast pump, fridges and freezers have been essential in making human milk a mobile biosubstance. Cryotechnologies become even more important when donated milk has to be preserved for the feeding of hospitalized babies or when, in the form of milk probiotics, it enters the realms of scientific research and industrial production. However, attention to cold only offers one side of the picture, as thawing and heating are essential processes in human milk circulation too. Drawing on research on milk banking practices in Spain, we present three instances where technologies of cold and heat are applied to human milk or its components: hospital banks that collect milk from donors; the practices of lactating women who donate part of their milk to hospital banks, share it informally with other women, or participate in clinical research; and biopharmaceutical companies developing cutting-edge nutritional products employing microbial strains obtained from breast milk. Each of these scenarios resorts to different technological manipulations of cold and heat, generating distinct thermal assemblages where technical questions and sociocultural logics are simultaneously at stake.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank to all the staff at 12 de Octubre BHM and all the donors interviewed, as well as the laboratory director and staff of Biosearch Life for their invaluable contribution to this research. We would like to thank as well to the Special Issue editors, members of the project Cryosocieties, Thomas Lemke, Veit Braun, Sara Lafuente-Funes, and Ruzana Liburkina, for their comments and suggestions to a first draft on this paper that without a doubt have help to strengthen and enrich the article. We would like to thank all the professionals at the HMB at the 12 de Octubre Hospital, the Biosearch I+D department and all the women who have collaborated with us in the interviews. We are especially grateful to the Cryosocieties Research Team (Thomas Lemke, Ruzana Liburkina, Viet Braun, and Sara Lafuente) for inviting us to write for this special issue and for the feedback they offered throughout the process of finishing the article. We also thank the ST&HV editors and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions.
Authors’ Note
This paper is part of the research project “Feminist Epistemologies and Health Activisms” (FEM2016-76797-R), funded by Spanish State I+D+I Program.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article has been funded by the research project “Feminist Epistemologies and Health Activisms: Emerging Practices, Care and Knowledge in Biomedical Contexts” (FEM2016-76797-R), National Spanish R+D+I Plan 2016-2020.