Catherine Waldby

• PhD Murdoch University
• Research Professor at Australian National University

As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues—such as skin, bones, heart valves, embryos, and stem cell lines—are stored and distributed for therapeutic and research purposes. The accelerating circulation of human tissue fragments raises profound social and ethical concerns related to who donates or sells bodily tissue, who...

This book explores the proliferation of various forms of embodied, transactional work associated with the lower echelons of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. It argues that activities such as surrogacy, tissue donation and clinical trials should be understood as a specific kind of post-Fordist service work, continuous with but also dist...

The death of an infant is devastating and life changing, eliciting profound grief for parents. Many mothers of stillborn infants and infants who die in the first days, weeks and months of life are faced with the complex task of managing the initial onset of breastmilk production or continuation of established lactation. In this case-study, we condu...

Objective: The study aimed to identify how, from the perspective of bereaved parents, hospital-based health professionals can better meet their lactation care needs. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with 17 mothers and 7 fathers bereaved by stillbirth, neonatal death, or older infant death. Participants were recruited from three large ho...

Breast milk is a highly valued substance, immunologically and nutritionally, which also signifies maternal care and love for the infant. This intersection of biological and cultural qualities confers breast milk with complex meanings, which necessarily shape the experience of breastfeeding. Our research, investigating the experience of lactation af...

Background: The increasing demand for ART services in Australia has supported the development of a significant number of private sector commercial providers. This sector is innovative and research active, but the effects of commercial influences on research and clinical innovation have not been fully explored. Here we report on the results of a Nat...

This exploratory study targets a significant gap in the lactation and bereavement literature by exploring bereaved fathers’ experiences, perspectives and practices in relation to their partner’s lactation after stillbirth, neonatal or infant death. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven bereaved fathers in two Australian state/territo...

Reducing the rate of over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care (OOHC) is a key Closing the Gap target committed to by all Australian governments. Current strategies are failing. The “gap” is widening, with the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in OOHC at 30 June 2020 being 11 time...

Objective: The study aimed to identify and map the factors that shape the delivery of hospital-based lactation care for bereaved mothers to inform quality improvement initiatives targeting hospital-based lactation care. Methods: Focus groups and interviews were conducted at three large hospitals in Australia with 113 health professionals including...

Tracking in/fertility—through ovulation biosensing, menstrual and perimenopausal apps, and ovarian reserve testing—is becoming increasingly commonplace amongst relatively privileged women in the Global North. Taking place on and through platforms comprised of devices, bodies, and discourses, such self-tracking articulates forms of in/fertility and...

Faulkner (Medical technology into healthcare and society. A sociology of devices, innovation and governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) discusses the regulation of medical devices, which includes the mundane as well as the more sophisticated—for example, everything from ‘the bandage to the bioreactor’.

Key Messages • There is a dearth of targeted online lactation health information provided to bereaved parents after stillbirth and infant death. • We collated and critically reviewed international evidence-based lactation and bereavement information to devise a comprehensive framework on the diverse options for lactation management after stillbirth...

This column explores a recent health profession disciplinary case which throws light on the problems of unconventional interventions by medical practitioners under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act 2009 (Qld). The case involved "innovative" practices which were later found to have been scientifically unsupported, dangerous to pati...

The prevalence of businesses selling autologous stem cell-based interventions to patients in Australia has raised serious concerns about how weaknesses in regulation have enabled the emergence of an industry that engages in aggressive marketing of unproven treatments to patients. Little is known about how patients experience this marketing and thei...

Lactation is a potent signifier of maternal love and care commonly associated with early motherhood and infant survival. It is common, however, for bereaved mothers who have recently undergone miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death to produce breastmilk. Drawing on a critical feminist lens that seeks to understand how maternal subjectivities and l...

While considerable research has focused on the experience of patients traveling overseas for unproven stem cell treatments, the situation of patients seeking domestic treatments has been relatively unexplored. Over the last decade countries not normally associated with unproven medical treatments or entrepreneurial clinics – Australia, Canada, Germ...

Book abstract The Oocyte Economy analyses the forms of value constituted around human oocytes-the gametes or reproductive cells specific to women. These are the cells that transmit genetic inheritance from mother to child, and orchestrate the processes of conception and gestation. At the broadest level, the book asks what it means to live with this...

In 2016, the Office of the State Coroner of New South Wales released its report into the death of an Australian woman, Sheila Drysdale, who had died from complications of an autologous stem cell procedure at a Sydney clinic. In this report, we argue that Mrs Drysdale's death was avoidable, and it was the result of a pernicious global problem of an...

In 2016, the Office of the State Coroner of New South Wales released its report into the death of an Australian woman, Sheila Drysdale, who had died from complications of an autologous stem cell procedure at a Sydney clinic. In this report, we argue that Mrs Drysdale's death was avoidable, and it was the result of a pernicious global problem of an...

In the 1990s, human embryonic stem cell research and mammalian cloning emerged as two of the most controversial areas of biomedical research, provoking complex social responses and contestations over the status of the embryo, the reproductive rights and obligations of women, the entitlements of patient groups and aging populations, and the commerci...

Human oöcytes (eggs) have proved quite resistant to the gift system that regulates much tissue donation in the developed nations. With a few exceptions, they move from donor to recipient through incentive systems, including high rates of compensation and frank payment. Recently, women have turned in small but growing numbers to private oöcyte banki...

Tra il pullulare di discorsi sul capitalismo avanzato spicca l'assenza di analisi sui corpi. Sono in tanti a focalizzarsi sul capitalismo cognitivo, trascurando il versante della produzione materiale sul quale si fonda l'economia della vita. Melinda Cooper e Catherine Waldby con questo libro colmano tale lacuna, mostrando come la bioeconomia si sia...

We, like many colleagues, were deeply shocked and saddened to hear of Herbert Gottweis’ untimely death on the 31 March this year. While we were aware of Herbert’s illness, we also hoped that, against the odds, he would recover in his typical, buoyant style. This was not to be. A few days after receiving the terrible news, we began a discussion of w...

This paper examines the relatively recent practice of non-medical egg freezing, in which women bank their eggs for later use in conceiving a child. Non-medical egg freezing has only been available for about the last five years, as new vitrification techniques have made the success rates for actual conception more reliable than the earlier method of...

I would like to start my talk with a story that begins in a place none of you would have ever heard of – Jerilderie, in the Australian outback. 700 kms west of Sydney, it is in the heart of merino sheep country. In the late 1960s, a young science student, Alan Trounson, enrolled in the department of wool sciences at UNSW, spends three years in Jeri...

Decisions that individuals make about giving in their everyday lives are socially situated in that they are constrained by the social and legal norms of their times. In contemporary Australian society, human body parts are circulated between individuals and institutions for therapeutic and research purposes. Tissue donation, broadly referring to a...

We report the results of a qualitative study carried out in metropolitan Australia between 2009 and 2011 that canvassed the issue of payment for research oöcyte donation with participants drawn from three potential donor groups; fertility patients, reproductive donors and young, non-patient women. Research oöcytes are controversial tissues because...

This article develops a model of informed consent for fresh oöcyte donation for stem cell research, during in vitro fertilisation (IVF), by building on the importance of patients' embodied experience. Informed consent typically focuses on the disclosure of material information. Yet this approach does not incorporate the embodied knowledge that pati...

This article examines developments in the field of regenerative medicine with respect to two quite distinct models of therapeutic development, a medical innovation model and a 'cells-as-drugs' model. It seeks to contribute to our understanding of regenerative medicine clinical trials, by exploring the ways in which the contingencies that shape all...

The idea of biopolitics has proved one of the most generative in social studies of medicine and science, yet until recently it is an idea most readily deployed in relation to the history of Western Europe and the northern, developed nations. This is unsurprising, given that, in Foucault’s historical account of biopower, its emergence as a form of p...

We report on a study undertaken with an Australian in vitro fertilisation (IVF) clinic to understand IVF patients' and reproductive donors' perceptions of oocyte (egg) donation for stem cell research. Such perspectives are particularly valuable because IVF patients form a major recruitment group for oocyte donation for research, and because patient...

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) present particular problems for diagnosis, encompassing as they do communication difficulties, learning difficulties, social awkwardness, and severe disability, as well as some strengths and special skills (such as perfect pitch or artistic abilities). Hence ASDs have proven difficult to standardise, and evidence-ba...

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biome...

The development of genomics has dramatically expanded the scope of genetic research, and collections of genetic biosamples have proliferated in countries with active genomics research programs. In this essay, we consider a particular kind of collection, national biobanks. National biobanks are often presented by advocates as an economic ‘‘resource’...

In late 2003, the Singaporean government launched Biopolis, a life sciences technopole that brings key Singaporean biomedical research institutes together with global and local biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and governance bodies. The government has allocated generous funding to a range of biomedical research at Biopolis and adjacent ac...

Like other wealthy states in East Asia, Singapore is busy building a bioeconomy. The government has allocated billions of dollars to life sciences research, under the aegis of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative (BMSI). This paper focuses on one important life sciences research project to consider some of the biopolitical implications of bioeconomic...

Regenerative medicine is a field characterized by a global struggle for scientific, economic and national advantage. Drawing on a wide range of interviews, primary and secondary sources, this book investigates the dynamic interactions between national regulatory formation and the global biopolitics of regenerative medicine and human embryonic stem...

In the previous chapters, we have mapped some of the diversities and uncertainties of the hESC field. We have seen the range of cultural reactions to embryo research and the volatility of national political responses to the challenge of integrating a stem cell research programme into society. We have also seen that, to an extent, national regulator...

In this chapter we will further elaborate our central argument that the shaping of hESC policies is certainly determined by numerous factors including history, culture and religion, but that discursive memory, narrativizations and decisions to create particular policy dramaturgies clearly play a very important role in shaping regulatory outcomes. A...

Throughout the developed and developing world, states are investing public funds in basic ESC science and devising regulatory frameworks to facilitate research. In the neoliberal climate that has dominated, or at least influenced, most national administrations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since the 1980s, the...

In the last two chapters we described the rise and development of the increasingly differentiated and complex global stem cell economy. Closely related to the operation of the emerging stem cell economy, and regenerative medicine more generally, is a regulatory regime that deals with the multiple societal, legal and ethical challenges in this field...

Although announcements of the birth of a cloned sheep, a baby born to a 62-year-old woman, plans by a researcher to try to clone a human baby, as well as the prospect of reproductive cloning, had all sent considerable shock waves throughout the Western world, none of the countries discussed in this book had clear majorities that supported a total b...

When it was announced on 20 November 2007 that the journals Cell and Science were going to publish two papers on iPS, they were immediately hailed as historic breakthroughs in human stem cell research. They appeared to benefit from the progress in hESC research without the need to deal with the multifold bioethical issues involved in hESC research...

On 11 August 2004 Miodrag Stojkovic and Alison Murdoch of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne received the United Kingdom’s first licence to create human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) using cell nuclear replacement. Stojkovic and Murdoch’s application was based on research funded by the UK Department of Health, the Department of Trade and Industry...

As the last chapter indicated, ethical reasoning and the creation of national bioethics committees or boards have played an important part in dealing politically with the regulatory challenges of hESC research. For the most part, these bioethical actors have been supportive of hESC research, and they have also played a central role in separating re...

Before we discuss the impact of globalization on hESC regulation, it is necessary to acknowledge that the biological material itself — the stem cell lines — circulates through global vectors. This chapter will focus on this material and its precursors — embryos and oocytes — and elucidate the political dynamics that shape their trajectories.

It is estimated that when all of the EU’s Framework Programme (FP) 6 (2002–6) projects have come to an end, about €21 million will have been spent on hESC research. This figure constitutes 0.85 per cent of the €2.45 billion Health Research Programme budget within FP6 and 0.10 per cent of the total €17.5 billion budget (Europa, 2007). If the financi...

cases, they are proving ineffective, as women and couples prioritise economic security and career development over the production of large families. The reasons for this shift in priorities are complex, intertwined, as Neilson notes above, with transformations in the biopolitical ordering of life. 3 These transformations could be summarised as the...

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) research, otherwise known as therapeutic cloning, requires large numbers of research oocytes, placing pressure on an already limited supply. In the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore and most of Western Europe, oocytes are made available through modestly reimbursed donation, and, owing to the onerous nature of don...

In this paper we examine an increasingly important form of global governance for the field of human embryonic stem cell science; the processes of standardisation. Technical standardisation is essential for any scientific field to develop and is applicable to all stages of knowledge production from the basic science to the market product. However in...

Umbilical cord blood has proved an effective substitute for bone marrow in the treatment of blood disorders, and most nations in the developed world have public programmes for the harvesting and storage of cord blood for allogenic transplantation. Private cord blood banks have sprung up alongside public banks, offering parents the opportunity to ba...

This paper investigates the first documented case of non-transfusion-related surgical HIV transmission in a developed country, Australia. In 1989, four women were infected with HIV as a result of surgical procedures in a private clinic. A subsequent medical tribunal failed to establish medical negligence or a failure of infection control procedures...

Clinical medicine and biotechnology increasingly utilise and transform human bodily tissues in novel ways. Today more and more tissues--blood, whole organs, ova, embryos, sperm, skin, bone, heart valves, cellular material, bone marrow and corneas--can be transferred between donors and recipients. Hence more and more people in developed nations have...

Configurations 11.1 (2003) 27-46 Biomedicine and biotechnology increasingly draw on marginal forms of living tissue as sources of therapeutic substances. More and more biomedical treatments rely on the collection, storage, transformation, and redistribution of tissues, the development of new kinds of "separable, exchangeable, and reincorporable bod...

More and more areas of medicine involve subjects donating tissues to another — blood, organs, bone marrow, sperm, ova and embryos can all be transferred from one person to another. Within the technical frameworks of biomedicine, such fragments are generally treated as detachable things, severed from social identity once they are removed from a part...