Since 1938, the United States (US) Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act has required potential drugs be tested for both safety and efficacy in non-human animals (e.g., mice, dogs) before being tested in humans. Indeed, biomedical research has heavily relied on the use of animal models throughout the 20th century to the extent that it is hard to imagine our contemporary biomedical research infrastructure without animal models. And yet the translational failures of them in pharmaceutical testing have been well documented, and the use of animal models has long been the focal point of scrutiny from those within and outside the biomedical research community. As such, the process of translation—the conversion of knowledge and results produced in non-human animal models to humans—has become a site of interest, financial investment, and social action: so much so that in 2022, the US passed legislation that enables new pharmaceuticals to bypass the animal testing requirement to receive US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to move to human clinical trials. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 explicitly enables researchers to use alternative technologies, such as organ chips and computational models that promise to better predict human relevance. In this work, I follow one set of these alternative technologies, organ chips. Researchers claim organ chips have the potential to transform pharmaceutical testing and provide new insights into human pathophysiology by bringing “the human” into the earliest stages of biomedical research. In this talk, I excavate how a technology becomes human enough, dissecting how this construction is socially negotiated in the case of organ chips following three examples: a lung chip, a female reproductive system chip, and an ‘addiction’ chip. In doing so, I demonstrate the sociality of scientific work and the politics and power relations at play in shaping biotechnologies.
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