UCSF

In 2010, a team of researchers published a paper in Science claiming to have created a “chip” platform that recapitulated a human lung. They claimed this technology, because it used human cells, provided a more accurate way to model the human body and its responses than animal models, like mice, rabbits, hamsters, and dogs. The scientists predicted that these technologies could overcome translational barriers in pharmaceutical and toxicity research, by introducing human-based models into the earliest stages of safety and efficacy testing. In doing so, they suggested that “organ chips” would eliminate the failure of translation between non-human animal models and humans, while also making pre-clinical testing stages more efficient and cheaper. Less than two years later, the US National Institutes of Health National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences devoted extensive federal research funding to launch the Tissue Chip Program. Since then, organ chip research and development and public and private investment in these technologies have greatly expanded. Drawing on interviews with organ chip researchers and funders, ethnographic observations of laboratories, scientific conferences, and educational settings, and document analysis of scientific publications and policy and regulatory documents, I document how organ chips, as technological artifacts, emerge as productive and valuable tools, and trace how they are imagined and brought into fruition by a diverse set of actors across government, industry, and academic sectors. I begin the dissertation with an analysis of the discursive construction of the translational crisis, arguing that the failure to translate biomedical discoveries from “bench to bedside” is constructed as a problem of an inefficient research pipeline and misaligned infrastructure of academic biomedical research. I show how constructions of the crisis of translation in biomedicine fuel particular formations of research teams, funding structures, and the prioritization of particular kinds of health interventions, that together make organ chips the ‘right’ tool for resolving the translational crisis. Following, I offer a social worlds analysis, exploring how organ chips become constructed as the right tool for particular jobs, analyzing the sociotechnical conditions of possibility alongside the actors and networks that leverage them to position organ chips as ‘doable’ and ‘right’ technologies. I then turn to the models themselves, to surface the social nature of model making. I contend that organ chips are rendered “human enough” through social processes of scientific negotiation and show how market forces shape the technical design of these technologies. Thus, I argue that the interests that elevate these technologies and their value also shape their very design, in ways that may fundamentally transform how we model human health and disease. Finally, in response to the historical moment in which this dissertation research was conducted, I offer an empirical analysis of how COVID-19 disrupted laboratory science. Turning my gaze to scientific labor and organization, I show how the pandemic exacerbated institutional pressures, leading laboratory workers to launch critiques of academic science and to articulate the conditions of their estrangement.