REVIEW - Science as Culture 19(3):369-374 · September 2010 Tracking failing biologies AYO WAHLBERG Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Local Cells, Global Science: the Rise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India, by Aditya Bharadwaj and Peter Glasner, Routledge, 2009, pp. 152, £80.00 The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington’s and the Making of a Genetic Disease, by Alice Wexler, Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 288, $30.00 The contrast between the two settings of Alice Wexler’s The Woman Who Walked into the Sea and Aditya Bharadwaj’s (with Peter Glasner) Local Cells, Global Science could not be starker: nineteenth century East Hampton on the easternmost tip of Long Island in rural America with its fields of grain, horse wagons, beaches and village church bells, and twenty first century ‘neo-India’ (New Delhi and Mumbai) where bullock carts and BMWs jostle for space in a cacophony of crowded urban streets. The tasks at hand are also methodologically distinct as Wexler historically traces the making of a hereditary (later genetic) disease and Bharadwaj ethnographically tracks the rise of embryonic stem cell research in India. Yet the two books read very well together, not least because of their focus on what might be described as the social experience of human biology: as a locus for bio-social identities and groupings; as a ground for exclusion/marginalisation; as a (bio-)valuable, exchangeable and exploitable resource; or as a form of expert knowledge. That is to say, the different ways in which contested biological science can inform and impact upon lived experience and vice versa. Wexler’s book opens with a striking clipping taken from the June 30 th , 1806 edition of East Hampton’s Suffolk Gazette. The report, which is placed just above a wanted ad for “a negro girl from eighteen to thirty years of age”, recounts the circumstances surrounding the death of Phebe Hedges, wife of distinguished town trustee Captain David Hedges: “[T]here is every reason to believe she has precipitated herself into the surf which washes the south shore… This extraordinary step is attributed to her extreme dread of the disorder called St. Vitus’ dance, with which she began to be affected, and which her mother has to a great degree” (p.3). This vignette provides the perfect entry point for a historical investigation into the social experience of families suffering from what is today known as Huntington’s disease and which through the past two centuries has gone by the names of St. Vitus’ dance, the magrums, hereditary chorea and Huntington’s chorea. The Woman Who Walked into the Sea, Wexler explains, is a continuation of her autobiographical account of living in a family with Huntington’s disease (Mapping Fate from 1995). “I was well acquainted with the stigma and silences surrounding [Huntington’s disease] in the late twentieth century. But I wanted to know whether it had always been this way, or whether in the past this illness – and those affected by it – may have been viewed differently” (p. xix). Using Phebe Hedges’ family and descendants as