"Fascinating! "Icons of Life "is an account of how we have come to know ourselves as ourselves, both a compelling human origin story and an engaging tale of intellectual curiosity, biological specimens, reproductive politics, and science. Morgan draws skillfully on her ethnographic toolkit to reveal the social context of embryology alongside the cultural and scientific work of crafting objective 'facts of life' from unremarkable flesh."--Monica J. Casper, author of "The Making of the Unborn Patient" "How do scientists ...
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"Fascinating! "Icons of Life "is an account of how we have come to know ourselves as ourselves, both a compelling human origin story and an engaging tale of intellectual curiosity, biological specimens, reproductive politics, and science. Morgan draws skillfully on her ethnographic toolkit to reveal the social context of embryology alongside the cultural and scientific work of crafting objective 'facts of life' from unremarkable flesh."--Monica J. Casper, author of "The Making of the Unborn Patient" "How do scientists convert people into things? Lynn Morgan's book takes the reader on a wonderfully eerie tour through the cultural history of a macabre science, that of collecting human embryos. Not only is it an immensely valuable contribution to the anthropology of science, but it represents at the same time an extended hand across the field of anthropology, where the remains of human beings are still commonly passed around tables of undergraduate students--inviting us to reconsider the nature of our own scientific specimens."--Jonathan Marks, author of "Why I Am Not A Scientist"
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