Abstract
Three-dimensional ‘bioprinting’ is under development, which may produce living human organs and tissues to be surgically implanted in patients. Like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine generally, the process of bioprinting potentially disrupts experience of the human body by redefining understandings of, and becoming actualised in new practices and regimes in relation to, the body. The authors consider how these novel sociotechnical imaginaries may emerge, having regard to law’s contribution to, as well as its possible transformation by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors draw on Gilbert Simondon and corporeal, material feminists to account for these disruptions as ‘ontogenetic,’ in the sense that technology can produce new ontologies or beings. The authors focus namely on ontogenesis, individuation and the pre-individual forces that comprise, and yet remain inexhausted by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors argue legal phenomena are pre-individual forces that ‘in-form’ ontogenesis. These pre-individual forces are indistinguishable from those implicated in the individuation of the body’s physical form; thereby, the individuation of the bodily material through 3D bioprinting may be expressive and generative of sociolegal phenomena, at least as those relate to the body. The authors conclude that 3D bioprinting shores up conventional, liberal conceptions in law of the human body as individual, bounded and primarily contractual. Three-dimensional bioprinting may introduce ontological difference to the extent it promises and realises a new temporality of the human as a species- and legal-subject, although such a development would only seem to expand, rather than attenuate, a biopolitical regime.
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Notes
The description is provided on the website for the Tissue, Culture and Art Project, https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/victimless-leather/.
Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Challenge Ahead: Integrating Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing Technologies into Canada’s Healthcare Systems (Ottawa: Senate of Canada, 2017), online: https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/421/SOCI/Reports/RoboticsAI3DFinal_Web_e.pdf, at p. 6; a description of bioprinting can also be found on the Alevi Blog, What is 3D Bioprinting, published online on October 22, 2020: https://www.allevi3d.com/what-is-3d-bioprinting/.
See an explanation in the Government of Canada guidance document, Health Canada Policy Position Paper—Autologous Cell Therapy Products, available online: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-health-products/biologics-radiopharmaceuticals-genetic-therapies/applications-submissions/guidance-documents/cell-therapy-policy.html.
Guidance from Canada’s Minister of Health, Health Canada Policy Position Paper—Autologous Cell Therapy Products, specifies how ‘emerging autologous cell therapy products’ are to be regulated under the Food and Drugs Act. Its description of autologous biologics does not specifically name 3D bioprinting, but appears to cover the technology and its uses.
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Acknowledgements
This research formed part of a collaborative project supported financially through a New Frontiers in Research grant in the amount of $250,000 CAD from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. The NSERC-funded project, ‘Zero-Gravity 3D Bioprinting of Super-Soft Materials’ (NFRFE-2018-0088) was led by Principal Investigator Dr. Aleks Czekanski of York University and Co-Applicants Dr. Kristin Andrews, Dr. Tara L. Haas and Dr. Roxanne Mykitiuk of York University.
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Shaw, J.D., Mykitiuk, R. Jurisgenerative Tissues: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Legal Secretions of 3D Bioprinting. Law Critique 34, 105–125 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-022-09319-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-022-09319-0