For help elsewhere in China I would like to thank Li Zheng, director of the Shanghai Sperm Bank, as well as Tang Lixin, the late director of the Guangdong Sperm Bank, for hosting me and facilitating interviews with donors during my visits to their respective facilities in 2013. In Beijing I would like to thank the director of the fertility clinic at the Third Hospital, Professor Qiao Jie, and Li Rong, as well as Professor Cong Yali of the Medical Ethics Unit at the Peking University Health Science Center, where I spent a semester as a visiting fellow in the fall of 2007.
In carrying out the research for this book I have relied on and received the assistance of a great number of persons to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for helping in the collecting of documents, transcription of interviews, and translation. For translation help during interviews my thanks to He Jing, Long Xingyu, Nie Hongchuan, Hu Jing, and Tang Ruilin. For help in transcription and translation of interviews and various documents my thanks to Vicky Wang, Katherine Tchemerinsky, Yang Jiani, He Jing, Nie Hongchuan, Long Xingyu, Wang Xingming, Tang Wuilin, Lu Haiyuan, Xu Fang, and Aelred Doyle. The research for this book was made possible, in part, by a generous Sapere Aude Young Researcher Grant (no. 10–094341) from the Danish Council for Independent Research, which I would like to sincerely thank. Independent research funding is an increasingly endangered species and I hope this book can play its part in attesting to the importance of long-term, independent research.
Over the last decade, while working on this book, I have had the great fortune of working in a number of conceptually fertile research environments. From 2003 to 2009 I was based at the BIOS Centre, London School of Economics. I can safely say that I would not be the scholar that I am today had I not had the opportunity to work with Nikolas Rose, Sarah Franklin, Ilina Singh, Filippa Lentzos, Carlos Novas, Linsey McGoey, Scott Vrecko, David Reubi, Chris Hamilton, John Macartney, Megan Clinch, Joy Zhang, Michael Barr, Amy Hinterberger, Des Fitzgerald, and many, many more who spent time at the BIOS Centre in the noughts.
In 2009, I was once again fortunate when securing a position at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, yet another vibrant research community. My thanks go to all of my colleagues at the department, especially members of the Health and Life Conditions and the Technology and Political Economy researcher groups who have shared their thoughts on various chapter drafts over the past years. A special thanks to Tine Gammeltoft, with whom I have had the privilege of working very closely ever since I arrived at the department and who patiently read through every chapter of this book, providing important feedback.
Housed in a building just fifty meters from our department (what luck!) is the University of Copenhagen’s innovative Center for Medical Science and Technology Studies (MeSTS), where I enjoyed a semester as a visiting scholar in early 2009. My thanks to Lene Koch, Klaus Høyer, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Anja Bornø Jensen, Maria Olejaz Tellerup, Sebastian Mohr, Zainab Afshan Sheikh, and Stine Willum Adrian (based at Aalborg University) for their insights and feedback on various chapter drafts. At the Copenhagen University Hospital’s (Rigshospitalet) fertility clinic I would like to thank Anders Nyboe Andersen and Søren Ziebe as well as Lone Schmidt from the University of Copenhagen for supporting my research project through the years and for their hospitality during exchange visits from Changsha.
At the University of Cambridge, I have benefited greatly from spending time with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group during the writing of the book. My thanks to Sarah Franklin, Janelle Lamoreaux, Katie Dow, Noémie Merleau-Ponty, Zeynep Gürtin, Karen Jent, Robert Pralat, Marcin Smietana, Mwenza Blell, and Lucy van de Wiel. Likewise, participating in the IVF Global Histories conference at Yale University in April 2015 was a huge inspiration. My thanks to the organizers Marcia Inhorn and Sarah Franklin as well as participants Aditya Bharadwaj, Bob Simpson, Andrea Whittaker, Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, Soraya Tremayne, Elizabeth Roberts, Viola Hörbst, Charis Thompson, Sandra Gonzalez-Santos, Michal Nahman, Sebastian Mohr, and Trudie Gerrits. Learning about national IVF histories from around the world has shaped many aspects of this book. Also in the United States I would like to thank Lisa Handwerker for sharing her fieldwork experiences in Beijing in the early years of reproductive technologies in 1990s China and for her comments on my historical account of the development of reproductive technologies in China. Thanks are also due to Reed Malcolm and two anonymous reviewers from the University of California Press for comments that have greatly improved this book. For guiding me through the production process special thanks are due to Zuha Kahn, Tom Sullivan, Nicholle Robertson, and Kate Warne.
Parts of chapter 1 appeared in Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online as “The Birth and Routinization of IVF in China” (2016); parts of chapter 2 appeared in The Right to Life and the Value of Life, edited by Jon Yorke (2010), as “Assessing Vitality: Infertility and ‘Good Life’ in Urban China”; and parts of chapter 3 appeared in Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup (2013), as “Human Activity between Nature and Society: The Negotiation of Infertility in China,” as well as in Science, Technology & Society as “Exposed biologies and the banking of reproductive vitality in China.” (2018) My thanks to Routledge, Ashgate, Sage, and Elsevier for permissions to reproduce sections from these publications.
And finally, long-term research endeavors such as the one that lies behind this book would simply not be possible without the love and support of family and friends. A special thanks to my parents, who showed my brothers and me the world before we realized there was anything else. And last, but most importantly, thank you Helle, Mathias, and Jonas for always reminding me how good life is.
Abbreviations
| AID | artificial insemination by donor |
| AID | artificial insemination by donor |
| AIH | artificial insemination by husband |
| ART | assisted reproductive technology |
| CCTV | China Central Television |
| ED | endocrine disruptor |
| GLP | good laboratory practices |
| GMP | good manufacturing practices |
| ICSI | intra cytoplasmic sperm injection |
| IVF | in vitro fertilization |
| MCS | multiple chemical sensitivity |
| PGD | preimplantation genetic diagnosis |
| RMB | renminbi (Chinese yuan) |
| SOP | standard operating procedure |
| SRT | selective reproductive technology |
| TDS | testicular dysgenesis syndrome |
| TILT | toxicant-induced loss of tolerance |
Introduction
SPERM CRISIS
In the early months of 1981, Lu Huilin received a letter at his office in the bustling, river-laced city of Changsha, capital of China’s Hunan Province. The letter was from a patient who said he suffered from azoospermia, the severest form of male infertility. He had read somewhere that farmers were creating sperm banks for cows and pigs, prompting him to write to Lu, a prominent medical geneticist at Xiangya Medical College: “Why can’t you build one for humans? I could be your first experiment!”
Lu had developed a keen interest in reproductive technologies ever since news of Louise Brown, the world’s first so-called “test tube baby” had filtered through to Changsha, some months after her birth in England in 1978. Conditions were harsh for scientists in the years following the Cultural Revolution; clinical and laboratory facilities were dilapidated and access to equipment and the latest scientific findings all but nonexistent. Nonetheless, moved and perhaps also intrigued by the man’s plea, Lu had an idea. He placed the letter into a new envelope together with a cover note and posted it to his daughter, Lu Guangxiu, in Beijing, who recounts:
My father forwarded this letter to me in Beijing. At that time, I had just finished three months of study in Beijing, so I thought about it and asked my teachers at the Chinese Academy whether there is a sperm bank in Beijing. They said there is a sperm bank for cows in the countryside, so I rode two hours by bicycle [laughter] to the countryside to have a look at the sperm bank. Only one whole afternoon, I got to know how to freeze the sperm, how to use yolk and glycerol to freeze the cow sperm, only in this afternoon. I learned quickly! After that I came back to Changsha.