As a feminist working on bioethics, I often turn to the reality of material singularity as a way to argue for more specificity in our dealings with the matter of living bodies. What do I mean by “material singularity?” This term attempts to sum up the way that matter, and especially living matter, is the source of irreducible difference (as feminists like Irigaray and Grosz, along with other thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, argue). Because matter itself is the source of difference, each body is singular and unique. No body is universal and no body is exactly like another. The inherent singularity of living bodies is often overlooked in Western medicine, but it cannot be effectively ignored. We see this singularity, for example, in the ways that each individual body reacts differently to medications and treatment. Clinical research in various fields, such as toxicology and nutrition, makes use of statistical aggregates and averages to attempt to overcome these singularities, but the fact that these methods are necessary shows that the singularity of living bodies is in fact irreducible. Sexual difference is a major (but not the only) example of an irreducible difference in living bodies. The fact that there is now a push to pay attention to sexual difference in clinical trials, an issue discussed in several IJFAB blog posts last week, is a huge step towards recognizing the importance of material singularity for providing just and adequate health care.
This commonly overlooked aspect of bodily life that I am calling “material singularity” has also taken a surprisingly central role in an intense political debate that has unfolded over the last year between the U.S. and Colombia regarding healthcare access, costs, and social justice. Like many other Latin American countries, Colombia has been developing policies to regulate the development and use of biotechnological drugs. Biotech drugs are produced using living human cell lines and are used to treat a variety of conditions, from wrinkles to Leukemia and rare blood conditions. Since 2013, Colombia’s ministry of health has been working on legislation that would regulate the use of these medicines while also enabling Colombia to begin to develop its own biotech industry, with the goals of making these medicines more available to its citizens while lowering their costs. As in other places in the world, increasing access and lowering costs happens through the development of generics. This is where things get complicated, because, as it turns, out, living cell lines cannot be precisely reproduced, especially when the original cell lines are protected by patents.
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