| This dissertation considers the ontology of stem cells as a future-oriented life form characterized by its potentiality in relation to the anticipatory mode of living in contemporary Korea. The biological notion that stem cells have the potential for differentiation and the capacity for self-renewal is central in the future-oriented enterprise of stem cell research and industry, as it promises the technological control of biological time within the vision of regenerative medicine. And it is through the promises of regenerative medicine that stem cells are cultured both as a biological object and an object of investment that holds the biological and economic potential in themselves. I conceptualize stem cells as a "promissory thing"---a material-semiotic entity whose mode of being enacts and is enacted by diverse forms of future-oriented practices, and explore how this promissory thing is produced by and becomes generative of a myriad of anticipations that instigate scientific, religious, and economic commitments with differently imagined futures. Through this, I argue that promises are constitutive of the stem cell biology, rather than derivative of it.;Since the biological concept of stem cells is predicated on the future that they promise, the biological life of stem cells is inextricably intertwined with the social life of promises. I first examine the sites where the biological concept of stem cells is materialized and their promises are substantiated through various forms of experimental labor. Part I concerns the bodily, intellectual, and affective engagements of donors, scientists, and patients as the mediums of (re)production of stem cells and promises. As stem cells are derived from the living tissues, cultured and studied by scientists, and made to show their efficacy through patients' bodies in anticipation of materializing the promises of stem cell biology, they are produced as a new form of biovaluable. The promises of biology move beyond the closed circuit of scientific knowledge production, and proliferate in the speculative marketplaces of promises. Part II looks at how the promises of stem cell promises create and find their niches in places where the future-oriented affects are valorized---faith in the potent entity, anxieties about the uncertain futures, and dreams about futures that are different from the present. In these future-oriented marketplaces, the plasticity of technologized biology and biological time can appear promising with the backdrop of the imagined intransigence of social, political, and economic order in the Korean society. |
