Tamar Novick is trained as a historian of science, and writes about agriculture, technology, animals, bodily waste, and fertility research in Palestine/Israel. She is the author of Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (MIT Press, 2023).
The Queen of Foreskins: Swinging with Tissues on the Waste-Value Pendulum
Beginning in 1975, an Israeli biochemist began traveling across the country to attend Jewish circumcision ceremonies. The great majority of Israelis, both Jewish and Muslim, circumcise their children. The scientist would learn of a circumcision event planned, and would travel in an attempt to obtain the freshly cut foreskin, otherwise buried or thrown away. She would then rush to her laboratory in order to allow the skin tissue to release a precious material – interferon beta, a kind of protein that can enhance antiviral defense in other cells. Interferon beta became the basis of ointments as well as the most successful drug for multiple sclerosis available to date. For her practice of collecting these skin tissues that at the time held a great promise, she was named by her colleagues the “queen of foreskins.” Genetic engineering gradually succeeded in producing interferon beta, without the need for fresh human tissues, making most of the queen’s research in the 1970s redundant, or, perhaps, waste. My talk will follow newborns’ skin’s various kinds of swings with the pendulum of waste and value.