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Let's talk a moment about my new relationship with human bone cancer in vitro. Our relationship has just begun but I've been researching the two types, who I've personified as Sonya and Osanna, and so know a fair bit about them/it already. I see them as female, if microorganisms can have a gender (can they? should they?). These particular cell lines are derived from female donors, so I've assigned them that gender for now because it serves my feminist discussion thus far--however, bone is universal and osteosarcoma can happen to any gender and probably any species, even. I could suggest that it's ultimately trans/inter/omniphilic.
I've read that human osteosarcoma is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer a child can suffer, afflicting mainly adolescents during stages of rapid bone formation. I also understand that it forms a malignant bone tissue mass, or osteoid, which in healthy circumstances is the precursor to the crystallized bone we all depend on to solidly frame up the rest of our squishy biomateria. Osteoid will mineralize, and so bone cancer will in part become a calcified monster, a crystalline nightmare.
But I'm learning to appreciate it from my safely distant observer position (on the other, 'outer' side of the flask). I'm learning to love it (if love can be defined as a profound appreciation, which is in fact how I define it) because I'm developing an intimate relationship with it. The intimacy does have boundaries--it isn't technically inside me, but it's inside my thoughts and inside my emotional processes. It's inside my daily routines, as I have to feed it and care for it like a mother. I'm investing a ton of money into its 'well being'. I want to see it grow and thrive and become beautiful, in the way only a mother could appreciate. I watch it closely, monitoring its changes, recording its activities, registering its surprises, making adjustments according to its needs. I have plans for its future. I take my job of protecting it from danger seriously.
Does it love me back? This question is seemingly ludicrous but also an important one to digest: am I in a one-sided relationship with this specimen or do my observations of it somehow change it, affect it in any way? Certainly, practically speaking, my decisions around its maintenance have an effect on it. But does it register an outside observer/ provider? Does it respond energetically to my presence, my body's magnetic field in close proximity to its cellular electromagnetic functioning? Does it feel pulled towards me the way I feel pulled by the moon--almost unconsciously? Do the vibrations of my words, as I look through the microscope and utter soft approvals and appreciation to it out loud, have an impact on the quantum level? What might that look like, if so?
Known research, such as the Double Slit Experiment (the relational interpretation of the experiment), posits that observation does indeed change the nature of a subject/ material--in the case of the experiment, from wave to particle and vice versa but we can employ this philosophy elsewhere. What would Jane Bennett say? She is critical of a singular pontiff power of perception, in the subject/object dichotomy where the only 'actant' is the observer of a subject or object and where an object has no agency to a(e)ffect anything in return (though a subject might). Bennett has compellingly written about the possible inherent 'thing-power' of the inanimate object, to act on the observer and be acted upon. What about the thing-power of a cancer cell? It is animate, but is it the same kind of animate as any other living thing? What kind of animate is it? Simply plasmic animation? We know it can be devastating to us. Can it perceive, too? How does it perceive? How would it express? At this point in time, aside from the cancer culture thriving or failing to thrive, I have no way to know how it feels or if it feels.
The prospect of feeling a profound appreciation for cancerous growth is perhaps incomprehensible, seemingly perverse. My mother and grandmother, as well as my grandfather have suffered (and long recovered) from cancers--thyroid, colon, uterine. They know firsthand the fear and anguishing lack of control that ensues and I have witnessed and internalized some of this. For humans, cancer is a culture of theft, stealing our very lives. It is every dirty, despised thing known in human nature, anthropomorphized on the micro level. What happens to the person who embodies it then, even if briefly? How much of the cancer do they become, how much shame do they feel when they contain the representation of that deplorable thing, when it becomes visible in their hair loss, their thinness? How much do they struggle to not identify with it?
How much is my body, MY own body? Aside from a contested, problematic legal definition of bodily ownership and autonomy, let's consider our interactions with all microorganisms: 3lbs of bacteria in the gut, influencing our hormonal secretions/synthesis and ultimately our emotional reactions and perceptions of the world, not to mention gender and systemic health (life). This is a massive paradigm shift. Suddenly, how much control do we ever have, anyway? How much of who we are IS actually who we imagine or enact that we are, and how much of who we are IS someone/thing else, another entity, a microentity or entire colonies of microentities? Can we appreciate them? Can the earth appreciate us even though we are collectively destroying it? What if the earth hated us and would do anything to be rid of us, take an antibiotic to kill us off in droves or blast us with so much radiation from the sun that we wither, even though we might love it, need it? What do we do with our irreconcilable differences?

I've just begun my relationship with osteosarcoma and already I'm talking about irreconcilable differences. Perhaps it is better to adhere to scientific protocol and remain completely impartial towards my specimens after all? From an ethical standpoint, that is just as dangerous.