Taking the early tissue culture experiments of Alexis Carrel in the 1910s–1930s as its example, the article explores the relationship between advances in biotechnological control over living matter and a holistic ontology of life, which stresses the temporal specificity of living things. With reference to Henri Bergson, Carrel argued that physiological time depends on an organism’s relationship to its milieu. By developing a laboratory apparatus and culture media, new objects of investigation could be made to live outside the organism and be brought to behave in novel temporal ways. In difference to recent biotechnological advances, like for example genome editing, which seek to ‘engineer’ living organisms by rebuilding them from their DNA up, then, early twentieth century interventionist laboratory practices were often linked to an understanding that biological plasticity results from organismic complexity and interactions between organism and milieu. These notions contributed to shaping laboratory apparatuses and techniques; they also helped to establish an understanding of environmental control that would allow for the production of novel ‘living things’.

本文以1910年代至1930年代Alexis Carrel的早期组织培养实验为例，探讨了生物技术对生物的控制方面的进展与生命的整体本体之间的关系，后者强调了生物的时间特异性。关于亨利·柏格森（Henri Bergson），卡雷尔（Carrel）认为生理时间取决于生物体与其环境的关系。通过开发实验室设备和培养基，可以使新的研究对象生活在有机体之外，并以新颖的时间方式表现出来。与最近的生物技术进步（例如基因组编辑）不同，后者试图通过从DNA向上重建生物来“改造”生物，然后，二十世纪早期的干预主义实验室实践常常与一种理解有关，即生物可塑性是由生物的复杂性以及生物与环境之间的相互作用产生的。这些概念有助于塑造实验室设备和技术。他们还帮助建立了对环境控制的理解，从而可以生产新颖的“生物”。