Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life

I've been struggling with this book, published in 2006, for months. Today I realized I could combine my notes with a handful of key index entries to create a more useful synthesis. I end with ten other books I have reviewed that augment this one. My first impression of the book was soured by the absence of any mention of green chemistry, ecological economics, or ecology of commerce. I've known about citation analysis clusters since 1970, but I grow increasingly frustrated by the fragmentation of knowledge and the constantly growing barriers between schools of thought within political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic. An important early distinction is between industrial-cost for profit capitalism and commercial speculative capitalism. Toward the end of the book I finally encountered the author's emphasis on national priorities, and I for one condemn all seeds that do not reproduce naturally. In agriculture, economy, energy, health, my bottom line is that anything that retards the eradication of hunger, poverty, sustainment, or individual and social health gains, is inherent against the laws of God and man. Early notes include: + Information science plays huge role in genomics. I am reminded of the convergence in the 1990's among cognitive and information science, nano-technology, bio-technology, and earth science. I have a later note, "life sciences becoming information sciences." + Although E. O. Wilson is not cited, the author is on a clear convergence in taking about how valuation is a vital aspect of getting it right. I think of India as IT rich and farm poor--they are allowing the aquifers to drop a meter a year because farmers can sell a tanker-full of water for $4, which is insane, and 2,000 farmers a year commit suicide in the face of drought and debt. Valuation is a critical national function. + This work falls within a new category of reading that I have been increasingly impressed by, "ethnographic," or the study of localities and particularities to map global system that is not generic, homogenized, or blurred.. + As the author does not cite Paul Hawken or Herman Daly, I draw the distinction between the author's focus on "natural capitalism" as of the privatization of biocapital and the patenting of gnomes, and the purer definition, of natural capitalism as one that understands the true costs over the lifetime of the materials being used including water (4000 liters of water Bangladesh cannot afford to export in a designer cotton shirt), and that makes the case for going green to create gold. + The author views biocapital as a combination of circuits of land, labor, and value; and biopolitics. + Life sciences are being "overdetermined" by speculative capitalism. I agree, and apart from India's symbiotic relationship with the US, I would like to see India develop a special relationship with Cuba and with the global academic community to take patents away from speculator

"Biocapital" by Kaushik Sunder Rajan is an impressive book that offers a sophisticated analysis of the biotech industry. Written as an MIT graduate student well-grounded in Marxian economics and Foucauldian social theories, Mr. Rajan's ethnographic study compares and contrasts biotech companies in the U.S. and India to illuminate how industrial practices are shaped by a myriad of economic and cultural forces. Among the many insights produced in this fascinating study, the author convincingly demonstrates how the so-called 'life sciences' are representative of a new phase of capitalism that is characterized by the temporality of our postmodern time. Mr. Rajan discusses how biotech is changing relationships and practices between public and private entities. He explains that high tech capitalism is dependent upon information in order to innovate and produce; traditionally, this service was fulfilled by publicly-funded research institutions. But the speed at which the biotech industry competes has blurred these boundaries; the race to map and "own" the human genome that pitted the National Institute of Health against Celera Genomics is a case in point. The author explores struggles over privacy and ownership rights, finding that governments are responding to these pressures by behaving more like corporations. For example, the U.S. has seen an explosion in partnerships between universities and private corporations while the Indian state has sought to retain genetic property rights for its public hospitals. In this sense, Mr. Rajan's narrative positions the biotech industry squarely in the vanguard of contemporary global economic and institutional change. Mr. Rajan's extensive comparative analysis reveals how such dynamics play out in markedly different ways in local contexts. In the U.S., the author describes how messianic corporate leaders hype their miracle drugs as salvationary promise; venture capital sometimes finances ritualistic displays of excess that intends to inscribe corporate brands on the minds of investors and employees. The author explains that a reverence for free market capitalism and the fetish of personalized medicine compels investors to risk massive amounts of money on little more than the promise of scientific discovery. However, the process of calling the future into the present creates a tension between the promise and the reality, a problem that is addressed by corporate public relations departments -- including marketing campaigns that are aimed at introducing remedies for consumer patients-in-waiting at progressively earlier stages of intervention. In India, Mr. Rajan traces technocapitalism to the postcolonial drive to invest in science as a path to empowering the independent state. Consequently, he finds that Indian entrepreneurship is much more conservative than in the U.S. In fact, many Indian companies tend to engage in production or research work on a contractual basis for western businesses. The author discusse

Sunder Rajan expertly disassembles and reconstitutes the rapidly growing global industry behind "life sciences" - showing that life itself has become a new form of capital, or biocapital. In contrast to labor, wealth or materials, biocapital realizes its value through explicit ownership of the intellectual property locked away within living things. Sunder Rajan convincingly demonstrates, by situating himself in both American and Indian "life science" companies, that the ultimate ownership, transfer and wealth-creation that intellectual property (IP) provides does not always fall to the expected recepients. (Full disclosure. I and my company are featured extensively in one chapter of this book.)