Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of BIOCAPITAL: THE CONSTITUTION OF POSTGENOMIC LIFE (2006).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Biocapital" is excellent. It offers new insight into both late capitalism and the life sciences and also provides material and arguments for rethinking foundational concepts such as 'valuation' and 'exchange.'"--Kim Fortun, author of "Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Biocapital

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Capitalisms and Biotechnologies.......................................................................11. Exchange and Value: Contradictions in Market Logic in American and Indian Genome Enterprises.....................392. Life and Debt: Global and Local Political Ecologies of Biocapital................................................773. Vision and Hype: The Conjuration of Promissory Biocapitalist Futures.............................................1074. Promise and Fetish: Genomic Facts and Personalized Medicine, or Life Is a Business Plan..........................1385. Salvation and Nation: Underlying Belief Structures of Biocapital.................................................1826. Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups: The Story of an E-learning Company..................................................234Coda: Surplus and Symptom...........................................................................................277Notes...............................................................................................................289References..........................................................................................................315Index...............................................................................................................327

Chapter One

Contradictions in Market Logic in American and Indian Genome Enterprises

In March 1999, undergraduates of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) belonging to the Harvard-MIT Hippocratic Society organized a conference titled "Genetic Technology and Society." This brought together leading biotech scientists and entrepreneurs with politicians, antibiotech activists, religious leaders, and bioethicists to debate some of the social issues arising from biotechnology. It was clearly an uncomfortable venue for a number of the attending scientists, academic and corporate, who were evidently not used to presenting their achievements on the same panel as nonscientists who shared less sanguine views of the scientists' efforts than they themselves did.

One of the attending scientist-entrepreneurs was Kari Stefansson, founder and chief executive officer of the Iceland-based genome company DeCode Genetics. The pitch for this company was that Iceland, by virtue of its purported genetic homogeneity, provided an ideal site for population genomics experiments. What in fact made it an especially good site for such experiments was the existence in the country of excellent national medical records dating back to the early twentieth century, coupled with a wealth of genealogical information thanks to a population who took the tracing of their ancestry seriously.

Just as private genome companies in the United States such as Celera Genomics were creating controversy in 1998 (in their case because of their stated desire to patent the DNA sequences that they generated), so too was 1998 a controversial year for genomics in Iceland. This is because the Icelandic parliament had given DeCode exclusive rights to create a genomic database of the Icelandic population by collecting DNA samples and elucidating their genetic sequence, and further by coupling that genotype information to the health records of the population maintained by the state. This venture, called the Health Sector Database, presumed the consent of the Icelandic population. Instead of obtaining the informed consent of each potential participant in the database, DeCode allowed individuals to opt out of it. Unless an Icelander actively opted out of the database, his or her medical information was presumed to be a part of it. Not surprisingly, DeCode's efforts were becoming hugely controversial, not just in Iceland but in debates among American bio-ethicists, many of whom felt that it was inappropriate for a single company to own exclusive rights to a nation's genetic information.

As a graduate student with nothing to lose, I had e-mailed Stefansson before his arrival in Cambridge in the hope that I might be able to meet with him during the conference, and as expected had not received a reply. At a reception at the end of the first day of the conference, I met him in person, tall and elegant in a light gray Armani suit that matched his silvery beard. I told him that he had not responded to my e-mail, for which he apologized profusely, stating that he received in excess of two hundred e-mail messages a day, but that "we must talk." He suggested that we have lunch together on the following day, just after his own session.

The next day, Stefansson gave a wonderfully sculpted presentation on DeCode, in which he talked about its scientific and business potential, and also about the great care taken by the company to behave in an ethical fashion. He was particularly eloquent regarding the measures taken to protect the privacy of all individuals who were included in the Health Sector Database. One of his copanelists was a soft-spoken bioethicist from the Cambridge-based Council for Responsible Genetics named Martin Teitel, who raised many of the standard objections that opponents of DeCode's efforts had been raising in the previous few months. Stefansson exploded in the middle of Teitel's talk, saying that Teitel was not qualified to speak about the scientific aspects of DeCode's work, as he was not a scientist, and did not have the right to pass judgment on an Icelandic matter, as he was American. Teitel responded gently that if he could not, as a nonscientist, talk about science, and could not, as an American, talk about Iceland, then by that logic, Stefansson did not have the authority to talk about ethics, since Teitel was trained as an ethicist, and Stefansson was not. Stefansson realized that he had made an error, dramatically buried his face in his hands, shook his head, put his arm around Teitel, and apologized to him in public.

After the panel, I hovered expectantly around Stefansson for the promised lunch, but he swept past me, grabbed an associate by the hand, and stomped off with him, saying firmly as he went, "We must get ourselves a bioethicist!"

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites

The circulation of capital is intimately tied to questions of value. Value is one of those nice double-jointed words that always already imply two different things. On the one hand, "value" implies the market value that gets realized through processes of exchange. On the other, it implies the nonmarket values that might be called, in shorthand that has led to the term's own black-boxing as it has been used by members of the life science community, ethics. One of the things I show in this chapter is how market valuation depends on notions of value that are deemed somehow "external" to the market, while the "ethical" gets increasingly encroached on, co-opted by, and made answerable to, systems of market valuation.

One of the key transformations in the life sciences that genomics marks, as I explained in the introduction, is that biology increasingly becomes an information science. Therefore an analysis of biocapital involves asking at the outset where value resides as biology becomes an information science, and what work and whose agencies are required to create these...