Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets Kaushik Sunder Rajan Duke University Press 2012 (original) (raw)
Related papers
BioScience, 2013
The abundance of high-throughput biological data (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) in existing databases and literature has enabled systems level viewpoints of biological data analysis. As visualization tools to support the analytical processes of biologists continue to emerge, questions remain as to the efficacy of existing visualization tools and the extent to which the analytical processes employed by biologists are understood by tool developers. Traditional interviewing and user observation techniques to address these questions during tool evaluation and development are inherently subject to certain shortcomings, namely, the inclusion of feedback from expert biologists at only some stages of the development/review process and the lack of an in vivo approach during user observation. To address these issues, we present an interdisciplinary approach to tool review and development with preliminary results regarding the identification of shortcomings in existing visualization tools, an understanding of the analytical processes employed by biologists, and observations on the utility that emerging technologies (i.e., large, high-resolution displays) provide in biological data analysis. We include a discussion of the results to address the benefits provided by the chosen approach, to provide a framework for the development of tools to support the analytical processes of biologists, and to explore the potential of large, high-resolution displays as a mitigating factor in supporting the analysis of highthroughput biological data.
Theorizing the bioeconomy: Biovalue, biocapital, bioeconomics or … what?
Science, Technology and Human Values 38(3): 299-327, 2013
In the policy discourses of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Commission (EC), modern biotechnology and the life sciences are represented as an emerging ‘‘bioeconomy’’ in which the latent value underpinning biological materials and products offers the opportunity for increasing our wealth and our health. This articulation of modern biotechnology and economic development is an emerging scholarly field producing numerous ‘‘bio-concepts.’’ Over the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to theorize this relationship between biotechnologies and their capitalization. The article highlights some of the underlying ambiguities in these conceptualizations, especially in the fetishization of everything ‘‘bio.’’ We offer an alternative view of the bioeconomy by rethinking the theoretical importance of several key economic and financial processes.
Third World Quarterly, 2001
Advances in modern biotechnology have provided researchers with tools that are now opening up new avenues for consumer products and medicinal treatments. But the advances made in this industry are still dependent upon natural resources as the major components in solving some of the puzzles scientists are exploring. Biological extracts and specimens provide the needed resources for research on products, therapies and procedures that could assist people in their everyday lives or in their battles against disease. At the same time the research is also a windfall for the biotechnology companies themselves, because the potential exists for new products and procedures to generate billions of dollars in corporate revenues. As a result the trade in biological specimens has increased, with researchers continually seeking new sources of specimens. The goal of our research is to explore two fundamental questions related to the biotechnology industry:
6 The social construction of the biotech industry
New genetics, new social formations, 2007
6 The social construction of the biotech industry Kean Birch Introduction Because the biotech industry is still in its infancyhaving 'as a whole... never been profitable'(Ernst & Young 2003: 5)it represents an ideal research subject in both economic sociology and science and ...
Cult Med Psychiat, 2001
This essay discusses three interpretive concepts that link bioscience and biotechnology to society: the medical imaginary, the biotechnical embrace, and the clinical narrative. Drawing on research carried out in the United States and internationally on the culture and political economy of biomedicine, the essay examines these interpretive concepts through examples from studies of patients, clinicians, scientists, and venture capitalists engaged in the worlds of oncology and high technology medicine. These interpretive concepts contribute to an understanding of how the affective dimensions of the experience of patients, clinicians and scientists invested in high technology medicine are fundamental to bioscience and biomedicine, and to the political economy and culture of hope. KEY WORDS: biotechnology, clinical narrative, culture of medicine, oncology Cultural and social studies of biomedicine and biotechnology lend themselves to examining what anthropologists Fischer (1991) and Marcus (1998) have referred to as "multiple regimes of truth," and thus the call for multi-sited and-implicitly or explicitly-comparative ethnographic research in the areas of science and technology. Although acknowledging the importance of "cultural pasts" and "cultural differences," Fischer argues that today "it is increasingly artificial to speak of local perspectives in isolation from the global system. .. the world historical political economy" and "transnational cultural processes" (Fischer 1991: 526). This formulation echoes recent trends in anthropological studies of biomedicine and biotechnologies, and the whole domain of scientific research and clinical culture. Such studies highlight the dynamic relationship, tensions and exchanges between the local worlds in which medicine is taught, practiced, organized and consumed and the global worlds of the production of knowledge, technologies, markets, and clinical standards. Although we may speak about a plurality of biomedicines that are socially and culturally situated rather than about a single unified body of knowledge and practice, such local worlds are nevertheless "transnational" in character-neither cultural isolates nor biomedical versions of indigenous healing traditions. Rather local meanings and social arrangements are overlaid by global standards and technologies in nearly all aspects of local biomedicine.
In this paper it is argued that the modern economy, as it transforms itself into a knowledgebased economy, loses much of the immunity from societal influences it once enjoyed, at least in advanced societies. This implies that the boundaries of the economy as a social system become more porous and fluid. Among the traffic that increasingly moves across the system-specific boundaries of the economy, from the opposite direction as it were, are cultural practices and beliefs that were heretofore perceived as alien to taken-for-granted conventions of economic conduct and the kinds of preferences immanent within the economic system. The enlargement of the economy is examined with reference to biotechnological products and processes. I will call these changes the "moralization" or "decommercialization" of the production and consumption process. The moralization of the market and of production ultimately depends on the growing role of knowledge in economic affairs as well as the exceptional rise in affluence and, in its course, consumer sovereignty.
The Myth of the Biotech Revolution1
TRENDS in Biotechnology, 2009
The existence of a medical'biotech revolution'has been widely accepted and promoted by academics, consultants, industry and government. It has generated expectations about significant improvements in the drug discovery process, health care and economic development that underpin a considerable amount of policy-making. This chapter presents empirical evidence, from a variety of indicators, which shows that a range of outputs have failed to keep pace with increased R&D spending and rather than producing revolutionary ...
Reconstructing Biotechnologies: critical social analyses
The main subject of this publication is the co-creation of society and biotechnology. The authors do not treat society and biotechnology as separate domains, instead they consider technologies as socially constructed. The main focus of this publication is on agro-biotechnologies and the contributors present perspectives for reconstruction both from and in 'the North' and 'the South'. Reconstructing biotechnologies offers a range of critical social analyses confronting the actuality of biotechnology with the potentialities of its social reconstruction. In doing that, the book develops and merges literature from four different disciplines, namely (i) critical theory and its analyses of technology and power, (ii) political economy, critically assessing the interrelationship between economy, politics and technology, (iii) social constructivism, which holds that technology is the product of agency and knowledge systems, and (iv) the analysis of rural society and agrarian technologies in rural sociology. Reconstructing biotechnologies introduces exciting approaches and examples into the social reshaping of biotechnologies. It brings together critical examinations of contemporary biotechnology development and puts forward possible alternatives written by critical scholars. The contributions in this publication are for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines such as social and political sciences, science and technology studies, and development studies. The editors of the book are associated with the Social Sciences Department of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the Graduate School of Economics of Kyoto University in Japan. They have published extensively on social and political theory and biotechnology.