Abstract
In this contribution, I decribe some of the key mutations occuring in contemporary biopolitics, suggesting they are linked to changes in the styles of thought, objects, forms of organization and technologies of the contemporary life sciences, and to their intense capitlization. I name these molecularization, optimization, subjectification, expertise, and bioeconomics. I suggest that these are giving rise to a new molecular ontology of life, a ‘flattened’ biomedical epistemology, and circuits of vitality, in which the elements of life are accorded a new mobility. Vitality can now be decomposed, stabilized, frozen, banked, stored, commoditized, accumulated, exchanged, traded across time, across space, across organs and species, across diverse contexts and enterprises in the service of both health and wealth. I suggest that we have seen the birth of a new ‘somatic’ sense of ourselves, which extends to self and identity itself – hence we are becoming ‘neurochemical selves’. Our corporeal existence has gained unrival salience in our conduct of our lives – our ‘Lebensführung’ is now shaped by what I term a somatic ethic. In conclusion, I argue that there is an ‘elective affinity’ between this somatic ethic and the ‘spirit of biocapital’.
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Notes
This paper is based on my presentation for the first Social Theory & Health Annual Lecture, given in London on 12 October 2006. In turn this talk was based on the Introduction to The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity, PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton, 2006
From the 1960s to the 1980s, this threat to the authority of the clinician was responded to by a number of attempts to develop a philosophy of medical practice from the standpoint of the clinician at the bedside, and to give a philosophical and conceptual justification for the priority of clinical judgement: see, for example,Engelhardt and Towers (1979), Feinstein (1967). Clinical Judgment. Baltimore, Williams & Wilkins. I am grateful to Uffe Juul Jensen for putting the issue so clearly in a seminar presentation entitled ‘‘We really need a whole new philosophy of medical knowledge' – and more' given to the BIOS Centre in November 2005 See Jensen (1987) was also part of this movement to defend the primacy of clinical practice.
I use the term ‘molar’ here in the sense that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘Of or relating to mass; acting on or by means of large masses of matter. Often contrasted with molecular’.
This, of course, is the ‘clinical gaze’ whose archaeology is traced by Michel Foucault in Birth of the Clinic Foucault (1973); a gaze beautifully illustrated in the catalogue of the Spectacular Bodies Exhibition mounted in London in 2000 Kemp and Wallace (2000).
For an introduction to PXE, see http://www.geneclinics.org/profiles/pxe
For an analysis of the invention of just one of the technologies, the polymerizing chain reaction, see Rabinow (1996b).
Others have noted this shift and analyzed it in various ways, some drawing from literary or cultural studies, and focusing on shifting metaphors and tropes in the language and writing of prominent biologists. See, for example Doyle (1997).
No doubt the fragmentation of the body into transferable tissues that could, often with difficulty, be freed from their marks of origin and re-utilized in other bodies, began with blood and blood products. A useful chronology of blood transfusion can be found at http://www.bloodbook.com/trans-history.html. See also Starr (2002).
Tim Tully's work with his company Helicon on the development of a memory enhancing compound based on his work with fruit flies, received extensive publicity in April 2002, when it was dubbed Viagra for the Brain: see http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0204/060_print.html
Thanks to Btihaj Ajana for suggestion this formulation – becoming more biological – which also has resonances with Sarah Franklin's remarks on ‘mo biology’ in her inaugural lecture at the LSE on 24 November 2005. Ian Hacking, in a brief account of different conceptions of the cyborg, points out that the word was first used in 1960 by two multitalented individuals. The first was Manfred Clynes, who had carried out extensive prior work on computer assisted biofeedback control, before he developed the technology for the CAT scan, while working in the laboratory of Nathan Kline at Rockland State Hospital Hacking (1998). Kline and Clynes’ cyborg was invented at the behest of NASA to free humans in space from the business of continually checking and adjusting to the environment: ‘The point was to supplement a human being, to make it possible to exist quaman, as man ‘not changing his nature, his human nature that evolved here.’ (Hacking op. cit.: 209; he is quoting Clynes from p. 47 of Gray et al. (1995).
Adriana Petryna has also used this term, but in a more restrictive sense, as I discuss presently: (Petryna, 2002).
For two of the very many examples of such groups see the Chromosome 18 Registry & Research Society at http://www.chromosome18.org/Registry/Default.aspx or the Genetic Alliance at http://www.geneticalliance.org/
See Rose (2004).
I am leaving to one side the areas of crime control and psychiatry where these famous ethical principles have only limited purchase.
Roger Cooter suggests that the term ‘bioethics’ appeared in print only in 1970 in an article by Van Renselaer Potter and was taken up independently by R Sargeant Shriver and André Hellgers when they named the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics in Georgetown, Washington, DC, in 1971 – the former ‘saw it as a new discipline combining science and philosophy’ while ‘the Georgetown philosophers and theologians regarded it as a branch of applied ethics’. Controversies over medical experiments and other criticisms of medical practice and research in the 1960s and 1970s ‘facilitated the empowerment of ‘bioethicists’ to advise on the ethical limits of medicine and biotechnology’ Cooter (2004); cf. Potter (1970). See also Jonsen (1998). Outside the US certainly before 1990's such reflections were either the province of ethicists or more usually of medical lawyers, as, for example, in Ian Kennedy's 1980 series of Reith Lectures in the UK criticizing the disguised moralism underpinning many medical decisions. For Kennedy, bioethics is a rather unappealing term used in the US for what he prefers to see as mixtures of ethic, law, philosophy, sociology and politics as they relate to medicine Kennedy (1981).
For a compendium on the ‘official history’ of medical ethics in the US and the role of the American Medical Association, see Baker et al. (1999).
Many of these questions are discussed in a special issue of The Tocqueville Review, 2003, 23, 2.
For a critical analysis of the involvement of bioethicists with the US pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology corporations, see Elliot (2001).
ELSI, Ethical, Legal and Social Implications. The Human Genome Project institutionalized this trend, seeking to deflect social and political criticism by setting aside a proportion of its funds for work on ELSI issues.
Once more it is necessary to stress that there is nothing novel in close relations between industrial corporations and the development of scientific research, outside and inside universities. Indeed the image of scientific knowledge as developing within the sequestered space of the university laboratory, funded by public moneys, detached from commercial imperatives, mobilized only by Mertonian norms of dis-interestedness and the like applies, if at all, only to a small number of disciplines in an exceptional period of 50 years or so in the mid-20th century.
I have argued elsewhere that images of the development of scientific disciplines that trace a vector running from the laboratory to society described in the language of ‘application’ are misleading Rose (1985).
As Franklin points out, in Volume 3 of Capital, Marx discusses the capitalization of cattle and sheep breeding in his account of the process in which capital became an independent and dominant force in agriculture; Franklin suggests that, in many ways, the cloning of Dolly the sheep – made possible only through the investment of venture capital and with the aim of creating transgenic ‘bioreactor’ sheep that could create marketable enzymes for treating human diseases in their milk – binds the oldest definitions of capital as ‘stock’ to the newest forms that this takes in contemporary biocapital. Human aspirations thus become literally ‘embodied’ in the vital living existence and capacities of capitalizable entities. This, then, can serve as an exemplar for many other instances of the capitalization of ‘stock’ or ‘live stock’ in the bioeconomy, for example in the capitalization of stem cells: Franklin (2006).
For some examples, see the ‘Biocapital Hotbed Maps’ at http://www.biospace.com/biotechhotbeds.aspx. The collection of papers edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock began to develop the idea of biocapital in intriguing ways, pointing to the new hybrids of knowledge, technology and life involved in patenting, sequencing, mapping, marketing, purifying, branding, marketing and publicizing new life forms: these studies contributed greatly to my own, less ethnographic approach to these issues: Franklin and Lock, (2003). See also Franklin (2006).
Charis Thompson developed the idea of promissory capitalism in her work on what she termed ‘the biotech mode of (re)production’: Thompson (2005), especially Chapter 6. The idea that speculative, risk and venture capital depend upon issuing promissory notes against the hope of future returns has long had a central place in Marxist and other studies of the rise of capitalist economies.
The OECD put it thus in 1996: ‘The OECD economies are increasingly based on knowledge and information. Knowledge is now recognized as the driver of productivity and economic growth, leading to a new focus on the role of information, technology and learning in economic performance. The term ‘knowledge-based economy’ stems from this fuller recognition of the place of knowledge and technology in modern OECD economies' Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (1996).
Available from 10 Downing Street under Prime Minister's Speeches, at http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1548.asp, accessed 11 August 2005.
See also http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/biotech/iceland/new.html. In a Press Release in Reykjavik, Iceland, dated August 2, 2005 deCODE genetics report, in their Second Quarter 2005 Financial Results: ‘Net loss for the second quarter 2005 was $13.3 million, unchanged from the second quarter 2004. For the 6 months of 2005, net loss was $30.3 million, compared to $25.3 million for the same period last year. This is the result principally of increased spending on the company's drug development programs. Basic and diluted net loss per share was $0.25 for the second quarter this year, unchanged from the same quarter last year. Basic and diluted net loss per share for the first 6 months of 2005 was $0.56, compared to $0.48 for the same period in 2004.’ See http://www.decode.com/ accessed on 11 August 2005.
For the Estonian Genome Project, see http://www.geenivaramu.ee/index.php?show=main&lang=eng.
Of course, especially in the US, one should not neglect the ‘opportunities and challenges in biodefence’ following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: the Department of Health and Human Services spending on biodefence increased almost 14-fold from 2001 to 2005, and the Bioshield Act of 2004 earmarked £5.6 billion for US countermeasures against pathogens.
This outsourcing is driven by the great increase in numbers of clinical trials for product development, by competitive pressures for speed and economy in drug development, by the ethical and other restrictions that hamper the recruitment of trial subjects (for instance the ban on the use of prisoners for much testing of pharmaceutical products inn the US) and by the growth of commercial organizations contacting to carry out drug trials for profit. Many of these issues are insightfully analyzed in Petryna (2005). References in this excellent paper guided me to a number of other sources: Some indication of the growth in this area is given in a report on the Globalization of Clinical Trials by the Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services, in 2001, stated that just 41 foreign clinical investigators conducted drug research in 1980 under the FDA procedure known as ‘Investigational New Drug Applications’ – by 1990, that number had grown to 271, and by 1999, to 4458 Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (2001). The Globalization of Clinical Trials: A Growing Challenge in Protecting Human Subjects. Boston, Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. Bonnie Brescia estimates that ‘As of 2000, there were approximately 7,500 clinical projects in the R&D pipeline worldwide, according to IMS Health. By 2003, analysts estimate the total number will grow to more than 10,000 clinical projects worldwide. CenterWatch reports that for each new drug application to FDA, pharma companies must conduct an average of 68 studies (Phases I–III) that need a total of 4300 volunteers. With the expected increase in global R&D projects over the next year, the number of patients needed for enrollment is expected to grow by 15 percent annually…. In 2000, an estimated 86 percent of all clinical studies failed to enroll the required number of patients on time. And on average, US clinical studies are delayed by 366 days. With the daily out-of-pocket cost for a clinical study at roughly $37,000, those delays are significant. Combine those expenses with the cost of losing out on daily product sales averaging $1.3 million-up to $11 million for blockbuster drugs-and timely recruitment becomes a huge consideration.’ Brescia (2002). Many have been very critical of such practices. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/issues/bodyhunters/ accessed 9 August 2005. See also Kelleher (2004)
In the 1990s, the research in China involving the French company GENSET and the US based Millennium Pharmaceuticals became particularly controversial, see Sleeboom (2005). However, commercial organizations have developed a business model based around such collections – see, for example, Asterand, based in Detroit ‘the leading supplier of human tissue in the world, whose ‘ worldwide network of donor sites has enabled collection of over 200,000 human tissue samples reflecting every area of pharmacologic interest.’: http://www.asterand.com/Services/. On controversial developments in Tonga, see http://www.ipcb.org/issues/human_genetics/human_populations/tonga/autogen_buys.html accessed on 23 August 2005.
Sarah Franklin has pointed acutely to the way in which biotechnology corporations themselves now seek to internalize these ethical considerations in their business models and their artifacts, in what she terms ‘ethical biocapital’: Franklin (2003).
As Weber himself argues in the final paragraph of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber (1930).
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Rose, N. Molecular Biopolitics, Somatic Ethics and the Spirit of Biocapital. Soc Theory Health 5, 3–29 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700084
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700084