The value of life: Somatic ethics & the spirit of biocapital

Daedalus

Volumn 137, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 36-48

  Rose, Nikolas ^a,b  

^a Department of Sociology ^*

^b LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40549131882     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/daed.2008.137.1.36     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. This paper draws on Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton, NJ. : Princeton University Press, 2006).
2. Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel, "The Value of Health and Longevity," NBER Working Paper 11405, June 2005, http://www.nber.org/ papers/Wii.405 (accessed March 20, 2006).
3. For example, W. Kip Viscusi, "The Value of Life," New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, 2nd ed., 2005, http://ssrn.com/abstract=827205.
4. http://ostpxweb.dot.gov/policy/EconStrat/treatmentoflife.htm#1 (accessed March 12, 2006).
5. http://www.cursor.org/stories/afghandead.htm (accessed March 12, 2006).
6. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/o6/19/6ominutes/main559472.shtml.
7. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve : Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York : Free Press, 1994).
8. Harriet Ritvo, "Possessing Mother Nature : Genetic Capital, in the Eighteenth Century,"in John Brewer and Susan Staves, Early Modern Conceptions of Property (New York: Routledge, 1996).
9. "An Invitation to Join the Decatur Beef Alliance" (speech, Commercial Agriculture Producer's College, Oberlin, Ky., November 14, 2000), http://agebb.missouri.edu/commag/inst/decbeef.htm.
10. http://www.thehindu.com/2006/01/16/stories/2006011600810200.htm (accessed March 20, 2006).
11. Richard Horton, editor of the influential medical journal The Lancet, provides an over-view of some of the key issues ; R. Horton, Health Wars : On the Global Front Lines of Modern Medicine (New York : New York Review of Books, 2004).
12. Once more I must stress that there is nothing novel in itself in close relations between industrial corporations and the development of scientific research, outside and inside universities. 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 disinterestedness applies, if at all, only to a few disciplines during an exceptional period in the mid-twentieth century. Novelty, today, lies in the particular configuration taking shape around the life sciences.
13. I have argued elsewhere that images of the development of scientific disciplines that portray a path from the laboratory to society, described in the language of 'application,' are misleading, especially in those domains that have what Michel Foucault termed a "low epistemological threshold." The psychological sciences, for example, were 'disciplined' around their fields of application - in industry, the schoolroom, the military, the courtroom - and only later established in the university. Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869-1939 (Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). The impact of military priorities and funding should not be underestimated, in even the most apparently theoretical of disciplines such as mathematics.
14. The collection edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock made significant advances in our understanding of biocapital, pointing to the new hybrids of knowledge, technology, and life involved in patenting, sequencing, mapping, purifying, branding, marketing, and publicizing new life forms : these studies contributed to my own less ethnographic approach to these issues ; S. Franklin and M. Lock, eds., Remaking Life and Death : Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences (Santa Fe, N.M. : School of American Research Press, 2003). I am grateful, to Franklin for letting me read her own development of these ideas in advance of publication ;
15. S. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
16. C. Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (New York : Routledge, 2000).
17. In volume 3 of Capital, Marx points to the significance of the capitalization of cattle and sheep breeding in enabling capital, to become an independent and dominant force in agriculture. Franklin argues that the cloning of Dolly the sheep - made possible by the investment of venture capital in the hope of creating transgenic 'bioreactor' sheep to produce marketable enzymes for treating human diseases - binds the oldest definitions of capital as 'stock' to the newest forms that it takes in contemporary biocapital. Human aspirations become literally 'embodied' in living capitalizable entities; ibid.
18. The conferences of BioCapital Europe enable biotech companies to present themselves to venture capitalists, institutions, and other biotech and pharmaceutical companies looking for investment opportunities within the biotechnology market. See www.biocapitaleu-rope.com (accessed November 25, 2005).
19. See http://www.biospace.com/news_story.aspx?StoryID=20035520&full=1 (accessed November 25, 2005). There are now many such Hotbed Maps, which can be found at http://www.biospace.com/biotechhotbeds.aspx (accessed November 26, 2005). The original 1985Biotech Bay™ Map for the San Francisco Bay Area hangs on permanent display in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. BioCapital was first launched in 1996.
20. Franklin and Lock, in 2003, attributed the term 'promissory capitalism' to Charis Thompson's then-unpublished work on what she termed "the biotech mode of (reproduction"; S. Franklin and M. Lock, "Animation and Cessation : The Remaking of Life and Death," in Franklin and Lock, eds., Remaking Life and Death : Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences.
21. See C. Thompson, Making Parents : The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005), especially chap. 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 studies of the rise of capitalist economies. I draw on arguments made in my Clifford Barclay Memorial. Lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science in February 2005.
22. G. Palsson and P. Rabinow, "Iceland : The Case of a National Human Genome Project," Anthropology Today 15 (5) (1999) : 14 ;
23. H. Rose, The Commodification of Bioinformation : The Icelandic Health Sector Database (London : Wellcome Trust, 2003).
24. See also http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/biotech/iceland/new.html. In a press release of August 2, 2005, deCODE Genetics put a brave face on their progress but nonetheless reported losses in their second quarter. See http://www.decode.com (accessed August 11, 2005).
25. A. Abbott, "Sweden Sets Ethical. Standards for the Use of Genetic 'Biobanks,'" Nature 400 (July 1999) : 3 ;
26. K. Høyer, "Conflicting Notions of Personhood in Genetic Research," Anthropology Today 18 (5) (2002) : 9 -13 ;
27. K. Høyer, '"Science is Really Needed That's All I Know.' Informed Consent and. the Non-Verbal Practices of Collecting Blood for Genetic Research in Northern Sweden," New Genetics and Society 22 (3) (2003) : 229 - 244 ;
28. A. Nilsson and J. Rose, "Sweden Takes Steps to Protect Tissue Banks," Science 286 (1999): 894;
29. S. Roseli, "Sweden's Answer to Genomics Ethics (letter)," Nature 401 (September 16,1991).
30. For the Estonian Genome Project, see http://www.geenivaramu.ee/index.php? show =main&lang=eng.
31. See U.K. House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, Report on Biotechnology, 2003.
32. Ernst & Young, Resilience : America's Biotechnology Report, 2003.
33. Ernst & Young, Beyond Borders : Global Biotechnology Report, 2003.
34. And, especially in the United States, one should not neglect the "opportunities and challenges in biodefense" following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 : Department of Health and Human Services spending on biodefense increased almost fourteenfold from 2001 to 2005, and the Bioshield Act of 2004 earmarked £5.6 billion for U.S. countermeasures against pathogens.
35. Ernst & Young, Beyond Borders : Global Biotechnology Report, 2005, 35.
36. Ibid., 67.
37. M. J. Balick and P. A. Cox, Plants, People and Culture : Science of Ethnobotany (New York: Scientific American Library, 1996) ;
38. R. E. Köhler, Lords of the Fly : Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago : University of Chicago Press), 1994.
39. B. Salter and M. Jones, "Human Genetic Technologies, European Governance and the Politics of Bioethics," Nature Reviews Genetics 3 (10) (2002) : 808 - 814 ;
40. B. Salter and M. Jones, "Biobanks and Bioethics : The Politics of Legitimation, "Journal of European Public Policy 12 (4) (2005): 710-732.
41. C. Elliot, "When Pharma Goes to the Laundry : Public Relations and the Business of Medical Education," Hastings Center Report 34 (5) (2004): 18-23.
42. I have discussed the way of thinking about ethics and self-technologies developed by Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze elsewhere : G. Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1988);
43. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (London: Penguin, 1985);
44. N. Rose, Inventing Our Selves : Psychology, Power, and Personhood (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996).
45. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London : George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930), 183.