Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise by Nicolas Rasmussen
The rise of biotechnology is a history told many times over, and told in both celebratory and dismissive, comic and tragic modes. Did biotech revolutionize the life sciences and create new tools for curing disease and producing value? Or was science essentially corrupted by its submission to venture capital and market forms of value assessment? In Gene Jockeys, Nicolas Rasmussen, like a handicapper, aims for an even race between the goods and evils of biotech. On the one hand, he argues that biotech firms offered an environment that was not radically opposed to the norms of the academy—“quasi-academic,” as he phrases it (p. 184). Above all, the biotech firms encouraged the publication of scientific papers: to keep scientist employees satisfied, to keep in touch with broader research fields, and above all, to further hype the reputation of the firm. Here Rasmussen gives too much weight to the rather unsurprising fact that scientists working in industry remained concerned with scientific credit, and he fails to identify the significant mutations of vocation and ethos that Paul Rabinow and others uncovered in the biotech milieu (Making PCR, 1996).
On the other hand, Rasmussen suggests that despite the truly innovative work of scientists in the biotech sector, much of the value that they produced was—to cite one of his favored metaphors—“low-hanging fruit.” Decades of publicly funded university research during the cold war had left an archive of scientific knowledge that was quickly mined for patentable molecules. For Rasmussen, an “overgenerous” (p. 4) intellectual property regime enabled a few well-placed individuals to profit from the accumulated results of public research. This concept leads to Rasmussen’s most provocative claim, laid out in his conclusion. “We can never again expect the measure of business success so far recorded”:
Any efforts to reproduce the remarkable, creative atmosphere of the first two decades when molecular biology met the business world—dependent as it was on the conjunction of ephemeral conditions in science, culture, law, and business—would be as futile as capturing a breaking wave in a bottle (p. 191).
As I write from Singapore, where the government is furiously attempting to turn the tropical city-state into a biotech hub, the implications of this claim, if true, are extraordinary. Indeed, Singapore’s $500 million Biopolis could be a very costly incarnation of this bottle set out to catch the breakers.
Mostly, however, Rasmussen’s Gene Jockeys eschews historical judgment for pace: thoroughbred pace. The titular metaphor aptly captures the tone and mood of the book’s narrative, which gallops from the 1920s [End Page 700] through to the 1990s in a breakneck 180 pages. Individuals, firms, events, methods, technologies appear and disappear as the story races by. As a result, despite Rasmussen’s occasional allusion to the concepts and approaches from anthropology or sociology of science, the work lacks the careful attention to the displacement of “epistemic things” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) that characterizes the best laboratory histories and ethnographies.
Lyle Fearnley is assistant professor of anthropology at Singapore University of Technology and Design.
