Bioethics at Stake: The Challenge of Corporate Science and Biocapitalism

Nowadays, it is a common and recurrent intellectual task to rethink ethical and political concepts and theories so as to readjust them to the constraints and possibilities of the so-called age of globalization. Old and new fields of knowledge, such as ethics and bioethics, are revisited to test the applicability of their paradigms when setting out social challenges. Lately, this rethinking has had to cope with the obsolescence of theories (of justice, for example) that were formed at a time when the nation-state was the implicit context.

Nancy Fraser has proposed a theoretical strategy called reframing, or the present-day need to identify different scales of justice—minimal, local, national, transnational, and global justice—to identify legitimate claims that do not find a public or institutional space of confrontation, deliberation, and resolution (Fraser 2005). The demands of global justice require new public arenas and institutions that normalize and adjust the vindications of human rights to a new global scenario. The fact is that the Westphalian and Keynesian framework of the nation-state has been superseded by the global economy, which puts pressure on and determines national and transnational politics, including scientific politics.

In general, I agree with M. Julia Bertomeu's diagnosis regarding the present state of bioethics. The emergence of biocapitalism and its challenge to basic human and environmental rights is a global phenomenon that is "invisible" to traditional bioethics, which presupposes a liberal paradigm and largely focuses on the clinical relationship between doctors and patients and on the ethical dilemmas concerning the beginning and the end of life. The institutional deficit and the inability to analyze structural injustices in society—related to gender, class, race, sexuality, and so forth—are the result of the decontextualized and ahistorical approach, as Bertomeu points out, of "standard bioethics." One of the original sins of this discipline is the preponderance of "experts" and, in its process of institutionalization, its divorce from social movements such as feminism, environmentalism, and working-class organizations, among others, which makes it difficult to hear the voices of under-developed countries concerning North–South inequalities. Bertomeu highlights the effect of the private health care system in the United States as a constitutive presupposition of the liberal model. In addition, the abstraction and the excessive formalization of theories of distributive justice, all of them related to health assistance, have fostered the depoliticization of bioethical issues. The need to include an analysis of social, cultural, and economic structural asymmetries is the main aim of a global bioethics when coping with the North–South gap. The field of bioethics must deal with bioeconomics and biopolitics, not only in the Foucaultian sense—which associates it with "biopower," and thus, with the control and regulation of life through the institutions of state power—but as oriented in the sense of the democratization of transnational scientific policies. Issues of justice, such as universal access to health care, should take priority. The democratization of biotechnoscience and the possibility of thinking of a bio-citizenship (Plows and Boddington 2006) are emergent issues that should be included in the agenda of a global bioethics.

In this brief response, I add two considerations related to global bioethics and its new research aims. First, I try to show how an erroneous and obsolete concept of science is a serious obstacle in understanding the ongoing development of biotechnology. Second, I focus on some features of biocapitalism, a notion that finds scarce attention in bioethics.

Biotechnoscience is no longer a mere "academic science"

As Bertomeu points out, "standard bioethics" is blind to contexts and institutions. I think that one of the main problems is its inability to understand the changes and mutations in the institutional structure and the functioning of "big" science in, at least, the last four decades. Bioethics did not reflect enough on ". . . a change in the aspirations and expectations of professional civilian scientists, a reconfiguration of the structure and function of the science profession, a relocation of the ownership and governance of scientific research, a reorientation of science policies and the priorities of research, and...