Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life by Kaushik Sunder Rajan (review)

In a biotechnological utopia, with the DNA of the entire humanity mapped and sequenced, scientists and pharmaceutical companies can finally work together to provide highly customized diagnoses and cures for diseases and genetic defects. While corporations, universities, and governments rushed into this sector in recent decades, the genomics industry has been creating new dynamics as well as hegemonies as it becomes increasingly plugged into the global political economy. In contrast to the industrial economy of material products, the world of the genome industry becomes one that is determined by the intangibles of knowledge, information, and promises.

From witnessing an openly heated exchange between a corporate chief and a bioethicist in a conference in the United States to negotiating for access to interview subjects in Hyderabad in the face of deliberately bureaucratic hurdles, Kaushik Sunder Rajan attempts to come to grips with the complexities of the brave new world of genomics. Seeking to further Michel Foucault's biopolitics as part of the active use of disciplinary mechanisms to regulate the populace, Biocapital lays out and conceptualizes the cultural logic of the circulation of capital in the biotechnological age.

Spending five years between 1999 and 2004 in his fieldwork into the emerging upstream genetics research and mapping companies and the more traditional downstream pharmaceutical companies, Rajan tries to establish a grammar for biocapital. Decoding the language of truth-claims of science, corporate jargons, and state ambitions interlayered with the messier idiosyncrasies and ambitions of entrepreneurs, CEOs, scientists, and politicians, he illuminates the epistemic and discursive undercurrent in global capital formation and circulation through the genomics industry. Perhaps the most appealing section of Rajan's research has been the skeptical treatment of the hyperpositive pronouncements and promises of industry players both linguistically and ideologically as mechanisms of articulating "genomic fetishism."

Nonetheless, these articulations do have real geophysical and material implications. As Rajan brings readers to extravagant industry conferences and company parties in the United States as well as science and technology parks in India, one sees the evident manifestations of the structural shifts with the introduction of what the author describes as "biocapital." Here, he demonstrates the persistence of global Marxian inequalities in which the new economy of genomics continues ride on the old circuits of power between the third and first worlds: countries such as India play a supplementary role in providing the raw population base as experimental subjects for mapping the human genome for Western-based multinationals that would in turn process, brand, repackage, and patent new and costly databases and drugs to be sold back to the developing world. Interviews and conversations with local officials and the diaspora in Silicon Valley reveal that, nonetheless, the Indian participants, buttressed implicitly by a primordial sense of civilization, like the messianic underpinnings of their US counterparts in the industry, do not seem keen to remain in a subordinate position for long.

A problem with this volume is a visibly hurried attempt to convert a detailed doctoral dissertation into a published monograph that does not require tiresome elucidations of concepts, repetitive justifications on the organization of chapters, and enthusiastic references to social and cultural theorists from Slavoj Žižek to Bruno Latour. In addition, Rajan's research took place during an early stage of development of the genomics industry, before it had taken an estimated 15 years and billions of dollars to map all 3.3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Like the democratization of cyberspace in the Internet revolution, the processing cost and speed of genomics have dropped dramatically to such an extent that it is possible to sequence an entire human genome for less than USD $100. Nevertheless, his attempts to merge a multiplicity of Marxist and Foucauldian theories can be commendable. Furthermore, despite the seemingly optimistic proliferation of data in the information-scapes, the tentacles of neoliberal global capitalism persist in new manifestations. Hence, as much as it is now a narrative of the development of biocapital from...