Biocapital

Author: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388006
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
Biocapital is a major theoretical contribution to science studies and political economy. Grounding his analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge. Sunder Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period spanning 1999 to 2004. He draws on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug development in the two countries, examining the practices and goals of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the process, he illuminates the global flow of ideas, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives. Sunder Rajan’s ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls technoscientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

Biocapital

Author: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822337201
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
DIVAn ethnography about the work of genome scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in biotech drug development in the United States and India./div

Lively Capital

Author: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822348314
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 523

Book Description
This collection of anthropology of science essays explores the new forms of capital, markets, ethical, legal, and intellectual property concerns associated with new forms of research in the life sciences.

Life as Surplus

Author: Melinda E. Cooper
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295990317
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences. The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy. At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.

Pharmocracy

Author: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822363132
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Continuing his pioneering theoretical explorations into the relationships among biosciences, the market, and political economy, Kaushik Sunder Rajan introduces the concept of pharmocracy to explain the structure and operation of the global hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. He reveals pharmocracy's logic in two case studies from contemporary India: the controversial introduction of an HPV vaccine in 2010, and the Indian Patent Office's denial of a patent for an anticancer drug in 2006 and ensuing legal battles. In each instance health was appropriated by capital and transformed from an embodied state of well-being into an abstract category made subject to capital's interests. These cases demonstrate the precarious situation in which pharmocracy places democracy, as India's accommodation of global pharmaceutical regulatory frameworks pits the interests of its citizens against those of international capital. Sunder Rajan's insights into this dynamic make clear the high stakes of pharmocracy's intersection with health, politics, and democracy.

Animal Capital

Author: Nicole Shukin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816653410
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
The juxtaposition of biopolitical critique and animal studies--two subjects seldom theorized together--signals the double-edged intervention of Animal Capital. Nicole Shukin pursues a resolutely materialist engagement with the "question of the animal," challenging the philosophical idealism that has dogged the question by tracing how the politics of capital and of animal life impinge on one another in market cultures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Physicians of the Future

Author: Rosalynn A. Vega
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477328688
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
The first scholarly exploration of the forums, practice, and economics of functional medicine.

The Politics of Life Itself

Author: Nikolas Rose
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691121915
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
But today normality itself is open to medical modification.

Asian Biotech

Author: Aihwa Ong
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822393204
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Providing the first overview of Asia’s emerging biosciences landscape, this timely and important collection brings together ethnographic case studies on biotech endeavors such as genetically modified foods in China, clinical trials in India, blood collection in Singapore and China, and stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. While biotech policies and projects vary by country, the contributors identify a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in biotechnology, and they highlight the ways that political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences. As ascendant nations in a region of postcolonial emergence, with an “uncanny surplus” in population and pandemics, Asian countries treat their populations as sources of opportunity and risk. Biotech enterprises are allied to efforts to overcome past humiliations and restore national identity and political ambition, and they are legitimized as solutions to national anxieties about food supplies, diseases, epidemics, and unknown biological crises in the future. Biotechnological responses to perceived risks stir deep feelings about shared fate, and they crystallize new ethical configurations, often re-inscribing traditional beliefs about ethnicity, nation, and race. As many of the essays in this collection illustrate, state involvement in biotech initiatives is driving the emergence of “biosovereignty,” an increasing pressure for state control over biological resources, commercial health products, corporate behavior, and genetic based-identities. Asian Biotech offers much-needed analysis of the interplay among biotechnologies, economic growth, biosecurity, and ethical practices in Asia. Contributors Vincanne Adams Nancy N. Chen Stefan Ecks Kathleen Erwin Phuoc V. Le Jennifer Liu Aihwa Ong Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner Kaushik Sunder Rajan Wen-Ching Sung Charis Thompson Ara Wilson

The Right to Life and the Value of Life

Author: Jon Yorke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317017730
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Book Description
This groundbreaking book is the first collection to investigate the law, political science and ethical perspectives collectively in relation to the right and value of life. Its contributions from international roster of scholars are organized around five themes: a theoretical positioning of life and death; War, armed conflict and detention; Death as punishment; Medical parameters for ending life; and medical policies for the preservation of life. In studying this issue in its contemporary contexts of "right" and "value," the volume fills the current scholarly lacuna in the general subject of the orientations of life. It presents a much-needed examination of key issues in a broad practical and theoretical context, and holds broad appeal for scholars, researchers, and students occupied with issues of war, armed conflict, the death penalty, and various contemporary medico-legal scenarios.