Table Of ContentLiveLy CapitaL
e xperimentaL Futures
Technological lives, scienTific arTs, anThropological voices
A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit
LiveLy CapitaL
BioTechnologies, eThics, and
governance in gloBal MarkeTs
edited by Kaushik sunder rajan
D u K e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s D u r h a m a n D L o n D o n 2 0 1 2
© 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Capitalization of Life and the
Liveliness of Capital 1
Kaushik sunder rajan
part i. enCountering vaLue
1. Prescription Maximization and the Accumulation
of Surplus Health in the Pharmaceutical Industry:
The_BioMarx_Experiment 45
Joseph Dumit
2. Value-A dded Dogs and Lively Capital 93
Donna J. haraway
3. Air’s Substantiations 121
timothy Choy
part ii. property anD Dispossession
4. Taking Life: Private Rights in Public Nature 155
sheila Jasanof
5. Rice Genomes: Making Hybrid Properties 184
elta smith
6. Marx in New Zealand 211
travis tanner
7. AIDS Policies for Markets and Warriors: Dispossession,
Capital, and Pharmaceuticals in Nigeria 228
Kristin peterson
part iii. gLobaL KnowLeDge Formations
8. Diagnostic Liquidity: Mental Illness and the Global
Trade in DNA 251
andrew Lakof
9. Transforming States in the Era of Global Pharmaceuticals:
Visioning Clinical Research in Japan, Taiwan, and
Singapore 279
wen-h ua Kuo
10. Biopolitics and the Informating of Environmentalism 306
Kim Fortun
part iv. promissory experiments anD emergent
Forms oF LiFe
11. Genomics Scandals and Other Volatilities of Promising 329
mike Fortun
12. Desperate and Rational: Of Love, Biomedicine, and
Experimental Community 354
Chloe silverman
13. Lively Biotech and Translational Research 385
michael m. J. Fischer
Epilogue: Threads and Articulations 437
Kaushik sunder rajan
Bibliography 453
About the Contributors 491
Index 495
aCKnowLeDgments
This volume comes out of a workshop, also titled “Lively Capital: Biotech-
nology, Ethics and Governance in Global Markets,” held in November 2004
at the University of California, Irvine. I wish to thank the National Science
Foundation, the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute,
the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at uc Irvine, and uc Irvine’s
Division of Research and Graduate Studies for providing the funding that
was required to conduct the workshop.
I next wish to thank the participants in the workshop for their com-
mitment, friendship, and collegiality during the workshop; and for their
patience through the long process required to convert the workshop pro-
ceedings into this edited volume. For me, thinking with, and learning from,
other people is the most enjoyable aspect of being an academic, and I could
not wish for a better group of interlocutors than those who are a part of this
volume. In addition to the authors of the various chapters herein, I wish to
thank Geofrey Bowker, Lawrence Cohen, and Cori Hayden, who also pre-
sented papers at the workshop, but were unable to contribute their pieces to
the volume.
My colleagues in the department of anthropology at uc Irvine deserve
special thanks. As I planned the workshop, I received tremendous encour-
agement from Jim Ferguson, who was at the time chair of the department,
and that support and encouragement was replicated by every one of my
other colleagues, many of whom served as discussants to papers at the work-
shop, and all of whom contributed in signifcant measure to making it a
success. Bill Maurer also provided a careful and critical reading of my intro-
duction to this volume, and I have benefted greatly from his comments. In
addition, people from other departments at uc Irvine and elsewhere served
as discussants and interlocutors at the workshop. I wish to thank them—
Bogi Andersen, Simon Cole, Jean Comarof, Marianne de Laet, and Sharon
Traweek—for adding immeasurably to the conversations. Since the work-
shop, Elta Smith has read (too) many drafts of my introduction as they were
written, and I have benefted immensely from her patient, honest, and in-
valuable insight.
A few people deserve special thanks for the execution of the workshop.
Caroline Melly, Guillermo Narvaez, and Neha Vora were heroic in attending
to every organizational and logistical detail. Elta Smith transcribed the pro-
ceedings, while Esra Ozkan videotaped them, hence providing an invaluable
archive that I was able to draw on while compiling the edited volume and
writing my introduction.
Since 2002 Joe Dumit and Michael Fischer had been discussing with
me the importance of providing a venue where current work on the life sci-
ences and capital could be discussed. They both had a big role in inspiring
me to organize the workshop; in providing feedback on the various grant
applications that had to be written in order to get it funded; in helping me
outline and structure the workshop; and in being sounding boards at vari-
ous stages during the preparation of this volume. More generally, I recog-
nize now just how much my enjoyment in collaborative work and thinking
is due to having had them as my dissertation advisors. Very early in my
graduate career, Joe eagerly approached me with an article that had just been
written on the political economy of genomics, which is what I was planning
to study in my own research. He then stopped and asked, “Are you one of
those people who like it when other people are working on the same thing
that you are? Because I do. I think it’s so much more fun to think with other
people about my work.” I know that such an ethic—not just of collabora-
tion, but of friendship and of genuine engagement with and enjoyment in
the work of others—is not necessarily the norm in the academy, and is cer-
tainly not accounted for in the audit cultures that predominate in evaluating
research activities and outcomes. I am grateful that I was immersed in such
an ethic, because Joe and Mike taught me not just about anthropology, sci-
ence studies, or social theory, but showed me by their examples the sort of
academic that I wanted to be. I feel it is only appropriate that this volume is
appearing in the “Experimental Futures” series, which they coedit.
I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for careful and detailed feed-
back that has helped greatly in the production of this volume, and especially
in the writing of my introduction. (One of them subsequently revealed him-
self to be Lawrence Cohen, who also, a few years previously, had the un-
viii acknowledgments
enviable task of reviewing the manuscript of my book Biocapital. So I have
much to thank him for, not just in terms of this volume, but in terms of my
intellectual development more generally. Much of my published work has
been marked, and improved, by his generous and rigorous readings.) Asya
Anderson has provided invaluable editorial assistance in compiling the vol-
ume. Ken Wissoker, Courtney Berger, and Leigh Barnwell at Duke Univer-
sity Press have been wonderfully supportive throughout the process, and
Patricia Mickelberry has been incredibly thorough and helpful in ironing
out wrinkles during the volume’s production. I am grateful to be working
with a press that has provided such a congenial and encouraging venue for
this work, for my work, and more generally, for work in the anthropology of
science.
acknowledgments ix
