Biocapital

Download or read book Biocapital written by Kaushik Sunder Rajan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-24 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Biocapital written by Kaushik Sunder Rajan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-24 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn ethnography about the work of genome scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in biotech drug development in the United States and India./div

Download or read book Life as Surplus written by Melinda E. Cooper and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Lively Capital written by Kaushik Sunder Rajan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-02 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Animal Capital written by Nicole Shukin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Physicians of the Future written by Rosalynn A. Vega and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first scholarly exploration of the forums, practice, and economics of functional medicine.

Download or read book Pharmocracy written by Kaushik Sunder Rajan and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.