Biocapital

Biocapital
The Constitution of Postgenomic Life

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

duke university press

durham and london
2006
∫ 2006 Duke University Press

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For Appa and Amma
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Capitalisms and Biotechnologies 1

Part I. Circulations

1. Exchange and Value: Contradictions in Market Logic

in American and Indian Genome Enterprises 39

2. Life and Debt: Global and Local Political

Ecologies of Biocapital 77

Part II. Articulations

3. Vision and Hype: The Conjuration of

Promissory Biocapitalist Futures 107

4. Promise and Fetish: Genomic Facts

and Personalized Medicine, or
Life Is a Business Plan 138

5. Salvation and Nation: Underlying Belief

Structures of Biocapital 182

6. Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups: The Story

of an E-learning Company 234

Coda: Surplus and Symptom 277

Notes 289
References 315
Index 327
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been made possible by a number of teachers, in the university
and in the field. Each one has had something special to contribute toward my
learning. I wish to thank Michael Fischer for sharing his deep and profound
scholarship; Joe Dumit for teaching me how to read; Sheila Jasano√ for pass-
ing on to me her deep ethical commitments about writing and intervention in
multiple communities of practice (and, related to that, her important lectures
to me on lucidity, not always heeded!); and Donna Haraway for her con-
tagious energy and for pushing me to always think beyond boundaries. Learn-
ing from them individually and collectively has been a privilege.
No ethnographic work is possible without the informants who make it so.
There are many who let me into their lifeworlds, in spite of the huge intrusion
my work represented to their time. Many of these people live in worlds where
information is guarded with almost paranoid zeal, which makes me even more
thankful for the access they gave me. While there are many people who taught
me about the worlds of the life sciences and capital, a few deserve special
thanks. Mark Boguski made this project possible in the first place, both with
his encouragement and by enabling me to attend the Cold Spring Harbor
Genome Sequencing and Analysis meetings in 1999, giving me my first initia-
tion into the worlds of genome scientists. At GeneEd, I was made to feel
welcome not only as an observer but also as a friend. I wish to thank everyone
there, especially Sunil Maulik, Salil Patel, Paul Eisele, and Mai Grant. At the
Centre for Biochemical Technology, Samir Brahmachari and Manjari Mahajan
were extremely generous with their time and insights. Thanks also to D. Bala-
subramanian, Kent Bottles, Deepanwita Chattopadhyaya, Debashis Das,
Arthur Holden, David Housman, Satish Kumar, Ramesh Mashelkar, Mitali
Mukerji, Svati Pande, Ali Pervez, Raji Pillai, Premnath, R. Rajagopalan,
M. Samuel, S. Sivaram, Hari Tamanna, Patrick Terry, Uday Turaga, Patrick
Vaughan, Akella Venkateswarulu, M. Vidyasagar, Spencer Wells, and Dar-
shana Zaveri for giving me invaluable insights into biocapitalist lifeworlds at
various stages of this work.
I have benefited greatly from three intellectual communities that I have
been privileged to be a part of—the Science, Technology, and Society Pro-
gram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (especially the graduate
student community that was a source of such collegiality during my disser-
tation years); the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy School of Government; and the Department of Anthropol-
ogy at the University of California, Irvine. Thanks also to the History of
Consciousness Program at uc Santa Cruz for giving me a≈liation while I did
my fieldwork in the Bay Area. Fieldwork support came from mit’s sts Depart-
ment, mit’s Kelly-Douglas Fund, and the mit Graduate Student Council. The
constant help and cheerful presence of Chris Bates, Shirin Fozi, Debbie Mein-
bresse, and Judy Spitzer at sts headquarters at mit, of Seth Kirshenbaum at
the Kennedy School, of Sandy Cushman at uci, and of Sheila Peuse at Santa
Cruz, as well as Jerry Burke’s supply of used laptops to take on fieldwork trips,
were all vital enabling ingredients.
Many of my friends, who have also been collaborators in various ways,
deserve special thanks. The transformation of a completely unwieldy Ph.D.
dissertation into a hopefully slightly less unwieldy book owes hugely to de-
tailed comments I received at various stages of its revision from Sheila Jasa-
no√, Nick King, Bill Maurer, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. It also owes greatly
to conversations I have had with Etienne Balibar about Marx’s labor theory of
value; with Lawrence Cohen about questions of theorizing biopolitics; with
Joe Dumit, who has generously shared his recent work on surplus health and
has included me in his extremely generative experiments reading Marx; with
Kris Peterson, for conversations about global capital and therapeutic econo-
mies in Africa that highlighted for me just how partial a perspective into
biocapital as a global regime is provided by the United States and India; with

x Acknowledgments
Venkat Rao, whose introduction to the history of Andhra Pradesh and strong
theoretical sensibilities have been invaluable in writing the sections of this
book having to do with the establishment of a technoscientific culture and
infrastructure in Hyderabad; and with Elta Smith, for careful and caring read-
ings of my work, and invaluable conversations comparing aspects of this
work to parallel emergences in agricultural genomics and biotechnology. For
reading and commenting on parts of this work at various stages of research
and writing, I also thank Stefan Beck, Joao Biehl, Marianne de Laet, Kim and
Mike Fortun, Cori Hayden, Jonathan Kahn, Chris Kelty, Michi Knecht, Andy
Lako√, Hannah Landecker, George Marcus, Torin Monahan, Adriana Pe-
tryna, Rachel Prentice, Arvind Rajagopal, Anupama Rao, Jenny Reardon,
Chloe Silverman, Karen-Sue Taussig, and Charlie Weiner. Two anonymous
reviewers for Duke University Press (who subsequently revealed themselves
to be Lawrence Cohen and Kim Fortun) have incalculably improved this
manuscript with their detailed, meticulous, and thoughtful comments, for
which many thanks, again. Thanks also to my editor, Ken Wissoker, for the
support he has given this project, and to Christine Dahlin, Courtney Berger,
and Pam Morrison at the press for their editorial assistance. I am grateful to
J. Naomi Linzer for compiling the index. The material act of writing this
manuscript was enabled at various times by the ca√eine and friendliness avail-
able at Darwin’s Café in Cambridge, Diedrich’s Co√ee in Irvine, and Brueg-
ger’s Bagels in Durham.
A special word of thanks to Naira Ahmad for all her love and support and
for making the years spent researching and writing this book so worthwhile.
This book is dedicated to my parents, who supported me through my transi-
tion out of laboratory-based biology and into the social sciences, and who
have constantly been there for me in every possible way. My mother has
virtually been a fifth dissertation committee member, teaching, editing, proof-
reading, and expanding my theoretical horizons. But there is so much more to
thank them for than just the materiality of research sustenance. I thank them
for genetics and environment, bios and capital, support and love.

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
Capitalisms and Biotechnologies

In January 1999, I spent a month in a lab at the National Institutes of Health

(nih), because my Ph.D. dissertation advisor Michael Fischer felt I should
experience how it feels to be part of a lab as an observer. It felt pretty uncom-
fortable, and not just because the only place I had to sit on was an icebox in a
corridor outside the lab. At such an early stage in my Ph.D, I really had no
story as to why I was there, what my questions were, or what I wanted to find
out or study—all of which, of course, were things that the scientists in the lab
were curious about.
The lab I was ‘‘studying’’ itself studied signal transduction pathways within
cells, and the one thing that struck me was how each researcher’s bench had
a computer that was constantly downloading dna sequence information in
real time, as soon as the information was released into GenBank, the public-
domain dna sequence repository. I remarked on this to the head of the lab,
who said that I must go and meet Mark Boguski, a scientist at the National
Center for Biotechnology Information, which runs GenBank. And so I did.
As I said, what was most uncomfortable for me about my encounters with
various scientists was that I did not have a story to tell them about my pres-
ence. And yet the first words that Boguski said when he met me were: ‘‘I’ve
read Paul Rabinow, so I know exactly what you want to do. I think someone
needs to write a contemporary history of genomics, and I think you should do
it.’’∞ Boguski was organizing the Cold Spring Harbor genome meetings that
year, which was the major annual meeting of the publicly funded Human
Genome Project. He waived my registration fees and got me to attend. That is
how I started studying genome scientists.
 In 1999 I could quite comfortably say that the subject of my research was
genomics, at a historical moment when genomics meant the sequencing of the
human genome and the generation of software tools to make sense of that
sequence. That year was also a conjuncture marked by the ‘‘race’’ to sequence
the human genome between the public Human Genome Project and Craig
Venter’s private genome company Celera Genomics. Over the next few years,
genomics remained an important part of this study for reasons that I will try to
explain throughout the book, but the objects of my study became inseparable
from the larger epistemological and political economic terrains, themselves
emergent, within which they were situated. The larger context of what I am
studying is what I have called biocapital, but before I explain what I mean by
that, it is worth at least setting the stage by mentioning, in the most perfunc-
tory fashion, what was happening in genomics in 1999.
In 1998, Craig Venter was brought in to run a new company, Celera Geno-
mics, that challenged the public Human Genome Project, which had until that
point planned to sequence the genome from one end to the other, with a
stringent error frequency of not more than one in every ten thousand base
pairs.≤ This was ultimately resolved as a fight between ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’
genomics, the key node around which contestation took place being the pat-
entability of gene sequences. Private companies like Celera were keen to patent
the sequences they generated and to realize commercial value o√ them, while
public researchers felt that generating sequences was not particularly inventive
and that granting them patents would stifle genomic research by making those
sequences unavailable in the public domain.
Many things happened over the next year or so, not least the continuous
running of sequencing machines in public and private laboratories around the
world, so that in June 2000, when the working draft sequence of the human
genome was announced both by the Human Genome Project and by Celera,
everyone smiled with Bill Clinton for the cameras, and we were told that the
‘‘Book of Life’’ had been read, the ‘‘Code of Codes’’ decoded, and the ‘‘Holy
Grail’’ attained.≥
Such momentous happenings were not necessarily evident to everyone liv-
ing in the small town of Syosset in upstate New York, the home of the famous
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, in 1999, as exemplified by the following

2 Introduction
story. While going to the laboratories for the 1999 meetings (held at the height
of the sequencing ‘‘race’’), I shared a taxi with two people, one a genome
sequencer going to the meetings, the other a woman who lived in the town,
going elsewhere. The two had the following conversation:

resident: Are you here doing research?

sequencer: Yes, we’ve come for the conference.
resident: What conference is that?
sequencer: Genome mapping and sequencing.
resident: Of what?
sequencer: Oh, the genome.
resident: Of what?
sequencer: Human.
resident: Yes, but of what? What are you mapping?
sequencer: [increasingly perplexed] The whole thing.
resident: But that’s already been done, hasn’t it?

Biocapital
We live in a world of rapid changes, many of which force us to ask afresh what
we mean by words that are an integral part of our lexicon, words like ‘‘life,’’
‘‘capital,’’ ‘‘fact,’’ ‘‘exchange,’’ and ‘‘value.’’ Genomics is one such change, but
it is a change, I argue, that reflects more general changes in two broad do-
mains. The first is in the life sciences, which, consequent to the rapid ad-
vances in genomics, are increasingly becoming information sciences. The sec-
ond is in capitalism, which is triumphantly acknowledged today as having
‘‘defeated’’ alternative economic formations such as socialism or communism
and is therefore considered to be the ‘‘natural’’ political economic formation,
not just of our time but of all times.∂ The title of this book, therefore, signals
its thesis that the life sciences represent a new face, and a new phase, of
capitalism and, consequently, that biotechnology is a form of enterprise inex-
tricable from contemporary capitalism. I will try to explain here what I mean
by this, and specifically try to explain how I conceive of the relationship of
‘‘biocapital’’ as a concept to contemporary systems of capitalism and to emer-
gent scientific and technological horizons in the life sciences. I will then pro-
vide a brief overview of the drug development marketplace and of genomics in

Introduction 3
order to lay out the terrain on which I have conducted this study, before
outlining the structure of the book.
The object of bioscience, the practice of bioscience, and the locations of
bioscience have all been changing rapidly over the past thirty years, and one
of the major directions this change has taken has been toward more corpo-
rate forms and contexts of research. But this drift toward corporatization has
hardly been natural, inevitable, or without contestation. As demonstrated in
1999 by the angry response of public genome researchers toward the pos-
sibility that dna sequences might be patented, the corporatization of the life
sciences has simultaneously been rapid and hegemonic on the one hand, and
contingent and contested on the other, setting up what I call a frictioned terrain
on which these emergences take shape. Further, biotechnologies cannot sim-
ply be analyzed by studying them ‘‘within’’ laboratories. Rather, all science
needs, as Emily Martin (1998) has argued, to situate changes within scientific
and technological worlds in larger social and cultural contexts. This has been
the practice, over the last decade and a half or so, of the also rapidly emer-
gent field of the anthropology of science. And this contextualization of sci-
ence cannot, as a number of scholars within science and technology studies
(sts) have argued, simply be a unidirectional attribution of causality. In other
words, it is too simple to state either that social change is a consequence of
scientific and technological development or that science and technology are
completely conditioned by ‘‘the social,’’ as if ‘‘the social’’ were something uni-
tary and easy to identify and thus purify. sts scholars refer to the mutual
constitution of ‘‘the scientific’’ and ‘‘the social’’ as coproduction, and it is this
coproduction of the life sciences with political economic regimes that I investi-
gate in this book.∑
An example of such coproduction is evident even in the extremely truncated
story of genomics in 1999 that I recounted earlier. As mentioned, there was
considerable anxiety among public genome researchers that private companies
might patent the dna sequences they were generating at the time. The legal
status of the patentability of the sequences was (and in fact still is) quite
ambiguous and rests, among other things, on whether the generation of these
sequences could be regarded as an ‘‘inventive’’ activity.∏ In other words, the
question of whether dna sequences should be patented could not at the same

4 Introduction
time take recourse to externally established criteria of patentability without
asking the question of what those criteria meant in the context of new tech-
nological possibilities for innovation, in this case the development of auto-
mated sequencing machines that could generate dna sequences at speeds and
resolutions inconceivable before. At the same time, further use of these se-
quences depended in considerable measure on their legal status, either as part
of the public domain or as legitimate private property. The legal status of dna
sequences depended on the technological mechanisms that produced them,
while the continued production and use of these sequences absolutely de-
pended on their legal status. Neither could a priori be settled without bringing
the other into question.
The beginning of the biotechnology industry in the late 1970s and early
1980s was itself marked by a coproduction of new types of science and technol-
ogy and changes in the legal, regulatory, and market structures that organized
the conduct of that technoscience.π The ‘‘new’’ technoscience was recombi-
nant dna technology (rdt), which is a set of techniques that allows the
cutting up and joining together of dna molecules in labs. The biotechnology
industry came about largely as a consequence of this technoscientific develop-
ment in 1973 by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen. This sort of cutting and
splicing allows scientists to study the functionality of di√erent genes and dna
sequences by expressing these sequences in organisms (usually bacterial or
viral) called vectors. These vectors can be research tools that ‘‘house’’ the dna
to be studied, or can function as production factories for more dna (if it gets
amplified by the polymerase chain reaction, or pcr), or for the protein that
might be coded by that dna. In other words, rdt allows the life sciences to
become ‘‘technological,’’ where the product that is produced is cellular or
molecular matter such as dna or protein. Some of these proteins could, in
principle, have therapeutic e√ects (especially for diseases that are caused by, or
have as a central symptom, an abnormal amount of that protein) and be
produced industrially. This, in a nutshell, represented the possibility and the
rationale for the biotechnology industry.
While rdt could be said to have ‘‘led’’ to the development of the biotech
industry, the emergence of a new technology could hardly in itself be consid-
ered su≈cient cause for the development of an entire industry. The shift of the

Introduction 5
technoscience of rdt to industrial locales was evidenced by the emergence of a
slew of biotechnology companies in the early 1980s, a development that in
turn led to further research and innovation in the life sciences and biotechnol-
ogy. One can only understand this coproduction in terms of a conjuncture of
several events and factors.
One was the willingness of venture capitalists to invest in a technology that
had little credibility at the time as a successful business model. A second
was the enormous amount of money spent by the U.S. federal government
on basic biomedical research through funding of the National Institutes of
Health (nih) consequent to the declaration of a war on cancer in the early
1970s.∫ A third was the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which was legislation that facili-
tated the transfer of technology between academe and industry and thereby
enabled rapid commercialization of basic research problems. A fourth was a
supportive legal climate that allowed the protection of biotech intellectual
property, marked, for instance, by the landmark 1980 U.S. Supreme Court
ruling in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which allowed patent rights on a genetically
engineered microorganism that could break down crude-oil spills.
While I argue that the life sciences and capitalism are coproduced, I do,
however, further argue that the life sciences are overdetermined by the capitalist
political economic structures within which they emerge. ‘‘Overdetermina-
tion’’ is a term used by Louis Althusser to suggest a contextual relationship, but
not a causal one (Althusser 1969 [1965]). In other words, even if a particular
set of political economic formations do not in any direct and simplistic way
lead to particular epistemic emergences, they could still disproportionately set
the stage within which the latter take shape in particular ways. And so, even if
capitalism represents particular types of political economic formations, in this
current moment in world history, as Slavoj Žižek argues, it ‘‘overdetermines
all alternative formations, as well as non-economic strata of social life’’ (Žižek
2004). Therefore, even while emphasizing the historicity and the far from
natural emergence of capitalism as a set of political economic forms and struc-
tures, it is important to acknowledge the importance of capital as being what
Žižek calls the ‘‘ ‘concrete universal’ of our historical epoch’’ (ibid.).
This book, then, is simultaneously an analysis and a theorization of the life
sciences, especially as they pertain to biomedicine, with an analysis and theori-

6 Introduction
zation of capitalist frameworks within which such technoscience increasingly
operates. This is the rationale for the term ‘‘biocapital.’’ A fundamental assump-
tion of this book is that capitalism, even as it overdetermines the emergence of
new technoscience, is a political economic system whose own contours are not
unitary or rigid. In other words, capitalism cannot be assumed in studies of
biomedicine, because capitalism is in itself dynamic, changing, and at stake.
I do not make the argument here that biocapital is a distinct temporal or
figural form of, or from, ‘‘capitalism’’ as some unitary entity. Rather, I wish to
make the argument, made most powerfully by scholars such as Žižek and
Susan Buck-Morss, that what is at stake is the very conception of capitalism as
something unitary, eternal, and without history (see, for example, Žižek 1994;
Buck-Morss 2002). Rather, capitalism is mutable and multiple; it is always
capitalisms.Ω Biocapital is one vantage point from which to view the complexi-
ties of capitalism(s), and like all situated perspectives, it contains within it
both its specificities as well as its diagnoses of more general structural features
of capitalism.∞≠ Therefore, rather than define what I mean by ‘‘biocapital’’ at
the outset, I wish to explain next, with a digression through the political
economic analysis of Karl Marx as a basis, how I see this relationship of
biocapital to systems of contemporary global capitalism writ large.
A major theoretical argument that I make in this book is for a return, not to
Marxism in any dogmatic sense, but to reading Marx as a methodologist from
whom one can learn to analyze rapidly emergent political economic and epi-
stemic structures. Indeed, I believe that Marx himself is often read too simply
as heralding inevitable communist revolution. While this was certainly the
polemical tone of The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1986 [1848]),
one can see that by the time Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon in 1852 (Marx 1977 [1852]), he was o√ering a much more nuanced
understanding of capitalist processes that emphasized their tendential nature.
The Eighteenth Brumaire is a historical treatise concerning the events be-
tween 1848 and 1851 in France, during the presidency of Napoleon’s nephew
Louis Bonaparte. This was a period during which France’s National Assembly
was dominated by the reactionary Party of Order. The period saw constant
tension between the Assembly and Bonaparte, leading finally to a coup by
Bonaparte in 1851. Bonaparte ended up being hailed as a revolutionary, as a

Introduction 7
single individual who took on and overthrew the reactionary forces of Order.
Marx disputes this by closely following the political happenings in these years
to show how Bonaparte was, in fact, resolutely counterrevolutionary. Further,
Marx points out that Bonaparte was not just hailed as a great revolutionary
by the bourgeoisie but was very much the undisputed leader of the small
peasantry, which was among the most economically depressed sectors of the
French populace at the time. Marx’s concern in The Eighteenth Brumaire is to
show how even those sectors of society whose structural relations of produc-
tion within society would have suggested that they embrace revolutionary
communism might put their faith in a counterrevolutionary personage. More-
over, the desire for political stability that was expressed in the faith in a coun-
terrevolutionary dictatorship like Bonaparte’s was completely conditioned by
the need for economic stability in a capitalist society, an economic stability that
the peasants and the bourgeoisie alike saw to be in their interests. In other
words, The Eighteenth Brumaire itself traces a co-constitution of a political
regime with an economic one, in which each conditions the other, but in ways
whose outcomes are not dictated as they logically ought to have been as a
consequence of the structural relations of production prevailing at the time.
Marx, however, also realized that the economic structure of capitalism was
multiple. Therefore, in outlining the labor theory of value over successive
volumes of Capital, Marx begins by outlining a hypothetical system of the
production and circulation of capital but proceeds to situate that hypothetical
system in the context of ‘‘real’’ systems of capitalism that were emergent (and
hardly stable) at the time. By Capital, Volume 3 (Marx 1974 [1894]), Marx is
already analyzing two distinct forms of capital, what he calls industrial capital
(which was the primary subject of analysis in the first two volumes) and
trading or merchant’s capital. This latter form of capitalism is its emergent
commercial (as distinct from commodity) form, distinct only in that its ‘‘process
of circulation is . . . set apart as a special function of a special capital, . . .
established by virtue of the division of labor to a special group of capitalists’’
(267). In other words, the function of trading capital is not just the produc-
tion and exchange of commodities as a means to an end (that end being the
generation of surplus value) but is commercial activity as an end in itself. This
‘‘special type’’ of capitalist to whom Marx refers is the speculative capitalist, a
precursor to the types of capitalists, such as, for instance, venture capitalists or

8 Introduction
investment bankers, who are central to sustaining the dynamics of contempo-
rary capitalism. In other words, the merchant is to commercial capital what the
producer is to commodity capital. And the key function of the merchant is the
advancement of money in order to set commercial capital in motion. Commer-
cial capital, according to Marx, does not create surplus value in and of itself but
does so indirectly by constantly perpetuating the circulation of capital, and by
providing it with its own self-perpetuating, self-sustaining logic that does not
need to originate from the moment of production of commodity.
One can see a similar disjuncture in the forms of production and circulation
that biotech or pharmaceutical companies are involved in today, where, on the
one hand, there exists the manufacture and sale of therapeutic molecules, but,
on the other, there exists an elaborate system of valuation that is essential for the
existence of these companies that only indirectly depends on this actual man-
ufacture and sale. The everyday existence of a biotech or a pharmaceutical
company, then, involves the coexistence of at least these two simultaneous,
distinct, yet mutually constitutive forms of capital, one directly dependent on
the production of commodity, the other speculative and only indirectly so.
Depending on the institutional and legal structure within which these com-
panies operate, one or the other of these forms can predominate in the creation
of value; yet neither of these forms flows seamlessly from the other. And
therefore, in India, for instance, there has tended to be a more direct correlation
between therapeutic molecule production, sales, profit margins, and the value
of a pharmaceutical company. In the United States, where biotech companies
are almost always enabled by venture capital funding, and where biotech and
pharmaceutical companies almost always become publicly traded companies
when the opportunity presents itself (and therefore answerable to investors on
Wall Street), valuation is more directly dependent on speculative capital.∞∞
Marx further outlines the relationship between merchant’s and industrial
capital as follows:

Since merchant’s capital is nothing but an individualized form of a portion of

industrial capital engaged in the process of circulation, all questions referring to it
must be solved by representing the problem primarily in a form, in which the
phenomena peculiar to merchant’s capital do not yet appear independently, but
still in direct connection with industrial capital, as a branch of it.∞≤

Introduction 9
 In other words, Marx first argues for at least two distinct forms of capi-
tal, industrial and merchant’s. He then proceeds to posit the latter as, simul-
taneously, a continuation of, an evolution of, a subset of, and a form dis-
tinct from, the former. Both these forms of capital exist in close relationship
with each other, but one cannot be reduced to the other. Further, the rela-
tionship between the two cannot be understood except at multiple registers
simultaneously.
I wish to clarify the relationship of biocapital to capital (and to capitalisms)
in precisely these terms. Biocapital does not signify a distinct epochal phase
of capitalism that leaves behind or radically ruptures capitalism as we have
known it. At the same time, there are significant particularities to biocapital
that have to do both with the institutional structure within which drug de-
velopment takes place, and with the technoscientific changes in the life sci-
ences and biotechnologies over the last thirty years, that make it too simplistic
simply to say that biocapital is a ‘‘case study’’ of capitalism having to do with
the life sciences. Rather, the relationship between ‘‘capitalism’’ (itself not a
unitary category) and what I call biocapital is one where the latter is, simulta-
neously, a continuation of, an evolution of, a subset of, and a form distinct
from, the former. Further, biocapital itself takes shape in incongruent fashion
across the multiple sites of its global emergence.
Indeed, the relationship of emergent and constantly mutating forms of
capitalism to ‘‘capitalism’’ as a theoretical concept describing a political eco-
nomic system has continued to vex social theorists since Marx, and the agent
often implicated in this mutation of capitalism is technological change. An
outline of the relationship of a form of a system under analysis to the concept
underlying that systemic understanding that I take inspiration from is Jean-
François Lyotard’s. In The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984), a ‘‘report
on knowledge’’ written for the Canadian government in the late 1970s, Lyo-
tard is also confronted with theorizing a moment in capitalist modernity that
is marked by rapid technological change, much of which had to do with what
might be called the information revolution. These technological changes, on
the one hand, saw the persistence and reproduction of some ‘‘fundamental’’
aspects of capitalism as diagnosed by Marxism (such as, for instance, structural
inequities in relations of production, especially when extended and considered

10 Introduction
globally) and yet occurred in the context of a di√erent set of political con-
junctures, most notably the dissipation, to the extent that it existed, of a strong
notion of proletarian class consciousness that was central to Marx’s analyses of
industrial capitalism. Lyotard’s definition of the ‘‘postmodern,’’ then, is not a
system that marks a radical rupture with modernity but rather one that is
a subsumed, incongruent, evolving component of it. In other words, for
Lyotard, postmodernism is a symptom of modernity, just as I attempt to show
biocapital as, among other things, being symptomatic of capitalism (with
‘‘symptom,’’ of course, itself being a biomedical term), rather than a new
phenomenon that is radically distinct from, and rupturing with, the old.∞≥
While my relationship of biocapital to capital is similar in form to Lyotard’s
relationship of the postmodern to modernity, it is also not dissimilar in con-
tent. Fredric Jameson, for instance, posits Lyotard’s analysis of the postmod-
ern squarely in the frame of contemporary capitalism when he says that ‘‘post-
modernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order . . . but
only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of
capitalism itself ’’ (Jameson 2003 [1991], xii).
And yet what is crucial here is not just an understanding of capitalisms
(however multiple) as structures that form the grounds for the emergence of a
certain sort of technoscientific enterprise but also an understanding of political
economy as an epistemology. I read Marx as himself only able to achieve a
critique of capital by means of critiquing political economy as the emergent
foundational epistemology of the time that had consequences for structuring
social formations.∞∂
Many of the life sciences involve production and circulations of many sorts,
not all of them geared toward the generation of surplus value. Indeed, Robert
Merton (1942) propounded communism as one of the four fundamental
norms of science. By this, he meant not a particular system of scientific gover-
nance or regulation but a self-imposed scientific ethos that valued the sharing
of scientific information and materials. Such an ethos is very much a part of the
everyday functioning of much academic life science today: it is, for instance,
extremely common for one lab to send another information, or materials such
as a dna clone or a cell line they may have created, without any charge and
even if no formal collaboration exists between the labs. At the same time, of

Introduction 11
course, there is the increased protection of these same forms of information
and material as private property, not just among corporate biologists, but even
among academic scientists. This protectionism could arise because these aca-
demic scientists are themselves, actually or potentially, also corporate entre-
preneurs on the side (an increasingly common phenomenon in the United
States thanks to the incentive structures of the Bayh-Dole Act that reward the
transfer of technology from academe to industry); because the university that
employs these scientists seeks to aggressively protect its intellectual property
much as a corporation would; or defensively, to protect information or mate-
rial from private protection by industry. Further, the biological ‘‘stu√ ’’ that
circulates, whether information or material, could circulate as objects that
have di√erent connotations attached to them. For instance, information could
be ‘‘raw data’’ (useful but not worked into anything ‘‘theoretical’’ or ‘‘fac-
tual’’); it could be in the form of an algorithm or some form of software code
that might itself be a potential or actual commodity protected by intellectual
property rights; or it could be ‘‘scientific facts.’’ Therefore, understanding
the systems of production, circulation, and consumption of various ‘‘biologi-
cals,’’∞∑ including the ways in which these circulations insert into more ‘‘gen-
eral’’ processes of capitalist circulation, is one side of the analytic challenge of
studying biocapital as a system of exchange.
But the other side to its study springs from Marx’s analysis of political
economy as epistemology, and that is the study of the epistemic reconfigura-
tions of the life sciences. In this case, as I have mentioned, these epistemic
reconfigurations are co-constituted by technical reconfigurations as well. ‘‘Bio-
capital’’ is a study of the systems of exchange and circulation involved in the
contemporary workings of the life sciences, but is also a study of those life sci-
ences as they become increasingly foundational epistemologies for our time.
In the former register, it is indeed a subset or ‘‘case study’’ of contemporary
capitalism; in the latter, it points to the specifically biopolitical dimensions of
contemporary capitalism.
Biopolitics is a notion put forward by Michel Foucault to show how moder-
nity put life at the explicit center of political calculation (see, for instance,
Foucault 1990 [1978]). Through his work, Foucault traced the constitution
of modernity, which he felt was marked by a qualitatively di√erent operation

12 Introduction
of power, leading to the construction of a di√erent type of subject, from the
power that operated between a regal sovereign and his subjects in medieval
times. Therefore, tracing the processes by which power operates, and looking
consequently at ways in which di√erent types of selfhood (such as, for in-
stance, that of the madman, the leper, or the criminal) emerge, was in a sense
the purpose of Foucault’s analyses.∞∏ Once again, however, I am interested in
the methodologies that Foucault employs to attain such an end.
What Foucault focuses on specifically is the fact that power (which, conse-
quent to having life firmly in its calculus, is a form of what he calls biopower)
operates through institutional, epistemic, and discursive mechanisms. In other
words, Foucault puts together what he calls his archaeology of modernity by
looking at the institutions and the disciplines that constitute it. And therefore
his corpus of work traces the emergence of institutions such as the prison, the
clinic, the school, and the asylum, or disciplines such as demography and
psychology.
Of particular interest in terms of the methodological influences on this book
is Foucault’s ‘‘archaeology of the human sciences,’’ The Order of Things (Fou-
cault 1973), where he argues, first, that a constellation of disciplines collec-
tively concerning the knowledge of humanity becomes fundamental to the
operation of modern rationality, and, second, that three such disciplines of
particular importance are biology, political economy, and philology, corre-
sponding respectively to understandings of life, labor, and language.
In a very di√erent register, then, from Marx, and with a very di√erent set of
analytic operations, one sees an articulation of ‘‘the life sciences’’ and ‘‘political
economy’’ as a central operation of an emergent modernity—an operation
that I argue is still very much in process and whose understanding is still very
much at stake. What Foucault does explicitly is what I have argued Marx does
implicitly, which is consider political economy as consequential not (just)
because it is a political and economic system of exchange but because it is a
foundational epistemology that allows us the very possibility of thinking about
such a system as a system of valuation. The biopolitical, then, does not just
refer to the ways in which politics impact everyday life, or in which debates
over life (such as, to take an evident example, over new reproductive technolo-
gies) impact politics, but rather points to the ways in which our very ability to

Introduction 13
comprehend ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘economy’’ in their modernist guises is shaped by
particular epistemologies that are simultaneously enabled by, and in turn en-
able, particular forms of institutional structures.
The third peg of Foucault’s triad, however, is equally important, and that
points to the way in which the grammar of life is itself at stake. Layered within
my arguments about the articulations between the life sciences and capitalisms
in this book are central arguments about the discursive forms that both take, at
a moment in the life sciences that might be called ‘‘postgenomic,’’ and at a
moment when our global political economic systems might unequivocally be
called ‘‘capitalist.’’∞π Therefore I argue (most directly in chapter 4) that the
sorts of knowledge genomics provides allows us to grammatically conceive of
life in certain ways, not in terms of an Aristotelian poesis, but rather as that
whose futures we can calculate in terms of probabilities of certain disease
events happening—and this shifting grammar of life, toward a future tense, is
consequential not just to our understanding of what ‘‘life’’ now means, but
contains within it a deep ethical valence, what Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas
(2005) refer to as a ‘‘political economy of hope.’’ Similarly, the current mo-
ment in American capitalism, which was grotesquely magnified during the
[Link] heyday of 1999–2001, sees speculative capitalism as apparently dis-
proportionately setting the terrain of valuation—a triumph of Marx’s ‘‘com-
mercial’’ capitalism over his ‘‘commodity’’ capitalism. Speculative capitalism,
as I show most directly in chapter 3, contains its own future-oriented gram-
mar, which is also consequential for value in both senses of the word and
pertains to what might, in parallel to Rose and Novas, be called a political
economy of hype. In other words, the articulations of life, labor, and language
are themselves in formation (and information) that constitute biocapital and
postgenomic life, and it is an analysis of these articulations that is a central
attempt of this book.
Therefore this book is an explicit attempt to bring together Foucault’s the-
orizations of the biopolitical with a Marxian attention to political economy,
labor, value, commodity forms, and processes of exchange as they get con-
stituted alongside the epistemic and technical emergences of the life sciences
and biotechnologies.∞∫ It is, further, an attempt to do so with an explicit
attention to the globalizing dimensions of capital and, increasingly, of techno-
science. To that end, this book is a comparative investigation of postgenomic

14 Introduction
drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. I elaborate on
my reasons for choosing these two sites at a later stage of this introduction,
after further explaining the theoretical groundings of this work.

Materiality and Abstraction

So far, I have outlined the relationship as I see it between biocapital and the
life sciences and contemporary capitalism. Central to my analytic method
throughout the book is to show how both the life sciences and capital are
constituted by relationships at multiple levels between di√erent forms and
registers of materiality and abstraction. In this section, I attempt to explain
what I mean by this. I show how five distinct domains of analysis in this
book—exchange, commodities, valuation, science, and globalization—are all
animated by this dialectic. For that, it is important to again digress into Marx’s
methodology and explain historical and dialectic materialism.
Marx borrows the dialectic from Hegel. The logic is that the dialectic whole
inherently consists of two antithetical parts and is an inherently contradictory
structure. However, both parts are essential for the constitution of the whole.
By showing both objects and systems to be thus contradictorily constituted,
Marx both shows the object or system under analysis in its entirety and points
to its instability.
Marx, however, inverts the Hegelian dialectic by basing it not in the mind
or the idea or consciousness but in materiality. Human activity for him is a
consequence of the historical material conditions of human existence. Marx
designates consciousness as being ‘‘from the very beginning a social product,
[remaining] so long as men exist at all.’’∞Ω The attempt, according to Marx,
should be not to see how consciousness creates social existence but to see how
the conditions of existence shape consciousness. Therefore, a simple inter-
pretation would suggest that Marx shows material relations of production as
underlying the evolution of the social phenomenon that capitalism was.
This straightforward reading of the Marxian method is expectedly too sim-
plistic to withstand rigorous analysis, if only because it reduces all politics to
the politics of class. But there is something to be grasped from a materialist
analysis as it might be applied to biocapital that I shall do before attempting to
read Marx’s own formulation of materialism in more complex terms.
For instance, as mentioned earlier, one of the things said to be unique about

Introduction 15
genomics is the way in which it allows us to conceive of life in informational
terms. And yet the idea that life is information has been very much a part of the
central dogma of molecular biology, which signifies the mechanics of life as
being a series of coding operations, where dna gets transcribed into rna,
which gets translated into protein—an algorithmic conception of life that has
been prominent within molecular biology since at least the 1950s.≤≠ The di√er-
ence now is that genomics allows the metaphor of life-as-information to be-
come material reality that can be commodified. In other words, one does not
just have to conceive of life as information: one can now represent life in infor-
mational terms that can be packaged, turned into a commodity, and sold as a
database; and this change itself is enabled not so much by conceptual advances
as by the development of the technological hardware that enables the genera-
tion and processing of information at speeds and resolutions inconceivable
before. And indeed, the evidence of genomics as an assemblage of technolo-
gies that generates material information that can be commodified was made
explicit by the fact of the ‘‘race’’ to sequence the human genome. What was at
stake in regulating the commodity status of dna sequence information was
not just Merton’s norm of communism but also the fact that whoever owned
this object that dna sequence information had now, consequent to genomic
technologies, become was consequential to the modes of conduct of subse-
quent research.
And yet Marx’s materialist analysis is rife with moments that defy materialist
explanations. Marx’s own schema to account for this was outlined in terms of
his conception of base and superstructure. According to Marx, the material
relations of production constitute the basic driving force of social activity, and
forms of consciousness are ‘‘superstructures’’ that need to be understood in
terms of this base. Therefore, for instance, in The German Ideology (Marx and
Engels 1963 [1845]), he is able to dismiss religion as ‘‘false consciousness,’’ as
not something grounded in the material relations of production.
By the time Marx outlines the labor theory of value, however, this simple
relationship of base as material and superstructure as abstract is considerably
muddied.≤∞ This is evident in Marx’s analysis of surplus value, which in many
ways grounds his structural analysis of capitalist exploitation. To understand
how surplus value leads to exploitation, Marx poses the question of the funda-

16 Introduction
mental contradiction of capitalist political economy that he is trying to resolve,
which is how an exchange of equivalents can lead to the generation of surplus.
To answer this question, Marx locates the generation of surplus value not in
the labor that the worker exchanges for wages from the capitalist but in the
potential of the worker to perform work in excess of that wage. It is this po-
tential that Marx terms ‘‘labor power.’’ As creative potential, labor power is
not predetermined value. Therefore the apparent act of equivalent exchange
(worker’s labor for capitalist’s wages) has hidden within it an element of
nonequivalence, because wages are fixed remuneration, but the labor, which is
actually labor power, is the potential for creation of value over and above the
money expended in wages.
The key here is that labor power is an entirely abstract concept, and yet it is in
this abstract concept that the fundamental dynamics of the labor theory of
value, as an explanation of political economy distinct from the bourgeois
understanding of it, rest. Historical materialism depends entirely, then, on this
fundamental abstraction, but it is an abstraction, in turn, that stems entirely
from the structural, material relations of production, because it is an abstraction
that can only be enabled by the fact that the capitalist controls the material
means of production. Therefore, at the very heart of Marx’s analysis of capital is
the dialectic relationship between forms of materiality and forms of abstraction.
This sort of relationship between materiality and abstraction runs through-
out Marx’s work and is a central methodological lesson from Marx that I
incorporate into this analysis. For instance, the very act of exchange is ani-
mated by this dialectic. This could be the case whether the act of exchange in
question is between capitalist and worker, or whether the exchange in ques-
tion involves the circulation of money and commodities, the contours of
which Marx describes at the start of Grundrisse and Capital. Biocapital, like any
other form of circulation of capital, involves the circulation and exchange of
money and commodities, whose analysis needs to remain central and at the
forefront of analysis. But in addition, the circulations of new and particular
forms of currency, such as biological material and information, emerge. One
of the things that genomics fundamentally enables is a particular type of ma-
terialization of information, and its decoupling from its material biological
source (such as tissue or cell line).

Introduction 17
 And yet, as Marx teaches us, one cannot be satisfied by simply tracing the
circuits traveled by various forms of commodity, currency, or capital. Because
again, at the heart of Marx’s analysis of the circulation of money and com-
modities is the mystical and magical nature of the commodity, the fact that it is,
in his words, ‘‘full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’’ (Marx
1976 [1867], 163). In other words, at the heart of the interaction between
either worker and capitalist or money and commodity is an uncanny kernel of
abstraction that eludes capture in purely materialist terms.≤≤ It is this uncanny
kernel that enables the commodity, which as an object is a rather banal thing, to
become the mediator of social bonds. Indeed, that Marx alludes to it doing so in
a ‘‘theological’’ manner is particularly striking. If, twenty-two years previously
(in The German Ideology), he dismissed religion as ideological and therefore
superstructure, a form of false consciousness, then by the time he writes Capi-
tal, the ‘‘theological’’ character of the commodity becomes a central symptom
of its fetish.≤≥ It is not surprising, then, that a moment of exchange is also
referred to as a moment of conversion, conversion being a process whereby one
type of object (money, for instance) gets converted for its holder into another
(such as commodity), but also being, explicitly, a theological category.≤∂
Just as the act of exchange is animated by the dialectic of materiality to
abstraction, so too is the act of valuation. Indeed, valuation is an integral part
of the exchange process, but with the di√erentiation of capitalism into its
industrial and speculative forms, valuation too starts operating at multiple
levels or registers. Therefore, on the one hand, we have registers of valuation
that depend on tangible material production—the amount of product manu-
factured, distributed, or sold by a company, for instance, or its profit margins
and revenue flows. On the other hand, and certainly in many ways more
central in the [Link] heyday of 1999–2001 that much of this book traces, we
have forms of valuation having not to do with tangible material indicators of
successful productivity, but with intangible abstractions, such as the felt pos-
sibility of future productivity or profit. Vision, hype, and promise, as I show
in detail in chapter 3, are fundamental drivers of this kind of valuation and
are central animating factors in drug development, whether it involves the
valuation of start-ups by private investors such as venture capitalists, or the
valuation of public companies on the stock markets of Wall Street. As the stock

18 Introduction
market scandals over the last couple of years indicate, this di√erent level of
abstraction is not merely discursive but has led to di√erent, tangible material
practices such as creatively articulated accounting mechanisms. Layered on
these di√erent registers of valuation is the fact that ‘‘value’’ itself, like conver-
sion, is a double-jointed word that not only implies material valuation by the
market but also suggests a concern with meanings and practices of ethics. This
is particularly salient for industries such as biotech and pharmaceuticals, which
generate significant symbolic capital from being, as they are never averse to
pointing out, in the business of saving lives. Just as commodity objects and
exchange processes are animated by a certain theological mystique, so too are
systems of valuation.
So too, indeed, is science, which operates with its own authority by virtue of
its ability to generate scientific ‘‘fact.’’ This fact production is itself, as men-
tioned earlier, never driven by conceptual advances alone but often requires
enabling technological advances. Indeed, genomics would have been a non-
starter had it not been for what are called tool companies, the companies that
manufacture kits, reagents, and technological machinery that in many ways
fundamentally enable genomic research to happen. The development of sub-
jects (as in technoscientific disciplines such as genomics) is, however, always
already entwined with the configuration of subjects (as in disciplined agents).
In the case of genomics, these latter subjects could, for instance, be patients, or
consumers, or experimental subjects, as I trace in chapter 2 and, especially, in
chapter 4. This is particularly so when the disciplines in question are those that
concern the very meanings of life, as the biological sciences in general and
genomics in particular claim to do. In many ways, the particularities of biocapi-
tal stem from a combination of the specific market terrains of drug develop-
ment (elaborated hereafter) and the specific epistemologies and subject for-
mations of new life sciences.
So far in this introduction, I have talked about biocapital in delocalized
(and implicitly in American) terms. This book, however, is a comparison of
biocapital in the interlinked contexts of the United States and India and is
specifically attentive to capitalisms as global regimes and practices. And indeed,
globalization too is animated by a dialectical relationship between materiality
and abstraction.

Introduction 19
 One of the methodological challenges of a project such as this is that sym-
metrical comparison between American and Indian techno-capitalism is in fact
impossible, because there is an evident and wide asymmetry in the resources
available to the two countries to do science or to influence the global mar-
ketplace. Therefore there are significant, material di√erences in structural rela-
tions of production that are absolutely vital. At the same time, I argue that the
actions of Indian actors in this account cannot be explained simply by recourse
to structural inequalities, because they are animated by a range of individual
and collective desires, specifically the desire to be a global free market player.
However, this desire, for these actors, always already implies acting as if Ameri-
can: there is a marked imitation of an American free market imaginary. In spite
of these imitative desires, however, actual emergences of techno-capitalist sys-
tems on the ground in India tend often to diverge in incongruent ways from
their American models. And these divergences are themselves conditioned
both by di√erent structural histories (such as India’s colonial past, and five
decades of postcolonial state socialism) and by the fact that Indian free market
imaginaries are themselves not seamlessly articulated but rather frictioned and
in tension with various forms of nationalist indignation at the unequal rela-
tions between India and the West. Similarly, the normative attribution of a
particularly American mode of globalizing free market imaginary as somehow
being the unmarked form of free market capitalism is itself, I show, animated
by underlying abstractions such as nationalism, which get articulated di√er-
ently in the United States than they do in India.≤∑
In other words, an account of a system of global capitalism, if one learns
from Marx’s methodology, cannot simply be a network analysis that traces the
various types of technoscientific or capital flows that occur in order to produce
and sustain this system.≤∏ Such an account also needs to understand how these
flows are constantly animated by multiple, layered, and complex interactions
between material objects and structural relations of production, on the one
hand, and abstractions, whether they are forms of discourse, ideology, fetish-
ism, ethics, or salvationary or nationalist belief systems and desires, on the
other. These abstractions may be hard to pin down and map in the same
diagrammatic fashion as networks and flows, but it is essential to acknowledge
them if we are to make sense of what Donna Haraway might describe as the
biocapitalist ‘‘onion.’’≤π

20 Introduction
The Upstream-Downstream Terrain of Drug Development
I have argued so far that the complex relationships between materiality and ab-
straction constitute the nature of the tendential emergences of biocapital, as sets
of systems and practices that are simultaneously globalizing and particular in
their manifestations. However, these relationships are themselves constituted
on certain terrains that have evolved historically. At their simplest, these terrains
are overdetermined by logics of capital in our present historical conjuncture.
But capitalist terrains are themselves multiple, and di√erent market segments
have di√erent market terrains. One of the particularities of biocapital is the
particular terrain of drug development that is constituted both by the nature of
the drug development enterprise and by the histories of market evolution of the
biotech and pharmaceutical industries, which, as I show hereafter, are two
distinct arms of the drug development enterprise. In this section, I describe this
particular American terrain, referred to as ‘‘upstream-downstream,’’ and pro-
vide a brief overview of the drug development process, before briefly situating
the Indian pharmaceutical industry in relation to this terrain.
The stages of drug development start with the identification of potential
lead compounds (what is known as drug discovery), through a process of
clinical trials (which is the subset of the entire process actually referred to as
drug development), to finally the manufacture of a therapeutic molecule that
gets marketed. The earlier stages of this process are referred to as upstream
stages, the later ones as downstream.
Biotech and pharmaceutical companies represent two quite distinct arms of
the drug development enterprise. They have evolved at di√erent historical
moments, have engaged for the most part in quite distinct science, and tend to
occupy di√erent locations in the drug development market terrain. The de-
velopment of therapeutic molecules by the pharmaceutical industry has largely
occurred by organic chemical synthesis, where derivatives of often serendipi-
tously found biological substances were created in order to obtain therapeutics
with better safety and e≈cacy profiles than the natural substance from which it
was derived. The major driver of new molecule development over the last
seventy-five years has indeed been synthetic chemistry. These traditional meth-
ods still form the bedrock of the pharmaceutical industry, in spite of consider-
able investment to make the initial identification of lead compounds less seren-
dipitous and more rational and predictive.

Introduction 21
 The beginnings of the biotech industry, on the other hand, depend on
recombinant dna technology (rdt), as mentioned earlier.≤∫ If the logic of
pharmaceutical organic chemical synthesis is the production of small chemical
molecules that interact with and modify cellular and molecular components,
then that of biopharmaceutical development is to engineer molecules that are
normally components of the cellular and molecular machinery.
The story of the pharmaceutical industry has arguably been one of the most
dramatic stories of industrial growth in the twentieth century. The pharma-
ceutical industry was actually incubated in, and grew out of, the dye industry,
just as the biotechnology industry in the 1970s was initially supported by, and
grew out of, the petrochemical industry. The ‘‘boom’’ in the pharmaceutical
industry occurred in the 1930s with the discovery of the sulfa drugs, followed
by the industrial-scale manufacture of penicillin as part of the World War II
e√ort, which highlighted the importance of the links between defense and
security needs during war and pharmaceutical innovation.≤Ω At the end of the
nineteenth century, the two companies that could be called pharmaceutical
companies were Bayer and Hoechst. They were joined in the 1930s and 1940s
by would-be pharmaceutical giants such as Ciba Geigy, Eli Lilly, Wellcome,
Glaxo, and Roche. The burst in natural-product chemistry occurred in the
1940s and 1950s, starting with the successful development of streptomycin for
the treatment of tuberculosis. Not surprisingly, the development of biophar-
maceuticals has a more modest history, both because the history of the bio-
tech industry is much shorter and because in many ways the synthesis of
biopharmaceuticals, which are chemically much more complex than small
organic molecules, is often a much trickier process than traditional pharma-
ceutical development.≥≠
If biotech has an origin story, then it is probably to be located in that of
Genentech, even though Cetus Corporation, formed five years before Genen-
tech in 1971, is considered the first biotech company. It was Genentech’s initial
public o√ering (ipo) on October 14, 1980, however, that really announced to
the world the reality of biotech companies on Wall Street and further pointed
to the market possibilities of companies that could by definition operate only
on promise for years, until tangible therapeutic products could emerge from
their r & d e√orts.≥∞

22 Introduction
 The innovative capabilities of biotech companies—which tend to be much
smaller than pharmaceutical companies—are not simply the consequence of
their doing ‘‘newer’’ science but are also a manifestation of a smaller, more
adaptable, and managerially supple organizational structure. Nonetheless,
there is no questioning the starkly di√erential positions of power and bar-
gaining that biotech and pharmaceutical companies occupy when they actually
do business with one another, and a fundamental aspect of the upstream-
downstream terrain of drug development is that, with a few exceptions, bio-
tech companies tend to focus on upstream drug discovery, but do not always
have the capital to take molecules through downstream clinical trials pro-
cesses. Instead they often license a promising therapeutic molecule out to a
pharmaceutical company that does have the resources to do so.
To summarize, then, the market terrain of drug development in the United
States today is constituted by small biotech companies that tend for the most
part to work on upstream drug discovery projects before licensing potential
therapeutic molecules out to pharmaceutical companies, and by big phar-
maceutical companies that, in spite of some moves toward biopharmaceutical
development, still tend to rely for the most part on the development of small
therapeutic molecules through organic chemical synthesis. In addition, much
of their strategic functioning involves in-licensing molecules from biotech
companies or occasionally acquiring biotech companies with promising mole-
cules in their pipeline. This terrain fundamentally structures the dynamics of
drug development and provides it with some of its particularity.
Genomics very much occupies an upstream market niche in the drug de-
velopment process, though the dream of most genome companies, like that of
any biotech company, would be to increase capital reserves and revenue flows
so as to be in a position to increasingly move their therapeutic lead molecules
further and further downstream. From the point of view of the empirical
content of this book, which is about postgenomic drug development market-
places, pharmaceutical companies are a fundamental animating specter rather
than a site of analysis themselves. Di√erent pharmaceutical companies are in-
terested to di√erent degrees in genomics as sources of potential value to them,
and some do invest resources in genomic-related research and development.
But for the most part, pharmaceutical companies act as the eight-hundred-

Introduction 23
pound gorilla in the drug development process, the one institutional entity
with the capital reserves and the proven history of being able to take molecules
to market. As mentioned earlier, the way they often do that with biophar-
maceuticals is by in-licensing molecules from biotech companies and then
taking them through downstream stages of drug development. In many ways,
pharmaceutical companies, in addition to making molecules, could be said to
be the regulators of capital and commodity flow in the drug development
value chain, often deciding which upstream technologies and molecules are
worth investing in, either through a licensing agreement or by buying the
upstream company. In this manner, pharmaceutical companies almost act like
the investment banks of the drug development enterprise.
The other crucial aspect worth noting here is that there are two economies
at stake that are themselves not seamless with respect to each other and that
correspond to Marx’s ‘‘industrial’’ versus ‘‘commercial’’ capitalisms that I dis-
cussed while talking about the relationship of biocapital to systems of capital-
ism writ large. On the one hand, there is the r & d, manufacturing, and
marketing of drugs, the component of the drug development economy that
has to do with the production, distribution, and sale of commodities (similar
to Marx’s ‘‘industrial capitalism’’). On the other, there is the speculative mar-
ket, which for pharmaceutical companies (almost all of which in the United
States are publicly traded) translates into market valuation on Wall Street
(similar to Marx’s ‘‘commercial capitalism’’).
Ironically, the larger and more powerful a company is, the harder it is, in
some ways, to satisfy Wall Street. This is because while one metric for measur-
ing the value of an investment is its stability and reliability (on which score
pharmaceutical companies are extremely sound investments), another, whose
importance was particularly magnified during the [Link] boom of 1999–
2001, is the ability of a stock to appreciate in value. This is known as earnings
per share (eps), which is the annual percentage increase for an investor in the
value of the shares he or she holds in a company. Investors like to see between
12 and 15 percent eps in any stock they hold; typically, pharmaceutical com-
pany eps has been in the range of 8 to 10 percent. This has largely to do with
the time, capital intensiveness, and high risk of drug development. It also has
to do with the fact that large, successful, and extremely profitable industries

24 Introduction
have to do correspondingly more in absolute terms to register an equivalent
increase in relative value of a share than a much smaller company. Thus a small
biotech company with one therapeutic molecule in its pipeline will generate
huge stock market excitement when a second therapeutic molecule enters
clinical trials, whereas for a large pharmaceutical company that has, say, twenty
patented molecules on the market, seven of them blockbusters, and eight
others in various stages of clinical trials, the addition of a ninth into the
pipeline, which requires the same amount of development resources and re-
search e√orts as it would for the small biotech company, would likely not
generate the same amount of investor excitement, because it would not be as
defining an event for the larger company relative to its own market history.
This is why one can simultaneously have an activist discourse that points to the
huge profitability of the pharmaceutical industry as an argument against high
drug prices, and an industry discourse that points to the need for high drug
prices in order for the industry to survive, as apparently completely antithetical
discourses that both make market sense: the former discourse points to the
commodity marketplace and the generation of revenues, the latter to the spec-
ulative marketplace and the need to satisfy investors.
I have so far talked about the upstream-downstream terrain as descriptive of
drug development in the United States.≥≤ But pharmaceutical companies exist,
and have existed for decades, as robust industries in many countries other than
the United States. The Indian pharmaceutical industry, for instance, is one of
the most interesting national pharmaceutical industries in the world today, in
large measure because its character has been so significantly shaped by patent
regimes. The 1970 Indian Patent Act granted process as opposed to product
patents on drug manufacture. This meant that Indian pharmaceutical com-
panies, unlike their American counterparts, could manufacture drugs that
already existed on patent in the market, as long as they came up with their own
method for doing so.≥≥ This helped shape the industry into one that was
capable of cheap reverse-engineered bulk drug manufacture, which has in turn
enabled Indian drug prices to be among the lowest in the world. In 1995,
however, India became a signatory to World Trade Organization–imposed
patent regimes, which required the industry there to be completely wto com-
pliant by 2005. The change in patent regimes toward a wto-imposed one has

Introduction 25
therefore necessitated a paradigm shift in the Indian industry, as after 2005
Indian pharmaceutical companies will not be able to take a molecule already
on the market, remake it through an indigenous process, and then sell it.
Indian companies will now have to focus on novel drug discovery and de-
velopment in a manner much more closely reflective of the American drug
development marketplace.
The major question facing the Indian pharmaceutical industry today is what
e√ect becoming wto compliant will have on it, a question of what exactly the
consequences will be of a paradigm shift toward a property regime that will
not allow reverse-engineered bulk drug manufacture. The Indian pharmaceu-
tical industry was not a sick or dying industry in need of market rejuvenation
but was, throughout the 1980s, a quite profitable industry. Therefore, chang-
ing over to a wto regime, for this industry, does not just mean adopting new
and unfamiliar methods of drug discovery, which necessitates the setting up of
r & d facilities; it also means abandoning a revenue-based business model in
favor of the potentially lucrative but far riskier growth-based model, in which
Indian companies would be evaluated not just by the amount of product that
they are able to sell but also by the potential value that investors speculate they
can provide, while pitted in direct competition against more powerful West-
ern companies.
There are, however, an increasing number of Indian companies that have
been in the process of retooling themselves to become companies that can
discover new chemical entities. The stakes are not just profits but global expan-
sion. The niche that Indian companies starting to invest in r & d occupy
becomes similar to the one a Western biotech company occupies with respect
to a big pharmaceutical company. Dr. Reddy’s Foundation (drf), for in-
stance, is the r & d division of Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, which is one of the
Indian pharmaceutical companies best positioned to retool itself away from
reverse engineering of generics and toward novel drug discovery and develop-
ment. But it employs just 250 people (the size of a very small U.S. biotech
company); its r & d e√orts involve drug discovery rather than development;
and its new business model has involved out-licensing the molecules it dis-
covers to big pharmaceutical companies that can take a molecule through
clinical trials. From the revenue garnered from such licensing, companies like

26 Introduction
Reddy’s hope to move further up the value chain by holding on to the mole-
cule longer before out-licensing it. While it is nearly impossible to actually get
breakdowns of milestone payments at di√erent stages of drug development
when the drug has been licensed from a discovery company to a development
company, it is well understood that a molecule’s value increases exponentially
the further up the clinical trials process it gets before being out-licensed. In
other words, the story of drug development in India, from the perspective of
its pharmaceutical companies, is one that sees a shift from the reverse engi-
neering of generic molecules for primarily domestic markets, a profitable busi-
ness model in terms of revenues, to one that much more closely approximates
the role and market position of a U.S. biotech company, involved in early-
stage novel drug discovery (though still primarily using traditional organic
chemistry), that it hopes will allow it to eventually take its molecules further
downstream.≥∂
While the Indian pharmaceutical industry is well established, India does not
have much of a biotech industry. As indicated earlier, this is partly because of
the absence of a traditional scientific strength in the life sciences to match that
in the chemical sciences, coupled to the risk aversion of pharmaceutical com-
panies that do not want to abandon research in areas of their core strength.
However, as I note at many instances throughout the book, Indian state actors
are particularly keen to change this situation, and view genomics as the answer
to India’s developing an emergent biotech industry. As with the Western
pharmaceutical industry, the Indian pharmaceutical industry too is not an
explicit site of analysis for much of the rest of the book. Rather, I focus on
India’s biotech and genome ventures, many of which are enabled in consider-
able measure by the state and strategically constrained and influenced by the
global influence and strength of Western pharmaceutical companies. I con-
tinue to set the stage for this further analysis by briefly explaining the changing
meanings of genomics, both as science and, in the United States, as business
model, over the past few years.

Genomics
One set of background contexts necessary to understanding the assemblages
of actors, practices, stories, and events that I narrate in this book concerns the

Introduction 27
terrain of drug development.≥∑ However, I also argue that genomics repre-
sents an epistemic and technological shift of some significance to biocapital in
its particularity. In this section, I provide a quick tutorial on genomics. ‘‘Geno-
mics’’ itself, I wish to show, is not a stable referent, and its own meaning has
evolved over the last few years, from the days of the initial conception to map
and sequence the human genome at the start of the Human Genome Project
(hgp) in the late 1980s to today’s postgenomics era subsequent to the com-
pletion of the working draft sequence of the human genome. Further, this
evolution in what genomics means has not just been consequent to tech-
nological innovation or epistemic advances but has also been conditioned, in
significant measure, by what is deemed a potentially successful business model
at the time.
Genomics itself, then, is multiple things, but it is first and foremost an
articulation of experimental with informational science. To this extent, it in-
volves an articulation of di√erent scientific perspectives on biological systems,
of mathematics and computational biology on the one hand with molecular
genetics and cell biology on the other.
Genomics has to a significant extent been technologically enabled, and anal-
ysis has also tended to be driven by automated technology rather than by
hypotheses. It represents the rapid, high-volume analysis of information, what
is known as high-throughput science. The initial attempts of genome scientists
focused on mapping and sequencing human (and other) genomes, which has
been followed now by more complicated genomic analysis. Therefore the first
‘‘phase’’ of genomics was very much about the generation of databases, and
this was very much the prime activity of many of the public labs and pri-
vate companies from 1999 to 2001, the period that I trace most directly in
this book.
An important informational tool in genomic analysis is knowledge of ge-
netic variability between individuals and populations, and the potential cor-
relation of that variability to phenotypic variability (i.e., variability in visible
traits). Major informational artifacts that enable such analysis are called single
nucleotide polymorphisms, or snps (pronounced ‘‘snips’’). snps are single
base variations in the genetic code that occur about once every one thousand
bases along the three-billion-base human genome. Knowing the locations of

28 Introduction
these closely spaced dna landmarks both eases the sequencing of the human
genome and aids in the discovery of genes variably linked to di√erent traits. A
map of all the snps in the human species would provide the basic database to
perform association studies, which compare the prevalence of particular ge-
netic markers among individuals who possess a certain trait (which may be a
disease trait or a predisposition to a disease or to side e√ects to certain drugs)
and those who do not. Association studies can provide insights in unearthing
obscure disease-related genes or in helping preventive diagnosis. snps, there-
fore, have a potential value as tools leading to therapy, in a more pinpointed
and versatile way than a random dna sequence. Indeed, the ‘‘human’’ genome
sequences generated by the public hgp and by Celera represent a rather small
sampling of human dna sources.≥∏
As mentioned toward the beginning of this introduction, the hgp started as
a public initiative to sequence the genome. This was o≈cially undertaken by a
five-nation consortium, though not surprisingly much of the policy impetus
came from the United States. Therefore, at the outset, genomics was hardly
overdetermined as corporate. In fact, the initial interest in the project came
from the U.S. Department of Energy. Many biologists were skeptical because
what was being proposed was not hypothesis-driven science. Indeed, in its
guise as a state-sponsored project of big, industrialized science, whose plan-
ning proceeded throughout by means of the generation of five-year plans, the
hgp could almost be said to have resembled Soviet science in its conception
rather than American.≥π
The approach of the genome project was to start by developing genetic and
physical maps, and then to sequence regions of interest. All of this could be
done only through the concomitant development of technological hardware,
and by the parallel sequencing of model organisms.≥∫ This was followed by the
development of database tools to annotate the sequence and the beginnings of
the development of functional genomics capability, with a special focus on
dna sequence variations.≥Ω
All these plans were accelerated by the formation of Celera Genomics, and
by Craig Venter’s challenge to the hgp mentioned at the start of this introduc-
tion. This also marked the upstaging of big state science by entrepreneurial
corporate science and was enabled in large part by new automated sequencing

Introduction 29
machines developed by Applied Biosystems (abi), whose parent company,
Perkin-Elmer, was the company that also seeded Celera. Therefore, while
biotechnology’s corporate contours had already taken shape in the early 1980s
with events such as the Bayh-Dole Act, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, and the
Genentech ipo, genomics itself only started looking increasingly corporate
because of the enabling role played by Perkin-Elmer, a company that until that
time had been a completely unglamorous instrumentation company, a nuts-
and-bolts company far removed from the sort of cutting-edge research and
development associated with biotech.
I have, so far, myself tried to provide some nuts-and-bolts background at
the start of this introduction, by outlining what I see as some of the central
theoretical terrain that I am trying to cover through an attempt to explain the
notion of biocapital, and by explaining all too briefly the market terrain of
drug development and a brief overview of genomics. Both these latter contexts
are essential to understanding the arguments of especially the first four chap-
ters of this book. I now move on to outline the structure of this book and to
describe some of the sites of my analysis.

This is a book that studies a global political economic system and uses eth-
nographic methods to do so. This is already an incongruent attempt, which
e√ectively sets out resources well equipped to study locality and particularity in
order to map a set of global systems, structures, and terrains. In many ways, it is
this incongruence that captures the spirit of what George Marcus and Michael
Fischer diagnosed for social and cultural anthropology in the 1980s, the con-
stitutive element of what they called an ‘‘experimental moment in the human
sciences’’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986), and that indeed typifies the fundamental
contradiction of ethnographic practice.∂≠
This necessitates reconfigurations of the spatial boundaries of ethnographic
practice to map onto the spatial reconfigurations of the relationships between
‘‘local’’ and ‘‘global’’ brought about by global capitalism. Traditional, ‘‘single-
sited’’ ethnography, as Marcus and Fischer point out, tends not to be su≈cient
to capture the complexities and multiple causalities that constitute contempo-
rary social systems and structures. They therefore proposed multisited eth-

30 Introduction
nography as a methodological solution to the problems confronting ‘‘experi-
mental’’ social and cultural anthropology. By multisited ethnography, they do
not simply mean a multiplication of the number of field sites that an anthro-
pologist travels to, a quantitative ‘‘adding on’’ to single-sited ethnography.
Rather, they have argued that multisited ethnography is a conceptual topology, a
di√erent way of thinking about field sites in relation to analytic and theoretical
questions about the world we live in. This might require di√erent method-
ological strategies (for instance, involving new types of collaborations, formal
and informal, between anthropologist colleagues, or between anthropologists
and their informants), access to a di√erent range of sources (for instance, Web
sites and other sources of mediated information in addition to participant
observation and formal interviews), and di√erent narrative strategies (more
dialogic and polyphonic).∂∞
The ambition of this book, in a similar vein, is to make social theoretical
interventions in science studies and political economy by using empirical eth-
nographic material. Therefore, on the one hand, this book is about ‘‘biocapi-
tal’’; on the other hand, it is also a multisited ethnography of postgenomic
drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. Such a limited
demarcation of sites necessarily leads to partial and fragmentary insights into a
political economic system. I argue that it is nevertheless in the particularities
that constitute global systems that the functioning of those systems can truly
be elucidated and understood. Further, as I have argued earlier, if capitalisms
are always already multiple and mutable, then the challenge is less one of
creating a grand unified theory of capitalism than one of contributing to a
proliferation of thick, multiple, locally grounded analyses of technoscientific
market regimes and practices. India and the United States are central and in
many ways unique sites that contribute to such an analysis, but they by no
means capture ‘‘biocapital’’ in any sort of entirety. Rather, they provide win-
dows into global capitalisms, together generating a systemic perspective.∂≤
The other challenge of this book is to confront the fluidity of the systems
that I am writing about. If capitalism is multiple and mutable, any analysis of
capitalism needs to relentlessly emphasize it as process. Similarly, biotechnology
is a constantly emerging and changing field: to repeat, even genomics fails to
be a constant referent over the last five years that could be said to constitute the

Introduction 31
period of ethnographic investigation for this book.∂≥ The changes in genomics
as an epistemology have paralleled changes in genomic business models, as
business plans that in 1999 or 2000 were deemed to be the future of the life
sciences (such as, for instance, those based in the creation of bioinformatic
databases) now often seem to have been naively optimistic. Indeed, many
genome companies that generated their initial investment on the basis of
bioinformatic business models are in the process of reinventing themselves as
drug discovery biotechnology companies. Perhaps the most notable example
of such a company is Celera Genomics, which played such a major role in
generating the working draft sequence of the human genome. Meanwhile,
changes in Indian technoscience and capitalism have been particularly rapid
over the past decade and a half, as the recent dramatic investment in high tech-
nology has been matched by drastic changes in an economic and legal environ-
ment that has been retooled, both intentionally and as a consequence of global
structural constraints, toward an aggressive embrace of the free market.
Therefore, complementary to a multisited ethnographic methodology that
emphasizes the spatial scale and incongruence of global systems is a necessary
emphasis on temporality as a consequence of the fact that these systems are not
rigid or eternally resolved structures but processes constantly in formation.
On the one hand, then, this book tells stories of people, places, technolo-
gies, epistemologies, business models, and market logics in two countries that
are distinct yet interrelated in asymmetric fashion. On the other hand, how-
ever, many of these stories are structured by flows of various sorts—of mate-
rials, people, money, and information. While I trace the cultures of particular
sites throughout the book, I am also interested in tracing the multiple ex-
change relations between these sites. I do not, therefore, study and describe the
sites in this book as reified, static, or solitary entities, but as nodes in multiple
sorts of exchange.
In my fieldwork, I have adopted a combination of di√erent approaches: in-
tensive, medium-length participant observation (one to six months per site);
short targeted ‘‘probes’’ (one- to two-day site visits); ongoing monitoring of
written products of the drug development marketplace; semistructured, mul-
tiple life history and career development interviewing; use of scientific con-
ferences and trade shows as ritual spaces for seeing many of the promotional,

32 Introduction
competitive, and status constituents enacted and renegotiated; and seminars
that I gave at one of my sites (GeneEd, an e-learning start-up based in San
Francisco), which emerged as an ethnographer’s variant of a focus group
technology. In the process, I have physically covered a number of sites in the
United States (mainly around Boston and the Bay Area) and in India (mainly
in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period from early
1999 through mid-2004.
This book is written in two simultaneous narrative registers that implicitly
ground its structure. The core theoretical argument of the book is that under-
standing biocapital involves analyzing the relationship between materiality
and modes of abstraction that underlie the coemergences of new forms of life
science with market regimes for the conduct of such science. In other words,
one can understand emergent biotechnologies such as genomics only by si-
multaneously analyzing the market frameworks within which they emerge. In
doing so, for instance, marketing discourse, the hype and hope surrounding
emergent technologies, the fetish of genetic determinism, and the belief in
science, nation, and religion all constitute the assemblages of postgenomic life
that this book maps at the same time as it maps the technological and epis-
temic shifts that are both cause and consequence of genomics, biotechnology,
and drug development.
The book also maps three sets of terrains: one, the upstream-downstream
terrain of drug development that I have already briefly described; the second,
terrains within which start-ups deal with investors and customers; and the
third, the global market terrains that structure technology and capital flows
between centers of innovation such as the United States and aspiring ‘‘Third
World’’ peripheries such as India.
In chapter 1, ‘‘Exchange and Value: Contradictions in Market Logic in
American and Indian Genome Enterprises,’’ I argue that much of the geno-
mics ‘‘revolution’’ is based on technological advances rather than on funda-
mental conceptual advances. New technological hardware and methodology
allow experiments and measurements to be performed at resolutions and
speeds inconceivable before. The chapter shows how market logic is as much
at stake as technological change, as such innovations always emerge in the
context of fluid and contested ownership and intellectual property regimes.

Introduction 33
Further, these are exchange regimes in which the apparent binaries of ‘‘public’’
and ‘‘private’’ are in fact hard to maintain as American corporations take strate-
gic recourse to gift regimes at the same time that the Indian state attempts to
negotiate global playing fields as a market agent.
In chapter 2, ‘‘Life and Debt: Global and Local Political Ecologies of Bio-
capital,’’ I explore, through fieldwork conducted in the outskirts of Hyderabad
and in the center of Bombay, the local political ecologies of indebtedness that
are constituted by, and constitutive of, globalization. Biocapital is referred to
here in two distinct yet simultaneous analytic frames, more explicitly than at
any other point in the book: on the one hand, as the circuits of land, labor, and
value (in a classic Marxian sense) that are inhabited by biotechnological inno-
vation and drug development; on the other hand, as the increasingly constitu-
tive fact of biopolitics in processes of global capitalism. In other words, the
chapter explores both what forms of alienation, expropriation, and divestiture
are necessary for a ‘‘culture of biotechnology innovation’’ to take root, and
how individual and collective subjectivities and citizenships are shaped and
conscripted by these technologies that concern ‘‘life itself.’’ I thereby argue that
the playing out of First World–Third World asymmetries in globalization, as
opposed to those of industrial colonial expansion, occurs through the recon-
figuration of the relationship of imperial power to colony into one of vendor
to client.
In chapter 3, ‘‘Vision and Hype: The Conjuration of Promissory Biocapital-
ist Futures,’’ I argue that genomics, and indeed all biotechnology, is a game
that is constantly played in the future in order to generate the present that
enables that future. I therefore trace the conjuration of corporate promissory
futures as a constitutive feature of biocapital, which changes the very grammar
through which ‘‘life,’’ which now gets transformed into a calculable market
unit, is understood, and which structures the strategic terrain on which bio-
tech and drug development companies operate.
In chapter 4, ‘‘Promise and Fetish: Genomic Facts and Personalized Medi-
cine, or Life Is a Business Plan,’’ I follow the modes of abstraction that geno-
mic knowledge itself provides and is based on, leading to what I term ‘‘geno-
mic fetishism.’’∂∂ I reflect the tensions between abstraction and materiality
when considering the operation of scientific facts, which themselves are pro-

34 Introduction
duced on terrains overdetermined by questions of ownership and the public
domain on the one hand and vision and hype on the other. I argue that
genomic facts centrally imbricate multiple types of risk discourse. These dis-
courses, on the one hand, concern the probability of future disease that geno-
mic technologies can foretell, and on the other hand, they concern the high-
risk, capital-intensive process of drug development that biotechnology and
pharmaceutical companies are involved in.
In chapter 5, ‘‘Salvation and Nation: Underlying Belief Structures of Bio-
capital,’’ I show how the promises of biocapital are undergirded by salva-
tionary and nationalist rhetorics and discourses. I talk about the structural
manifestation of biotechnologies in the United States as promissory salva-
tionary science; show how such salvationary stories are embedded in specific
biographies of individuals; and argue that they are embodied in the ethos of
specific corporate cultures, and in cultures of the biotechnology and drug de-
velopment industries writ large. I contrast this to the nationalist manifesta-
tions of biocapital in India, in terms of everyday work practices, institutional
structures, regulations and mechanisms, biographies of Indian scientists, and
the missionary zeal of Silicon Valley–based nonresident Indian (nri) entre-
preneurs and the role they see for themselves as agents in India’s develop-
ment. I thereby conclude that understanding technoscientific emergence in
India is not simply a case study of Third World science and technology, but
rather that global market terrains are structured by tensions between domi-
nant hegemonic imaginaries (invariably American) and countervailing na-
tionalist imaginaries. These latter simultaneously submit to and resist Ameri-
can market hegemony in ways that lead to manifestations of market logic, state
action, and scientific development that diverge in incongruous ways from
what gets conceived in ideologies of innovation and technology transfer.
In chapter 6, ‘‘Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups: The Story of an E-learning
Company,’’ I describe fieldwork at GeneEd, a San Francisco–based start-up
that sells e-learning courses in drug discovery and development to biotech and
pharmaceutical companies. GeneEd is neither a biotech nor a pharmaceutical
company, but it is situated in all three sets of terrains that I concern myself
with throughout the book, and therefore is the one site to which I devote an
entire chapter of traditional, single-sited ethnographic attention. By virtue

Introduction 35
of being a start-up, GeneEd negotiates the investment terrain that entrepre-
neurial ventures have to contend with, something that much of the biotech
industry has had, and continues to have, to do in a market segment where
dealing with venture capitalism and venture capitalists is a central constitutive
element. Both of GeneEd’s founders are Indians in Silicon Valley and, al-
though not (yet) directly involved in technology transfer to India, are to
varying degrees networked into the Silicon Valley nonresident Indian entre-
preneurial community, which forms one of my central links in this book be-
tween Indian and U.S. market biotech worlds. And finally, GeneEd sells its
products to upstream biotech and downstream big pharmaceutical companies
and therefore has a particularly invested, and well-situated, perspective on the
upstream-downstream terrain of drug development (a terrain that has itself
significantly shaped the emergence of GeneEd’s own history as a company).
This chapter therefore shows how innovation is structured in start-ups, how
start-ups relate to their investors and customers, and how labor and manage-
ment practices and core values are impacted within the start-up itself in the
course of its evolution.
In my concluding reflections, I return to Marx to redefine what I have
meant by biocapital at various points in this analysis. In the process, I try to
tease out some of the continuities and some of the novel specificities that the
implosion of emergent life sciences with emergent market terrains and logics
present to us.

36 Introduction
Part I
Circulations
1. Exchange and Value
Contradictions in Market Logic in American
and Indian Genome Enterprises

In March 1999, undergraduates of Harvard University and the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (mit) belonging to the Harvard-mit Hippocratic
Society organized a conference titled ‘‘Genetic Technology and Society.’’ This
brought together leading biotech scientists and entrepreneurs with politi-
cians, antibiotech activists, religious leaders, and bioethicists to debate some
of the social issues arising from biotechnology. It was clearly an uncomfortable
venue for a number of the attending scientists, academic and corporate, who
were evidently not used to presenting their achievements on the same panel as
nonscientists who shared less sanguine views of the scientists’ e√orts than they
themselves did.
One of the attending scientist-entrepreneurs was Kari Stefansson, founder
and chief executive o≈cer of the Iceland-based genome company DeCode
Genetics. The pitch for this company was that Iceland, by virtue of its pur-
ported genetic homogeneity, provided an ideal site for population genomics
experiments. What in fact made it an especially good site for such experiments
was the existence in the country of excellent national medical records dating
back to the early twentieth century, coupled with a wealth of genealogical
information thanks to a population who took the tracing of their ancestry
seriously.
Just as private genome companies in the United States such as Celera Geno-
mics were creating controversy in 1998 (in their case because of their stated
desire to patent the dna sequences that they generated), so too was 1998 a
controversial year for genomics in Iceland. This is because the Icelandic parlia-
ment had given DeCode exclusive rights to create a genomic database of the
Icelandic population by collecting dna samples and elucidating their genetic
sequence, and further by coupling that genotype information to the health
records of the population maintained by the state. This venture, called the
Health Sector Database, presumed the consent of the Icelandic population.
Instead of obtaining the informed consent of each potential participant in the
database, DeCode allowed individuals to opt out of it. Unless an Icelander
actively opted out of the database, his or her medical information was pre-
sumed to be a part of it. Not surprisingly, DeCode’s e√orts were becoming
hugely controversial, not just in Iceland but in debates among American bio-
ethicists, many of whom felt that it was inappropriate for a single company to
own exclusive rights to a nation’s genetic information.∞
As a graduate student with nothing to lose, I had e-mailed Stefansson before
his arrival in Cambridge in the hope that I might be able to meet with him
during the conference, and as expected had not received a reply. At a reception
at the end of the first day of the conference, I met him in person, tall and
elegant in a light gray Armani suit that matched his silvery beard. I told him
that he had not responded to my e-mail, for which he apologized profusely,
stating that he received in excess of two hundred e-mail messages a day, but
that ‘‘we must talk.’’ He suggested that we have lunch together on the follow-
ing day, just after his own session.
The next day, Stefansson gave a wonderfully sculpted presentation on De-
Code, in which he talked about its scientific and business potential, and also
about the great care taken by the company to behave in an ethical fashion. He
was particularly eloquent regarding the measures taken to protect the privacy
of all individuals who were included in the Health Sector Database. One of his
copanelists was a soft-spoken bioethicist from the Cambridge-based Council
for Responsible Genetics named Martin Teitel, who raised many of the stan-
dard objections that opponents of DeCode’s e√orts had been raising in the
previous few months. Stefansson exploded in the middle of Teitel’s talk, saying
that Teitel was not qualified to speak about the scientific aspects of DeCode’s
work, as he was not a scientist, and did not have the right to pass judgment on
an Icelandic matter, as he was American. Teitel responded gently that if he

40 Circulations
could not, as a nonscientist, talk about science, and could not, as an American,
talk about Iceland, then by that logic, Stefansson did not have the authority to
talk about ethics, since Teitel was trained as an ethicist, and Stefansson was
not. Stefansson realized that he had made an error, dramatically buried his face
in his hands, shook his head, put his arm around Teitel, and apologized to him
in public.
After the panel, I hovered expectantly around Stefansson for the promised
lunch, but he swept past me, grabbed an associate by the hand, and stomped
o√ with him, saying firmly as he went, ‘‘We must get ourselves a bioethicist!’’

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites

The circulation of capital is intimately tied to questions of value. Value is one
of those nice double-jointed words that always already imply two di√erent
things. On the one hand, ‘‘value’’ implies the market value that gets realized
through processes of exchange. On the other, it implies the nonmarket values
that might be called, in shorthand that has led to the term’s own black-boxing
as it has been used by members of the life science community, ethics. One of the
things I show in this chapter is how market valuation depends on notions of
value that are deemed somehow ‘‘external’’ to the market, while the ‘‘ethical’’
gets increasingly encroached on, co-opted by, and made answerable to, sys-
tems of market valuation.
One of the key transformations in the life sciences that genomics marks, as
I explained in the introduction, is that biology increasingly becomes an in-
formation science. Therefore an analysis of biocapital involves asking at the
outset where value resides as biology becomes an information science, and
what work and whose agencies are required to create these values. Answering
these questions involves understanding the circulation of information and the
changing forms of corporate activity. I theorize the dynamics of information
flow and corporate action around the fact that information is something that
can be and is now owned. This chapter, therefore, o√ers an analysis of the
dynamics of information ownership in the life sciences. Specifically, it fo-
cuses on the relationship between genomic information flows and the ‘‘speed
bumps’’ created by its private ownership, in order to trace its implications
for understanding the operation of the market logic of biocapital. In the

Exchange and Value 41

process, I wish to show that ‘‘market logic’’ itself is hard to pin down and is
very much at stake.
Corporate biotech is a form of high-tech capitalism. Three defining features
consequently mark it: the importance of innovation; the role of fact produc-
tion; and the centrality of information. One of the things happening is that
information itself becomes a form of currency, susceptible to commodification
and decommodification. Also, information is something that can travel glob-
ally, in circuits of exchange tied to, yet independent of, the (in the case of
biocapital) living material (often dna, protein, cell, or tissue) that the infor-
mation comes from or relates to.
Let me tease out further the di√erent social lives of biological material and
biological information. Even though these are di√erent ‘‘things,’’ a continuous
relationship exists between them. Biological information helps to rationalize
experimental laboratory biology. For instance, one can use bioinformatics to
determine the probable function of a protein encoded by a particular dna se-
quence, by looking for homology between the sequence of interest and other
sequences (usually in other organisms) whose function is already known. By
thus narrowing the probable functional significance of di√erent sequences, it
is easier to experimentally determine the functionality of genes and proteins.
Therefore there is biological information, and the biological material (cell
or tissue) from which the information is derived, material that subsequently
becomes the substrate of experiments that validate the leads suggested by the
information. In the process, information is detached from its biological mate-
rial originator to the extent that it does have a separate social life, but the
‘‘knowledge’’ provided by the information is constantly relating back to the
material biological sample. The database plays a key intermediary role in the
transition of ‘‘information’’ to ‘‘knowledge’’: in this case specifically knowl-
edge that is relevant to therapy. It is knowledge that is always relating back to
the biological material that is the source of the information; but it is also
knowledge that can only be obtained, in the first place, through extracting
information from the biological material. The abstraction of information away
from the biological material has a specific function in making therapeutically
relevant knowledge. This is also why it is so easy to intuitively conceptualize
the generation of information as ‘‘inventive,’’ and therefore as something that
can legitimately be owned.

42 Circulations
 What is at stake, then, in analyzing biocapital is an analysis of multiple forms
of currency, such as money, information, and biological material, all simulta-
neously dependent on one another, yet not necessarily traveling the same
circuits at the same time. These circuits, however, are not simply preordained
networks but are often strategically constructed or constrained by various
institutional actors, whose actions may be at cross-purposes. The creation of
value, then, is a consequence both of circuits of exchange and of strategic
articulations of concerned individual and institutional actors.≤
One of the features of sequence information flow in genomics is the re-
markable speed at which dna sequences are being generated, a consequence
of considerable automation and investment in technological hardware in the
form of new dna sequencing machines. Therefore what is relevant is not
just that genomic information traverses circuits of exchange but that geno-
mics enables this circulation to occur at resolutions and speeds inconceiv-
able before. The pervasive rhetoric surrounding such rapid information gen-
eration is, not surprisingly, almost one of breathlessness, conveying a sense
of being overwhelmed with a huge amount of (presumably) valuable data that
is virtually impossible to keep up with. As I will show, this is not merely
rhetoric (though it is all rhetorical), because it is true that there is a huge
amount of data being generated, and while nobody quite knows the bio-
logical significance of even a fraction of it, any piece of information in this
haystack could turn out to be extremely valuable, therapeutically and com-
mercially.
Speed is also of direct material value, since a delay in the production and
marketing of what turns out to be a blockbuster drug could, in the calculation
of the pharmaceutical industry, cost a drug company in excess of a million
dollars per day. Speed manifests itself in two distinct ways: both as qualita-
tively massively compressed research and production time,≥ and as a number
of emerging segments that contribute to, or feed o√, speediness. In other
words, ‘‘speed’’ in genomics is important not just because change is fast but
because ‘‘speed’’ is a material-rhetorical fulcrum used to lever first the govern-
ment, and then the public and other companies, into responding to ‘‘hype’’
and thus further entangling themselves in biotech.
To stake a claim to the potential value of genomic information, there is a
desire, certainly among private genome scientists, to own it. Ownership, how-

Exchange and Value 43

ever, puts fetters on the seamless flow of information, which is the desired
condition for enabling information to be transformed into that valuable
‘‘something else,’’ which is often a pharmaceutical product. I will unpack this
dynamic in greater detail as the chapter proceeds, but this is the central theo-
retical problematic that I am trying to contend with: the breathlessness mani-
fested through a speed surrounding information flow, tempered by the speed
bumps installed as a necessary consequence of an institutional regime that
allows information to be owned. This leads to a frictioned process. I use the
notion of friction rather than that of noise (which has commonly been used in
information theory to denote obstructions to information that, if overcome,
can lead to a seamless flow of information),∂ because such obstructions are not
externalities waiting to be subsumed in a seamless flow but are internal to the
dynamics of the flow itself. Friction is both the product of things rubbing
against each other and suggestive of conflict; it is not just obstructive, but
productive. Speed, speed bumps, and friction, therefore, are all inherent to the
circulation of genomic information in contemporary capitalism. Further, the
forms of ‘‘gifting’’ that I describe later in the chapter, which are articulated as
alternatives to regimes of ownership and commodification, are themselves, by
virtue of in fact being commensurable with commodification, also obstructive
yet productive.
My theoretical arguments in each chapter are made through the use of
di√erent sets of ethnographic and empirical material. These, in di√erent cases,
include institutional sites, material objects, and individual biographies. In this
chapter, I use three sets of institutional and strategic sites and arrangements to
analyze notions of exchange and value in biocapital. These include the snp
Consortium; a U.S.-based biotech company that I call Rep-X; and the Indian
state. The choice of these three sites and sets of stories reflects my concern to
show the stratified dynamics of biocapitalist exchange through mapping its
multiple terrains.
As I described in my introduction while explaining the upstream-downstream
terrain of drug development, a broad distinction can be made between a
genomics company and a pharmaceutical company. A genomics company
tends to occupy upstream niches of the drug development process, tended
between 1999 and 2001 to focus largely on selling genetic information,∑ and

44 Circulations
tends to be smaller and newer. A pharmaceutical company tends to focus on
downstream aspects of drug development, sells drugs, and is usually much
larger and older. A common mode of operation for genomics companies is to
license their information to pharmaceutical companies, an arrangement that is
often more convenient for the pharmaceutical company than setting up an
extensive genomics facility of its own.
Thus genomics companies try to patent dna sequence information so that
they can sell or license it. Pharmaceutical companies usually have to pay up-
stream licensing fees and subsequent royalties on any therapy they may dis-
cover to these database companies. The pharmaceutical companies would,
therefore, much prefer information to be accessible in the public domain.
Therefore, even public/private debates are overcoded by corporate fights. In
other words, and this is crucial: What distinguishes the drug development mar-
ketplace from, say, the software industry is its peculiar upstream-downstream terrain.
Drug development is such a capital-intensive process that very few companies have the
muscle to actually take a drug to market.∏
The analogy of the upstream-downstream terrain of drug development with
the software market merits further exploration. I have suggested that drug
development is so capital intensive that it makes it very unlikely that small
biotech companies will ever really compete with or displace big pharmaceuti-
cal companies. Such a capital-intensive environment as a competitive advan-
tage for large companies does not really exist in industries like the software
industry. In other words, I have suggested that the very nature of drug de-
velopment makes it that much harder to alter the fundamental power relations
between small and big companies. Having said this, the fact remains that in
the software industry, few organizations have seriously tried to go up against
Microsoft’s core business. Many have tried to compete with one or two prod-
ucts or services that Microsoft has o√ered, but the only significant challenges
have come from companies that have fundamentally tried to change the rules
of the game (such as Netscape or aol, or more recently from the open-source
movement). The costs of bringing any big product to market, regardless of the
industry, are likely to keep the number of competitors low. Nonetheless, the
time when the biotech industry was just beginning (the late 1970s) was the
time when a little start-up called Microsoft was challenging the established

Exchange and Value 45

computing giants such as ibm and Wang. Even if Microsoft has an impene-
trable hold on the software market today, there has historically (as seen in
Microsoft’s own case) been the room for the emergence of a small company
into a giant corporation that has never happened in biotech.π
The snp Consortium is an attempt by public genome researchers and big
pharmaceutical companies to place information regarding genetic sequence
variability into the public domain so that genome companies cannot patent
such information.∫ In the portion of this chapter dealing with the consortium,
I show how such acts of apparent gifting of information to the public domain
are strategic and overdetermined by the interests of big pharmaceutical com-
panies. I argue that certain forms of strategic decommodification are part and
parcel of ‘‘market logic,’’ which in itself is hardly seamless or unitary but rather
constitutes a terrain for hegemonic contestation.
Rep-X is a biotech company that aims to collect dna samples from around
the world. It aims, in the process, to become the world’s largest corporate dna
repository and hopes to leverage the information it obtains from these genetic
samples for commercial value.
My account of Rep-X forms a bridge between the snp Consortium stories
and the stories of the Indian state in this chapter, because it is embedded in
both sets of terrains that I am trying to elucidate: the upstream-downstream
terrain of drug development in the United States, and the global terrain of
First World–Third World relationships around circuits of exchange relating
to biological material and information. In the former case, Rep-X represents
a new biotechnology company struggling to create a niche to generate market
value in the face of the hegemonic clout of the pharmaceutical industry. In
the latter case, it represents the powerful First World quasi-colonial entity seen
as expropriating genetic material from the ‘‘Third World’’ to create value in
the ‘‘First.’’
The Indian state, however, does not just exist as a ‘‘colonized’’ state actor, a
constrained victim of biopiracy. The incongruence in my stories of the Indian
state arises from the ways in which it paradoxically frames itself as a global
market actor in order, simultaneously, to resist acts of biopiracy while leverag-
ing itself as a ‘‘global player’’ in biotech. In the process, I argue that the Indian
state itself acts almost analogously to a biotech company, an aspiring ‘‘start-

46 Circulations
up’’ in a global technoscientific terrain that is always already overdetermined as
American and corporate.
Biocapital is creating a series of cultural transformations in the materiality
and exchangeability of what we call ‘‘life.’’ These transformations are created
through shifting and variable use of market commodification versus public
commons or public goods formation, both of which are disciplined by new
forms of capitalist logic, conforming neither to those of industrial capitalism
nor to those of so-called postmodern information capitalism. This is the ra-
tionale for the term ‘‘biocapital,’’ which asks the question of how ‘‘life’’ gets
redefined through the contradictory processes of commodification. In other
words, in this chapter, I attempt to get at the relationship between the mate-
rial objects of public goods and commons and the abstract objects of mar-
ket commodification, in an overall economic structure that might be called
material-speculative.

The SNP Consortium

There is a tendency to conflate genomics with its best-known institutional
manifestation, the Human Genome Project (hgp). The hgp, however, is very
much just a fragment, albeit a central one, of genomics. First, a primarily state-
sponsored venture, the hgp occupies a particular political space vis-à-vis geno-
mics writ large, as an endeavor that has used and continues to use public
money to generate gene sequence information. Second, the sequencing of the
human genome, a project that just a few years ago seemed so dauntingly far
away as to be an end in itself, is today very much conceived of as just the end of
the beginning, at a moment when a working draft sequence of the human
genome is already complete.
I start by mapping some of the major actors involved in the e√orts to
sequence the human genome. To start with, there is the National Institutes of
Health (nih), an umbrella term for a state institution that comprises various
generally academic research institutes; there are upstream companies, which
may be genome companies that sell information (either by simply sequencing,
or after annotating, the information), or tool companies; and there are down-
stream companies, of which pharmaceuticals (and invariably big multi-
national pharmaceuticals) are the most downstream. Tied into the di√erentia-

Exchange and Value 47

tion of upstream and downstream companies is the upstream-downstream
relationship of information itself to its ‘‘ultimate’’ product, the therapeutic
molecule (which of course need never actually be realized, but, as I argue in
chapter 3, whose existence as a future goal is vital to the operation of the
dynamics of the present).
As briefly described in the introduction, Craig Venter threw the genomics
community into turmoil in May 1998 by announcing that his private-sector
company, Celera Genomics, would sequence the human genome long before
the deadline of 2005 set by the publicly funded hgp. By 1999, the hgp was
clearly haunted by the specter of Venter. Much as the hgp researchers insisted
that the media overplayed the Venter story, he was often talked about in thinly
veiled taunts (‘‘combative entrepreneur’’ and ‘‘worm genome detractor’’ being
among the more colorful ones).Ω
‘‘Craig Venter,’’ says Time magazine in an issue devoted to ‘‘the future of
medicine’’ (January 11, 1999), ‘‘is a man in a hurry, and now all the genome
mappers are operating on Venter time. . . . Driven, impatient, demanding,
irritating, Craig Venter has a knack for making the rest of the world run at
Venter speed.’’ This description encapsulates the multiple embodiments of
hastened temporality in the contemporary world of biotech, where fast tech-
nologies are mirrored by fast ceos.∞≠
Venter’s history is controversial. He was at the nih in the early years of the
hgp and was involved in an nih attempt to patent dna fragments from brain
tissue in 1991 (Cook-Deegan 1994, 311–25). This generated considerable
controversy within and outside the nih. Not surprising, then, that much of
the ire of the hgp scientists toward Venter was (at least on the face of it) not
just born of a fear of being upstaged but came from the knowledge that Venter
would patent the dna sequences that he generated. If the genomics enter-
prise has been a race, then it has been one not just for credit but for ownership
as well.
It must be emphasized that it was not just Venter but the nih itself that quite
staunchly defended Venter’s 1992 patent applications, which were backed
strongly by nih director Bernadine Healy.∞∞ Major opposition to Venter’s
patent application came from James Watson, who was heading the hgp at the
time and was therefore director of the National Human Genome Research

48 Circulations
Institute (nhgri).∞≤ Thus this particular polarization into ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘pri-
vate’’ was a particular contingent outcome of a set of situated politics, perspec-
tives, and priorities, and by no means a ‘‘natural’’ falling out of public versus
private roles.
The genomics race between public and private actors continues to be con-
stantly redefined. Now that the working draft sequence of the human genome
has been completed, the competition between the nih and the private sector
has shifted to other types of information, such as annotated sequence informa-
tion or information about genetic variability. This competition, after all, has
not just been about finishing first and getting the credit for it—who generates
information first has always had huge implications for whether that informa-
tion goes automatically into the public domain or becomes the property of
particular companies. As I try to show later in the chapter, however, this
opposition between public and private sectors is more complicated than it
might seem simply from looking at the race to generate the working draft
sequence.
A consensus among especially younger public scientists in 1999 (at the
height of the race) seemed to be that the winner, regardless of who sequenced
the genome first, was always going to be Venter.∞≥ It was felt that he was in a
win-win situation simply because he always had the nih project’s sequences to
draw on as soon as they were done (since they were immediately released into
the public domain), while he did not need to divulge his sequence to the hgp.
So e√ectively the millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money going into the hgp
have all gone into Venter’s project as well, without his having to lift a finger;
and there is nothing anyone could have done to stop it.∞∂
A story about the interactions between ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ genome
worlds complicates the stark opposition that I have just set up between the
two. Signals magazine, an online magazine that analyzes biotechnology for
executives, has this to say:

Coming soon: A global genomic map of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (snps),

the tiny di√erences between two people’s dna that largely determine everything
from who’s the natural athlete to who’s the klutz to who’s likely to get lung cancer
from smoking and who’s not. In the not-so-distant future, scientists will also be
able to tell who’s at risk for cardiovascular disease, whatever their lifestyle, as well

Exchange and Value 49

 as who will respond, or not, to this drug or that. But the techniques now used
for discovering or mapping snps are costly, tedious and Ph.D.-intensive. The real
mark of a snp-detection assay scale-up will be its downward mobility: For charac-
terizing huge numbers of snps among large populations, cheap, fast and easy is the
way to go.∞∑

The working draft sequence of the human genome does not itself yield any
information about genetic variability between individuals and populations,
which has become an area of increased interest for scientists and the bio-
technology industry. The ultimate aim of studying human genetic variation is
claimed to be the generation of personalized medicine, which is therapy tai-
lored to individual genetic profiles. Determining human genetic variation is a
much more daunting task than sequencing the human genome, both because
the sample of humans required to be sequenced is much larger and because a
meaningful correlation of genetic sequence and individual or population dis-
ease trait would involve identifying the person from whom the sample came,
which raises ethical concerns. As the hgp has progressed, however, scientists
have paid an increasing amount of attention to informational and technologi-
cal tools that may help study human genetic variation, and conflicts and al-
liances have begun to arise around these tools.
The major informational artifacts of this emergent battlefield are called
single nucleotide polymorphisms, or snps (pronounced ‘‘snips’’). As de-
scribed in my introduction, snps are single base variations in the genetic code
that aid in the discovery of genes variably linked to di√erent traits. snps are
potentially very valuable markers for diagnostic and therapeutic development,
and therefore of great interest to pharmaceutical companies.
In autumn of 1998, the nih allocated $30 million to the National Human
Genome Research Institute to identify snps. This was a more than slightly
breathless undertaking (or as Francis Collins, head of the nhgri, put it, an
undertaking of ‘‘some urgency’’). The basic strategy that was decided in De-
cember 1997 involved the collection of at least 100,000 snps from dna do-
nated by 100 to 500 people in four major population categories: African,
Asian, European, and Native American (Marshall 1997a). Collins first started
promoting the project in September 1997, in response to the danger that snp
information would get patented and ‘‘locked up’’ by genomics companies

50 Circulations
(Marshall 1997b). In November 1997, Collins coauthored a Policy Forum
piece in Science with Mark Guyer and Aravinda Chakravarti that argued that
snp data would get locked away in ‘‘private collections’’ if it did not get public
support (Collins et al. 1997). Chakravarti has also argued for publicly sup-
ported coordinated data gathering, not just for reasons of unfettered access,
but for reasons of ordered access, saying that ‘‘we will lose information if we
don’t combine it all in one place’’ (Marshall 1997a). In other words, re-
searchers like Collins have been well aware since before the Venter challenge
that the private ownership of dna sequence information slows down informa-
tion flow. What is interesting in the snp story is the strategy that the public
researchers devised to get around this, and the speed with which the strategy
was employed. This is a strategy that potentially sacrificed some of the scien-
tific quality of the data in the interest of enabling quicker access, an accusation
that had ironically been leveled by the publicly funded scientists themselves
against Craig Venter’s sequencing modus operandi.
In April 1999, the nih strategy grew into a $45 million consortium funded
by the British nonprofit Wellcome Trust and ten major multinational phar-
maceutical companies. The objective of the consortium was to generate a full-
length snp map within two years and to place the results into a free public
database. The members of the consortium read like a who’s who of the phar-
maceutical industry combined with the major players of the hgp.∞∏ The objec-
tive was to fill the public databases with enough snp data to get around
anybody’s patent. According to snp Consortium chairman Arthur Holden,
‘‘Everybody will be able to do this sort of work without being held hostage to
commercial databases.’’∞π
While the snp Consortium database was not set up as a commercial data-
base (in that it was not established as a commodity in itself), its setting up was
without a doubt a commercial enterprise. In the rhetoric of contemporary
capitalism, this is framed not as altruism but as ‘‘win-win.’’ Indeed, the setting
up of the consortium, which was largely encouraged by the pharmaceutical
giant Merck, itself had its genesis in corporate battles. Merck hoped this move
would challenge the hold that its rival SmithKline Beecham had on expressed
sequence tag (est) information as a consequence of its exclusive agreement
with Human Genome Sciences (see Davies 2001, 100).∞∫ The move for a snp

Exchange and Value 51

Consortium ensured that, by immediate release of information into the public
domain, the major pharmaceutical companies would not have to go through
tedious or expensive licensing procedures with smaller genomics companies.
It also gave an aura of legitimacy to the big pharmaceutical firms, since it could
profitably be projected that consortium members had forgone patent rights on
snp information to facilitate cheap, fast, and easy public access to it. This is a
wonderful example of, to use Edward Grefe and Martin Linsky’s term, new
corporate activism (Grefe and Linsky 1995).
In The New Corporate Activism, Grefe and Linsky provide a blueprint and
strategies for political action on the part of corporations actively influencing
the outcome of issues a√ecting their organizations. At one level, this is just a
corporate public relations manual. However, Grefe and Linsky’s call for com-
bining democratic values, human psychology, grassroots organizing, and
modern technology into a winning corporate strategy draws explicitly on Saul
Alinsky’s (1989 [1971]) templates for grassroots activism in the late 1960s and
early 1970s and translates easily into a call for hegemonic corporate praxis.
Even the key metaphors used—‘‘setting a strategic approach,’’ ‘‘framing the
message,’’ ‘‘mobilizing the troops,’’ ‘‘dealing with crisis,’’ and ‘‘targeting com-
munications for maximum impact’’—are clearly metaphors of the battlefield
and come straight from Alinsky.
The dynamics of exchange of the various objects and forms of currency in
any capitalist system are not just a consequence of their traversing certain
networks. Throughout this book, I argue for the situated ways in which net-
works of exchange and circulation resolve. These resolutions are not just con-
sequent to the particular locations of actors and institutions within predesig-
nated systems or networks but are also a consequence of the strategic actions
of the involved actors.
What is important from the strategic perspective of a ‘‘new corporate activ-
ism,’’ however, is that such strategic actions not seem merely strategic, or mere
cynical manipulations. To act strategically, as Grefe and Linsky suggest, in-
volves making the fact, and the act, of strategic action inexplicit.∞Ω My account
of the snp Consortium is, then, the tracing of a strategic political act by
pharmaceutical companies that provides these companies with both material
and symbolic capital while always already appearing to be disingenuous commit-
ments to the public domain and to the progress of science.

52 Circulations
 But even such a strategic masking of strategic action cannot simply be read
as an act of cynicism. There is a contradiction inherent in a ‘‘new corporate
activism’’ gifting, which is the importance of the sincere gift. Dale Carnegie, in
his influential manual for businesspeople How to Win Friends and Influence
People (Carnegie 1998 [1936]), argues that the interest that must be shown in
others in order to succeed in business has to be a ‘‘genuine’’ interest (like
financial interest, genuine interest creates future value). This leads to the
paradox of magnanimity being necessarily interested, as in goal directed, the
means toward the garnering of symbolic capital, on the one hand, while on the
other hand, it cannot be reduced to a cynical appearance of magnanimity
simply to garner symbolic capital. That is why reading arrangements like the
snp Consortium, which are strategic calculations through and through, as
merely cynical does not appreciate the genuine sincerity that needs to underlie
such arrangements in order for them to function in a way that can in fact
garner the desired symbolic capital. The instrumentalism of gifting in market
regimes, which itself is a specific form and situation of gifting, cannot be
collapsed to utilitarianism.
The snp Consortium was not the only corporate collaboration formed to
hunt snps, and it was by no means the first. In 1997, Abbott Laboratories
seeded the French genomics company Genset to the tune of $42.5 million in
order to construct a snp map.≤≠ This is considered to be the first ‘‘strategic
alliance’’ (as Genset called it) of its sort in genomics.≤∞ Like many other
alliances between biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and unlike the snp
Consortium, this was an exclusive alliance. The division of labor in this alliance
was also quite typical of such alliances. While Genset’s job was to develop a
proprietary map of the human genome with relevant markers and genes asso-
ciated with responses to particular pharmaceutical compounds, Abbott’s was
to ‘‘develop, produce and market diagnostic systems derived from these genes
and markers to clinically test patient response to specific drugs.’’≤≤ The snp
Consortium replaces the direct contractual agreement of the Genset-Abbott
type with something more ‘‘communal’’ in nature, and at first sight counter-
intuitive to ‘‘market logic.’’ What is evident, however, is that the snp Consor-
tium is less an attempt to negate market logic than it is to redefine the terrain in
such a way that ‘‘market logic’’ is dictated by the strategic interests of the
consortium members.

Exchange and Value 53

 A major figure in the snp Consortium was Alan Williamson, former vice
president of research strategy at Merck, who called the initial meeting in April
1999 to propose the consortium. According to him, ‘‘Some companies have a
very positive attitude towards the idea of supporting a public database.’’≤≥
Statements like this imply, in the rhetoric of new corporate activism, that
some companies are inherently open to sharing information, while others are
spoilers who want to own it all themselves. What they hide is the locations of
specific corporations within a larger strategic market terrain where billions of
dollars are at stake. And this is where the upstream-downstream distinction
comes to the fore again. Even major genomics companies that might fancy
themselves as one day becoming pharmaceutical companies do not have the
history of pharmaceutical research and development and regulatory infrastruc-
ture that the big multinational pharmaceuticals have, and drugs are neither
their primary nor an assured product. For snp Consortium members, how-
ever, any possible profit they might make on a snp patent is small compared to
the profit they can make on a drug, and it is in their interests to remove the
necessity of sharing that profit with a genomics licensee. As Williamson says,
‘‘I don’t think a snp patent per se is going to be worth much. It’s the clinical
significance that really counts. Each snp has to be evaluated epidemiologically
or pharmacologically.’’≤∂
Therefore, while the snp Consortium purportedly opposes the ownership
of dna sequence information, it supports owning biologicals per se. Arrange-
ments like this increase the monopoly of the big pharmaceutical partners in the
consortium on any therapy that might accrue, at a lower cost to the companies
involved. It is not ownership itself but the modes and categories of owner-
ship that constitute the terrain for hegemonic struggle in genomics. In other
words, what is at stake is the rendering of the ‘‘raw material’’ of production
‘‘public’’—that is, not ‘‘owned’’—in order to give later ownership advantage
to those who control the modes of production.
These disputes highlight issues of corporate agency. While unobstructed
access and speedy progress of research remain the stated goals of all parties
concerned, clearly for each party research progresses ‘‘speedily’’ only when they
have unobstructed access, combined with the right, whenever they feel appro-
priate, to slow down and charge everyone else. The inherent logic of ownership,

54 Circulations
after all, is that the owner can decide what to do with the object (that has, by
virtue of its objectification, become alienable) owned. This could include
using it as an obligatory point of passage toward what are strategically deemed
to be more valuable ends (such as, in this case, by pharmaceutical companies,
therapeutic molecules).≤∑
The nih did not want information to be owned because it has a commit-
ment, as an institution of the state generating information with public money,
to release the information into the public domain. In other words, for the state
as represented by the nih, information has the status not of commodity but of
public good. Of course, in this case ‘‘the state’’ is represented by the nih and,
in the case of dna sequence patents, defends genomic information as part of a
commons for the public good. But it also is the state, in other guises, that
constructs the boundaries between public and private goods in ways that,
especially in the United States, favor the appropriation of the commons by
private companies through intellectual property protection.
The downstream companies do not want information to be owned because
their locus of surplus value generation is in selling the drug, and the less they
have to dish out to upstream companies on the way, the better for them.
However, by framing this self-interest in terms of a ‘‘relinquishing’’ of patent
rights on dna sequences in order to enter into a ‘‘partnership’’ with the hgp to
allow ‘‘free and rapid’’ flow of information, pharmaceutical company rhetoric
suggests that information is part of a gift, rather than a commodity, regime.
The idea that information is a gift on the part of big pharmaceutical com-
panies is well in keeping with the tenets of new corporate activism. As Marcel
Mauss (1990 [1954]) has shown, the gift has attached to it cultural obliga-
tions both to receive and to reciprocate.≤∏ The field of gifting, reception, and
reciprocation is much less clearly delineated in genomics than in the ‘‘archaic
societies’’ of Mauss and encompasses that extremely di√use, undefined, and
constantly recruited arena of the ‘‘public domain.’’ As Jacques Godbout and
Alain Caille have argued, there is a modality of gifting that is internal to
capital, with the market absolutely dependent on the existence of a form of gift
exchange (Godbout and Caille 1998).≤π To quote: ‘‘The mercantile relation-
ship must first be authorized by a gift relationship. In areas where the market
has not yet established its ‘automatic’ rules or where relationships count, we

Exchange and Value 55

still o√er presents. . . . The gift acts to authorize what follows it: a founding
act, it establishes the level of confidence required for the mercantile exchange
that ensues’’ (150). This is a gifting that still relies on a calculus of ratios, and
on comparability, rather than analogies and substitutability.≤∫
There is thus a tension between a linear race toward commodification and
the changing status of information from commodity to gift. In other words,
the linear race toward commodification has speed bumps inherent to it, speed
bumps that push actors to take recourse to mechanisms outside the sphere of
commodification, mechanisms that in turn facilitate the ‘‘linear’’ (now pur-
posefully in quotes) race toward commodification. This instability is a conse-
quence of the particular structures of biocapitalist knowledge production,
especially its upstream-downstream terrain, which is particularly well demar-
cated in the U.S. context. Here academic research is at least discursively (and
sometimes in actual fact) designated as contributing to the ‘‘public domain.’’≤Ω
But also, public research is naturalized as being the enabler of private research,
albeit a silent one. In other words, the mantra that innovation comes from the
private sector hides one of the fundamental conditions of possibility that
makes private innovation possible, which is the role that public institutions
play to enable private research.≥≠
Information potentially has, in addition to Marxian use value and exchange
value, a third form of value, a ‘‘moral’’ value that operates in the realm of
symbolic capital. This comes from two sources. For one, as a primary good or
gift that the state distributes or as a could-have-been commodity that the
(downstream) company relinquishes as gift, information acquires a decom-
modified status through a mechanism of rhetorical abdication that suggests
that its natural state is as commodity, and the decommodification is an act of
virtue—whether by the state or by the (downstream) company, which is
portrayed as a willing partner to the state in maintaining the unfettered flow of
information, and therefore of science.≥∞ There is, however, another, more
direct manner in which genomic information becomes virtuous, and that is its
extensive linkage, rhetorical and real, to therapy—a linkage that is made real by
the rhetoric. This too is a part of the background culture in which notions of
‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ are being formed. There was a wonderful moment, for
instance, at the end of a 1999 industrial genome conference, when Randy

56 Circulations
Scott, chairman and chief scientific o≈cer of Incyte Genomics, raised a toast to
‘‘the genomic community. Because they aren’t in genomics for themselves,
they are in it for Life.’’ Mirroring, indeed, Incyte’s own corporate slogan,
‘‘Genomics for Life.’’
It is evident that the production of biocapitalist value is to a large extent a
discursive act, whether it is through advertising, the selling of futures, the
rhetorical creation of a corporate scientific community committed to Health,
or many competing companies relinquishing property rights for the common
good. Indeed, the creation of this single community has as its internal logic the
existence of multiple competing actors, all of whom try to propagate their
particular informational value at the expense of their competitors.
It is evident, also, that information has to perform active work, variously ma-
terial and discursive, in the process of which the corporate drug development
community is created as an ethical entity, an entity represented (and encom-
passed) by Incyte’s ‘‘Genomics for Life.’’ It is not just the subject within the
genomics profession who gets informed at this moment; equally in-formed are
the subject (as in discipline, endeavor, or venture) of genomics and the cor-
porate subject such as Incyte, as ethical subjects that are in the business of
saving lives.
This section, then, is about flows, of information and of capital, the former
flowing ‘‘downstream’’ from raw dna sequence information through anno-
tated and more ‘‘meaningful’’ forms of information into the therapeutic mole-
cule that might eventually be produced based on such information. The flows
are constrained and enabled by legal regimes and technological advances, but,
intuitively at least, by that most nebulous and overarching of entities, ‘‘market
logic.’’ Market logic plays a friction-producing role in the analysis of capi-
talism similar to the role that scientific method plays in the analysis of sci-
ence. These are terms that are at once the ultimate signifiers of the boundaries
of actions that the market and science respectively can allow in order to be
the market and science, and yet precisely because of that, they assume an
almost transcendental position, impervious to analysis themselves. I have not
analyzed market logic as a single entity but have tried, through an actor-
centered analysis of information and scientific-corporate actors, to tease out
elements of what gets called ‘‘market logic’’ as it is played out. In the process, I

Exchange and Value 57

have tried to argue that the speed with which genomic information is gener-
ated, while indeed consequent to technological development, is equally an
intuitive outcome of market logic, whereby the speedy progress of science is
commercially beneficial. That it is therapeutically beneficial lends speed fur-
ther legitimacy.
The crucial point is that both the perpetuation of ownership and its obstruc-
tion can be argued as being ‘‘sound market logic’’: in the former case, owner-
ship is the reward that functions as incentive to innovation, whereas in the
latter the regulation of ownership (or its strategic elimination, as in the case of
the snp Consortium) allows maximally e≈cient and rapid circulation (which
itself can be an incentive). Clearly, therefore, the contestation here is over the
very definition of what constitutes market logic, the outcome of which has
considerable implications for the overall terrain of cooperation, conflict, and
value generation.
Furthermore, market logic goes much beyond a quantitative generation of
maximal surplus value—it needs to generate other forms of symbolic capital,
which in the case of biotechnology already exists in the rhetorical and real
construction of the industry as being in the business of Food, Health, and
Hope (to borrow this time from Monsanto’s company slogan). Meanwhile
there is the nih, an organ of the state, that has its own interests and constraints
as a consequence of being an institution funded by the public, and therefore
needs to have a commitment to the public domain—a commitment that again
gets justified through ‘‘market logic’’ at a contemporary historical moment
when market logic is perceived to greatly exceed the bounds of the market.
Such a formulation of market logic as exceeding its boundaries, however,
implies that it simply takes over the new terrain it encroaches on (such as that
of the state or the university) while itself remaining immutable. Market logic,
however, often (indeed necessarily) draws on strategies external to the process
of commodity exchange, the gift regime being a major one. The snp Consor-
tium, for instance, manages simultaneously to espouse ‘‘sound market logic’’
(by allowing ‘‘cheap, fast, and easy’’ circulation of information, leading osten-
sibly to cheaper, faster, and easier drug production) and to gain symbolic
capital by giving up property rights on information, an act that can be pro-
jected as a self-sacrificial abdication of market logic in the public cause. In

58 Circulations
the process, by the simultaneous holding up and negation of ‘‘market logic,’’
market logic as a terrain of hegemonic contestation is redefined. While the
strategies of the various actors redefine the terrain of contestation, they simul-
taneously redefine their own value as actors, as well as the value of the informa-
tion they produce.
As Slavoj Žižek says: ‘‘The ‘normal’ state of capitalism is the permanent
revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence: from the very beginning
capitalism ‘putrefies,’ it is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by
an immanent want of balance: this is exactly why it changes, develops in-
cessantly—incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and
again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, ‘con-
tradiction’ ’’ (Žižek 1994, 330).
I take Žižek’s call seriously here. I map contradiction not to show the im-
pending dissolution of capitalism but to map a terrain that highlights, in fact,
its flexibility and adaptability, and also to show the amount of work required
in sustaining it. My analysis tries to provide an insight into capitalism’s adap-
tive mechanisms, adaptations, however, that question the fundamental mech-
anisms of capitalism themselves while at the same time upholding them. Capi-
talism’s incessant development is brought about not because of the superiority
of its indices (e≈cient production, competition, market logic, or surplus value
generation) but because of its willingness to constantly abandon, redefine, or
mutate many of them in contested, unpredictable ways.
In this section of the chapter, I have shown how contradictions inherent to
the frictioned circulation of genomic material and information lead to fluid
and constantly contested boundaries between what constitutes the public do-
main and what private property. This is a fluidity essential for the sustenance
(albeit a constantly frictioned sustenance) of the exchange regimes and pro-
cesses in question.≥≤
The snp Consortium perhaps asks us whether we need a new language of
public and private to describe such arrangements that seem to transcend such
binary formulations. Rather than search for a new vocabulary, I would like
instead to take seriously the di≈culty of in fact ever having a pure ‘‘public’’ or
‘‘private’’ realm, and ask why it is that making apparent the breakdown of such
a powerful modern binary constantly occasions surprise.

Exchange and Value 59

Rep-X
One of the landmark cases concerning the patentability of human biological
material is Moore v. the Regents of the University of California (1990; henceforth
cited as Moore). John Moore, a patient a∆icted with hairy-celled leukemia,
had his spleen cells excised. The researchers belonging to the University of
California were able to convert these cells into a unique cell line (which they
named Mo, after Moore) and were able to patent the cell line. When Moore
found out that derivatives of his spleen cells had been made without his knowl-
edge and consent and had been patented, he demanded a share in the property
rights. The case was finally decided in the California Supreme Court, which,
while upholding Moore’s claim that the uc researchers had shown a breach of
fiduciary duty and had not obtained proper informed consent, denied him any
property rights in the cell line, which the court claimed was the researchers’
‘‘invention.’’≥≥
As already mentioned, the working draft sequence of the human genome
does not document genetic variability between individuals and populations.
For that, one needs dna from di√erent individual, patient, or population
groups. The development of, for instance, personalized medicine, which many
people claim is the ultimate aim of genomics, is vitally dependent on getting
large collections of dna samples (usually obtained as blood samples, occasion-
ally as tissue samples, depending on the disease being focused on). Human
biological material is obtained for such purposes from di√erent, often clearly
identified, patient or population groups that are strategically selected and then
genotyped (i.e., their genetic sequence is elucidated). Through such large-
scale analysis, especially when situated across multiple populations or patient
groups, it is possible to obtain information about the genetic variability that
centrally underlies specific traits or diseases of interest.
The human biological material—not information—is usually obtained
from hospitals with which researchers draw up specific agreements, though
other sources are also occasionally tapped. For instance, the Iceland-based
genome company DeCode Genetics obtains material from the general popula-
tion. That material is stored in a tissue repository of some sort. These reposi-
tories could be located within the company that is planning to perform sub-
sequent research (as in the case of DeCode), or in a public-domain tissue

60 Circulations
collection, or, with increasing frequency, in specific companies who base their
entire business models on serving as such repositories. The information that is
generated from this material is often converted into databases. These data-
bases are (or so it is hoped by the companies developing them) the precursors
of therapy. In an ideal world, the company that generates the database would
hold the information and use it in the company’s own drug discovery pro-
gram. In reality, taking drugs to market is so heavily capital intensive that most
database companies license their information to big pharmaceutical compa-
nies (again, in the case of the Icelandic example, DeCode has licensed its
database to the multinational pharmaceutical giant Ho√mann–La Roche). In
this way they try to ensure that information pays o√.
The key point here, which I will get back to later, is that genotyping alone is
not enough to generate meaningful information about the genetic basis of
disease: There is an absolute importance of medical history that can be correlated
with the genotype. It is only in the correlation of the two types of information that any
sort of therapeutically relevant meaning can be extracted.≥∂ Having in addition
information about family medical history is even more valuable, but is very
rare except in cases like Iceland. Now the dream (at least as articulated as part
of the rhetorical justification for sustaining its enterprise) for any company in
this business is that they can do all three of the foregoing steps: collect the
dna, generate valuable information, and then develop a drug. In reality, di√er-
ent companies end up concentrating their business models on specific points
of this value chain.
The controversy around dna patenting that I described in the previous
section while discussing the snp Consortium has really only involved the part
of the value chain that leads downstream from database to therapy. However,
the issues surrounding ownership that most closely resemble the Moore con-
troversy have more to do with the part of the chain between repository and
database. The field on which intellectual property debates in biotechnology
take place is framed by these two sets of debates.
In this section, I focus on ownership issues that arise when one deals with
the part of the value chain concerning itself with creating databases from
corporate dna repositories. What sorts of ownership barriers underlie the
business models of the companies that concentrate on this part of the value

Exchange and Value 61

chain? I will specifically talk about one company, a commercial dna repository
based in the northeastern United States, that I will refer to as Repository X
(Rep-X).≥∑
In its corporate description, Rep-X calls itself ‘‘a functional genomics com-
pany with a comprehensive, clinical approach to discovery, focused on de-
veloping high value, proprietary intellectual property for its own account and
in collaboration with major biopharmaceutical companies. Rep-X maintains
the [Rep-X proprietary repository],≥∏ an unparalleled, large-scale resource of
clinical research material, including human dna, serum and snap-frozen tissue
samples, linked to detailed medical information collected from patients world-
wide. To date, Rep-X has recruited more than 100,000 patients in its e√ort
to build the [Rep-X proprietary repository], and collections continue.’’≥π In
other words, what Rep-X wants to become is the world’s largest commercial
dna repository, collecting dna samples from all over the world, including
India, genotyping them and then leveraging them for profit.
Obviously a business model such as this can be deemed by many as ethically
somewhat fraught. So clearly bioethics is a key area in which Rep-X takes an
interest, which is not unusual for a biotech company these days. Indeed, Rep-
X has its own in-house bioethicist, a bioethicist being an emergent form of
expert mediator in the ethical debates that surround new biotechnologies.≥∫ In
fact, the ceo of Rep-X says of hiring bioethicists: ‘‘I’m surprised more com-
panies don’t do it. It doesn’t cost us anything, and in the end it may save us
[money, time or reputation]. I mean, the whole idea of it is so reasonable.
We’ve always said that if we are going to be on the front page of the New York
Times we’d better make sure we get it right.’’≥Ω In other words, bioethics is an
integral component of Rep-X’s business model.
Rep-X has not yet made it to the front page of the Times, but it has made it to
the business page of a leading U.S. newspaper. The article is typically celebra-
tory and paints a picture of dynamism, speed, and incessant progress, none of
which is unusual in a character sketch of a young biotech company: ‘‘When the
FedEx driver rings the bell on the loading dock at [Rep-X], it’s a call to action.
The driver unloads bundles of special envelopes marked with the biohazard
symbol: fresh samples of tissue and blood from patients nationwide. Within
minutes, technicians scurry to open individual plastic kits. Glass vials of blood,

62 Circulations
each identified only by a bar code, are quickly scanned into the computer—
like a giant grocery checkout in reverse. Processing the samples is a carefully
choreographed blend of tedious hard work and blazingly fast robotic automa-
tion.’’∂≠ And so it goes on: the combination of speed and genius combining to
create value from a novel business model, the rhetoric reflecting the seamless
operations of an aggressive young company.∂∞
Now the big ‘‘ethical’’ issue that Rep-X confronts is not the fact that it can
own samples but the fact that it should collect them properly; as their ceo
suggested in the earlier quote, ‘‘doing it’’ is not the question as much as ‘‘doing
it right’’ is. In other words, like the judges who constituted the majority
opinion in Moore, Rep-X is most worried about getting proper informed con-
sent. The company knows that in the United States at least, getting exclusive
property rights on the samples does not really constitute the bottleneck. This
is reflected in Rep-X’s fascinating statement of what it calls ‘‘Rigorous Ethical
Standards,’’ which states:

[Rep-X] is committed to maintaining the highest ethical standards possible, and

to that end, meets quarterly with a distinguished Bioethics Advisory Board that
has been invaluable in developing innovative solutions to the range of ethical
problems posed by genetic research. In addition, [Rep-X] has created a propri-
etary system for anonymizing collections while ensuring data quality and pro-
tecting patient confidentiality. Informed consent and patient rights are key to
[Rep-X]’s operations, and ensure sample quality while maintaining pristine ethical
standards. Working with international leaders in the area of informed consent for
genetic research, [Rep-X] has developed consent procedures appropriate to the
repository context.∂≤

Not only does Rep-X in statements like this portray itself as the embodi-
ment of ethical practice; it also sets up the idea that an institutionalized bio-
ethics provides expertise that can transcend national boundaries and contexts,
in the same way that the genetic samples Rep-X collects do. Indeed, Rep-X’s
statement is quite typical of the disclaimers that are central to many of the
companies that occupy the part of the value chain between repository and
database, and concerns itself with proper informed consent procedures for
sample collection, privacy, and confidentiality. Of course, what is notably

Exchange and Value 63

missing in this statement is anything to do with ownership rights, which, as in
the case of Moore, are deemed nonnegotiable. This is because it is the company
doing the genotyping that is deemed to be doing the ‘‘inventive’’ work; where
samples come from merely constitutes source, which, because of present law,
gets written out of intellectual property agreements.
Unfortunately for Rep-X and the retinue of ‘‘expert’’ bioethicists who pro-
fess transnational and universal problem-solving capabilities, the expertise
of institutionalized bioethics, professing as it does primarily American (and
sometimes European) codes for ethical governance, does not translate well
into other sociopolitical and geographical contexts. The final section of this
chapter has to do with the friction that Rep-X’s seamless rhetoric encounters in
the practical context of collecting genetic samples from India. This is a friction
that, of course, is left out of the narrative that institutionalized bioethics, the
business press, and Rep-X’s own public relations apparatus construct for it.
The question of why bioethics concerns itself so little with questions of
ownership is an interesting and important one to address. A major reason is
disciplinary and pedagogical: institutionalized bioethics, especially in the
United States, draws largely from analytic philosophy, which engages norma-
tive questions much more readily than questions that are more explicitly ‘‘po-
litical.’’ My suspicion, however, is that Moore has served as more than just a
legal precedent: it has further served as a normative precedent, which suggests
somehow that ownership issues are ‘‘settled.’’ This is why challenges to intellec-
tual property regimes come much more often from that messy and unpredict-
able space of the public domain, and through the messy and unpredictable
routes of politics, than through institutionalized spaces that, at some level, do
exist to channel and regulate this messiness through the ‘‘sanity’’ of expert
mediation. In other words, it is not just the content of bioethics that I find
problematic. It is the bioethicists’ mediation in such debates as experts, to the
exclusion of other participating voices, that makes institutionalized bioethics
such an undemocratic institution, even when it manages to be an ‘‘ethical’’ one.
There is a substantive underlying conceptual question at stake here, which is
that, first, bioethics therefore ends up representing particular interests and,
second, sets itself up as a universal discourse. In other words, I do not argue
here for a relativist position that somehow reifies an ‘‘Indian’’ bioethical posi-

64 Circulations
tion that should be regarded as distinct from a ‘‘Western’’ one and therefore
left untouched or unquestioned. Nor do I argue that the particularities of
situations that bioethics is called on to deal with in di√erent contexts neces-
sarily resolve along national lines. (And so my mention of ‘‘Indian’’ versus
‘‘Western’’ bioethics is merely shorthand for the di√erent sorts of ethical-
political emergence in the two sets of sites I study in this project.) What I
argue is that the posing as universal of very particular, situated interests and
value systems makes institutionalized bioethics a supremely ideological enter-
prise, in the sense in which Marx and Engels critiqued ideology as being
opposed to materialist understandings of the world in The German Ideology.∂≥
Further, it must be remembered that bioethicists, when deployed in the cor-
porate cause such as in the case of Rep-X, do not act simply as what Donna
Haraway calls ‘‘value clarifications specialists’’;∂∂ they also serve as value cre-
ation specialists, creating value in all senses of the word. They both lend
legitimacy to the corporate and scientific enterprise that they ‘‘adjudicate,’’ and
structure which questions get asked as ethical.
The question that is left hanging for me, then, is what a genuinely trans-
national bioethics would look like, since I do believe that biotechnology as a
global regime needs transnational, democratically accountable systems of gov-
ernance and regulation. I think one good way to start would be to reexamine
the connotations of the word ‘‘ethics.’’ ‘‘Ethics,’’ like many of the other terms
that I have described or analyzed (such as ‘‘genomics’’ or ‘‘capitalism’’), is
again not a stable referent. The universalizing tendencies of institutionalized
bioethics are not just consequent to a spatial uncoupling of ethical adjudication
from the context of the emergence of an ethical dilemma. They are also conse-
quent to the fixing of ‘‘the ethical’’ as somehow an eternally valid adjudi-
cation—as, in fact, a statement of a moral position.
In this regard, I find Michael Fortun’s distinction of the ethical from the
moral extremely relevant. Fortun, in writing about the DeCode controversy
for Mannvernd, the leading organized Icelandic opposition to the Health
Sector Database, says:

Ethics puzzles me—which is good, since I believe that if you’re ever not puzzled by
ethics, you’re in the realm of moralism, and moralism doesn’t puzzle me—it dis-
turbs me. Of all the things I could write about ethics here, let me start with just

Exchange and Value 65

 one: to me, ethics is not about a good or bad answer, or a good or bad action, so
much as it is about a certain quality of an encounter. I’m deliberately leaving that
rather vague for now. But it suggests some shared space between ethics and eth-
nography: each involves the careful staging of some sort of encounter.
Or layers of encounters.∂∑

Fortun does not seek to abandon the ethical as a notion. But by placing
ethics squarely as that which emerges from an encounter, as always already
indeterminate rather than simply ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘wrong,’’ as that to which one is
constantly obligated to work through, he moves ethics beyond the realm of
simple moral adjudication. He also moves it beyond the binary of universality
and relativism. Both transcendental, universal ethical positions and their rela-
tivist counterparts that simply celebrate particularity assume that the ethical
can be decided purely with reference to some kind of self-contained value
system—the only dispute being whether that value system holds across com-
munities or is distinct between di√erent communities. Fortun’s understanding
of the ethical points instead to the absolute impossibility of ethics in either
universal or relative frames of reference unless one recognizes the sorts of
incongruent discourses and value systems that come into contact in order to
create an ‘‘ethical’’ question demanding resolution in the first place.∂∏
Building on this Derridean sensibility, the ‘‘transnational’’ bioethics that I
invoke here is not simply an alternative moral framework within which ethical
disputes or dilemmas can be resolved. Nor is it a relativist celebration of the
multiple possible ethical resolutions of problems arising from new biotechnol-
ogies. It is, rather, an acknowledgment of the impossibility of an ethical regime
that trusts moral adjudication that is based on a situated set of principles and
referents (drawn largely from philosophical precepts central to advanced liberal
societies) to successfully deal with bioethical dilemmas that take shape ‘‘else-
where.’’ But it is simultaneously also an acknowledgment of the necessity of deal-
ing with bioethical dilemmas ‘‘elsewhere,’’ in an era of global capitalism where
even societies that do not have the same historical development as advanced
liberal societies are nonetheless deeply connected to them materially and ideo-
logically. The ethical-political terrain of technoscience is increasingly consti-
tuted by its global reach, and elucidating this terrain requires a set of tools that
takes the nature of global interactions and encounters into serious account.∂π

66 Circulations
 My stories in the next section are ones of exchange and value in a situation
that sees the interaction of a Western corporate entity (Rep-X) with a non-
Western, noncorporate entity (the Indian state). They are stories of ethics,
where the ethical is not a clash of incommensurable worldviews or value sys-
tems but a series of encounters that are structured by, and in turn structure, the
global terrain of biocapital. These are stories of population genomics, which is
a technoscientific assemblage that requires as its very condition of possibility a
multiplicity of genetic samples, and legal regimes that regulate the circulation
and ownership of these samples in a manner consistent with certain estab-
lished principles. These principles include values such as privacy and informed
consent that ensure the rights and dignity of the persons who constitute the
source of the samples.
But these are also stories where the agent collecting the genetic samples
happens to be an American company. The terrain on which the activities of
this company play out is not a seamless terrain of articulation, where ethical
rules are accepted without friction across national or private-public bounda-
ries. Rather, this terrain is striated—the very grounds on which Rep-X con-
structs ‘‘ethics’’ are disarticulated in significant ways from the grounds on
which the Indian state negotiates ‘‘ethics.’’ It is this disarticulation that needs
to be taken seriously into account in any attempt to come to terms with ‘‘the
bioethical.’’∂∫

The Indian State

India occupies a particularly interesting and ambiguous space in global tech-
noscience writ large, a space that is particularly accentuated in areas relating to
biotechnology and drug development. At one level very much a Third World
country with some of the lowest human resource indices in the world, India
has always privileged science and technology as a springboard into globally
competitive playing fields. Presently, India’s technoscientific establishment is
undergoing a period of profound change, as the institutional socialist model
of primarily state-sponsored research and development is giving way to a more
market-oriented approach. However, some of the most aggressive market
players in Indian biotech are not companies, which are still by and large
reticent and risk averse, but Indian public-sector labs.

Exchange and Value 67

 Genomics is an area that the Indian government has been particularly in-
terested in. India did not get into the Human Genome Project in the early
1990s, a fact that its scientific policy establishment was regretting by the mid-
1990s, when it became evident that genomics was where the action—and the
fame and money—was at. Therefore the Centre for Biochemical Technology
(cbt), which for the previous thirty years had been a dilapidated center that
had housed biochemical reagents, was reinvented as India’s cutting-edge pub-
lic genome lab.∂Ω Typically for these new market-oriented public institutions,
cbt is very interested in protecting its intellectual property.
cbt’s primary research focus is population genetics, because India’s popula-
tion is one that can be leveraged for genetic information in two ways. First, a
number of India’s indigenous populations are considered genetically homoge-
neous and might therefore be suitable groups on which to perform the sorts of
studies that DeCode performs in Iceland. Second, even India’s ‘‘general’’ pop-
ulation is a strong candidate population for genetic studies, because the preva-
lence of large families with very little genetic counseling will allow the family
genetics of disease to be traced in a way that is di≈cult to do in the West.∑≠ cbt
is therefore aggressively involved in these studies, with patient samples col-
lected largely from public hospitals with which it enters into collaboration.
Public labs in India such as cbt, therefore, see Rep-X’s sample acquisition in a
very di√erent light from Rep-X.∑∞ They maintain that Rep-X’s samples are
worthless, even if extensively genotyped, without detailed medical records.
These medical records are collected along with the samples from Indian hospi-
tals. Therefore, this argument goes, the Indian hospitals should have a share in
the intellectual property (ip). (Indeed, some American companies do draw up
extensive legal arrangements with the hospitals they obtain samples from.)
This argument says that if Rep-X shares ip with Indian hospitals, it can have all
the samples it wants. But if it does not, then it is stealing. What complicates this
analogy is that many of the best-known research hospitals in India are public
institutions, whereas in the United States, most such hospitals are private and
function as corporations. Therefore this argument of the Indian state paradox-
ically frames the state itself as a corporate entity. This is very much in keeping
with a post-1990s ideology of economic liberalization that has been prominent
in Indian elite and policy circles whose idea of India is as India Inc.∑≤

68 Circulations
 In fact, these demands have been codified in a set of ethical policies relating
to the human genome, genetic research, and services put forth by the Depart-
ment of Biotechnology (dbt) of the Ministry of Science and Technology
(dbt 2001).
The dbt guidelines explicitly mention intellectual property rights in an
‘‘ethics’’ document. They also claim that intellectual property rights are in
the ‘‘national commercial interest’’ (dbt 2001, 2), a rather odd combination of
terms normally associated with clearly demarcated ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’
spheres. The various ways in which benefit sharing is incorporated as ethical
guidelines are enunciated in article VIII.5 of the document (dbt 2001, 12,
which says: ‘‘It will be obligatory for national/international profit making
entities to dedicate a percentage [e.g., 1–3 percent] of their annual net profit
arising out of the knowledge derived by use of the human genetic material for
the benefits of the community’’); article IX.1 concerning dna banking (13: ‘‘If
any commercial use is made of the samples in the Repository, appropriate
written benefit sharing agreements, consistent with the policies stated earlier,
must be jointly signed by the donor, sample collector and Repository Direc-
tor’’); and article X.3 concerning international collaborations (15: ‘‘In inter-
national collaborative research, when genetic material from India forms the
primary basis of such research, intellectual property rights should be protected
with a majority share of the patent, if any, being held by the collaborating
Indian institution/organization. At least 10% of the benefit accruing from
such a patent should be used by the individual institutions to develop better
services for the population(s) that provided genetic materials. A minimum of
10% of Intellectual Property Rights should be held by Indian institution/
organization in any international collaborative research’’).
With Rep-X unwilling to draw up ip sharing agreements with Indian hospi-
tals, all the samples that they had collected from India since October 1999,
under the authority of the Indian Council for Medical Research (icmr), were
prevented from leaving India.
The resistance from the Indian state has been of a particular order that in
itself poses vexed questions of the status of ‘‘market logic’’ as employed by an
institution that exists to function in the public good. It does not want ip
because it thinks that the source of genetic information should be valued. It

Exchange and Value 69

wants ip because it realizes that generating medical records is part of the
inventive procedure. In fact, at first sight, the argument that public hospitals,
not patients, should share in ip might seem rather peculiar. Nor is it the Indian
state as represented by the icmr that wants to share ip, as an institution that
can distribute those rights through all hospitals, regardless of where samples
are obtained, as public good. All that the icmr stipulated is that the same
market principles for licensing and ownership sharing that get applied in
arrangements between hospitals and research institutions in the West be reap-
plied in the Indian context. This is a position that can be deemed problematic
both from the point of view of a distributive justice argument and in the way a
public institution frames itself as a corporate entity.∑≥ In the global (South–
North) travel of genetic material, the South or Third World gets framed as
‘‘source’’—and this is of course a framing with a colonial legacy, which even
anti-imperialists in countries like India buy into, often legitimately. The In-
dian argument here is that Rep-X’s taking samples from India and patenting
them is not colonial expropriation but industrial theft.
There is a larger contradiction, which is embodied in the stance of the
Indian state, one that is not merely conceptual but also strategic. As men-
tioned earlier, on the one hand, the Indian state in this case frames itself as a
market entity engaged in ‘‘corporate’’ fights with a Western corporation over
intellectual property rights. On the other hand, however, the impetus to do so
comes largely from a nationalist indignation about ‘‘neocolonial’’ expropria-
tion, which is not merely the position of activists on what might broadly be
called the Left, but very much the motivation for scientists involved in the
science policy establishment in India who have some say in charting the state’s
responses to situations like the one outlined here. This occurs at a moment in
Indian history when nationalism as necessarily a secular anti-imperialist ges-
ture has been seriously called into question by Hindu nationalist postures that
script a much more aggressive and exclusionary cultural nationalism. The fact
that the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), the political wing of the Hindu national-
ist movement, was the party leading the coalition government in power in
India from 1998 to 2004 is not insignificant for science policymakers, since
that makes the bjp their political masters. Thus there is always already inherent
a tension in the articulation of a nationalist position as an anti-imperialist
gesture in a situation such as this.

70 Circulations
 Perhaps the more acute tension for the purposes of understanding bio-
technology as an integral part of the phenomena of globalization, however,
is that Indian state actors are only able to take recourse to anti-imperialist
postures by coding them as ‘‘corporate’’ fights, and that this posture, while
e√ective to the extent of preventing Rep-X from exporting samples from In-
dia, is still partial and fragmentary. While the Indian state, and certain Indian
state actors, are keen to negotiate ip sharing agreements with Western com-
panies, there is a reluctance to aggressively push for such models at interna-
tional forums because it is felt that such a move might jeopardize foreign
investment into India, which is eagerly sought after in the current climate of
economic liberalization, regardless of the ideological persuasions of the parties
in power.∑∂ In other words, nationalism is completely enmeshed in the phe-
nomenon of globalization, both as a contradictory component and as an out-
come as well.∑∑
It is, however, the corporate coding of ‘‘the nation’’ that is of particular
interest to me here. Brahmachari, for instance, in a presentation to the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco), claims
that natural resources (in this case, the citizens and their biological matter) are
the property of the nation-state, a framing that both denotes legal and con-
tractual commodification of the resources in question, and the nation-state
itself as a quasi-corporate entity (Brahmachari 2001). This situation is further
complicated in cbt’s case because it is involved, literally, in a market venture of
its own.
In addition to reinventing the agenda of a public laboratory, Brahmachari
has, along with the Indian pharmaceutical company Nicholas Piramal (npil),
seeded a genomics start-up called Genomed on its premises.∑∏ In other words,
someone like Brahmachari, when he gets involved in policymaking that regu-
lates the flow of genetic material from India while encouraging the state to
frame itself as a global market player, is also a cofounder of a real biotech start-
up with its own global strategic interests.

Conclusion
It is impossible to talk about a concept without it flowing over inescapably.
And so there are two things that can happen with the notion of ‘‘exchange.’’
On the one hand, it can be hammered, analyzed, dissected, and critiqued—

Exchange and Value 71

dare I say ‘‘deconstructed’’—in ways that can make us think more carefully
about words like ‘‘commons,’’ ‘‘gift,’’ ‘‘commodification,’’ ‘‘public,’’ ‘‘private,’’
‘‘market logic,’’ and ‘‘value.’’ But it can also, in a very literal sense, be the subject
of deconstruction, because it gets deferred.∑π Getting a handle on exchange
means never quite being able to get a handle on it, always having it slip away,
but having other things, objects and concepts, present themselves.
This is precisely what has happened with the larger project that this book
attempts to describe and capture. What started as a study of American genome
companies quickly became one about a system of production and exchange
and a market regime—biocapital—that, as capitalist regimes do, refused to be
contained within the crucible of the ‘‘innovative center’’ of the United States.
Therefore, already, very quickly, I found myself trying to get a handle on
capitalism and globalization, in ways that would make them specific, by calling
them ‘‘biocapitalism.’’
I have tried in this chapter to emphasize contradictions in market logic
within state-corporate formations in particular contexts, such as the United
States; but I have also compared these sets of contradictions in di√erent state-
corporate formations of North and South, First World and Third World.
Therefore I have tried to highlight the radical incongruence of the playing out
of globalizing market logic in these two contexts. To reconfigure regimes of
exchange and maximize value, one sees, in the United States, corporations
taking strategic recourse to a gift economy, and, in India, the state taking
strategic recourse to a market economy.
I am also trying to argue that intellectual property debates, whether around
the patentability of dna sequences or in the context of collecting genetic
material from so-called Third World peripheries and moving them to the
‘‘inventive’’ centers of the First World, cannot be understood simply in terms
of inventiveness. Rather, they have also to be understood in terms of mate-
riality. I am seeking to question the very notion of invention as the defini-
tive notion that underlies the playing out of ip agreements on the ground. In
this sense, I am reading ip disputes much more in the sense that Rosemary
Coombe does as she traces what she calls the ‘‘cultural life’’ of intellectual
properties (Coombe 1998).∑∫
Coombe sees intellectual property not simply as a set of rights or as (reduc-

72 Circulations
tive) attributions of inventive genius. Rather, she shows it as a constitutive
object in commercial and popular lifeworlds, as a source and sink of social
power. Perhaps most in consonance with my own sensibility is her call for
what she calls an ‘‘ethics of contingency with respect to the use of commodi-
fied social texts’’ (Coombe 1998, 5).
The question then becomes how the fluidity of intellectual property trans-
lates into ethical-political complexities, especially in regimes of global infor-
mation flow, where the information in question has to do with ‘‘life itself,’’ and
where the information often travels along with tangible material objects such
as blood and tissue samples. John Frow, for instance, echoes an argument
made by many Third World opponents of global intellectual property regimes
such as the General Agreements on Tari√s and Trade (gatt) and the World
Trade Organization (wto) on the grounds that they directly disadvantage
these countries (Frow 1996). While I broadly agree with such sentiments, I
am also keen to tease out the constantly contradictory ways in which politics
on the ground trouble such easy political positions, especially in countries like
India that refuse to take their ‘‘Third World’’ status for granted.
Therefore, at one level, genomics in India would to a considerable degree
just not be possible without sequence information and other bioinformatics
resources that are generated in the West being accessible in the public domain,
since private databases are often too expensive to a√ord for most Indian re-
search centers. However, a number of ‘‘disenfranchised’’ groups, such as pa-
tient advocacy groups in the West, and indeed even cbt in India, are involved
in leveraging intellectual property arrangements in strategic ways for their
own benefit. This might be, in the former case, to ensure that rare genetic
disorders that would otherwise never get researched do get research atten-
tion;∑Ω in the latter case, as a mechanism to ensure a certain return in revenue
for what gets framed as the ‘‘Indian’’ public good. Indeed, it is hard to take an
excessively comfortable position on intellectual property issues in biotech and
drug development writ large when major proponents of dna sequence patents
are some genetic disease patient advocacy groups, and major opponents are
big multinational pharmaceutical companies.
One of the classic examples invoked to point to the ‘‘biopiracy’’ of Western
corporations patenting Third World natural resources is the case of the pat-

Exchange and Value 73

enting of neem, traditionally used in India for its medicinal properties for
centuries. In 1994 the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American
multinational company W. R. Grace were granted patents for neem-derived
products.∏≠ Paradoxically, it was not India’s Council for Scientific and Indus-
trial Research (csir) that cried foul over this issue of piracy, even though it
was csir that had to fight the case in global intellectual property courts (a case
that csir won, thereby enabling the neem patent to be overturned). csir,
however, points to the attempted piracy of neem not as the case in point of
biopiracy and neocolonialism but as the ultimate proof of the fairness of global
multilateral trade arrangements such as the wto that provide mechanisms to
overturn attempts at piracy. This is not to argue that I either agree with csir’s
position or disagree with it, but to point out, once again, that ‘‘politically
correct’’ positions that are in fact probably better informed by the inequities of
global trade systems than csir’s (which, after all, is operating on politically
constrained terrain, much as it is an enthusiast for globalization itself), are
almost invariably infinitely more complicated on the ground. The position
taken by csir in this case is an instance of an organization that might be
expected, from its structural positioning, to have a certain ‘‘Third World’’
consciousness resolutely failing to do so. This ‘‘failure,’’ further, is not on
account of ignorance or coercion, but rather is a conscious strategic decision.
Therefore even acknowledging an intellectual property system as being strati-
fied is often not su≈cient to enable one to understand its e√ects, unless one is
attentive to its (often unpredictable) political manifestations.
Indeed, csir’s embrace of globalization as signified by the wto is not just at
odds with its structural position as a governing body of ‘‘Third World’’ public
research institutions but is even at odds with pre-1990 political currents in
India. I have suggested that the 1990s saw a profound shift in the economic
ideology of the Indian state, away from a state socialist agenda and toward
aggressive market-oriented policies of liberalization, changes that have very
much been central to the direction charted by India’s technoscientific estab-
lishment as well. Of course, while 1991 did represent a watershed of sorts,
being the time when India proclaimed through a series of visible measures its
intentions to open its markets, India’s global leanings were already in evidence
in the 1980s, as both Indira Gandhi and her successor Rajiv Gandhi initiated

74 Circulations
economic liberalization in more modest but definite ways. And yet Indira
Gandhi addressed the World Health Assembly in 1982 with the following
words: ‘‘The idea of a better-ordered world is one in which medical discoveries
will be free of patents and there will be no profiteering from life and death’’
(cited in Braga 1990, 253). The extent to which csir’s current views on global
trade regimes, which include wto provisions on biotechnology and drug
development, di√er from even Indira Gandhi’s twenty years ago (let alone
Jawaharlal Nehru’s fifty years ago), of course, suggests changes in ideological
direction. But such di√erences also suggest various coproductions of law and
corporate ethos and prevailing political ideology. These are themselves influ-
enced by structural constraints, such as a huge balance-of-payments crisis in
1991 that provided the immediate impetus for economic liberalization; or the
Uruguay Round of gatt and the pressure brought to bear by the West on the
Indian government to be a signatory. They are also influenced by the agency of
individual actors (such as S. K. Brahmachari or the director general of csir,
Ramesh Mashelkar, whose role I discuss in chapter 5), who chart seemingly
irrevocable courses.
The challenge in understanding biocapital, then, is that it is a global regime
that sees exchange between sites, such as the United States and India, that
are radically asymmetric in the power they command in the global techno-
scientific marketplace. How, then, might it be possible to understand biocapi-
tal as it emerges on multiply striated global market terrains, marked by the
upstream-downstream terrain of drug development, but also by bilateral and
multilateral market and regulatory pressures that impact the United States and
India in di√erent ways?
I have shown that the global exchange regimes that both constrain and are
constructed by biocapital see an implosion of di√erent sorts of exchange that
are normally understood as binary counterparts to one another. For instance,
exchange in the public domain conflicts with the exchange of private property,
yet in di√erent situations each reinforces the other in unpredictable ways.
Similarly, it is hard to sustain binaries between commodity regimes and gift
regimes.
One thing that is common both to a market regime that depends on future
returns on current investments and valuations and to a gift regime is forms

Exchange and Value 75

of indebtedness, whether structured as monetary debt or as moral calling. In
other words, indebtedness is itself a form of valuation of circulatory systems of
exchange, again in both senses of the word ‘‘value.’’ It is the biopolitics of
indebtedness as constituted by global circuits of biocapital that I explore in the
next chapter.

76 Circulations
2. Life and Debt
Global and Local Political Ecologies of Biocapital

The first sign that one is greeted with in 2004 upon disembarking at Hydera-
bad airport advertises Genome Valley, which claims to be the ‘‘biotech hub
of India.’’ It is a six-hundred-square-kilometer area of land in and around
Hyderabad city that will, it is hoped, become the hub of academic and corpo-
rate innovation in the life sciences. In the last fifteen years, between 1989 and
2004, more than three thousand farmers have allegedly committed suicide in
the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, of which Hyderabad is the
capital. Three out of four farmers’ suicides in the country during this time are
estimated to have occurred in this state, which prides itself on being one of the
high-tech havens of India. This has included two phases, in 1997–98, and
again recently in 2003–4, which have seen a concentrated spate of suicides.
The normal reasons attributed to these suicides are drought, crop failure, and
mounting debt. However, the most recent spate of suicides has occurred in
spite of rising agricultural productivity and normal rainfall in 2003–4, suggest-
ing that debt was the overwhelming factor that precipitated the crisis.∞
The Andhra Pradesh state government during much of this time (1994–
2004) was led by N. Chandrababu Naidu. I describe Naidu’s vision and gover-
nance style and provide greater context about his regime later in the chapter.
Su≈ce it to say at this point that his government stopped paying compensa-
tion to families of suicide victims in 1998, on the perverse grounds that com-
pensation for suicides would provide an incentive for farmers to kill them-
selves. This has made it di≈cult to ascertain the number of farmers who have
in fact killed themselves, since the most reliable way of accounting for such
deaths is through an accounting of state compensation.
 One of the major policy documents of the Naidu regime is ‘‘Vision 2020,’’
which articulates Naidu’s modernist vision of the state as embedded in a dream
of rapid technological progress and material prosperity attained through glob-
alization and an aggressive embrace of the free market.≤ In the agricultural
sector, Vision 2020’s focus is on pesticides and agro-chemicals. Mechanization,
modernization, genetic modification, and a reduction of the number of people
on the land from 70 percent to 40 percent of the population are central tenets of
this policy document. A large part of the investment for these modernizing
changes is envisaged by Vision 2020 to come from the private sector.

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites

In this chapter I explore, through the lens of emergent biotechnology initia-
tives in India, the local political ecologies of indebtedness that are constituted
by, and constitutive of, globalization. ‘‘Biocapital’’ in this chapter operates
explicitly in two distinct yet simultaneous analytic frames: on the one hand,
as the circuits of land, labor, and value (in a classic Marxian sense) that are in-
habited by biotechnological innovation and drug development; on the other
hand, as the increasingly constitutive fact of biopolitics in processes of global
capitalism. In other words, on the one hand, what forms of alienation, expro-
priation, and divestiture are necessary for a ‘‘culture of biotechnology innova-
tion’’ to take root? On the other hand, how are individual and collective
subjectivities and citizenships both shaped and conscripted by these tech-
nologies that concern ‘‘life itself ’’?
As I outlined in the introduction, I use ‘‘biocapital’’ as a concept to mean
multiple things in relation to ‘‘capitalism,’’ itself a shifting concept with multi-
ple meanings. Specifically, I have argued that biocapital simultaneously mani-
fests as a specific case study of systems of capitalism—one situated lens through
which we can view the emergence of capitalist logics and systems writ large—
and as a particular form of capitalism made specific because of emergent tech-
nologies and epistemologies of the life sciences. My analysis of biocapital
swings between these two relationships to capitalism. Thus at least part of the
specificity of my stories in chapter 1 had to do with the emergent possibilities
of analyzing the ‘‘fundaments’’ of life as information that could be commodi-
fied and could operate as currency. In this chapter, on the other hand, I analyze

78 Circulations
biocapital in terms of how biotech enterprises shed light on emergent (and
in some ways continuing) manifestations of capitalism, globalization, and
biopolitics.
Biopolitics, to recapitulate, is a notion propounded by Michel Foucault,
whereby life becomes the explicit center of political calculation. Foucault’s
analysis of the biopolitical was largely situated in the empirical context of the
historical transition in Europe from absolute monarchy to the modern state,
where accounting for and taking care of the population becomes central to
the rationality of government. This emergent rationality, Foucault shows
throughout his work, takes place along with the emergence of institutions and
techniques such as the prison, the census, the clinic, and the asylum, and of
disciplines that produce the knowledge that underlies these calculations, such as
biology, demography, psychology, and political economy.
In other words, Foucault argues that emergent governmental rationality is
intimately connected to emergent institutions and techniques of governance,
and to emergent forms of knowledge production.≥ Also, this is a governmental
rationality whose territorial unit is the nation-state.
It is not surprising, then, that an emergent moment in world history which
is marked by globalization should present to us questions of the rationality of
global governance. And as we start thinking about governance in more global
terms, it is not surprising that biopolitical regulation—the regulation, cal-
culation, accounting for bodies, decisions about who lives and who dies—
becomes central to the calculus of this new governmental rationality.
The larger theoretical challenge here becomes one of mapping the articula-
tions of technoscience, capital flows, and global governance, and of asking
how these articulations enable us to understand emergent forms of knowledge
production and technological innovation, emergent forms of capitalism, and
the relationship between various levels—global, regional, national, and sub-
national—of governance.
Foucault’s primary concern with biopolitics had to do with an analysis of
the state as an agent of political calculation as very much at stake, and this
concern was in consonance with the increased role of the state as a defining
authoritative institution of modernity. We are in the midst of a historical shift
toward increasingly corporate regimes of governance. This is not a shift that

Life and Debt 79

automatically implies a reduced role for the state—indeed, in this chapter, I
show very much the opposite—but one that does pose questions about the
change in the state’s role.
In other words, by the phrase ‘‘corporate regimes of governance,’’ I imply
two things. On the one hand, corporations themselves are taking on agential
responsibility for dispensing services that, in the liberal ideology of the welfare
state, were ‘‘state’’ services.∂ On the other hand, the state itself is seen adopting
corporate strategies or forms of governance, which are often particularly ex-
plicit in the Indian context. I have narrated one instance of this in my stories of
the Indian state positioning itself as a quasi-market player in order to leverage
value from ‘‘Indian’’ genetic material in chapter 1.
In this chapter, I situate the circulatory processes and strategies described
earlier in the context of the ways in which governance—which is always al-
ready a melding of ‘‘state’’ and ‘‘corporate’’ forms and rationalities—manifests
on the ground in India. I address these questions through ethnographic field-
work conducted in the rural outskirts of Hyderabad city and in the urban
center of Mumbai. In the process, I argue that First World–Third World
asymmetries in globalization, as opposed to those of industrial colonial expan-
sion, play out through the reconfiguration of the relationship of imperial
power to colony into one of vendor to client. I also persist, thereby, with my
structural concern with circulation, and the circulatory structures, processes,
and regimes that are called into account in these global-local systems and
strategies of biocapitalist governance.
Central to these issues is a concern with indebtedness as a governing value
system, in both senses of the phrase, of capitalism today. I showed in the
previous chapter the ways in which supposedly pure market forms are com-
pletely enmeshed in certain forms of gifting (even if those are forms of gifting
that are always already open to being co-opted by the market and therefore
not quite the gift in the Maussian sense). Also there is the existence of the state
as an institution that ‘‘gifts’’ to the public good and thereby calls into account
certain forms of indebtedness to the nation. Therefore, at one level, indebted-
ness operates as moral currency.
But there is also indebtedness in more direct monetary forms of market
valuation, at multiple levels, and most certainly in American society. There is,

80 Circulations
for instance, the central importance of individual creditworthiness, with the
credit card industry as an obligatory node of contemporary American capital-
ism. Debts are also constitutive at an institutional level, in ways that are di≈-
cult to tease out into monetary and moral connotations of the term. Indebted-
ness is marked, for instance, in interactions between corporations and their
investors, whether they be large, public corporations and Wall Street, or entre-
preneurs who are forced to relinquish control over their companies by venture
capitalists to whom they are indebted, in both senses of the word, for the
capital that enables their company in the first place.
Then there is the symbolic capital that is called into account by the bio-
technology and pharmaceutical industries in particular, as I emphasized in the
previous chapter, by virtue of their being in the business of ‘‘food, health, and
hope’’—suggesting how consumers should be indebted to these companies
for undertaking high-risk, decade-long drug development ventures to pro-
duce therapies for otherwise untreatable diseases. This is an indebtedness that
rationalizes not just symbolic capital for the industry but also some of the most
expensive drug prices in the world.
Indebtedness operates at multiple levels or registers, as one structural facet
of a contemporary historical moment marked by particular arrangements of
capital flows, as a symptom of a free market system that is always already a
value system in all its multiple senses, and, more specifically for an analysis
of biocapital, the ways in which indebtedness becomes biopolitical and bio-
social.∑ It is not incidental, of course, that the American nation-state is itself
the largest debtor nation-state in the world.
Such multiple registers of indebtedness are at play in India as well. The
immediate impetus for India’s embarking on its rapid program of economic
liberalization and globalization in 1991 was a huge balance-of-payments crisis.
At the time, India’s foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $585 million, which
was su≈cient for financing just one week of exports. As a consequence, im-
ports had to be curtailed, and there was a high rate of inflation, which led to an
increase in domestic prices that further made the export environment unfavor-
able.∏ Additional structural factors were brought into play because of the first
Gulf War, which led to an increase in oil prices and a reduction in remittances
from Indian expatriates in the Gulf.π Ironically, a major reason for India’s

Life and Debt 81

indebtedness at the time was a more tentative, but nonetheless very real, push
toward liberalization initiated in the late 1980s under Rajiv Gandhi, marked
by what Partha Chatterjee calls a ‘‘mindless spending spree’’ (Chatterjee 1997
[1989], 201).
In spite of all these structural factors that evidently pointed to crisis, crisis
was itself evident only in its own production by ‘‘market logic.’’ Jayati Ghosh,
in her analysis of the initiation of liberalization programs, shows that at this
time both agricultural and industrial output were normal, and inflation not
particularly high (Ghosh 1998). What was key, however, was that India’s
balance-of-payment crisis was not inspiring confidence on the speculative mar-
ketplace. Once again, one sees the dissonance between ‘‘commodity’’ and
‘‘commercial’’ capitalism.∫ Just as a successful industry in terms of product
manufacturing and revenue generation like the Indian pharmaceutical indus-
try was deemed to be a failure from the perspective of a growth-based model
and was made under wto-imposed constraints to retool its business models,
so one sees an entire nation’s economic strategy similarly retooled because of a
perceptible ‘‘failure’’ in the eyes of a speculative market rationality that does
not necessarily seem like such a failure when seen in terms of a manufacturing
and production rationality.
In response to the 1991 crisis, the immediate solution adopted by the Indian
government was to take out a loan from the International Monetary Fund
(imf), putting India into a further state of indebtedness. Once again, both
monetary and moral registers of indebtedness were called into account, be-
cause the conditions of the imf loan necessitated embarking on structural
adjustment policies in order to be more ‘‘fiscally responsible.’’ The explicit
juxtaposition by the World Bank/imf of the fiscal responsibility or irrespon-
sibility of its (Third World) debtor countries with the ‘‘rewards’’ or ‘‘punish-
ments’’ as the case may be (which imply the extent of further creditworthiness)
is strikingly direct and paternalistic. Therefore, simultaneous to invoking a
system of monetary payback came, immediately, a call for moral reform—a
reform that demanded that India shed an ‘‘irresponsibility’’ that was not profli-
gacy but prudence, an absence of the profligacy, exuberance, and risk of embrac-
ing the free market.
I wish here to explore the Third World Other that is India, not in relativist,

82 Circulations
or even explicitly comparative, terms to the ‘‘center’’ of much of the techno-
scientific innovation in my stories, the United States, but rather as a constituent
of the American imaginaries that India currently inhabits in incongruent ways.
The relationship of India to the United States as I am trying to configure it,
therefore, is not the relationship of an outside to an inside (a binary or rela-
tivist framing from which no project of strictly symmetrical comparison can
completely escape) but the story of the outside that is always already within
the hegemonic inside—but within it in ways that make the inside uncomfort-
able, distend it, but never turn it ‘‘inside out.’’
In this chapter, I continue the sensibility introduced in chapter 1, inspired
by what Rosemary Coombe calls an ‘‘ethics of contingency’’ (1998, 5). I
simultaneously insist on locating India as a constituent of a hegemonic terrain
that is not of its own making, while refusing to acknowledge for it a Third
World status that is known in advance. In the process, many of the tactical and
strategic articulations of the Indian state tend not to be ‘‘resistance’’ to global
orders of technoscientific capitalism, even while they might rescript hege-
monic imaginaries in ways not imagined.
With this context, this chapter narrates ethnographic fieldwork at two sites
that I consider exemplary for studying the relationships between global capital
flows and local forms of indebtedness, and for showing the ways in which
biocapital ‘‘touches down’’ in di√erent contexts in India.Ω The sites that I
choose in this chapter are once again institutional assemblages, each of which
is located in a distinct political ecology. I do not use the phrase ‘‘political
ecology’’ in the sense that environmental studies scholars do,∞≠ but rather
employ it as shorthand for a ‘‘local’’ that is particular not just because of its
spatial circumscription but also because of a political economic environment
already conditioned by local and global histories and presents.
The first site is the icici Knowledge Park, known simply as ‘‘the Park,’’ a
biotechnology park started by the Indian financial services company icici and
the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh, with help from nonresident
Indian (nri) entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley. The Park is located about
forty kilometers outside Hyderabad, which, as mentioned earlier, is the capital
of Andhra Pradesh and one of the fastest-growing ‘‘technoscience cities’’ in
India. The second site is Wellspring Hospital, a hospital started by the Indian

Life and Debt 83

pharmaceutical company Nicholas Piramal India Limited (npil) in Parel, in
the heart of downtown Mumbai. The hospital houses Genomed, a genome
start-up seeded jointly by npil and the Centre for Biochemical Technology
(cbt), India’s flagship public-sector genome lab.
These sites are significant to my stories of biocapital at the level of the
institutions they represent and the political ecologies within which they are
situated. Both the Park and Genomed/Wellspring are start-ups in a country
that has very few start-up entities of the kind seen in the United States, most
markedly in Silicon Valley. The attempt to imitate a U.S. ‘‘start-up culture’’ in
both these experiments is quite explicit. The Park reflects start-ups at multiple
levels—it is itself a start-up venture with considerable investment in capital
and expertise put in by the investing parties, and its function is to enable the
incubation of biotech start-ups on its premises.
Yet both of these start-ups require significant, and explicit, state involve-
ment. The Park is enabled, as I will show, in large measure by the Andhra Pra-
desh state government, while cbt, a publicly funded lab of India’s Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (csir), is an equity holder in Genomed.∞∞
Hence both are examples of hybrid state-corporate assemblages set up in order
that India (the nation-state) become a ‘‘global player’’ (in the global mar-
ketplace) through corporate entities whose very conditions of possibility are
provided, in large measure, by the state. In other words, both are institutional
reflections of the active, resource-intensive interest taken by the Indian state in
fostering biotechnology innovation, which largely does not exist in India at
this point and is configured, from its initiation, as a global market venture.
However, the two sites inhabit completely di√erent political ecologies.
Needless to say, India’s size implies a huge heterogeneity in what constitutes
‘‘the nation-state’’ on the ground. Mumbai and Hyderabad, in many ways,
represent two epochs of India as an industrializing country, with Mumbai ex-
emplifying the phase of industrial growth through manufacturing, and Hy-
derabad (along with Bangalore) exemplifying a ‘‘postindustrial,’’ high-tech
capitalism.
Saskia Sassen makes the argument that cities are constituent nodes in the
capital flows of contemporary globalization, in ways that simultaneously ques-
tion the centrality of the nation-state while instantiating its importance (see,

84 Circulations
for instance, Sassen 2000). Cities trouble the centrality of the nation-state to
the extent that their nodal positions in global capital flows are not simply a con-
sequence of their being a component of a nation-state, as was the case in the era
of industrial colonial expansion. While cities are very much constituents of
nation-states, they are also, in direct and emergent ways, constituent nodes and
passage points in flows of transnational capital. Equally importantly, Sassen
calls for an attentiveness to locality, not as an oppositional category to ‘‘the
global’’ but as a constituent of the global. In other words, place matters, and
Sassen refuses to completely evacuate the role that particularity plays in shap-
ing the ways in which globalization manifests or ‘‘touches down.’’ This is very
much in line with my argument in making ‘‘comparisons’’ between the United
States and India, in my attempts to trace the radically incongruent manifesta-
tions in India of processes whose ideologies purport to be a seamless homoge-
nizing force. But it also shows up starkly in my comparison in this chapter of
political ecologies within India, which have consequences for understanding
the questions of governance with which I opened this section. It becomes clear,
especially in my accounts of the role of the Andhra Pradesh government in
fostering the Park and a culture of biotech innovation writ large, that ‘‘govern-
mentality’’ is not just complicated in contemporary capitalism by the melding
of state and corporate forms of governance, but the ‘‘state’’ in question, while
never ridding itself of the specter of the nation, cannot automatically be as-
sumed as the nation-state in its strict modernist understandings.∞≤
Both the sites that I write about in this chapter, of course, are also related to
questions of governmentality not just in the sense of instruments and strate-
gies of governance but as explicitly biopolitical instruments and strategies. The
incorporation (quite literally) of cultures of innovation as governing ideolo-
gies of state-corporate formations invested in enabling and facilitating global
capital flows has consequences for the ways in which the lives of subjects of the
state are reconfigured. These reconfigurations have everything to do with
historical and emergent relations of production, and with fundamental Marx-
ian concerns such as access to land and the encroachment of rural space by
urban expansion (in this case, in the explicit cause of technoscientific develop-
ment), urban proletarianization and deproletarianization, alienation, divesti-
ture and expropriation, and, as a governing framework, indebtedness.

Life and Debt 85

 This chapter does not o√er a subjective narrative from the perspective of
those displaced by, or recruited into, these start-up attempts at biotech inno-
vation. Rather, it is an attempt to map a structural terrain marked by a transi-
tion from one era of industrial capitalism (emblematized by agriculture, and
by, in Mumbai’s case specifically, textile manufacturing) to another, high-tech
capitalism.

The ICICI Knowledge Park

I start my story of life and debt in rural Andhra Pradesh by talking about
Chandrababu Naidu, who was chief minister of the state from 1994 to 2004,
and the political party that he heads, the Telugu Desam. This is among the
younger, and yet more powerful, of what are known as ‘‘regional parties,’’
parties that draw their political a≈liation from a particular region (usually a
single state) in India. On the one hand, these are parties whose ideologies and
identities are intensely shaped by a sense of locality, in opposition to the
centralizing tendencies of the Indian state that are most acutely upheld by the
Congress party, which has ruled India for forty-four of its fifty-seven years of
independence. On the other hand, these parties have become increasingly
central to national governance as the erosion of the Congress’s pan-national
hegemony has seen the emergence of coalition governments at the center,
likely to persist as the norm rather than the exception in the coming years of
India’s parliamentary democracy.
What is interesting for me here is how in many ways a regional party such as
the Telugu Desam is increasingly enrolling itself as a transnational facilitator of
capital flows into India, as the upholder of the ‘‘Telugu nation’’ turns out to be
the most aggressive and sophisticated political player in the game of globaliza-
tion. At one level, of course, it is not such a surprise that a political party that
depends on an ideology that is opposed to the centralizing tendency of the
state should find natural allies in entrepreneurs who are themselves opposed
to such centralization. Political decentralization and market decentralization
seem to find common cause in movements such as Naidu’s Telugu Desam.∞≥
Speed, information, and selling were the key modes of governmentality for
Naidu: ‘‘An Indian chief minister in today’s global economy has to be a sales-
man. If he rests on his pride nothing will be achieved. He also has to be like a

86 Circulations
chief executive who makes things happen. Speed is of the essence’’ (Naidu
2000, 9). And further: ‘‘The only course at that point was to go out and market
the state. That is what I set out to do. By going to every investors’ forum,
domestic or foreign, making Power Point presentations on what Andhra Pra-
desh has to o√er’’ (134). Naidu learned much from management pedagogy, as
any good chief executive would. He says: ‘‘Politicians must be acquainted with
the managerial wisdom of Peter Drucker and Jack Welch’’ (21). His attempt
has been to turn governance into an expert regime that is founded, further, on
imitating the United States.
This is governmentality, however, not of the nation-state but of the state-
state: the entity that Naidu was seeking to manage was, quite explicitly,
Andhra Pradesh, which after all is the region that the Telugu Desam in its very
inception claimed most directly to represent. Further, Naidu constantly em-
phasizes the competition between states for rapid economic growth and attrac-
tion of foreign investment, as if each state were a corporate entity.
But even the notion of Andhra Pradesh as a single state is a problematic one.
There is an increasingly strong movement for statehood in the region of
Telengana, which comprises the mostly interior parts of Andhra Pradesh. This
is a movement that has existed since India’s independence, with Andhra Pra-
desh, as a state, being the legislative conglomeration of three regions, coastal
Andhra, Rayalaseema, and Telengana. It is a movement that has gained force
recently because of the continued deprivation of Telengana, and also because
statehood has been given to three other regions in India that have fought for
autonomy for many years. Telengana provides most of the minerals and raw
materials that go into sustaining Hyderabad, and the relationship between the
center and the periphery of this state has very much been one of relatively
straightforward expropriation, with little development being channeled back
to Telengana. Indeed, Telengana has been the site of many of the farmer
suicides over the last decade.
Naidu, as mentioned earlier, e√ected a number of reversals of the founding
Telugu Desam ideology. While it received its discursive identity from the no-
tion of a federally strong Telugu statehood opposed to the Congress party’s
tendency to concentrate power in Delhi, Telugu Desam received its popularity
from the populist measures of its founder and former chief minister N. T.

Life and Debt 87

Rama Rao. Central to Rama Rao’s policy was providing cheap rice and huge
agricultural subsidies, and imposing prohibition, which had been the demand
of many women in urban and rural Andhra Pradesh. Naidu brutally reversed
all of these at the altar of fiscal management, structural adjustment, and prag-
matism. And yet, central to his art of politics was his ability to project these
brutal reversals, first as policies that were not imposed by an antipopulist state,
and second as policies that represented the continuation of Rama Rao’s legacy
while they reversed it.
Vision, then, was fundamental to Naidu’s mode of governance: it allowed
him to project attractive futures to investors and his electorate alike, to set
milestones for himself and his government to achieve, and was precisely the
mechanism that allowed a silent reversal of Rama Rao’s legacy, because it
implied, rhetorically, a legacy in itself, which Naidu artfully took credit for, but
always as an inheritor of a mantle, in a state where Rama Rao’s populism
makes his legacy an extremely useful one for electoral purposes.∞∂ Naidu posits
vision in explicit opposition to planning, which has always been undertaken
by the Indian state on Soviet lines, in terms of five-year plans. ‘‘For a vision,’’
says Naidu, ‘‘a reasonable time-span is 20 years’’ (Naidu 2000, 12). In other
words, in the terms of Antonio Gramsci,∞∑ vision, for Naidu, is strategic,
whereas speed is tactical: vision is the distant promissory horizon to set for
oneself, whereas speed is the means by which to narrow that distance as
energetically as possible.∞∏
There are direct links—of ideology, capital, and locality—between Naidu
and the nonresident Indian entrepreneurial community in Silicon Valley. One
of the more perverse mimetic borrowings has been that of the ideology of
venture capital. Naidu saw that venture capital was the engine that has fueled
entrepreneurialism in Silicon Valley. He therefore believed that Andhra Pra-
desh should have lots of venture capitalism. The state, therefore, has itself
decided to provide venture capital, by setting up a fund to which the contribu-
tors are the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Development Corporation Ltd., the
Small Industries Development Bank of India, and the AP Industrial and Infra-
structure Corporation Ltd. (see Naidu 2000, 139). In other words, Naidu set
up a system of public investment as ‘‘venture capital’’ funds, a completely
oxymoronic conception of venture capital, which by its American definition
comes out of huge private investment funds that expect an extremely high re-

88 Circulations
turn on investment. Naidu’s ‘‘venture capitalism’’ is, e√ectively, a euphemism
for government subsidy for high-tech industry.∞π The fostering of an ‘‘entre-
preneurial culture’’ in this way ultimately involves the removal of subsidies
from one sector, agriculture,∞∫ and the concomitant provision of subsidies
to another, high-tech—but primarily high-tech services rather than high-tech
innovation—where the services themselves are often performed for Western
corporations and exported.
Naidu’s ideology might be called an ‘‘intervention of no intervention,’’
premised as it has been on the ideology of minimal state intervention, an
ideology that, in order to be upheld, requires massive state intervention.∞Ω One
of the critical points to be made regarding such governance is that things like
information technology, biotechnology (together referred to in India quite
commonly as hipaa-bt), and tourism, which were all central to Naidu’s strat-
egy for attracting foreign investment into Andhra Pradesh, have all tended to
be emphasized at the expense of rural development.≤≠ Let me explore this
further by talking about one such state initiative to enable biotech innovation
in the Hyderabad area.
This is the icici Knowledge Park, which consists of a set of infrastructure
facilities developed by the state government in collaboration with the private
venture capital and financial services company icici. It consists of a set of
laboratories that can be leased out to companies who want to set up research
facilities. The rationale for this, according to Naidu, is that ‘‘a lot of multi-
nationals are interested in doing research in India because of the availability of
high quality scientific manpower’’ (Naidu 2000, 147). This is a rationale,
again, that is at complete odds with a rationale of doing innovative techno-
science and basic research by local scientists. In other words, the structure of
something like the icici Knowledge Park is best suited, from the perspective
of the state’s own investment in it, not necessarily to encourage basic, cutting-
edge science locally but to encourage the setting up of facilities to do research
at a fraction of the cost that it would take to do similar research in the West.
This is, of course, research that will use state-subsidized infrastructure but will
quite possibly translate into scientific and commercial advances that get re-
exported back to Western markets, even though the stated rationale for such
ventures is that some of the value generated will remain in India.≤∞
The Park is conceived as an idyllic research environment. All the labs are

Life and Debt 89

extremely open, and a lot of the space has been given to terraces that look out
over fields, fountains, and ponds, with a number of ducks thrown in for good
measure. Indeed, this is an aesthetic that icici is consciously trying to culti-
vate, as was evident from constant and anxious questions asked to me by the
ceo of the Park throughout my visit as to whether everything looked scenic
enough. It certainly did.
icici’s job here is to act as an estate manager and provide the enabling
conditions for companies to get together and do work in a workspace where a
number of labs are in close proximity to one another, thereby presumably
encouraging collaboration. While the job of ensuring smooth execution is
icici’s, the land has been made available by the Andhra Pradesh government
(this area is part of a tract of land designated by Naidu’s government as
‘‘Genome Valley’’). The Park has its own substation providing the labs with
electricity, and it has created its own tank to hold rainwater, thereby taking
care of the two big worries that plague any wet-lab researcher in India. Also,
the Park is not meant for companies with manufacturing facilities, as manufac-
turing would lead to pollution. The state government has declared a twenty-
five-kilometer zone around the Park as a no-pollution zone.
The built-up area when I visited in summer 2001 had space for ten labs, and
there were plans to erect more buildings in the future. One of the central
features of the Park is a customs shed. A major problem that Indian researchers
face is the absence of a standardized import policy for research materials,
which means that quite often valuable and perishable materials languish in
customs sheds without ever reaching their intended recipient. icici, however,
has ensured that any research materials coming to the companies housed in the
Park would be delivered straight to the Park, where the customs o≈cials
would come the next day and clear the material. (This, of course, is yet an-
other enabling feature that is ‘‘provided’’ by icici but actually enabled by the
government.)
Parks like these raise a number of questions, and in India the immediate one
is whether such ventures are huge steps toward becoming a ‘‘developed coun-
try’’ or a ‘‘global player,’’ or whether they are simply white elephants. The
answer may well depend on who rents the lab space in the Park. While in the
three years of its operation, a number of start-up ventures have leased space in
the Park, Indian industry has never been geared to take risks, as it has grown

90 Circulations
up in a largely protectionist environment. The brief high-tech boom and the
desire of nri entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley (who see in Naidu a great
supporter of their own wishes to transport a ‘‘culture of innovation’’ into
India) notwithstanding, India is a long way o√ from having what might be
called a start-up culture, certainly in biotech. icici believes that providing the
enabling infrastructure for starting up companies will change this, but an
adequate material environment alone does little for entrepreneurship unless it
articulates in creative ways with both long-term capital sources and a certain
sort of ideology of risk taking that is necessary for an entrepreneurial culture to
take root.≤≤ Another problem that industry has to tackle is the question of how
to leverage academe as an incubator. It is particularly ironic that a ‘‘start-up
space’’ is being envisaged forty kilometers outside Hyderabad, when the city
itself has some of the top academic life science research institutions in the
country, such as the Centre for Cell and Molecular Biology (ccmb).≤≥
The biggest question, however, comes back to the role of the state govern-
ment. The tragedy of water reservoirs being created and used for high-tech
‘‘global’’ research in what is not a water-rich region, and the gifting of land by
the government for the Park in a state that has seen a spate of farmers’ suicides
over the past decade as a consequence of unbearable debt, are structural mani-
festations of global capitalism that have to be taken especially seriously in
Andhra Pradesh, a state with revolutionary peasant movements completely
inscribed in its history and present.
The land in itself is easily made available by the state government because 10
percent of the land around Hyderabad belonged to its precolonial ruler, the
Nizam, and is known as sarf-e-khas (literally implying crown land, or land of
the king). The government still has control over these lands to dispose of as it
pleases. Real estate has boomed in Hyderabad over the last decade, in large
measure because the government has encouraged the growth of high-tech so
assiduously. Thus the land in areas like Shamirpet, where the Park is housed,
has become extremely valuable, but this area itself was not significantly agri-
cultural land. Therefore the government has not had to appropriate land for
ventures like the Park. To this extent, the Park does not represent a disposses-
sion of agricultural land for high-tech development. What it does represent is
an index of the priorities of the Naidu government, especially a vision of
development that has involved leapfrogging the agrarian sector.≤∂

Life and Debt 91

 What makes it so easy to conceive of such land as somehow ‘‘ideal’’ for
setting up high-tech enterprises is a conception of these areas as simply the
extension of Hyderabad city. The Park is itself located close to Turkapalli
village, which is o≈cially a part of Rangareddy district. It is, however, roughly
halfway between Hyderabad and Medak, the district headquarters of Medak
district. A few figures from the 1991 Andhra Pradesh census indicate what a
stark di√erence exists between urban Hyderabad and the surrounding rural
districts that are being made into an extension of urban Hyderabad.
Hyderabad has a literacy rate of 71 percent, compared to 49 percent for
Rangareddy district and 32 percent for Medak district. In a 217-square-
kilometer area, Hyderabad has 177 hospitals and 1,062 high schools. In a nearly
7,500-square-kilometer area, Rangareddy district has only 45 hospitals and
1,032 high schools. In a nearly 10,000-square-kilometer area, Medak district
has 49 hospitals and 1,363 high schools.≤∑ Twenty-one percent of the popula-
tion of Rangareddy district is involved in cultivation and agricultural labor, as is
35 percent of the population of Medak district (compared to 1.4 percent of the
population of Hyderabad). In other words, stark di√erences exist in the levels
of development between the city and the countryside, which are presumably to
be bridged by some inchoate notion of wealth trickling down.
It could be argued that the networks between Hyderabad and Silicon Valley
are in many ways stronger than those between Hyderabad and Medak. Even
the relationship between Hyderabad and Silicon Valley emphasizes various
histories and trajectories of indebtedness. The very opening up of the Indian
economy to global capital flows that has enabled the easy repatriation of
capital and expertise from Silicon Valley back to India stemmed, as I have
mentioned, from a situation of state indebtedness. The interest taken by the
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, as I will show in greater detail in chapter 5,
comes from a feeling of indebtedness toward India, as many of these entre-
preneurs received a highly state-subsidized higher education in India before
leaving to settle down in the United States. The solution to India’s balance-of-
payments crisis led to the implementation of imf/World Bank structural ad-
justment policies that exacerbated the indebtedness of local farmers, a situa-
tion that is part of Andhra Pradesh’s political economy to the extent that it is
not in any other part of India. The regional political complexities arising from
Naidu’s government being subjected to the constraints of representative de-

92 Circulations
mocracy (an indebtedness to the people of the state for being in power in the
first place), and of a state that has a history of both peasant revolutionary
movements and movements from autonomous statehood for Telengana, fur-
ther serve to accentuate the particularities within which biotechnology trans-
fer, a supposedly seamless homogenization of India’s market culture with that
of Silicon Valley, and a form of ‘‘technology transfer’’ that is completely about
global capital flows, actually manifests on the ground.

Wellspring Hospital
Michael Fischer, adapting an imaginary from Gilles Deleuze, proposes the
term ‘‘ethical plateaus’’ as a means of thinking about the intersections and
interactions of di√erent technologies and ethical-political emergences in ways
that are always already stratified (Fischer 2001). One lens through which the
tactical emergence of ethical-political terrains can be viewed is clinical trials,
which are techniques within which values, in all senses of the term, get incor-
porated. I wish here to talk about clinical trials in an Indian context by draw-
ing on some of my fieldwork at the Centre for Biochemical Technology (cbt)
and its associated start-up, Genomed.
As mentioned in chapter 1, Genomed is a start-up that has been seeded by
cbt in partnership with the Indian pharmaceutical company Nicholas Piramal
India Limited (npil). There were two physical lab spaces in which Genomed
is housed, very di√erent from each other. There is one Genomed on the
premises of cbt in Delhi, and another in a private hospital owned by npil,
Wellspring Hospital, in Mumbai.≤∏
The two Genomed sites quite literally represent di√erent worlds and dif-
ferent forms of life and indicate vividly how place matters in understanding
technoscientific production in situated and complex ways. On the one hand,
there is the evidently di√erent environment in which the two branches of the
company are located: one drawing directly on all the academic researchers,
facilities, and work happening in cbt, the other not, for instance. But there is
also a di√erence in the types of work being performed at the two. In addition
to doing population genomic research on schizophrenia (which parallels simi-
lar projects being done on asthma and type 2 diabetes in Delhi), Genomed
Mumbai also studies pharmacogenomic drug response in clinical trials.≤π
Wellspring Hospital is primarily an experimental site rather than a therapeu-

Life and Debt 93

tic one. It is, indeed, a ‘‘five-star’’ hospital in appearance: glittering marble
floors, comfortable sofas littering the hallways, and hospital beds with bright
yellow bedcovers all make Wellspring seem more like a hotel than a hospital,
and very di√erent from, say, the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences,
India’s premier referral hospital in Delhi, with which cbt Delhi has collabora-
tive projects under way. What makes Wellspring even more unlike anything
resembling ‘‘normal’’ Indian hospitals is the striking and almost complete
absence of patients.
This absence is because the major interventions that take place at Wellspring
are clinical trials. A stated purpose for ventures like the Human Genome
Project, or studies of genetic variability such as the snp analysis that I described
in chapter 1, is that they make the process toward developing a therapeutic
molecule more rational. However, the path from dna sequence information to
the development of a drug is extremely tortuous, for both scientific and busi-
ness reasons. Scientifically, this is because the genetic etiology of disease is
extremely complex and multifactorial. In terms of business rationalities, it is
because an increase in the number of targets for the development of a therapeu-
tic molecule, which is what genomics provides, does not necessarily decrease
the high capital risk associated with drug development for biotech and phar-
maceutical companies. There is a tendency among the latter, in any case, to
make drugs for existing indications (the so-called ‘‘me too’’ drugs) because, in
a certain market calculus, that is less risky than searching for drugs for new
indications. They also have very little guarantee of success.≤∫ The risk for drug
development companies here operates at two levels—the three phases of clini-
cal trials, especially phase 3 trials that need to be performed on a few hundred
to a few thousand volunteers, are extremely capital intensive. Also, even a small
percentage of adverse responders could lead to the drug not getting fda
approval for marketing in the United States.≤Ω
While the genetic etiology of disease is complex, that of drug response is
relatively simple and is associated with the Cytochrome p450 group of drug-
metabolizing enzymes. Therefore it is expected that the safety profile of a drug
correlates strongly with the patient’s Cytochrome p450 genetic profile.
Pharmacogenomics is the correlation of genetic profile with response to
drugs. Because the genetics of drug response is so much less complex than the

94 Circulations
genetics of disease, pharmacogenomics is much more easily realizable than
developing therapy based on dna sequence information. Meanwhile, if pa-
tients can be stratified based on their likelihood of developing an adverse
response to a drug, then it might be possible to market a drug only to that
segment of the patient population who are not adverse responders. This could
save millions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies, who might otherwise
see drugs like Pfizer’s Trovan fail to come to, or stay on, the market altogether
because of an adverse response of a small percentage of people taking the drug.
Thus pharmaceutical companies are extremely interested in pharmacogeno-
mics. The key here is how the epistemic reconfigurations promised by geno-
mics—such as allowing correlations between genetic profiles and response to
drugs—implode completely with economic considerations. The emergence of
particular rationalities of clinical trials is completely a coproduction of eco-
nomic or market considerations and possibilities with epistemic possibilities,
each providing the conditions of possibility for the other.≥≠
In addition to the money that could be saved for pharmaceutical compa-
nies by incorporating pharmacogenomics into their clinical trials regimes is
the money that could be saved by taking the trials to the so-called Third
World, where trials are significantly cheaper to perform. While Wellspring/
Genomed does research on the genetics of schizophrenia and type 2 diabetes,
a third major project, and potentially its most lucrative one, concerns phar-
macogenomics.
The pharmacogenomics work is explicitly conceived of as research that can
be of interest to Western biotech and pharmaceutical companies that might
wish to contract clinical trials out to Wellspring/Genomed. But the resource
in question that would make this attractive is not just the emergent pharmaco-
genomic capabilities in India as a result of state investment in biotechnology,
but the population. As the director of cbt and board member of Genomed
S. K. Brahmachari admits, India’s cross section of populations covers the
spectrum of the world’s populations. ‘‘If they want Caucasians, we’ll give them
Caucasians; if they want Negroids, we’ll give them Negroids; if they want
Mongoloids, we’ll give them Mongoloids.’’≥∞ Thus India becomes the melting
pot of clinical trials.
The idea that a local pharmaceutical company would invest in building a

Life and Debt 95

state-of-the-art hospital almost solely as an experimental site in itself makes
Wellspring an interesting institutional component of a genomic assemblage.
What makes it even more interesting, and pertinent in terms of my argu-
ments for situating ethical understandings in political economic contexts, is
the larger urban ecology within which Wellspring is situated.
Wellspring is located in Parel, in the heart of downtown Mumbai, but also
in the heart of the part of Mumbai that houses the textile industry. Mumbai’s
economy grew largely on the strength of a textile industry that rapidly dis-
integrated through the 1980s and 1990s, leaving visible from the windows
of Wellspring the empty shells of once prosperous mills.≥≤ Parel, therefore,
is teeming with unemployed millworkers, who have gone through periodic
cycles of unionization over the last decade, but whose struggles to reoccupy
and reopen the failing mills have probably, once and for all, ended in defeat.
Hospitals like Wellspring now abut both the poverty of recent deindustrializa-
tion (a very di√erent space of poverty from that of, for instance, Daravi,
widely regarded as Asia’s largest slum) and the new wealth that is displayed
through other monstrously glamorous erections, such as a nearby shopping
mall that sells a range of foreign brand-name consumables that can be a√orded
only by the rapidly ascendant middle-class consumer population. Such shop-
ping malls are clearly, at least partly, built in anticipation of the mills finally
being torn down and replaced by high-rise apartment blocks, since Parel rep-
resents prime real estate in a city with some of the most expensive real estate
prices in the world.
In other words, Wellspring’s location in Parel is almost certainly not acci-
dental, as there lies available to the researchers a huge unemployed local popu-
lation that ends up being easily recruited into clinical trials, which do, after all,
compensate their volunteers. Even if the correlation between the hospital’s
locality and the nature of the work performed is not direct or premeditated
(something I have been unable to ascertain), there is at the least an incon-
gruent breaking of a pattern that is otherwise prevalent in Mumbai. Normally,
private hospitals tend to be located in elite areas, whereas Wellspring is an
unusual example of a private hospital located in a mill area.≥≥
The ethics of such clinical trials can only be understood and evaluated if
situated within the local ecologies of their conduct, ecologies that trouble the

96 Circulations
very notion of a trial ‘‘volunteer’’ in ways that are not relativist but situated and
historically, materially produced. Just as Marx describes the forced proletarian-
ization of the working class during the Industrial Revolution in volume 1 of
Capital (Marx 1976 [1867], 873–942), so one can see how forced deprole-
tarianization as a consequence of the crippling contradictions of capitalism
leading to the virtual death of an entire industry in Mumbai leads in Parel to
the creation of a new population of subjects who are created as sites of experi-
mental therapeutic intervention.≥∂ What is at stake here is not simply a judg-
ment of the dubiousness or other character of clinical trials recruitment strate-
gies on their own terms, but rather the question of how regulatory and ethical
regimes of pharmaceutical governance happen on the ground. Specifically,
what is at stake is an understanding of the relationship between national-
global enterprises of clinical trials and local forms of indebtedness.≥∑ In this
process, biosociality itself gets configured as a relationship between vendors
and clients, just as globalization is.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have looked at the co-constitution of biopolitics with global
capital flows, which are themselves constituted by relations of indebtedness,
leading to localized, particular manifestations of global technoscientific capi-
talism, and raising questions, simultaneously, of exchange (a Marxian con-
cern) and governmentality (a Foucauldian concern).
My comparisons highlight the particularities of place. But once again, the
comparisons between Wellspring and the icici Knowledge Park are not meant
to be symmetrical. Rather, they are situated juxtapositions that highlight forms
of incongruent manifestations of the apparently homogenizing process of
installing a ‘‘start-up’’ culture. Of course, these particularities have everything
to do with local histories, such as that of Mumbai’s textile industry or the
history of rural development in Andhra Pradesh, which are themselves condi-
tioned by historical, global relations of production.
The history of the Mumbai mill districts is too long and rich to do justice to
in this chapter. Briefly, I have hinted at Mumbai’s transformation away from
being a center of the textile industry toward being almost exclusively a busi-
ness center—a transformation from commodity to commercial capitalism,

Life and Debt 97

leading to massive retrenchment among Mumbai’s textile workers, most of
whom live in the mill districts of the city, Parel and Byculla. Most of these
retrenched millworkers now make their living either as sidewalk hawkers or as
security guards in newly built shopping malls.
There is considerable union activity in Parel. Through much of the 1980s
and 1990s, the unions focused on reopening mills, but they now focus pri-
marily on documenting retrenched workers and their qualifications and ensur-
ing both tenancy rights and employment for them in new real estate and
businesses that come up in the mill districts.
The trope that union leaders use to describe the changes taking place in
Mumbai in terms of the lives of the workers there is sacrifice. For instance,
Datta Isswalkar, the founder of a community organization demanding the
right of retrenched workers to work, describes the consequences of Mumbai’s
rapidly changing landscape (both built and market) in the following terms:

Har waqt gareeb ka hi bali kyon dete ho? Hum to development ke khilaaf hain hi
nahin. Lekin iske jo su√erer hai, uske liye kya suvidha aapne banaaya? Woh kyon
har waqt wohin pichda rahen? Mera kehna hai ki poore duniya ke saamne global-
ization ke jaap karte ho, vikas ki baat karte ho, lekin har time vikas aur globalization
mein jo bali jaata hai woh gareeb jaata hai. . . . Investor yehi dekhte hain na, ki
security hai ki nahin usko? Lekin mazdoor apni suraksha nahin dekhna? Usko
adhikaar nahin chahiye? Yeh kaunsa satya hai? Iska matlab, vittha, capital ko aap
zyaada mahatva de rahe hain insaan se? To yeh kaunsa vikas hai bhai? Yeh kaunsi
globalization hai?≥∏
[Why do you always sacrifice the poor person? We are not against development.
But the su√erer of this, what help have you created for him? Why should he always
lag behind? What I’m saying is that you go on about globalization to the whole
world, you talk about development, but every time the person who gets sacrificed
by development or globalization is the poor person. . . . After all, don’t investors
look to see whether they have security for their investments? So shouldn’t the
worker also look for his security? Does he not want rights? What sort of truth is
this? This means that you are giving capital more importance than people? What
sort of development is this, brother? What sort of globalization is this?]

The story of Parel, then, can be situated along two theoretical frames. The
first is the Marxian frame of proletarianization and deproletarianization, hav-

98 Circulations
ing to do with shifting modes of production, the collapse of textile manufac-
turing, and the experimental recruitment of retrenched workers.
The second is a biopolitical frame. Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics is
an account of the ways in which, through techniques of normalization, stan-
dardization, visualization, and enumeration, populations get included, and
thereby accounted for, within ‘‘state rationality’’ in its broadest sense. In an
elegant inversion of this logic of inclusion of populations into a biopolitical
calculus, João Biehl shows how biopolitical techniques of governance, in the
case of the management of aids by the Brazilian state, create an excluded
population—an exclusion by systems of enumeration of a∆icted, treatable,
and treated patients that, as integral to the rationality of such enumeration,
fails to count those who, as a consequence, are left to die (see Biehl 2001; Biehl
et al. 2001).≥π
Both in Biehl’s case and in Isswalkar’s description of the situation in Mum-
bai, the excluded population in question is a sacrificial population. When this
excluded population gets incorporated into logics and circuits of global capi-
talism (such as into clinical trials regimes), however, this population shifts
away from being sacrificed to being consumed. The worker’s body becomes
available to systems of capital, and also to systems of science, as a source of
value generation, and as a source of knowledge production.
Scholars such as Biehl and Susan Greenhalgh (2003) in her work on China
show how acts of state enumeration have as integral to their logic and method
inactions; ‘‘seeing like a state,’’ to use James Scott’s phrase (see Scott 1999),
leads to certain forms of blindness as a part of the rationality of a certain mode of
seeing and accounting for the population.
Similar Marxian and biopolitical frames of reference present themselves in
the Andhra Pradesh story, though the particularities and historical specificities
are di√erent. The stories of the Andhra Pradesh government creating a culture
of technoscience in and around Hyderabad by embracing ideologies of inno-
vation and technology transfer necessarily involves configuring state priorities,
and state subjects, in certain ways that lead to exclusions, primarily an ex-
cluded population of indebted farmers, whose interests do not get accounted
for in circuits of global capital flow.≥∫
The thick historical and institutional contexts within which such biopoliti-
cal emergences take place, of course, are hardly so simple; even exclusion is not

Life and Debt 99

seamless. The biggest contradiction that faced Naidu in his attempts to create
a culture of innovation in the Hyderabad area has to do with the fact that he
himself was subject to the vicissitudes of representative democracy. In other
words, it is the excluded population of local peasants who vote politicians like
Naidu into or out of power, not the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or imf/
World Bank experts. This is a contradiction realized both by Naidu and by
Western free market ideologues.
Therefore, on the one hand, part of the art of Naidu’s governance is his
ability to give audience, and a certain form of voice (albeit not necessarily
equal voice) to both sets of interested parties, free market capitalists and
indebted electorate. For instance, it was possible for me (no doubt aided by
the symbolic capital of being a graduate student at mit) to get an appointment
with Naidu simply by e-mailing him out of the blue. On the other hand, the
complaints of nri capitalists and the Indian middle class regarding India’s
poor competitive position in global markets with respect to, especially, China
represent a thinly disguised dismay at the constraints imposed on an unbridled
exercise of the free market by representative democratic mechanisms. This is
evident, for instance, in a special issue of the Economist published in 2001 that
surveyed the first decade of India’s economic reforms. The last section of the
Economist survey calls itself ‘‘A Management Guide: How to Run India Inc.’’ It
starts by saying that ‘‘if India were listed on the stock market, it would be a
juicy takeover target. A corporate raider would see an enterprise that has raised
its game in the past ten years but remains constrained by caution. Surely
India’s assets could deliver higher returns under new management’’ (Unger
2001, 19). It becomes evident that only certain prescriptions can flow from a
framing of ‘‘India Inc.’’ as a ‘‘takeover target’’ for a ‘‘corporate raider,’’ India
simply needing ‘‘correction’’ so that it can achieve its ‘‘full potential.’’ What
needs ‘‘correcting,’’ not surprisingly, are things like ‘‘wages and salaries,’’ which
need, of course, to be corrected with that wonderful attribute of the Wall
Street trader, ‘‘draconian pragmatism’’ (ibid.).
In Parel, a di√erent regime of biopolitical inclusion and exclusion is at work.
This is the enrollment of a certain population that has become excluded from
mainstream economic activity because of the radical collapse of the city’s major
industry, getting recruited then as subjects in clinical trials, thereby becoming,

100 Circulations
quite literally, both source for genetic material that enters extremely contested
circuits of exchange, and also experimental subjects.≥Ω
Thus the stories about the Park are about the types of policy prioritization
and consequent neglect and alienation of certain sectors required for a culture
of innovation in biotechnology to take root in India. While the story of Parel
is also one of global capitalism, it also concerns the e√ects of the epistemic
changes being brought about by genomics and biotechnology.
In chapter 1, I talked about the indignation of Indian public scientists at
what they perceived to be the expropriation of Indian genetic material by
Western researchers or companies. I pointed to the irony that the mechanisms
of preempting such acts by the Indian state were market mechanisms, imply-
ing that the state acted as if corporate; but here the irony is doubled as, at the
same time that the state acts as a quasi-market agent to protect ‘‘Indian’’ in-
terests against Western corporate interests, it acts (through the company it
seeds) as a full-blown market agent in making Indian populations available to
Western corporate interests as experimental subjects. Of course, in such situa-
tions, Wellspring/Genomed becomes a contracting agent, so at one level, this
is simply a consistent enforcement of the desire on the part of the Indian state
that the same market principles that get applied by Western companies con-
tracting with other Western corporate entities also get applied when these
companies do business with ‘‘Indian’’ genetic material.
The incongruence arises because, in relationship to the state, populations
such as the unemployed millworkers of Parel are configured as a particular
type of subject, citizen.∂≠ Indeed, it is precisely the citizenship—a modernist
category of representative democracy—of peasants in Andhra Pradesh that al-
lows them, by virtue of their ability to vote, to bring friction into the seamless
imaginary of technology transfer that Naidu would otherwise have bought
into. The biopolitical incongruence of the Parel population resides in the way
in which they become, simultaneously, experimental subjects and obligatory
nodes in systems of global exchange consequent to their citizenship. It is, after
all, a consequence of citizenship that the people from whom Rep-X collects
samples get represented by the Indian state, which enters into contractual
relationships to act on behalf of, or in the name of, the sample donors. It must
be remembered that the populations from which Rep-X collects samples and

Life and Debt 101

the population of Parel are not necessarily, or at all, overlapping; however,
they do share the subject position of citizenship and thereby get interpellated
into particular relationships to the state, market, and state-market formations.
Adriana Petryna proposes the term ‘‘biological citizenship’’ in her analysis of
Chernobyl survivors in Ukraine (Petryna 2002). In her formulation, these sur-
vivors, who are also citizens of the new nation-state of Ukraine (which is itself
built on the debris of both Chernobyl and the former Soviet Union), configure
and perform their citizenship by virtue of their status as victims of radioactive
fallout. Reparations for Chernobyl victims are integral to—indeed, are defin-
ing of—Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation-state distinct from the Soviet Union.
However, these reparations can only be constituted by systems of enumera-
tion such as acceptable radioactive exposure that qualifies for reparation and
designates victims as quantified (and therefore qualified) in certain ways for
remuneration. These systems of enumeration exist in specific relationship to
an emergent idea and institution of a nation-state that has been constituted in
the shadow of radioactive catastrophe. In other words, Petryna argues, the
very conditions of constitution of citizenship in Ukraine are biological.
In India, an older nation-state than Ukraine, citizenship preexists such (in
the case of Ukraine, catastrophic) moments that instantiate the biological as
underlying a citizenship order.∂∞ This is evident in the Andhra Pradesh stories,
which show citizenship to be quite similar to what liberal political theory tells
us it is—a right to exercise electoral franchise. In Parel, however, citizenship
gets reconfigured.
More generally, this reconfiguration occurs alongside the epistemic changes
that genomics, always already overdetermined as market science, makes pos-
sible or brings about. What one sees here is the ability of information to
describe ‘‘life itself,’’ and to accrue value through insertion into transnational
circuits of exchange. This reconfigures subjectivity in ways that turn popula-
tions into source (in intellectual property considerations), experimental sub-
jects (in clinical trials regimes), and obligatory passage points without which
the global exchange networks that get constituted could not thus be con-
stituted. Since it is the Indian state that happens to be the most entrepreneurial
agent in Indian biotech today, the relationship of this emergent subjectivity to
citizenship comes to be at stake. This is especially so when the state enters into

102 Circulations
market contracts that involve populations that it claims to represent by virtue
of its statehood. Even if the citizenship in question does not exactly parallel the
biological citizenship Petryna speaks of, there is no question that a component
of citizenship at stake in these emergent, global, postgenomic transactions is
undeniably ‘‘biological,’’ and equally configured by relations of indebtedness at
multiple levels.
The first part of the book, then, has been concerned with circulation. This is
a circulation, as I have argued, that can be described and discerned in two
distinct narrative registers or ethnographic perspectives—that of circulatory
systems, with the vital importance of the obligatory passage points of those
systems; and that of particular locales, with the vital importance of the fact that
these locales are positioned within global circulatory systems.
I do not wish here to preordain the consequences, for whomever and in
whatever form, of the circulatory processes I am studying. At the same time, I
do not resist this preordination to fetishize, instead, the empirical, local, or
agential, in a fashion that reduces outcomes of processes that are undeniably
constrained by the structural edifices within which they are contained (or fail
to be adequately contained) to mere contingency.
The first two chapters have dealt with the conditions of possibility of
exchange, and the tendential ways in which these processes of exchange,
which always already relate to value in both senses of the word, manifest
on the ground in di√erent globalizing locales. The second part of the book
concerns the ways in which globalizing regimes of exchange (both techno-
scientific and market) articulate. Chapter 3 investigates the promissory gram-
matical structure of biocapital that structures the operations not just of corpo-
rate statements (public relations) but also of scientific statements (facts).
Chapter 4 maps the forms of individual and social subjectivities that get
configured through such grammars of promissory articulation that concern
‘‘facts’’ about ‘‘life itself.’’ Chapter 5 outlines the underlying belief systems,
such as nation and religion, that form the grounds or conditions of possibility
or the terrains of enablement for such forms and practices of articulation. And
chapter 6 provides a case study of some of my arguments throughout the book
in an ethnographic account of a San Francisco–based start-up company.

Life and Debt 103

Part II
Articulations
3. Vision and Hype
The Conjuration of Promissory Biocapitalist Futures

The L. V. Prasad Eye Institute (lvpei) in Hyderabad is a premier not-for-

profit research and treatment center for eye disease. To understand the epide-
miology of blindness, the institute undertook a major study called the Andhra
Pradesh Eye Disease Study (apeds). This study threw up some staggering
results, which suggested that 80 percent of the state’s population (and, by
extrapolation, India’s population) of blind people had avoidable, treatable, or
easily operable forms of blindness, such as cataracts, or simply lacked access to
eyeglasses.∞ To rectify this situation, lvpei has become part of a World Health
Organization initiative called Vision 2020: The Right to Sight.
A prominent researcher at lvpei who is involved in its Vision 2020 initia-
tive is D. Balasubramanian. A former director of Hyderabad’s prestigious
academic research institute, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology
(ccmb), Balasubramanian is also one of the architects of Andhra Pradesh’s
biotechnology policy, some elements of which (such as the support to knowl-
edge parks) I described in chapter 2. He was, in the process, involved in
another Vision 2020 initiative, that of the former chief minister of Andhra
Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu. Vision 2020 was the cornerstone of much of
Naidu’s public relations apparatus.
Getting an appointment with Chandrababu Naidu was remarkably easy and
simply involved e-mailing him out of the blue. His o≈ce had an electronic cell,
which forwarded my message to his joint secretary, who set up my meeting.
Such online (or, for that matter, o√-line) responsiveness is generally quite
unheard of in Indian politics, but Naidu had a reputation for responding to
e-mail requests, especially if they either came from someone based in the
United States or had anything to do with science and technology.
Much of the ‘‘meeting’’ was, not surprisingly, waiting, but that too was
quite an interesting experience. Naidu met with people every evening, and
there were two separate rooms outside his o≈ce for people to wait, one for the
‘‘common man’’ and the other for vips. I had, no doubt by virtue of my mit
a≈liation, been classified in the latter category. The arrangement reminded me
of a Mughal emperor’s court, with a separate Diwan-e-am and Diwan-e-khas
for public and special audiences respectively. My waiting-room companions
included a prosperous-looking nonresident Indian from Washington, D.C.,
who worked for Sylvan Learning Centers. The second was an even more
prosperous-looking nonresident Indian from Denver, who was chaperoning
an elderly, clearly ‘‘local,’’ gentleman who was rehearsing his presentation to
the chief minister from a bright pink folder labeled ‘‘Tirumala: Vision 2020.’’
Tirumala is the site of the Tirupati temple, arguably the most sacred pil-
grimage spot for South Indian Hindus. Clearly, in Naidu’s regime, religions
and religious institutions had to be visionary, too. And it helped to have
someone with American connections to articulate that vision.
Visions, of course, are articulated all the time in corporate America and
perhaps were never more consistently or extravagantly articulated than at the
height of the [Link] boom in Silicon Valley, the event and place that served
as a source for much of Naidu’s own visionary inspirations. Perhaps the most
dramatic example of a company that operated solely on the basis of extrava-
gant vision and hype was the bioinformatics company Doubletwist.≤ My own
first encounter with this company was at its stall at a 1999 industrial ge-
nome conference organized by Craig Venter’s Institute for Genomic Research
(tigr). At this time, the company was called Pangea but was on the cusp of
reinventing itself as Doubletwist. It was without a doubt the loudest and most
visible presence at any of the public relations events at the conference, typify-
ing the [Link] corporate attitude of the time, and clearly spending huge
amounts of money to stay garishly visible. Indeed, at one point, there was even
a billboard advertisement for the company on Highway 101 as it entered San
Francisco, possibly the most expensive spot for roadside advertising in the
United States. Pangea’s transformation into Doubletwist was the transforma-

108 Articulations
tion of a bioinformatics company that wrote annotation algorithms into a
[Link] company that was, in the words of its vice president of marketing
Rob Williamson, ‘‘a life science portal for online genetic research geared to go
directly to the scientist’’—in another words, a Web site that would put other
genomic database resources into one place for easier access.≥
The story of Pangea/Doubletwist is a fundamental part of stories of vision
and hype in Silicon Valley high-tech worlds that run in significant measure on
the basis of venture capital funding. Indeed, the role of venture capitalists in
Doubletwist’s saga led a number of its employees to refer to the company as
‘‘Double-Crossed.’’
Pangea was started by two Stanford graduates, Joel Bellenson and Dexter
Smith. Bellenson and Smith were crack programmers who wrote the code, as
contract workers, for the first version of Incyte’s gene expression database,
LifeSeq, which became the industry-standard expression database and the
major source of Incyte’s value in the late 1990s. As contract workers, the two
did not get any share in the intellectual properties or royalties Incyte received.
This was something that Bellenson and Smith felt very bitter about, though
equally something that Incyte felt was hardly to be expected, given that the
two had been hired as contractors, not employees. In starting Pangea, Bellen-
son and Smith were o√ered $10 million by one of the most famous Silicon
Valley venture capital firms of the [Link] boom.∂ In exchange, the venture
capitalists wanted 50 percent of the company, which Bellenson and Smith, not
knowing any better, gave up. Indeed, on the back of this investment came a
number of other extremely prestigious venture capitalists.
Now, this venture capital firm had also seeded a small bioinformatics com-
pany in San Diego that was going nowhere in particular. They suggested to
Bellenson and Smith that Pangea should buy the small company. Since the
venture capitalists had a substantial ownership share in the acquired company,
the acquisition served to further dilute Bellenson’s and Smith’s share in Pan-
gea. In other words, the venture capitalists had managed to get Bellenson and
Smith to spend their money in order to further relinquish hold on their com-
pany. Eventually the venture capitalists managed to so dilute Bellenson’s and
Smith’s holdings in the company that they finally even got rid of the founders
from the company’s board.

Vision and Hype 109

 Meanwhile, A√ymetrix, a tool company based in Santa Clara, California,
was hoping to go beyond being a tool provider and turn into an informatics
and drug discovery company. They were hoping to do this by acquiring a
promising young bioinformatics company. Pangea/Doubletwist, perhaps by
virtue of its high visibility, was the company that A√ymetrix initially sought.
In March 2000, A√ymetrix o√ered to buy Doubletwist for $300 million, quite
a staggering figure to o√er for a company that really had not developed any
genuine value-added commercial products. Doubletwist, however, felt they
were worth much more than that, and turned A√ymetrix down.
This failed acquisition was perhaps the most fortuitous event in A√ymetrix’s
history. Seven months later, they had acquired Doubletwist’s competitor Neo-
morphic instead. Doubletwist, meanwhile, spiraled through its huge reser-
voirs of venture capital money, attempted and failed thrice to go public, and
finally, in a symbolic gesture of supreme insult, was o√ered to be bought for
$10 million by Celera Genomics at the end of 2001. Spurning that last o√er as
well, Doubletwist finally ran out of money and closed its doors in March 2002.
It had managed to burn through $78 million of venture capital money, a
remarkable amount for what was purely a software company, with no wet-lab
facilities, but with one of the most aggressive public relations and investor
relations outfits in Silicon Valley biotech.∑
If Chandrababu Naidu’s vision failed because of the exigencies of represen-
tative democracy that saw him voted out of power, then Doubletwist’s failed
because they spent all their money on articulating their vision. Nonetheless,
both Naidu and Doubletwist, failures in one reckoning, managed fundamen-
tally not just to epitomize the capitalist terrain of their time but also, in signifi-
cant measure, to contribute to a definition of a culture of innovation that was
marked in Silicon Valley and markedly imitated in Andhra Pradesh. As I
attempt to show through my arguments in this chapter, such a culture of
innovation, driven by vision and hype, is not simply a waste or unreal but
rather an extremely productive mechanism of value generation in a speculative
marketplace.

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites

In many ways, this is the most theoretical chapter of this book. It investigates
the grammar of biocapital. As I have mentioned, Michel Foucault (1973) has

110 Articulations
argued that an understanding of modernity can be grasped by tracing the
changes that have occurred in life, labor, and language. This chapter most
explicitly concerns itself with language and investigates the discursive appara-
tus of biocapital.
The grammar of biocapital is a consequence of the type of capitalism that it
is. As a type of high-tech capitalism, biocapital is, certainly in the U.S. context,
often speculative, a reflection of commercial capitalism almost to the exclusion
of commodity capitalism.∏ At the same time, because biocapital is a techno-
scientific enterprise, its component institutions are involved in the production
of scientific fact, and in technological innovation. Biocapital is the articulation of
a technoscientific regime, having to do with the life sciences and drug develop-
ment, with an economic regime, overdetermined by the market. The life sci-
ences are involved in fact production that enables the creation of new tech-
nologies and therapeutic products (innovation). The outcomes of innovative
experiments are by definition unknowable; the market inputs into these ex-
periments, on the other hand, need to calculate and look forward to a return
on their investment. Therefore a speculative marketplace lends itself to in-
novation, while innovation breeds a speculative marketplace. An evident ex-
ample of this relationship between speculation and innovation is the high-tech
[Link] boom in Silicon Valley between 1999 and 2001.
Speculation and innovation both involve the articulation of vision. But it
is articulation that takes a certain form, that of hype. Vision and hype are
both types of discourse that look toward the future. Therefore, tracing the
grammar of biocapital involves asking theoretical and conceptual questions
about temporality.
I have started my analysis in this chapter, then, by providing a set of key-
words: grammar, speculation, innovation, scientific fact, vision, hype, and
temporality. All of these are keywords that get unpacked, individually or to-
gether, as the chapter proceeds. All of these are also keywords that relate to the
generation of value. To provide further context at this point, I spend a little
more time unpacking each of these.
The accounts in this chapter are particularly relevant to the U.S. context.
Parenthetically, in the Indian context, vision functions di√erently for two
reasons. First, as mentioned at a number of points in the book, the most
entrepreneurial actors in Indian biotech have tended, for the major part, to be

Vision and Hype 111

state actors. Meanwhile, Indian corporate actors have tended to embrace a
di√erent logic and yardstick by which to judge themselves, one that has to do
more with Marx’s commodity capitalism than with commercial capitalism. In
other words, the yardstick by which Indian biotech and pharmaceutical com-
panies have tended to be judged is by their manufacturing success, and conse-
quently by revenues and profits. On the contrary, in the United States, most
biotech and pharmaceutical companies tend to be deeply answerable to their
investors, whether they are private (since most biotech companies are venture
capital funded) or public (because of the fundamental importance of Wall
Street in the valuation of American companies, thanks to the basic fiduciary
duty of an American corporate ceo, under U.S. law, to maximize investors’
value).π I indicated this di√erence briefly in the introduction while talking
about the United States and Indian pharmaceutical industries, and emphasize
it again in this chapter by recounting the story of the initial public o√ering of
Genentech, one of the best-known U.S. biotech companies, and juxtaposing
that briefly to the story of Biocon, one of India’s most established biotech
companies. Biocon, like Genentech, is more than twenty-five years old, but it
had its own ipo more than two decades after Genentech had its.
Most of my analysis in this chapter, therefore, is pertinent to a speculative
capitalism that is a much more hegemonic form of capitalism in the United
States than it is in India. My use of the term ‘‘biocapital’’ in this chapter, then,
is shorthand, for the most part, for manifestations of techno-capitalist logic in
the hegemonic center of biotech innovation and free market ideology, the
United States.
The biotech industry could be said to have come of age in the early 1980s,
when a slew of biotech companies went public. This occurred during a period
of marked deregulation, the explicit embrace of the irrational exuberance of
the free market, and the symbolic valuation of the ‘‘entrepreneurial spirit.’’
In many ways, the apparent excesses of the Silicon Valley [Link] boom of
the late 1990s were anticipated in the early to mid-1980s. The coproduced
relationship between the changing face of high technology and the changing
face of capitalism implied, on the one hand, the emergence of a particular
upstream-downstream terrain of drug development in the marked, often
company-specific, division of labor that we now associate with the enterprise

112 Articulations
of therapeutic molecule development, and on the other hand, a more general
shift in capitalist practices and value systems toward one that more explicitly
embraced an ideology of risk taking.
The ideology of the free market as it manifests in, for instance, Silicon
Valley, sees a specific ethos at play, one quite distinct from the rational ac-
cumulation of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic (see Weber 2001 [1930]), and
more similar to Cli√ord Geertz’s description of deep play (Geertz 1973). This
is an ethos marked by an apparent irrationality, excess, gambling. Georges
Bataille argues in Principles of General Economics that excess is a ‘‘fundamental’’
impulse of capitalism (Bataille 1988 [1967]). What is particularly interesting
here is the way in which excess gets valued—seen as source of surplus value,
and valued as a moral system.
High-tech capitalism is a form of capitalism that Susan Strange (1986) calls
casino capitalism, where gambling becomes constitutive to the capitalist ethos
(certainly in the United States, the crucible of these changes). It is a form of
capitalism that is millennial in its spirit.∫ As I explore in chapter 5, the born-
again messianic overtones of this value system are all too evident in the case of
biotech and drug development in the United States.
The current strategic promissory horizon of genomics in the United States
is a form of therapeutic realization, personalized medicine. But what is also at
stake, of course, is commercial realization, for all involved corporate actors,
but also increasingly for academic or state actors as they act, more and more, as
if corporate. This commercial realization, as in any other capitalist enterprise,
involves a successful venture that provides a high return on investment, in-
creased revenue earnings, and corporate growth—value systems whose ide-
ologies are increasingly globalizing and homogenizing, but whose contours,
as I have argued in the first two chapters, are still highly specific and tendential.
What brings therapeutic and commercial realization into proximity to each
other is the ideology of innovation—a high-risk, free-market frontier ideology
that is simultaneously particularly American and globalizing. Innovation is a
qualitatively di√erent (albeit related) concept from the Industrial Revolution
or Marxian concept of surplus value generation. It implies not just the genera-
tion of infinitely greater amounts of things that already exist (capital or com-
modity), which itself, as Marx shows, is a mystical and magical generative

Vision and Hype 113

force, the source of capitalism’s power. Rather, innovation implies, in Michael
Lewis’s phrase, the creation of the ‘‘new, new thing’’ (see Lewis 1999). The
magic of technoscientific capitalism is not the magic of the endless pot of gold
but the magic of being able to pull rabbits out of hats. Therefore one side of
the ethos, authority, and magic of technoscientific capitalism has to do not just
with capitalism’s generative potential but with its creative potential.
The life sciences also produce scientific facts. Because these are facts about
something as fundamental as life, they are valued in certain ways. And because
they are facts (as opposed to, for instance, hypotheses, theories, or specula-
tions), they operate with a certain authority. Genomics is a set of epistemic
and technological assemblages that allows the creation of certain types of
scientific fact, and allows a certain sort of rationalization of the drug develop-
ment process, toward the much-hyped goal of ‘‘personalized medicine.’’
I investigate personalized medicine as a set of fact- and identity-producing
technologies and epistemologies in the next chapter. In this chapter, I concern
myself with the implosion of enterprises of scientific fact production with
those of capitalist value generation in ways that make considering one without
the other require a profound denaturalization of the categories and under-
standings of the involved actors. Joseph Dumit calls this overdetermination of
scientific research by the market ‘‘venture science.’’Ω It is the grammar of ven-
ture science—promissory, risk laden, steeped in the ideology of innovation,
and in many ways American (even if globalizing)—that I concern myself with
in this chapter.
Investor relations and public relations are central to the functioning of all
corporations. These are forms of discourse. They are also, invariably, hype.
Hype is not about truth or falsity; rather, it is about credibility or incredibility.
A successful investor relations pitch for a company is one that sounds credible,
even if no one who is being pitched to quite believes what is being said.
I argue that in biocapital the ‘‘classical’’ scientific binaries of truth and falsity
are articulated with those of credibility and incredibility. These are articula-
tions of noneconomic forms of sociomoral values that trouble the normative
structure of science as propounded by Robert Merton.∞≠ For the contempo-
rary biotechnology corporation to exist and survive, it is (to investors, for
instance, who would need to sink huge amounts of money into a biotech

114 Articulations
venture to enable it in the first place) credibility rather than truth that is
essential to start with. At some fundamental level, it does not matter whether
the promissory visions of a biotech company are true or not, as long as they are
credible.∞∞
The promissory statement of biocapital relates to corporate pr and is quite
similar to the promissory discursive terrain of much high-tech as seen during
the Silicon Valley [Link] boom. But the other form of statement that ema-
nates from biotech companies, as mentioned earlier, are scientific facts. Mean-
while, even the promissory statements of corporate pr are made on a terrain
constrained by certain regulations that exist to prevent fraudulent corporate
behavior. In other words, while corporate pr is, in every sense, hype, biotech
corporate pr is constrained by two regimes of ‘‘truth,’’ where in each case truth
means something di√erent and operates within a di√erent value system. One
form of truth is scientific fact, established by adherence to a rigorous scientific
method (albeit a method that has been shown by sts to be much more con-
tingent than the seamless ideology of technoscientific progress makes out),
subject to peer review. The second form of truth is that which constitutes
ethical business practice, more generally applicable to all companies, which
primarily implies a moral order that discourages the sorts of untruth that
constitute a defrauding of investors. Therefore, if pr is about credibility, then
ethical business practice and scientific facts are both about truth in di√erent
forms, and the question becomes one of the nature of the articulation of
discursive forms that deal with credibility and with di√erent forms of truth
telling in an enterprise that is always already one, simultaneously, of fact pro-
duction, therapeutic product development, and surplus value generation. The
question of such articulation lies at the heart of understanding the epochal
shift that venture science represents from the scientific ethos expounded by
Merton, and gets at the question of the consequences of the implosion of the
political economic with the epistemic, which is the implosion that makes
biocapital a specific exhibition of capitalist systems, regimes, and processes
writ large.
In terms of the rhetoric or structure of promissory marketing, I make two
arguments that relate the generation of commercial value from biotechnology
and drug development to necessary temporal lags. First, to generate value in

Vision and Hype 115

the present to make a certain kind of future possible, a vision of that future has
to be sold, even if it is a vision that will never be realized. Excess, expenditure,
exuberance, risk, and gambling can be generative because they can create that
which is unanticipated, perhaps even unimagined. But this can only be so if
the temporal order of production is inverted, away from the present building
toward the future and instead toward the future always being called in to
account for the present. It is this realization of the operation of temporality,
intensely value laden, that needs to be taken very seriously if one is to under-
stand the functioning of promissory futuristic discourse, hype. I argue that
hype cannot simply be cynical but is, rather, a discursive mode of calling on the
future to account for the present. A central theoretical insistence of this chap-
ter, then, is that hype cannot be opposed to reality, as is too easily done when
hype is read cynically. Rather, hype is reality, or at least constitutes the discur-
sive grounds on which reality unfolds.
Vision, hype, speculation, and temporality all relate to questions of value.
As Friedrich Nietzsche says: ‘‘It might even be possible that what constitutes
the value of those good and honored things resides precisely in their being
artfully related, knotted and crocheted to these wicked, apparently antithetical
things, perhaps even in their being essentially identical with them’’ (Nietzsche
1973 [1886], 16).
This chapter is about discourse of a certain sort: promissory. But it is dis-
course conditioned by specific institutional grounds, by the question of a
specific type of implosion—of the sciences with capitalism. It is this implosion
that leads to the shift away from Merton’s description of science to venture
science. This has consequences for value in both senses of the word. On the
one hand, this implosion makes technoscience more driven by market value;
on the other, it troubles, displaces, and puts at stake a normative structure of
science based on values of universality, disinterestedness, communism, and
organized skepticism.∞≤
It is as easy to dismiss Merton’s norms of universalism, communism, dis-
interestedness, and organized skepticism as it is to dismiss corporate pr as
‘‘simply hype.’’ After all, one has only to look at the grossly unequal distribu-
tion of research budgets and facilities, within and between countries; the
increasing encroachment on science’s stated commitment to the public do-

116 Articulations
main by private interests, especially as enshrined in intellectual property law;
the active pursuits of credit and profit by often less-than-honorable means by
many scientists; and the fact that peer evaluation of scientific results is as
dependent on brand value (from whom and where do these results come?) as
it is on objective, unbiased, rigorous peer review to conclude that Merton’s
norms perhaps exist only in name in the real world, to the extent that they
exist at all.
At the same time that legal, political, and ideological mechanisms promote
the seamless corporatization of science, however, is the fact that this seamless-
ness does encounter friction. The incongruence of venture science is not that
‘‘public’’ science is getting seamlessly incorporated but that this apparently
seamless incorporation is taking place, as if natural, at the same time as it causes
much disconcertment among involved actors and the larger polity. I have, for
instance, already alluded to the aversion that scientists of the publicly funded
Human Genome Project have exhibited toward genome companies patenting
dna sequences. A good deal of this aversion, no doubt, comes from a fear of
being upstaged. And equally, a good deal of this aversion is voiced by public
scientists like Eric Lander, who is also cofounder of Millennium Pharmaceuti-
cals and Infinity Pharmaceuticals and one of the most avid and successful
scientist-entrepreneurs to symbolize the emergence of venture science. None-
theless it is undeniable that at least some of the public scientists’ opposition
stems from a sensibility that the norm of communism is important to uphold
in practice.
In other words, Merton’s ethos, even if partial, fragmentary, perhaps even
residual, is still a strong organizing principle of the value system of science.
Biomedical journals, for instance, still have strong disclosure requirements of
their authors so that links to industry are clearly made explicit. But at the same
time, research divisions of public universities receive huge amounts of funding
from private companies in ways that cannot but change the ethos of science
away from disinterestedness.∞≥ Lander leads vocal opposition to the patenting
of gene sequences but at the same time is on the board of one of the most
aggressively growing biotech companies in the world. S. K. Brahmachari vehe-
mently opposes the expropriation of genetic material from Indian populations
by Western companies at the same time as he seeks to leverage value for his

Vision and Hype 117

start-up by licensing genetic information from Indian populations to Western
companies. Scientific fact produced by biotech companies goes through the
same peer-reviewed mechanisms that academic scientists go through, yet it is
considered perfectly natural, at the same time, to issue press releases that are
indeterminate, sometimes even misleading (if never, legally, fraudulent). This
is the knot of venture science—not the seamless replacement of one value sys-
tem by another, but the implosion of two apparently distinct value systems into
one where each feeds o√ the other—a quasi-symbiotic, quasi-parasitic gob.
If this is venture science, then the value of Merton’s science—initially config-
ured, by Merton, purely in the realm of the normative—gets realized through
another form of value, that of the free market. And it gets realized through the
market to such an extent that the only way normative value, not just monetary
value, can be realized is through the exercise of market mechanisms. It is this
form of encroachment by the market on science that allows the naturalization
of assertions such as the one often made by pharmaceutical companies that if
they are not given free rein to set drug pricing (to the exorbitantly high levels
that one sees in the United States in particular), the alternative would be no
new research, and no new therapies for unmet medical needs.
Hence the prescience of Nietzsche’s quote—that both the material and
symbolic value of ‘‘good and honored’’ things (like Merton’s norms of sci-
ence) might in fact reside in their being ‘‘artfully knotted and crocheted’’ to
‘‘wicked, apparently antithetical things’’ (corporate encroachment). The word
‘‘artfully’’ is the key here: venture scientific articulations are hardly natural
consequences of technological, legal, political, and ideological constraints.
Rather, they are strategically crafted forms of discourse and practice. That does
not mean, at the same time, that they can be reduced to cynical manipulation.
The ‘‘artful knotting’’—promissory conjuration as a means of discursive strate-
gic articulation, ‘‘hype,’’ or pr—is the subject of analysis of this chapter. The
‘‘becoming identical’’ of Merton’s science with corporate science is no doubt a
disconcerting emergence, but it is undeniably a powerful and consequential
one that gets naturalized and globally disseminated, and forms the grounds on
which such strategic articulations take place.
The sites through which I make my arguments in this chapter are not
necessarily locales or institutions. My first site is, simultaneously, an individual

118 Articulations
and a performative space. The individual is Randy Scott, the founder of Incyte
Genomics, one of the leading genome companies of the late 1990s. More
recently, he has founded Genomic Health, a ‘‘consumer genomics’’ company
whose story I tell in chapter 5. Scott is a recurring and central biographical
figure in this book. He is so both because of his individual stories and ar-
ticulations and, especially in this chapter, because of his embodiment of a
certain type of public figure in the worlds I am trying to trace, the scientist-
entrepreneur-manager. (Unlike many start-up founders, Scott tends to stay on
to manage, in some capacity and for a significant period of time, the com-
panies he founds.)
My accounts of Scott are, in fact, accounts of his public persona, rather than
accounts consequent to privileged ethnographic access (as my accounts, for
instance, of S. K. Brahmachari are). This is partly because I did not have
privileged ethnographic access to Scott.∞∂ But it is also because I am keen to
analyze Scott’s persona as performative, because it is the performative aspect
that allows him to do the work of promissory conjuration and creation of
symbolic capital that I am writing about.
The performative space in which I have seen Scott is at conferences, either
industrial genome conferences that served as trade shows, or conferences
aimed primarily at investors.∞∑ Therefore the audiences that he targets at these
sites of speech are investors and consumers, those who provide the conditions
of possibility for his corporate entities to exist. I tell stories of Randy Scott’s
performativity in sites of speech targeted to investors and consumers in order
to conjure promissory futures, and the existence of his companies in the pres-
ent. On Wall Street, these forms of performative conjuration are referred to as
‘‘story stocks.’’
My stories of Scott are an attempt to portray conjuration as process—simul-
taneously as discourse and as drama. My second site moves away from persona
to event. This is Genentech’s initial public o√ering, the first ever biotech ipo,
which closed in October 1980 after raising $35 million when the company did
not even have a product on the market, exceeding all expectations. The Genen-
tech ipo highlights both the necessity of conjuration for biotech companies
and its enormous potential. It both heralded the arrival of the biotech industry
in the investment marketplace and anticipated the ‘‘irrational’’ enthusiasms of

Vision and Hype 119

the [Link] boom in the late 1990s. The Genentech ipo stories lead to struc-
tural questions about the periodic market cycles of boom and bust in the
biotech industry, questions that I argue can be answered by paying attention
to the promissory discursive terrain that provides both the conditions of pos-
sibility for the industry and the contradictions within which those conditions
of possibility are constrained. I contrast Genentech’s story to that of an Indian
counterpart, Biocon, which was founded as far back as 1978 but did not have
its own ipo until 2004. In the tale of these two companies lies the tale of the
di√erential salience of the speculative marketplace (at least at this point in
time) in India and the United States.
The third site is a discursive apparatus and legal instrument, the ‘‘forward-
looking statement.’’ This is a statement allowed by the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (sec) that exempts companies indulging in forms of
promissory articulation (such as press releases or similar forms of pr) from
being held accountable if actual events di√er from those predicted in the state-
ment. And yet care is taken to distinguish the forward-looking statement from
intentionally fraudulent statements—from the lie. An analysis of forward-
looking statements allows me to explore in greater detail the relationship
between truth and credibility in promissory corporate worlds.
Promissory corporate articulation is legally sanctioned and constrained by
the forward-looking statement. This legal sanctioning and constraint allow
boundaries to be drawn between that which is not true because it cannot
possibly be predicted with accuracy (the exact historical and material evolu-
tion of the company making the promissory statement), and that which is not
true because it is an intentional lie (thereby constituting a defrauding of inves-
tors, for instance). Of course, as illustrated by the recent spate of corporate
scandals in the United States, many of them involving technology companies
and almost all of them blamed on the ‘‘irrational exuberance’’ of the [Link]
years, the line between these two forms of nontruth are contested, blurred,
and often easy to cross. Throughout these three sections, I elaborate first on
the types of performance central to the ‘‘story stocks’’ of biotech; second on the
promissory speculative terrain that has allowed the biotech industry to de-
velop in the United States; and third on the consequences of this perfor-
mativity for theoretical understandings of truth and credibility to biocapital.

120 Articulations
Randy Scott
In this section, I describe the discursive performativity of one of the key
entrepreneurs of the genomics revolution, Randy Scott. The stage that I de-
scribe is at the Hilton resort in Miami, at an industrial genome conference in
1999 organized by the Institute of Genomic Research, the nonprofit organiza-
tion headed by J. Craig Venter, at the time the ceo of Celera Genomics. That
year was a particularly interesting one for genomics, as the genomics commu-
nity was on the verge of generating a working draft sequence of the human
genome. It was also a year when the genomics community was particularly
fractured between the publicly funded Human Genome Project and a number
of private-sector genome companies (of which Venter’s Celera was simply the
most visible). The Miami conference was a site of gathering for the latter.
The company that really stole the show in Miami in 1999 was not Celera but
its rival, Incyte Pharmaceuticals (now Incyte Genomics). In the context of the
1999 Miami conference, the keynote address by Incyte’s chief scientific o≈cer
Randy Scott marked the turning point of the proceedings into an Incyte
conference. The visibility had been there, the publicity had been there, but
it had been built up for a purpose: Scott knew his business, and he executed
it well.
A lot of his talk was about biology, about the various projects under way at
Incyte. What was interesting, however, was its visionary nature—Scott was
selling a vision for the future. This involved outlining a timed series of pro-
jections, through 2010, by which time, according to Scott, would be achieved
a real understanding of biological pathways—and a systematic, annotated,
accessible informatics understanding of it, with Incyte as the major creator of
that understanding.
The beauty of a futuristic vision, of course, is that it does not have to be true.
Legally, for instance, many futuristic pronouncements are qualified with dis-
claimers disowning the responsibility of the visionary to actualize the vision.∞∏
Let alone legally, visions do not even have to be true to sell. Scott’s talk was
simultaneously addressing another audience, as much as or more than the
strictly scientific audience: the audience of investors, who were clearly going
to form their business judgments through events like this talk. For investors,
of course, sinking money into such visions is risky. This is particularly so with

Vision and Hype 121

genomics, which does not yet have many tangible drug products to show for
itself. But by selling his vision for the future, Scott could be assured of having
money to go into that future, irrespective of what might actually be produced.
The product of a genome company is the creation of (some form of)
information that is in turn a condition of possibility for the creation of a drug.
The conditions of its own possibility (and thereby the actual conditions of
possibility of the drug) can only be created by the performative creation of the
conditions of possibility of the drug, that is, through a vision. This is, how-
ever, a vision whose realization is not communal but, in the first instances at
least, the responsibility of the company. Further, while not contractual in a
legal sense, this is a vision that functions as a direct plea to the investor to make
possible its (possible) realization by investing capital in the company. This is
why the promissory vision of the future creates the conditions of possibility
for the existence of the company in the present. While this does not guarantee
the realization of the vision in the future, it is a necessary condition for such a
realization.
A guarantee is a vexed idea, as well. While the implicit guarantee of the
genome company’s promissory vision is toward the investor investing capital
in it (‘‘We will realize your investment by enabling the creation of this prod-
uct’’), the performative of the vision is directed to a number of listeners and
functions di√erently for each of them. The primary audience in the confer-
ence, whom Randy Scott was addressing, for instance, was of scientists, who
were interested in his visions from the perspective of enabling their own
research. The pharmaceutical companies, which are downstream from the
genomics company, are particularly interested parties, since they actually pro-
duce the drugs potentially enabled or facilitated by genomics. For the general
public, this is a vision in a much less immediately interested manner; for
policymakers this interest manifests di√erently. The performative of the future
thus functions to create very di√erent futures for the di√erent concerned ac-
tors, irrespective of the actual future product that may (not) be produced.
There is also a slight but tangible di√erence that depends on whether the
company making the investor pitch is a public or a private company. In the
latter case, the investors in question are often venture capitalists or other
private investors; in the former case, it is Wall Street, and the public stock
market, that are listening. The explicitly speculative nature of recent, especially

122 Articulations
technoscientific, capitalism is indeed a function of Wall Street’s acknowledg-
ment of the nature of the performative operation of the promissory statement:
those public companies that are still years away from making a tangible prod-
uct (usually biotech companies) but are driving their stock prices by virtue of
promise alone (something that was particularly marked with genomics com-
panies in 1999–2000) are, as mentioned earlier, referred to on Wall Street as
story stocks.
But there was something else going on in Scott’s talk, and it had to do with
the symbolic capital of genomic information as information that is a precursor
to therapy. There was that wonderful moment at the end of the Miami con-
ference (in a party organized by Incyte) when, as recounted in chapter 1, Scott
raised a toast to ‘‘the genomic community. Because they aren’t in genomics for
themselves, they are in it for Life’’—mirroring, as I pointed out, Incyte’s own
corporate slogan, ‘‘Genomics for Life.’’
Derrida makes the claim that speculation is always theoretical and theologi-
cal. It is perhaps not insignificant to the story of Randy Scott that he is an
evangelical Christian. But I am not indicating this with a wish to attribute
motives—I am not saying that Scott is a good genome entrepreneur because
he is a good Christian. Rather, I am arguing for a natural cohabitation of
discourses, the visionary discourses of corporate bioscience being morpholog-
ically akin to messianic discourses. Scott’s ability to cohabit the two worlds of
science and religion clearly allows him to use the discourse particularly well,
and I will elaborate on this in chapter 5. Biotechnology, therefore, occupies a
messianic space, of technology and of Life linked through capital, which be-
comes, naturally, the object mediating the fetish.
Indeed, this messianic space is a structural part of the biotech industry and
has to do with much more than Scott’s Christianity or lack thereof. This is
evidenced in Barry Werth’s description of Joshua Boger, founder of Vertex
Pharmaceuticals and Jewish, in his history of that company, The Billion Dollar
Molecule. Here is an extract from Werth’s account of Boger’s pitch to investors,
and how that pitch is always already positioned as a religious and salvationary
project:

Boger knew that stories have to be accessible and that what investors want most
from them is a≈rmation, so he molded Vertex’s slide show not as a disquisition on

Vision and Hype 123

 science or business strategy, but as a quest. The grail—the object of the quest—
was structure-based design and its transcendent prize of safer, smarter, more profit-
able drugs. The impetus, as always in such stories, was a combination of righteous-
ness and greed. (Werth 1994, 96)

Nonetheless, the salvationary-cum-profitable structure of this performative

discourse was undergirded and overdetermined by Boger’s own background
and attributes, just as Scott’s Christianity is not determining, but definitely
significant, for the types of stories he tells and the ways in which he conjures up
futures as scripted by Incyte. As Werth proceeds:

That was the text. There were also subtexts that Boger didn’t mention, the most
intriguing being about himself. Boger never referred in his slides to his relation-
ship with Merck [where he had formerly been an employee before starting up
Vertex], but he was seldom introduced anywhere without it being mentioned. To
listeners with a knowledge of the drug industry, his defection was the most tan-
talizing part of Vertex’s story, introducing, as it did, a whi√ of patricidal intent, of
vengeance. Here was Boger, a scion of America’s Most Admired Corporation, the
most productive drug company in history, Wall Street’s gold standard, rejecting all
that it had to o√er because he thought he could do better. It didn’t take a rereading
of Genesis: Boger’s saga of defiant departure was as old as Adam. (96–97)

The thematic constitution of motifs such as quest, messianic articulation,

salvation, and defection asks questions of discourses of hope, risk, happiness,
and success in American investment talk in particular, and in American culture
more generally. Indeed, all these elements exist in the attempt to sequence the
human genome, often articulated as a quest for the ‘‘Holy Grail’’ of life itself. It
is uncanny, also, that the head of the public hgp at the time that the working
draft sequence of the human genome was published was Francis Collins, also a
born-again Christian. Collins has said that his passion for tracing disease genes
is like ‘‘appreciating something that up until then, no human had known, but
God knew it. . . . In a way, perhaps, those moments of discovery also become
moments of worship’’ (quoted in Davies 2001, 72).
In his many flashes of brilliant performance, then, Scott establishes that the
real goal is saving lives; that genomics is the vehicle through which lives can be
saved; and that the genomics community, led by the vanguard scientists at

124 Articulations
Incyte, merely exists to fulfill that vision. Genomics, in this performative, is
not vocation but calling. Scott’s employees are not scientists but missionaries.
Further, the missionary zeal, at least in Scott’s case, is not tied to some
abstract utopian desire for Health but embedded and embodied by real stories
of su√ering. So that Scott finished his talk with a perfect, poignant story that
speaks to the motto and vision of ‘‘Genomics for Life’’: a story of Scott’s
friend, recently diagnosed with cancer, who ten years later could have been
saved by genomics.
And at this perfectly poignant, perfectly appropriate moment, after a talk
that was perfectly orchestrated, Randy Scott, chairman and chief scientific
o≈cer of Incyte Pharmaceuticals, broke down and cried.

The Genentech IPO

I have argued that the promise(s) of biocapital provide the conditions of
enablement for a certain type of present.∞π What, however, actually happens in
the present, and how does the promise by its very nature create contradictions
that make the present untenable simultaneously to making it possible? There is
a more directly historical way of posing this question: how does one explain
stock prices in the hundreds of dollars for companies less than a decade old
with no tangible therapeutic product even on the horizon during the [Link]
heyday of 1999–2000, and how does one explain the equally dramatic slump
that sees those same stock prices operating sometimes in the single digits
today? The simple answer, of course, is to take recourse to that ultimate
agency, the market, and attribute the fall in biotech stocks to the general slump
in the market. There is, I argue, a more complicated set of answers, relating to
the political economy that hype works within and creates.
The biotech industry has in fact been experiencing cycles of boom and bust
pretty much since its inception in the mid- to late 1970s, and these cycles have
been morphologically highly akin to the [Link] boom and reality check bust
of the last five years. Biotech has played to highly inflated stocks in the past
with no sign of a tangible product even in the context of a 1980s economy that
was much more conservative and that was much less willing to go along with
the Silicon Valley mode of (apparent) high-risk investment that has marked
the [Link] economy. The apparently irrational response to promise has in

Vision and Hype 125

fact been the single factor that has enabled the existence and growth of an
industry that would otherwise just not have been able to survive the extremely
long periods of time and high amounts of investment required to bring drugs
to market. The realization that promise rather than pipelines could create
enduring value started dawning as early as October 14, 1980, the day Genen-
tech went public.
The Genentech ipo closed with one million shares at thirty-five dollars each,
an amount that exceeded all expectations, and an incredible amount for a com-
pany whose first product (recombinant insulin) would not appear on the mar-
ket until 1982. In the next six years after the Genentech ipo, another nineteen
biotech companies went public and together raised $542.3 million through
their ipos (Cetus, which was the second biotech company to go public, alone
raised $107 million).∞∫ Clearly, therefore, promissory visions have been much
more than just a feature of the biotech industry: they have enabled it to exist.
There is, however, a gap that opened up at the very heart of this promise,
and that is the gap between infinite promise and what has to be necessarily
measured as inadequate in relation to such promise. So while the promise
creates the conditions of possibility for the present, it also, necessarily, creates
the conditions for its own failure of realization, and the consequences of that.
This gap is the place of the spectral, and of marketing and public relations. In
other words, really successful long-term marketing and public relations are not
the articulation of vision but the closure of the gap between what is envisioned
and what is (inadequately) achieved. The periodic cycles in biotech have to be
thus understood. The gap that opens up between promise and its realization is
where events occur, and where politics—speed and tactics—take over. If prom-
issory visions have made the biotech industry possible, then they have also
placed the risk that attends all drug development—in this case, the risk of not
fulfilling one’s promise—at the heart of the calculus of biotech.∞Ω
I have been arguing at various stages of this book, however, that speculative
capitalism in India is far less developed in relation to manufacturing capi-
talism, which suggests that sales and profits, rather than the conjuration of
futures, are likely to be the driving dynamic of the Indian biotech and phar-
maceutical industries. This, of course, is a situation that is changing along
with India’s attempts to ‘‘go global.’’ Nonetheless there is a qualitative dif-

126 Articulations
ference in the grammar of capitalism as it has manifested in Indian drug
development. I wish to illustrate this by contrasting the story of Genentech to
that of Biocon.
Earlier I indicated that whereas the Indian pharmaceutical industry is an
established industry, Indian biotech is a fairly recent phenomenon, and still
not very established. While this is true for the most part, Biocon, based in
Bangalore, is a notable exception. It was founded in 1978 by Kiran Mazumdar,
making it just two years younger than Genentech.≤≠ For much of its existence,
Biocon focused on enzyme synthesis, a not particularly glamorous or innova-
tive business model. But in the months leading up to its ipo, it came to
emblematize the global, U.S.-inspired shift of Indian biotech, as reflected in
Biocon’s new slogan, ‘‘The Di√erence Lies in Our dna.’’ From an enzyme
manufacturer, Biocon is in the process of reinventing itself as a drug discovery
and development company.
Nonetheless, even this reinvention is publicly marked by manufacturing
scale-up. While the ‘‘expansion’’ of U.S. biotech companies such as Genentech,
Amgen, or Millennium typically implies either the licensing of products from
other companies or the acquisition of other companies, ‘‘expansion’’ in the
case of Biocon just before their ipo involved announcing the construction of
new facilities that would allow a manufacturing scale-up. This is not to say that
U.S. biotech companies do not scale up their manufacturing as they expand—
it is just to say that manufacturing scale-up is not the aspect of their business
that gets play as part of corporate pr and investor relations, as the activ-
ity fundamentally driving valuation. On the other hand, Charles Cooney, a
professor at mit and member of Biocon’s scientific advisory board, talks of
Biocon’s strategy looking forward in the following terms: ‘‘Build technical
capability, validate that capability by selling products into the marketplace in
competition with global companies, and expand the technical and product
portfolio while earning profits along the way.’’≤∞ This, a call to build a company
through the validation of its manufacturing capability, is virtually the opposite
of Genentech’s history.
As an article in Business India puts it, ‘‘Biocon’s real growth story is only
three years old.’’≤≤ For the first two decades of its existence, Biocon called itself
a biotech company, but in a tie-up with Unilever, it focused on enzyme synthe-

Vision and Hype 127

sis. This was still biotechnology, but not the biotechnology that was driven by
hype in the United States, which has become the focus in recent Indian bio-
tech vision epitomized by documents such as Naidu’s Vision 2020.≤≥ Indeed,
Biocon has only recently entered the generic pharmaceutical market, looking
specifically to reverse-engineer blockbuster generics that go o√ patent. While
their focus has largely been on cholesterol-lowering drugs (the statin family),
they were also in 2004 planning to launch recombinant insulin to the market.
This is in some ways a coincidence in terms of drawing comparisons to Genen-
tech: as mentioned earlier, Genentech’s first marketed therapeutic product in
1982 was recombinant insulin.
The story of Biocon, read against that of Genentech, shows that biotech in
India has not necessarily lagged behind biotech in the United States by two
decades. However, an enterprise of biotech in India that subscribes to an
American technoscientific imaginary of biotech—driven by growth, and fo-
cusing on therapeutic molecule development—is a recent development even
for Biocon, occurring at a time when Indian science and Indian economic
policy attempts to ‘‘go global.’’ Clearly, going global implies, at least in part,
doing the sorts of science that sells in the West, and attempting to open up
both domestic and Western markets in the process. But even then, this attempt
to go global, in an American image, manifests in incongruent fashion. Biocon
still is not (and does not necessarily need to be) driven by speculation to the
extent that American drug development companies are; manufacturing still
remains the company’s primary source of value. Indeed, when I asked a senior
manager at Biocon about the e√ects of going public, he replied that there was
not much di√erence in terms of the company’s day-to-day functioning. The
only tangible di√erences, he said, were that there would be greater trans-
parency in the accounting of the company, and that it would ‘‘look good’’ for a
company that claimed it was becoming a global player.≤∂

The Forward-Looking Statement

So far in this chapter, I have talked about the performance of visionary discourse
(by actors like Randy Scott), and about the value and political economy of
hype in biotech. But this pertains mainly to market value. Also at stake, as I
have indicated, is symbolic capital and moral value when Merton’s norms of

128 Articulations
science get troubled by venture science, and regimes of scientific fact implode
with regimes of pr. I explore the discursive regime of pr in this section
through an analysis of the forward-looking statement. Specifically, I explore
through its lens questions of truth and credibility in techno-capitalism and
argue that visionary practice in such enterprises is an act of fabricating the
truth, which does not equate to fabricating a lie.
The forward-looking statement is not something specific to biotech com-
panies. This section, therefore, is one of those in this book that is not specific
to biocapital but concerns capitalist processes writ large. There are, however, a
number of reasons, as follows, why an analysis of discursive forms such as the
forward-looking statement is essential to an analysis of biocapital.
As mentioned earlier, the 1980s saw the coevolution of the biotech industry
with a larger Reagan-inspired free market ethos. This was a neoliberal ethos
that valued promissory conjuration in a qualitatively di√erent manner from
the value systems of liberal capitalist economy. Both the biotech industry,
which was itself emergent at this time, and this discursive promissory terrain
helped reconfigure the contours of the drug development marketplace into the
upstream-downstream terrain that we now recognize. New biotechnologies,
such as genomics, have similarly inserted themselves as subsequent upstream
elements in this terrain. Thus the upstream-downstream terrain of drug de-
velopment is strongly correlated, even if not causally linked in any manner, to
the discursive terrain of corporate promissory conjuration.
Drug development companies are situated within the context of the high-
tech economy. Promissory conjuration is a constitutive part of the lives of all
technology companies, both because many of them are relatively young and
formed within an ethos of neoliberal valuation, and because technology com-
panies tend to require a high level of capital investment before they can show
product and realize value.
With biotech, this situation is further exacerbated, because not only is drug
development a highly capital-intensive venture, but its ultimate realization in a
therapeutic molecule, assuming it were ever to be realized, is a decade or more
away from the initial research toward it. Considering that most biotech com-
panies in existence today are less than two decades old, a significant propor-
tion of their lives and histories are stories of these companies having to sell

Vision and Hype 129

visions of their future products as much as or more than selling the products
themselves. Therefore, while the forward-looking statement as a discursive
instrument (and more generally promissory conjuration as a form of life) is a
constitutive feature of contemporary American capitalism writ large, its stakes
are significantly exacerbated when biotech companies are involved because of
the high-risk, time- and capital-intensive nature of drug development.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, the crucial specificities of biocapitalism stem
from the involved implosions of the economic with the epistemic, and further
with epistemologies concerning ‘‘life itself.’’ While all biotech companies claim
to be in the business of drug development, the more upstream components of
drug development marketplaces tend primarily or mostly to be involved in
drug discovery. Much of this upstream discovery work is not about the produc-
tion of an object or commodity as much as it is about, on the one hand, the
identification of possible lead molecules that might successfully be converted
to therapeutic molecules, and on the other hand, the initial testing activities
that suggest that such a molecule would not be incredibly toxic the minute it
enters a living system.
Therefore, even in traditional pharmaceutical development through organic
chemical synthesis (which, twenty years after the start of the ‘‘biotech revo-
lution,’’ still remains the most common and most reliable way of making drugs
that function optimally in human systems), there is an entire element of scien-
tific fact production and testing, primarily relating to protein kinetics and
dynamics, that precedes the work of developing the drug, putting it into
human clinical trials, and (if successful) manufacturing enough to market it.
With the emergence of biotech and biopharmaceutical development, this
upstream epistemic component becomes even more important. E√ectively,
what biotech promises is the development of pharmaceuticals that insert into,
and set right abnormally functioning, bodily biochemical processes. This puts
an understanding of bodily physiological and biochemical processes, often at
the cellular or molecular level, front and center in the preliminary processes of
therapeutic molecule development.
With genomics, the upstream scientific knowledge as conditioning the en-
tire drug development process gets even further exacerbated. At one level, as
briefly mentioned in the previous two chapters, genomics further bases the

130 Articulations
understanding of bodily biochemistry (and biophysics) into information that
can be objectified and commodified. It also (as I discuss in the next chapter)
makes it much easier to create molecular diagnostic tests than therapeutic
molecules. This is because the patterns of inheritance that genomic informa-
tion can shed light on can instantly highlight future probabilities of disease in
each individual who gets tested, without in any way altering the timeline, level
of uncertainty, or capital intensity of therapeutic molecule development. Per-
haps even more to the point, the complicated multifactorial nature of almost
any disease event makes it extremely di≈cult to engineer a therapeutic entity
that can ‘‘set it right’’ at the genetic level, and the way therapeutic molecules,
even those ‘‘rationally’’ derived from genomic information, will actually act in
human systems is likely to remain indeterminate, and ultimately only resolv-
able through perhaps even more complicated clinical trials procedures.
What this means is that the emergent assemblages of personalized medicine
are likely, more and more, to focus on regimes of scientific knowledge of
future probable health and illness, around diagnostic capabilities. In other
words—and this is fundamentally the question that this chapter and the next,
taken in conjunction, together ask—the specificities of biocapital stem from a
question of how the legally enshrined, discursive forward-looking statements
of corporate pr articulate with the epistemologies and scientific facts of geno-
mics and personalized medicine.
A forward-looking statement is defined as
(A) a statement containing a projection of revenues, income (including
income loss), earnings (including earnings loss) per share, capital
expenditures, dividends, capital structure, or other financial items;
(B) a statement of the plans and objectives of management for future
operations, including plans or objectives relating to the products or
services of the issuer;
(C) a statement of future economic performance, including any such
statement contained in a discussion and analysis of financial condition
by the management or in the results of operations included pursuant
to the rules and regulations of the Commission;
(D) any statement of the assumptions underlying or relating to any state-
ment described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C);

Vision and Hype 131

 (E) any report issued by an outside reviewer retained by an issuer, to the
extent that the report assesses a forward-looking statement made by
the issuer; or
(F) a statement containing a projection or estimate of such other items as
may be specified by rule or regulation of the Commission.≤∑
The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provided a ‘‘safe har-
bor’’ for forward-looking statements, which means that the issuers of such
statements (usually corporate investor relations departments) are not liable in
case of the failure to fulfill any promises or predictions made within the state-
ment. It is immediately evident from the act, however, that a failure to fulfill a
promise or prediction does not constitute a lie, to the extent that a lie, indi-
cating intent, might be indicative of fraudulent behavior. Indeed, the safe
harbor provision is not available to issuers who have committed certain felo-
nies or misdemeanors such as false reports, bribery, perjury, burglary, forg-
ery, counterfeiting, fraudulent concealment, embezzlement, fraudulent con-
version, or misappropriation of funds or securities, all of which might be said
to be acts of lying.≤∏
What sort of not-truth (as opposed to untruth), then, is a forward-looking
statement? For that, I will turn to an example of such a statement that I quoted
in an earlier footnote, which was put out by Incyte while announcing a col-
laboration with the Huntsman Cancer Institute to study the role of genes in
the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this
press release, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the ‘safe har-
bor’ provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These
forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause
actual results to di√er materially. For a discussion of factors that may cause results
to di√er, see Incyte’s sec reports, including its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for
the quarter ended June 30, 1999. Incyte disclaims any intent or obligation to
update these forward-looking statements.≤π

The truth ingrained within the forward-looking statement is the implicit state-
ment on the part of the issuer that ‘‘I will not have lied, and that is the truth.’’
In other words, regardless of the outcome of Incyte’s collaboration with the

132 Articulations
Huntsman Cancer Institute, Incyte would not have defrauded its readers with
its promises—even if some of those readers might have invested in Incyte as a
consequence of expectations raised by those very promises. What the forward-
looking statement formalizes is the fact that, as Derrida points out, it is impos-
sible to locate an unfulfilled promise as a lie even as it is always perceived—
even perhaps accepted—as a nontruth. In that sense, a forward-looking state-
ment quite nicely fits in with Derrida’s formalization of the popular-cultural
conception of the lie. He says, ‘‘For structural reasons . . . it will always be
impossible to prove, in the strict sense, that someone has lied even if one can
prove that he or she did not tell the truth’’ (Derrida 2001 [1995], 68).
The tension of biocapital, as a form of venture science, then, is the tension
between the ‘‘lie’’ of corporate pr and the ‘‘truth’’ of science; where corporate
pr ‘‘will not have been a lie,’’ and science is authoritative as truth when its
statement is one of scientific fact. This tension becomes even more acute when
such facts are accorded inherent truth (inherent as in essential to the statement,
but also, when the facts concerned have to do with knowledge about ‘‘life
itself,’’ inherent as in essential to the self that gets constituted by the ‘‘true’’
fact). This is of particular importance in understanding the constitution of
subjectivity by genomics that I explore in the next chapter.
What, then, is the truth of venture science, as opposed to the truth of
Merton’s conception of science? It is that the truth lies somewhere, ‘‘lying’’ here
meaning both existing and being the thing that is not the truth. The truth of
venture science is always already under erasure; it is truth. But this truth,
which is not a lie, is also not an error.≤∫ If a lie could be said to be an intentional
falsehood, then an error might be said to be an unintentional mistake, a failure
to calculate adequately the uncertain circumstances that might lead a prom-
issory statement to ‘‘not pan out.’’ A forward-looking venture scientific state-
ment cannot be a failure to calculate correctly, because the futures it promises
are precisely incalculable (and therefore it becomes even more important to
calculate them).≤Ω
What constitutes a venture scientific statement is itself a question, since it is
not the formalized scientific statement that goes on to constitute ‘‘fact.’’ In-
deed, it could be argued that scientific facts do remain the same, regardless of
where they are produced. I am not arguing that corporations produce dif-

Vision and Hype 133

ferent scientific facts from academic labs; I am arguing that the sorts of scien-
tific ventures that get undertaken in the first place change, that the agenda of
scientific practice changes as it becomes venture science, and that this changed
agenda has everything to do with the sorts of nonscientific truth claims that
constitute corporate public relations and investor relations. Further, this dif-
ference is constituted by the di√erent actors that define these market terrains,
such as investors and venture capitalists, pharmaceutical company and patient
consumers, and Wall Street speculators, which become a central part of the
assemblages of biocapital and venture science as distinct from an academic
science conducted in the image of Merton’s norms. Corporations, like aca-
demic labs, can produce erroneous scientific ‘‘facts’’ (those that get falsified
subsequently and at that point stop operating as facts), independent of the
context of the production of truth claims through which they operate.
There is a question of temporality that resides in the relationship of a lie, or
of a truth, to error. In the case of the truth, the statement precedes, and indeed
often performs or conjures, the event (or fails to do so); in the case of the
error, the event (such as, for instance, the result of a genetic test) leads to a
statement that then becomes a ‘‘fact.’’ As I have been arguing until this point,
venture science is constituted by the dialectic between the truth—truth that is
always under erasure and pertains primarily to formally nonscientific articula-
tions that create the conditions of possibility for science to occur (such as the
existence of the company, and capital, in the first place)—and fact, which may
be erroneous on occasion, but does not have to be. Regardless of the particular
error that may or may not occur, however, fact operates on the fact that it is,
authoritatively, true.
In terms, then, of working toward a typology of truthlike statements in
drug discovery and development, one could talk about promise, which oper-
ates both in the interactions of companies with investors and in the public
relations apparatus of companies; about fact, which operates during discov-
ery; and about evidence, which is what clinical trials produce, and necessarily
has associated with it notions of regulation and expert mediation (in the case
of U.S.-based clinical trials, by regulators at the Food and Drug Administra-
tion). Each of these constitutes a di√erent type of truth-producing enterprise
that collectively constitutes biocapitalist corporate envisioning. Further, the

134 Articulations
enterprises that produce fact, evidence, and pr are completely intertwined.
This is why dismissing hype as ‘‘simply cynical,’’ a mode of dismissal that is
fundamentally what I am writing against in this chapter, is not a fruitful way of
understanding the mechanisms of its operation. Attributions of cynicism serve
to erect a simple binary between the truth and the lie (hype always being
somehow associated, not just typologically but normatively, with the lie), a
binary that just does not serve to understand the ways in which the truth and
the lie are co-constituted as di√erent types of truth.
The key here is that forms of corporate pr are tied to the production of
scientific fact, which is supremely authoritative and is moreover in this case
scientific fact about ‘‘life itself.’’ Therefore, simultaneous to exploring the rhe-
torical and discursive apparatus of corporations is the need to explore the sorts
of scientific facts that genomics provides, especially when its ‘‘ultimate’’ aim,
or current strategic promissory horizon, is personalized medicine. Person-
alized medicine refers not just to new types of therapeutics but to a new
ensemble of techniques, practices, and institutional structures of medicine,
one that is determined to a significant extent by the market. It is in this larger
context of technical and institutional assemblages that the facts of genomics
and the promise of personalized medicine need to be situated, and it is this
that I undertake in the next chapter.

Conclusion
I have attempted to do three things in this chapter in relation to the grammar
of biocapital: to explore its performative articulation, its institutional e√ects,
and its consequences for corporate credibility and scientific truth-telling. I
started this book by tracing global systems and processes of exchange in the
life sciences and capitalism. Exchange here involved the circulation of capital
and commodities, but more specifically, biological material, therapeutic prod-
ucts, and, particularly consequent to genomics, information of various sorts, all
of these operating as related but distinct forms of currency, as sources of
material and symbolic value, surplus value, and moral or ethical value. In the
process, I have argued for the constant overflowing, slippage, and contradic-
tions within these forms and systems of exchange.
I have started examining the discursive grounds on which biocapitalist artic-

Vision and Hype 135

ulations occur, where ‘‘articulation’’ always already refers, simultaneously, to
the capacities of, and possibilities, for utterance and to the process of linking
together in striated, hegemonic fields of action.
These discursive terrains are constituted at multiple levels, especially in the
context of the hegemony of speculative capitalism in American high-tech.
There is the promissory conjuration—hype and pr—that is a fundamental
part of the discursive apparatus of contemporary capitalism, though it is per-
haps exacerbated in types of high-tech capitalism, drug development in par-
ticular, where the tangible product (the therapeutic molecule) is temporally
and in terms of capital and resource investment very far away. A discursive
terrain of promissory conjuration, where a vision of the future is sold to create
the conditions of possibility of the present, is consonant with an ethos of
neoliberal capitalism, as well as with an ideology of innovation, and is less
evident in a situation such as India’s, where manufacturing capitalism still
predominates in drug development.
However, some of the key specificities for biocapitalism stem from the
epistemic changes taking place within the life sciences, and this is where geno-
mics becomes a conjuncture of profound consequence. I am keen to pursue
the argument that biotech, as a form of venture science, does not just see the
implosion of Merton’s ethos of science with the ethos of the free market, but
also sees the reconfiguration of ideas of ‘‘life itself ’’ that lead to the implosions
of the valuation of life with valuations of the market. In terms of staying
attentive to grammar, it could be argued that if the Aristotelian grammar of life
conceived of it as poesis, then this new grammar sees life as something that can
be invested in. This new grammatical tense that the discourse of biocapital
speaks in might be called ‘‘future perfect, present tense,’’ an indication of future
pronouncements leading to current uncertainty, which relate equally to the
discursive terrain of corporate articulation, and to the epistemic terrain of
scientific fact production. Such a grammar, I argue, configures life as a busi-
ness plan.
If this chapter has paid particular attention to corporate discursive articula-
tion, then the next pays particular attention to the epistemic articulation of
fact, especially to facts produced by genomics. I analyze the current strategic
promissory horizon of genomics, personalized medicine, which itself is an

136 Articulations
assemblage that is an implosion of the corporate and the scientific. Person-
alized medicine is both the future that is conjured by genome companies to
realize value in the present, and the future that is promised by the sorts of
information genomics has already provided or is expected to provide in the
future. An analysis of personalized medicine is an analysis of the promise and
fetish of the scientific facts of genomics.

Vision and Hype 137

4. Promise and Fetish
Genomic Facts and Personalized Medicine,
or Life Is a Business Plan

In outlining the history of the discovery and functional elucidation of transfer

rna (trna), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger argues that the material culture in which
experimental biology is situated profoundly impacts both the type of ‘‘knowl-
edge’’ produced and the manner in which it is produced (Rheinberger 1997).
Similarly, the materiality of a functional genomics lab suggests the sorts of
transformations, technological and disciplinary, that genomics marks. An ex-
ample of this is the Whitehead Institute’s Center for Functional Genomics,
one of the major basic research labs working on single nucleotide polymor-
phisms (snps).∞
The Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the most
prestigious centers for academic biology research in the world. It is a semi-
autonomous institute with links to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(mit). Much of the Whitehead’s recent clout comes from its prominence as
one of the major centers in the Human Genome Project (hgp). Indeed, the
Whitehead has been responsible for generating about 30 percent of the public
genome sequence, making the institute the largest of the public sequencing
centers in the United States.≤ There is much more to the Whitehead Institute
than its Genome Center, but in terms of space, the Genome Center has some-
what taken over the Whitehead. So in addition to the original Whitehead
Institute building on Main Street, Cambridge, there are two other buildings
in di√erent parts of the town that house the Genome Center. There is a
building in which sequencing takes place, and one that houses the functional
genomics unit. It is the latter that is responsible for making sense, in some of
the many ways possible, of genome sequence information. Both buildings of
the Genome Center are part of the Lander lab, Eric Lander being the head of
genomics at the Whitehead in addition to being one of the superstars of the
hgp, and a cofounder of Millennium Pharmaceuticals.
The Whitehead functional genomics lab is located at 1 Kendall Square,
which is what my informant there called a ‘‘vanity address.’’≥ It is a rather
characterless and incongruous block of o≈ce buildings rising up in the middle
of an otherwise lively array of shops and restaurants located around a red-
brick square.
The inside of the center looks more like a corporate o≈ce than a lab: plush
orange carpeting, a reception hall with a secretary, no smells or lab coats
or chemical muck. No signs of any of that even on the bench of the post-
doc showing me around, where a computer was the only sign of any work;
this could have been a cubicle out of Dilbert. Behind her desk were three
workbenches.
It was on one of these workbenches that I got my first glimpse of the famed
A√ymetrix chips. A√ymetrix, a biotechnology company based in Santa Clara,
California, is the inventor and manufacturer of dna chips, what they call
GeneChip arrays. The dna chip is a 1 cm x 1 cm silicon wafer substrate that has
genes tagged to it, on which hybridizations can be performed to compare two
sets, and ‘‘states,’’ of genetic samples to see which genes are selectively regu-
lated in response to certain events, or predispositions to events. These events
are usually biochemical interactions that trigger certain genes being turned on
or o√, or trigger cascades of biochemical interactions constituting a biologi-
cal pathway. In other words, the chip itself maps clusters of genes to pro-
vide broad views of gene expression. dna samples are hybridized onto a
silicon chip to create the dna chip. Both a commodity and an object of knowl-
edge production, the chip has within it the mysticism and authority associated
with each.
Essentially a machine, dna chips are also an experimental site, an entire
laboratory on a single silicon wafer,∂ and a bearer of scientific fact, as they are
tools that not only provide a profile of gene expression across whole clusters of
genes (conceivably across whole genomes) but also are said to enable people

Promise and Fetish 139

to know their predispositions to various traits once those gene expression
profiles are adequately correlated with them.
There are three enabling facets to the dna chip. First, it enables the rational-
ization of the earliest stages of therapeutic development by helping to look for
gene candidates that might be therapeutic targets (though the sorts of infor-
mation provided by the chip are a very early stage in the possible development
of any therapy actually based on such information), and by looking for gene
markers that could be used to develop diagnostic tests (a much easier proposi-
tion). Second, therefore, dna chips can be used to develop diagnostic tests,
which are central to the assemblage of technologies and health management
practices that constitute ‘‘preventive medicine.’’ And third, the dna chip al-
lows high-throughput gene expression studies: massively parallel analyses of
whole genomes or parts of genomes that can increase the speed of discovery
manyfold.
For example, a major early publication that showed the utility of the A√y-
metrix chip used it to di√erentiate acute myelogenous leukemia (aml) from
acute lymphocytic leukemia (all) (Golub et al. 1999). This was a landmark
paper because it enabled the classification of these two cancers based on dif-
ferential gene expression patterns of fifty genes, without any prior biological
knowledge. Normally, tumor classification would require clinical, pathologi-
cal, and cytological analysis. Classifying these cancers is of crucial importance
in choosing the right treatment regimen, and the regimens for these two types
of leukemia vary considerably. Often cells that follow di√erent clinical courses
look similar in biopsies, and traditional diagnosis of one or the other form of
leukemia requires a complicated battery of tests. The dna chip enabled this
form of cancer diagnosis to move away from systems based on visual analysis
to molecular-based systems and, in this experiment, allowed the comparative
measurement of activities of nearly seven thousand genes expressed in bone
marrow samples from thirty-eight patients.
Performed in the Lander lab, this study points simultaneously to the scien-
tific, specifically diagnostic, possibilities of the A√ymetrix chip and to the ter-
rains of academic-industrial collaboration that enable such possibilities. The
Whitehead study was funded by a consortium consisting of A√ymetrix, the
multinational pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (which is a

140 Articulations
market leader in oncology therapeutics), and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, a
biotechnology company that wants to become a biopharmaceutical drug de-
velopment company and was cofounded by Lander himself.
In other words, the dna chip not only allows the identification of patterns
of genetic variability across individuals and populations, or in di√erent dis-
eased states, but allows such identifications in a high-throughput manner.
Speed and information are of central importance here. The possibility of such
high-throughput analysis has everything to do with the particular material
nature of the chip. The hybridizations themselves are made possible by the
nature and contours of the silicon wafer,∑ but also because of miniaturization.
Increasing the density of hybridization makes it possible to speed discovery by
obtaining more information from a chip at one go. Thus the material structure
of the chip has everything to do with the nature of scientific fact that can be
produced, and this is recognized by a series of intellectual property protections
that cover the A√ymetrix technology.
The chips themselves were encased in a small rectangular sheath, making
them look rather like fancy microscope slides. But the process of hybridizing
and detecting on them is a complicated one, and completely automated. At the
Whitehead lab there was a large room that housed only the machines into
which the chips are locked, buttons turned on, and readouts obtained. There
were also, on the postdoc’s bench, some glass slides that were in the process of
being turned into more inexpensive, homemade dna chips.
In the center of the floor was a bizarre spiral staircase that looked like
something out of a spaceship in a 1960s version of Star Trek. Downstairs was
what is called the ‘‘variant’’ group, which did comparative genomics work.
This looked like a more typical ‘‘wet’’ molecular biology lab, though much
larger—almost more like a factory than a lab. This floor had an area to pour
gels in, shelves stacked with measuring cylinders, and proper lab benches.
Much of the upstairs, where the bioinformatics work happened, housed se-
cluded o≈ces. My conversation with the postdoc did indeed revolve around
organizational structure, and the o≈ce was a peculiarly organized place, with
these two groups, that seem hardly to interact at all, constituting the inter-
disciplinary space of ‘‘functional genomics.’’
The architecture at the Whitehead was situated in the context of larger

Promise and Fetish 141

institutional relationships, with the functional genomics group’s lab meetings
often being attended by people from Millennium Pharmaceuticals, which is
housed a few floors below in the same building. As mentioned earlier, Eric
Lander is one of the cofounders of Millennium, a leading genome company.
The Whitehead lab meetings are quite literally physical sites of di√usion of
academic research into industry, and, in the opinions of many genome scien-
tists that I have talked to, a major source of competitive advantage for Millen-
nium.∏ The interaction between the Whitehead and Millennium, indeed, does
not take place only at the level of architecture or informal interaction. The
Whitehead functional genomics group, as mentioned, is funded by a con-
sortium that comprises Millennium, A√ymetrix (whose dna chips are ex-
tensively used at the Whitehead), and Bristol-Myers Squibb (with whom
Millennium has close ties in the area of oncology pharmacogenomics and
therapeutics). The Whitehead consortium therefore brings together the major
components and actors of the drug development marketplace with a func-
tional genomics company, a tool company (as two distinct types of upstream
providers), a big pharmaceutical company downstream, and an academic lab
that is funded by all three and feeds basic research into the development
programs of its industrial partners. Such arrangements typify the venture sci-
ence worlds epitomized by genomics.

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites

So far in this book, I have introduced a number of empirical and theoretical
issues that I propose to tackle explicitly in this chapter. The first is that bio-
capital is the implosion of an emergent economic regime with an emergent
epistemic one. The second is that the biotechnology and subsequent genomics
‘‘revolutions’’ are techno-capitalist assemblages that allow analyses, and create
types of knowledge, that reconfigure definitions, understandings, even the
grammar, of ‘‘life itself.’’ The third is that the articulations of biocapital are
those of corporate pr and promissory conjuration with those of scientific fact,
at a time when Merton’s norms of science are simultaneously consequential
and at stake in emergent venture scientific assemblages.
All of this means that it becomes particularly important to seriously analyze
and understand the technoscience that is genomics, in terms both of its epis-
temologies and of the ways in which it is likely to reconfigure drug develop-

142 Articulations
ment terrains as well as the practice of medicine. I do this here at a number of
levels. First, I explore in greater detail the logic and rationality of pharmacoge-
nomics and personalized medicine, two related yet distinct postgenomic as-
semblages that I argue constitute the current strategic promissory horizon of
genomics. Next, I show how the sorts of knowledge provided by these geno-
mic technologies and epistemologies are likely to shift the drug development
enterprise, especially to the extent that it depends on genomics, toward diag-
nostics rather than therapeutics as its endpoint, or at least as a subsequent obliga-
tory passage point.π
These are the sorts of knowledge that have consequences for the configura-
tion of subjectivity, especially when genomics sees the fetishism of scientific
fact implode with the fetishism of the gene as being understood to somehow
designate or represent the entire organism, sometimes even whole popula-
tions.∫ I describe what I mean by this ‘‘genomic fetishism’’ and contextualize it
in relation to Marxian commodity fetishism, essential in a venture scientific
terrain that sees the implosion of enterprises of scientific fact production with
those of market innovation and surplus value generation.
The key to understanding the implosion of these two value systems, I argue,
is to see how they articulate around the question of risk. The types of knowl-
edge provided by genomic representational devices, such as the dna chip that
I have described, inherently have to do with foretelling the future risk of
disease of individuals who undergo the test. Meanwhile there are multiple
levels of risk that the biotech and pharmaceutical industries confront. Espe-
cially for biotech, genome, or other upstream companies, of course, there is
the very risk of being a start-up entity in a capital-intensive, high-risk mar-
ketplace, where such companies’ existence is wagered against the vagaries of
drug development as well as the muscle of big pharmaceutical companies. But
even for big pharmaceutical companies, there is the high risk of drug develop-
ment, constituted by the high expense and immense uncertainty of clinical
trials, in a marketplace deeply indebted to Wall Street and stock valuations. All
of these constraints put enormous pressure on biotech and pharmaceutical
companies to increase their markets, which for pharmaceutical companies in
particular are still very much in the domain of therapeutic rather than diagnos-
tic development.
In other words, genomic information that configures individual subjec-

Promise and Fetish 143

tivities as those of patients-in-waiting by foretelling future possible illness also
very much configures their subjectivities as consumers-in-waiting for drug de-
velopment companies looking to increase their market. This enlargement can
be achieved, at least in substantial measure, by constantly enlarging the do-
main of the ‘‘therapeutic,’’ as shown particularly vividly in studies of psycho-
pharmaceutical development by authors such as Joseph Dumit (2003, 2004),
David Healy (1997, 2002), and Peter Kramer (1997). Of course, this constant
enlargement of the domain of the therapeutic in a U.S. market system condi-
tioned by the valuations of Wall Street must also be situated in a global context
where millions of people die of diseases such as aids at least partly because of
exorbitant drug pricing by multinational pharmaceutical companies, because
such people do not have the purchasing power to constitute a significant
market for these companies.Ω
What is key for my argument in this chapter, regarding the shifts brought
about by genomics as an epistemic-technical assemblage and venture science as
an emergent institutional and normative assemblage, is that two understand-
ings of risk, one having to do with patient illness profiles, the other having to
do with market risk, are constantly at play and in relation to each other.
Indeed, in the venture scientific worlds of genomics, these two forms of risk
constitute each other, to the extent that individual dna profiles are market
calculations, both for the interpellated individuals and for the market entities
whose valuations depend on being able to generate and act on such forms of
knowledge. Life, for biocapital, is a business plan.
In this chapter, I refer to the way in which genomic facts function authorita-
tively as ‘‘genomic fetishism.’’ What that means, as I unpack in the chapter, is
that while, on the one hand, genomics is not deterministic, on the other hand,
genetic determinism does exist in our conceptual understanding of our selves.
This implies that a form of abstraction is at play in the interface between
science and ‘‘culture.’’ As Friedrich Nietzsche says: ‘‘One ought not to make
‘cause’ and ‘e√ect’ into material things, as natural scientists do . . . one ought to
employ ‘cause’ and ‘e√ect’ only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional
fictions for purposes of designation, mutual understanding, not explanation’’
(Nietzsche 1973 [1886], 33; italics in original).
In this book, I have not tackled the question of genetic determinism ex-

144 Articulations
plicitly, but there is no question that its specter haunts the subject and analysis
of genomics. It also becomes the straw man in nature/nurture wars. Recently,
for instance, the noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, a believer in the
existence of a biological basis for psychology and cognition, has devoted an
entire book to attacking the perceived ‘‘environmental determinism’’ of pro-
ponents of ‘‘nurture’’ over ‘‘nature,’’ ‘‘culture’’ over ‘‘biology’’ (Pinker 2002).
This is a debate I wish to skirt, not least because the reduction of biosociality to
such simple binaries is a puerile process of simplification and purification.
However, I do argue that a central source of authority for genomics stems
from ‘‘genomic fetishism’’—the fetish, simultaneously, of the authority of
scientific fact as something that is definitive and ultimate, and not the result
of contingent, fragmentary, contested, and constantly revised processes of
knowledge production; and of the authority of the gene as somehow standing
in for, or representative of, entire organisms, populations, or species.∞≠
I embrace, instead, Paul Rabinow’s notion of biosociality (see Rabinow
1992), which involves an attentiveness to the coproduced ways in which bio-
logical and social structures mutually evolve, and therefore involves having a
fundamentally di√erent understanding of causality than sociobiology has. To
posit causal explanations in some sort of binary opposition to explanations of
pure contingency is a mistake. Rather, inspired by Weber (and by Rabinow’s
use of Weber), I make the argument for staying attentive to the multiple,
layered causations that lead to emergences of certain social worlds instead of
others. Of course, as Pinker would argue, there is a biological basis for under-
standing disease or cognition. The maneuver that I reject, whether the ques-
tion is of the relationship of genes to traits, or of genomics to capitalism, is the
purification of a set of complex, multifactorial interactions (which are multi-
factorial both at the genetic level and in the interactions of ‘‘genetic’’ and
‘‘environmental’’ factors) into a relationship of simple linearity, the making of
‘‘cause’’ and ‘‘e√ect,’’ in Nietzsche’s words, into ‘‘material things.’’
That this occurs in molecular genetics and genomics, even (perhaps espe-
cially) in academic genome worlds, is undeniable. An example of this was
powerfully in evidence at the Institute of Genomic Research genome con-
ference in Miami in 2000. Richard Gibbs, a high-profile public genome re-
searcher who ran the Human Genome Project sequencing center at the Baylor

Promise and Fetish 145

College of Medicine, gave a general progress report of the hgp, which ran
along expected lines, indicating how well everyone had done, how the chal-
lenge was only beginning, how the public and private enterprises were cooper-
ating as they ought to, and so on. The talk got interesting at the end, however,
when Gibbs said that the real thing to do next was to start correlating genes
with disease.
Gibbs then made the remarkable scientific claim that five thousand single-
gene diseases are likely to exist. Further, Gibbs was justifying his claims with
evidence from scientific literature: how an increasing number of articles in
journals such as Nature Genetics, for instance, were talking about ‘‘a gene/
mutant for ’’ diseases, thereby suggesting such simple correlations.∞∞ He was
not quite allowed to get away with his assertion, as Craig Venter, ceo of
Celera Genomics, argued that claiming single-gene correlation for diseases is
like looking under the lamppost for keys dropped elsewhere because it is best
lit under the lamppost.
Genetic determinism is scientific fact, to the extent that a matter on which a
scientific journal pronounces is scientific fact. But genetic determinism is also,
as Venter was hinting, merely artifact that gets reified into fact. In fact, one of
the scientists who worked on the initial development of GenBank, the public
dna sequence database, later expressed profound disgust to me about Gibbs’s
talk, claiming that one cannot, by definition, have such a thing as a single-
gene disease, since the very fact that every disease manifests itself at di√erent
times in di√erent individuals suggests that there is more than one gene in-
volved in regulating its onset. Further, he mentioned that the notion of a
‘‘single-gene disease’’ was developed as a classification category in GenBank, as
shorthand for genes that might be classified as not obviously complex in a
database that depended on such shorthand classifications for its creation. He
claimed to be dismayed at the way in which a classificatory maneuver had been
so completely appropriated by even credible and well-known scientists to
represent the ‘‘fact’’ of the existence of five thousand single-gene diseases.∞≤
Nietzsche’s phrase ‘‘as conventional fictions’’ is particularly resonant here.
The persuasive argument against reifying maneuvers such as genetic determin-
ism lies not in arguing against the content of ‘‘fact’’ derived from scientific
method but in the process of purification that simultaneously holds up the

146 Articulations
method of investigation as natural, infallible, a transparent representation of
‘‘the real world’’ rather than the process of contingent negotiations, guess-
work, and constant revision; and that reifies complex, situated, multifactorial
(in this case, biological) processes into a simple phenomenon of cause and
e√ect. It is this work of purification that Bruno Latour argues is symptomatic
of modernity (Latour 1993), and it is this combination of reifying maneuvers
that is the fetishistic process. Thus my critique of ‘‘genomic fetishism’’ is not a
critique of the question of the relationship of genes to traits (which I do
believe is consistently more complex than Richard Gibbs, for instance, made
out in the talk I described) but a critique of the maneuvers and processes that
make a certain, hardly natural articulation of these relationships seem natural,
supremely authoritative, and the way things ‘‘really’’ are to the exclusion of
other, more hybrid possibilities.
One form of abstraction that is at work in subject constitution by genomics,
then, is the shorthand operational at the level of production of scientific fact that
posits a correlation as a relationship of causality. A second form of abstraction,
related to the first, is the way in which subject formation takes recourse to the
‘‘objective’’ scientific fact once its production gets black-boxed. Joseph Dumit
refers to the latter as ‘‘objective self-fashioning’’ and describes the objective
self thus:

The objective self is an active category of the person that is developed through
references to expert knowledge and is invoked through facts. The objective self is
also an embodied theory of human nature, both scientific and popular. Objective
self-fashioning calls attention to the equivocal site of this production of new objec-
tive knowledge of the self. From one perspective, science produces facts that define
who our selves are objectively, which we then accept. From another perspective,
our selves are fashioned by us out of the facts available to us through the media,
and these categories of persons are in turn the cultural basis from which new
theories of human nature are constructed.∞≥

Dumit’s notion of objective self-fashioning calls attention to the equivocal

dialectic between the objective and subjective when the subject formation in
question is a consequence of an encounter with an ‘‘objective’’ discourse that
derives its supreme, fetish-producing authority from that very perception of

Promise and Fetish 147

objectivity—even though it is an objective knowledge that, in cases like per-
sonalized medicine or positron emission tomography (pet) scanning (which
is the case Dumit analyzes in the passage referred to here), is created precisely
to inform the subject who gets interpellated by it. In other words, facts pro-
vide the grounds for the creation of subjects at the same time that facts are
constituted by information derived from the very subjects they constitute in
particular ways. These acts of subject constitution by facts that are simulta-
neously subject dependent yet objective are made possible because they are
facts, the supremely authoritative statement that derives its authority by virtue
of being derived scientifically.
‘‘The person,’’ the subject of objective self-fashioning, is an important cate-
gory or identity to explore further. Dumit weaves elegantly away from the
unmarked ‘‘self ’’ to categories of persons that form ‘‘the cultural basis from
which new theories of human nature’’ (which often themselves acquire perfor-
mative force as facts) are constructed. In other words, scientific fact can oper-
ate in the ways it does because it is universal, not culturally specific. And yet the
modes of subject interpellation by these facts are specific. While the ‘‘subject’’
of personalized medicine need not be marked or explicit, in that a technology
like the dna chip could potentially tell any individual his or her genetic profile
and consequent future probability of illness, the ways in which genomic tech-
nologies like the dna chip operate are in fact quite specific and, not surpris-
ingly, show variation and incongruity between, for instance, the United States
and India.
The interpellated subject of genomic fetishism in this chapter, except in cases
otherwise mentioned, is the American who gets foretold his or her probability
of future health or illness by a technology such as the dna chip. Such a subject,
I argue, becomes a patient-in-waiting. But personalized medicine as a bio-
capitalist assemblage demands constant attention to the fact that produced
epistemologies and technologies, particularly in the U.S. context, are over-
determined as commodities and therefore require a market for their consump-
tion. In other words, I argue for the objectively self-fashioned (American)
patient-in-waiting as always already being a consumer-in-waiting, an intertwin-
ing of subjectivities that fundamentally underlies the rationality of person-
alized medicine in the U.S. context.

148 Articulations
 Indian populations could conceivably be consumers of personalized medi-
cine, and no doubt India’s desire to be a global player would be fulfilled when
it becomes possible to automatically conceive of a reified ‘‘Indian subject’’ of
personalized medicine as a patient or consumer-in-waiting. However, as I
argued in chapter 2, the tendential axes of global asymmetry on which bio-
capital plays out imply that the more likely subject position for Indian popula-
tions with respect to genomics is not that of consumer as much as that of
experimental subject. Genome profiles of a participant in a pharmacogenomic
experiment conducted by the Indian start-up Genomed in Parel, Mumbai, for
example, are much more likely to be useful in a pharmacogenomic analysis
whose outcome could prove valuable to a Western biotech or pharmaceutical
company in a clinical trial. Having already focused on the configuration of the
subject of pharmacogenomic experiments in Parel as experimental subject in
chapter 2, I focus in this chapter on the configuration of the subjectivity of the
(probably, but not necessarily, American) patient-in-waiting as consumer-in-
waiting consequent to his or her objective self-fashioning by genomic fact.
This focus allows me here to conceive of subjectivity through an unmarked
‘‘subject,’’ who could conceivably be subjected by biocapitalist emergences
regardless of his or her geographical subject position, but who is, at least
today, most likely in fact to be an American, or at least a Western (neo)liberal,
subject.
The disconcertment, then, is this. I believe it is possible to conceive of the
ways in which the implosions of epistemic and economic rationalities lead to
particular configurations of subjectivity, such as (as I describe in this chapter)
biocapital’s configuring of the subjects of personalized medicine as simulta-
neously patients- and consumer-in-waiting. And further, the global reach of,
and global desire expressed toward, such technologies imply that there is no
reason to believe that personalized medicine should not configure its Indian
subject as it would a Western (neo)liberal subject.∞∂ And yet, as I have been
arguing, the tendential alignments of global biocapital at present lead to a
situation where Indian subjects of personalized medicine (similar, in all likeli-
hood, to African American or other similarly marked population category
subjects of personalized medicine in the United States) are likely to be pri-
marily configured as experimental subjects instead.

Promise and Fetish 149

 It is important to consider why it is so easy conceptually for a chapter such
as this, considered theoretically to be about ‘‘subjectivity,’’ to analyze this
concept in a ‘‘placeless’’ fashion, at the same time as the subjectivity of experi-
mental subjects in Parel marks them otherwise (and Other-wise) as ‘‘Indian.’’
This is a serious question for ethnography and for theory.
Ethnography has always prided itself on deriving its analytic and empirical
power from its ability to localize, and make specific, what might otherwise be
left to the vague generalizations of ‘‘theory,’’ generalizations that often fail to
account for the actual, particular manifestations of the systems, regimes, and
processes that are being theorized in the first place. And yet science derives its
analytic and empirical power from its universality, from the fact that a fact-
producing experiment will produce the same fact regardless of the locale of its
performance.
In other words, a dna chip, for instance, will produce the same fact, for
example about genetic variability between individuals (though the particulars
of the information generated will be di√erent), regardless of whether it is used
to analyze pharmacogenomic profiles of an unemployed Indian millworker in
Parel or of a biotech corporate ceo in Palo Alto. And yet it is likely that the
subjectivities configured in the two cases will be di√erent.
In the first two chapters concerning circulation, I have been particularly
keen to emphasize how even an absolute imitation of a particular American
neoliberal free-market imaginary by Indian actors, because of the act of imita-
tion, changes the conditions of emergence for those same market systems,
leading to incongruence between the two locales. Similarly, I make the argu-
ment here that the replication of an epistemic system, in which the science is
resolutely the same whether performed in India or the United States, leads to
incongruent manifestations of, for instance, subjectivity in the two contexts, in
ways that allow one (Indian) to be conceived and written of as particular,
localized, contingent, and ‘‘empirical,’’ and the other (American) to be con-
ceived and written of as general, subscribing to epistemic rationality, placeless,
and ‘‘theoretical.’’
In other words, if biopolitical (and in this case, biocapitalist) emergence
can be theorized in the way that I do in this chapter, with the footnote that
such an emergence in, for instance, India would diverge in significant ways

150 Articulations
from this theorization, then how is it possible to explain that ‘‘exception,’’ such
as India, while still insisting on those ‘‘exceptional’’ emergences as structural,
tendential, and not reducible simply to contingency? Or—if we are to take
biopolitics as a theoretical concept seriously, as we ought to do—then how
can we account for ‘‘biopolitics elsewhere’’ in ways that do not reduce the
‘‘elsewhere’’ emergences to explanations of contingency?∞∑

Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine

In this section, I provide an overview of personalized medicine, which, in the
hype of promissory life sciences, is at some level the ‘‘ultimate’’ dream of
genomics (implicitly replacing, therefore, the genome sequence as its Holy
Grail). I use the vision of personalized medicine to talk about genomics as
scientific fact, and argue for its ability to constitute subjectivity by virtue of the
fetishism attendant on this fact. I will then reflect on what insights these facts
can provide into understanding relationships of production, consumption,
and subjectivity in biocapital.
The question of personalized medicine gets to the heart of what exactly
postgenomic drug development is all about. The steps involved in what might
be called a ‘‘genetic approach’’ to the diagnosis and treatment of disease could
be said to consist of the following: first, the identification of a disease with a
genetic component; second, the mapping of the gene(s) involved in the dis-
ease to specific chromosomal regions; and third, the identification of the in-
volved gene(s). At this point, one could develop diagnostics to identify the
presence or expression of the involved gene(s) in patients to determine pre-
disposition to the disease in question; use the gene itself as a drug (gene
therapy); or understand the underlying biology of the disease to ‘‘rationally’’
develop therapeutics to target the molecular mechanisms of disease etiology.
The diagnostic tests could further be a precursor either to steps taken to
prevent the onset of disease (which could either be interventionist or involve
lifestyle changes) or to what is known as pharmacogenomics, which involves
tailoring prescriptions and drug regimens to individuals based on their likely,
genetically determined, response to these drugs.∞∏ Of course, some of these
advances are likely to be more easily realized than others. The development of
diagnostic tests, for instance, is relatively straightforward. Targeted therapeu-

Promise and Fetish 151

tics based on the underlying biology of disease are much more complicated,
since diseases are always complicated multifactorial events that are di≈cult to
understand at the molecular level, and further not necessarily easy to target
and set right even if ever properly understood. Gene therapy, too, has been
hindered by the lack of finding optimal methods of gene delivery and was
further hindered by the death of a volunteer, Jesse Gelsinger, in a trial in 1999.
Most scientists, when they write or speak of ‘‘histories of ’’ or ‘‘prospects
for’’ genomics, do admit that some of these advances are more immediately
realizable than others. Francis Collins and Victor McCusick’s way of sum-
marizing this is that ‘‘the rate of progress for applying a genetic approach to
the diagnosis and treatment of each disease will be di√erent depending on the
research investment and the degree of biological complexity underlying the
disease. . . . Diagnostic opportunities may then come along rather quickly, but
will be of greatest clinical usefulness once prevention measures are developed
that have proven benefit to those at high risk. . . . In general, full-blown
therapeutic benefits from identification of gene variants will take longer to
reach mainstream medicine’’ (Collins and McCusick 2001, 543). And yet I
argue that it is this temporality—the di√erent likely rates of realization of each
of these genomic advances—that is the real issue and gets elided as a relatively
linear and equivalent set of outcomes in accounts such as this. It is what might
be called the therapeutic lag that is actually both the ethnographic window and
the political terrain of postgenomic drug development, and it is the ensemble
of events in the world that happen during the therapeutic lag that will deter-
mine whether, how, and what ‘‘full-blown’’ therapeutic development actually
takes place, and when. Making what seem suspiciously like Soviet-style five-
year and ten-year predictive plans, as Collins and McCusick do in their ar-
ticle, closes down this ethnographic window at the expense of relatively banal
crystal-ball gazing (though, as I have argued in the previous chapter, such
modes of prediction themselves have powerful influences in creating ethno-
graphic windows and political terrains).∞π
Both intuitively and from the hype that surrounds personalized medicine, it
seems evident that there are many potential benefits. There is the obvious
potential benefit to patients if drug treatment can be tailored to each individ-
ual: more e√ective drugs, more precise prescriptions, and better therapeutic

152 Articulations
outcomes. But there are also benefits at various stages of drug development for
companies involved in the process. These include a higher success rate, faster
time to market, reduced costs, and greater market share.
In this section, I investigate the hype that proclaims these benefits, espe-
cially when set against the contradiction at the heart of the pharmacogenomic
promise, which is the fragmentation of pharmaceutical markets, which in an
era of personalized medicine would be defined not just by the disease but also
by the target population. What I want to emphasize at the outset, however, is
that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, an investigation of hype cannot
simply be an exposé of hype’s hollow promises. Rather, it enables one to track
the intertwining of possible therapeutic benefit with market opportunity as
the ‘‘win-win’’ of biocapital. I will elaborate on the argument for this inter-
twining, its e√ects and a√ects, in the next part of this chapter while developing
the notion of genomic fetishism.
It is important at this point to escape conflating pharmacogenomics and
personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is not equivalent to pharmaco-
genomics but is, rather, a combination of pharmacogenomics and predictive
testing. Pharmacogenomics does not aim to provide deep insights into proxi-
mal causes of disease: its primary aim is to maximize the e≈ciency of thera-
peutic intervention, at the level both of pharmacokinetics (what the body does
to the drug) and of pharmacodynamics (what the drug does to the body).
Nonetheless, pharmacogenomics is likely to be the most immediately realiz-
able and practical manifestation of personalized medicine for some time to
come. The reason for this is that there are important di√erences between
genetic e√ects on diseases and on drug action. The major di√erence has to do
with the fact that the genetic etiologies of disease are often extremely com-
plex. The combination of this complexity with the extreme rarity with which
disease-causing mutations occur makes the therapeutic or predictive value of
any single gene relatively limited. Rather, arrays of potential disease markers
have to be determined or studied in an integrative fashion.
On the other hand, it has been realized that single-gene e√ects significantly
modulate the action of many common drugs. These include genetic e√ects on
metabolism that alter pharmacokinetics and e√ects on pathways of drug action
that alter pharmacodynamics. Most of the former can be localized to genes

Promise and Fetish 153

that code for drug-metabolizing enzymes (dmes), mainly belonging to the
cytochrome p450 (cyp450) class of oxidative enzymes (though there is a small
minority of drugs that do not undergo transformation by cyp450 before elimi-
nation). Therefore genetic studies of drug action are likely to provide more
therapeutic insights of commercial value than similar genetic studies of the
pathogenesis of disease.
The study of molecular genetic variation and its relationship to drug re-
sponse is not new. There is, however, a historical shift from pharmacogenetics,
which is a basic study of genetic variance, to pharmacogenomics, which is a com-
mercially driven, industrialized, high-throughput science that has emerged
consequent to the genomics revolution. Therefore the shift from pharmaco-
genetics to pharmacogenomics is a shift to an approach that is driven by process
from one that was driven by observation. Once again, I emphasize the impor-
tance of the high-throughput nature of this enterprise, marked by speed, its
desire and actualization, in industrializing life sciences such as genomics, as
changing not just the paradigms of knowledge production but also, as I will
elaborate later in the chapter, the very nature of the knowledge produced.
Pharmacogenetics as a concept was put forth as early as 1957 by Arne
Motulsky, the term was coined in 1959 by Friedrich Vogel, and the first book
on the subject was written as early as 1962 by Werner Kalow, in which Kalow
documented several examples of inherited traits that he confirmed as a√ecting
drug response or toxicity in human populations. Indeed, the long-entrenched
notion of taking a family history as part of a conventional medical examination
is itself based on an understanding that a patient’s genetic makeup, however
little known, has a bearing on decisions regarding therapeutic intervention.
The shift to a process-driven pharmacogenomic approach has the advantage
of no longer requiring an a priori detection of an altered phenotype. In other
words, one does not have to have pathology before studying the underlying
genetic causes; one can study genetic variability to predict future pathology
(and I will elaborate on this in the next section). The major driving force be-
hind this shift is largely technological, with the availability of high-throughput
methods for genetic analysis.
There are three steps to a pharmacogenomic process. The first step is the
discovery and definition of the multiple variations within genes. A powerful marker

154 Articulations
that enables such discovery is the single nucleotide polymorphism (snp),
which is described in chapter 1. After discovery, snps must be correlated with
clinically documented variations in drug response. They can then be used to
develop diagnostic tests to determine whether or not a patient has a genetic
profile that is predicted to correlate to a specific drug response.
The process leading from the analysis of genetic variations to the creation of
the best drugs as a consequence of that analysis has three steps: target identi-
fication, target characterization, and target validation (Jazwinska 2001). Each of
these steps correlates to di√erent technologies and business models. Most
important for my larger arguments about biocapital, however, is the mani-
festation of a basic contradiction of speed and information when one tracks
these di√erent steps. This is that the bottleneck quickly shifts away from being
a problem of inadequate information to being one of too much information.
Target identification is the conventional (one can now almost say ‘‘histori-
cal’’) conception of the role of genomics, made famous by what I call ‘‘first-
generation’’ genome companies, or target id companies. However, within a
year after the generation of the working draft sequence of the human genome,
and five to seven years into the lives of many of these companies, it became
clear that target identification had ceased to be the major bottleneck in drug
discovery and development through genomics. In fact, target identification
has created a host of new problems, in large measure because of its success: the
problem now is not generating new targets as much as it is trimming early
discovery portfolios to manageable proportions and identifying which targets
have the largest probability of success. Further, the identification of molecular
defects is useful in early diagnosis of disease and gives clues about the bio-
chemical pathways through which disease onset progresses. However, there is
no guarantee that this information is in any way useful in the development
of therapy.
Target characterization can be defined as the use of genetic analysis to define
the degree of variation within a gene encoding a potential drug target (Jaz-
winska 2001). Thus target characterization involves first the definition of vari-
ants and second the definition of the impacts of variants. A recent analysis of
variation in seventy-five candidate genes involved in hypertension identified
snps in seventy-four of them (Halushka et al. 1999). This study suggests that

Promise and Fetish 155

there is a high likelihood of finding genetic variation in any gene selected as a
potential drug target.
Target validation can be defined as a process by which knowledge of genetic
variation is exploited to show an association between particular targets and dis-
ease processes (Jazwinska 2001). This is typically useful in saving costs during
clinical trials by predicting before the clinical trials process whether the phar-
maceutical intervention might have a desired therapeutic e√ect by demon-
strating the association between target gene variation and clinical process. Tar-
get validation steps are twofold: first, the identification of well-characterized
clinical populations of specific relevance; and second, the identification of
variants within or close to the test gene.
The technical challenge of pharmacogenomics is very di√erent from geno-
mic sequencing. The focus here moves away from new gene discovery (which
underlies the business models of the target id companies) and toward the
elucidation of correlations and statistical analyses between genetic variations
and various types of response. In other words, pharmacogenomics and per-
sonalized medicine constitute a di√erent scientific-corporate enterprise from
the genomics of 1999–2000.
So far in this section, I have talked about how the upstream scientific and
corporate issue for genomics, as it comes to be about personalizing medicine,
shifts away from the identification of targets to their characterization and
validation. Next I want to theoretically ponder some of the subjective conse-
quences of these emergent sorts of genomic knowledge operating as scientific
fact. The ability to create diagnostic tests based on information relating to
genetic variability is a major part of this shift, and the impetus to move further
toward a testing society originates in upstream technoscientific and business
genome worlds.
As I have argued, pushing through a bottleneck in genomic drug discovery
can, by virtue of the amount of information generated, create a fresh bot-
tleneck. This has been the case with target identification, which has created the
need for new methods that can actually characterize the targets identified. A
major reason why target identification is only a very preliminary step toward
personalized medicine is that identifying a target provides no guarantee that
it can be targeted therapeutically. With the explosion of snp identification
technologies, another bottleneck is arising: a huge volume of snp informa-

156 Articulations
tion, with no guarantee that any particular snp will be predictive of an actual
therapeutic target, or even therapeutic response at a chromosomal level. It is in
this context that haplotyping assumes increased importance.
A haplotype is a combination of snps on a particular chromosome, usually
within a particular gene. Common haplotypes exist because in most genes
snps tend to be coinherited. While snp genotyping has many benefits in terms
of generating information that could be used toward personalized medicine,
haplotyping has greater promise for two reasons. First, haplotype analysis
greatly reduces the complexity of genetic analysis. Due to linkage disequi-
librium, only a small number of haplotypes are generally found in a popula-
tion, in contrast to the up to ten million snps that are said to exist in the
genome. For example, thirteen snps have been identified in the b2-adrenergic
receptor. Theoretically, these could assort into 2∞≥, or 8,192, haplotypes. How-
ever, the b2-adrenergic receptor has been found to have only twelve haplo-
types, with only four of these found commonly in the population. More
importantly, haplotypes are thought to predict gene activity more precisely
than genotypes. This is because individual polymorphisms may have di√erent
e√ects on the functioning of a gene. Therefore the predictive therapeutic value
of any single snp within a gene is relatively limited. A haplotype integrates
these e√ects and thereby provides the sum of the e√ects of all the polymorphisms.
The move from genotyping to haplotyping is a move away from assaying
arrays of potential mutations and toward generating integrative markers of
disease (Housman and Ledley 1998).
However, there are issues a√ecting the practicality of integrating haplotype
analysis into a program of therapeutic development. Haplotypes are markers.
They are closely linked to disorders, but that does not mean that they contrib-
ute to them. Therefore haplotype analysis is most likely to be used as a diag-
nostic tool, as it has been in the past.
Hence haplotypes could diagnose likely inheritance of a disease but still be
poorly predictive of drug response. In other words, there is a logical move
toward a diagnostic test as an endpoint of personalized medicine from an
upstream perspective as haplotypes emerge as manageable scientific knowl-
edge about genetic variability as it corresponds to chromosomal location and
coinheritance.
To sum up: on the one hand, there is the downstream therapeutic mole-

Promise and Fetish 157

cule, with therapeutic intervention often being viewed as the endpoint of the
practice of medicine. On the other hand, there is an upstream ensemble of
diagnosis, prognosis, monitoring, and management of disease, what might
collectively be called preventive medicine. It is between these upstream and
downstream assemblages of objects and practices that historical and ethno-
graphic windows open up to strategic praxis on the parts of the involved
players, and analytic intervention on the parts of social theorists.
Meanwhile, both upstream and downstream assemblages have invested in
them significant corporate interests with considerable capital and political
muscle. While the emergent diagnostics industry is heavily invested in preven-
tive medicine, downstream pharmaceutical companies are heavily invested in
therapeutic development.
One can see, however, that there is a pressure on pharmaceutical companies
that stems from a downstream logic to move therapeutic intervention to ear-
lier and earlier stages of disease manifestation, indeed toward a regime of
therapeutic intervention at the suggestion rather than explicit manifestation of
disease, which has been seen particularly in the increased prescription and use
of psychotropic drugs such as Prozac for depression, or Ritalin for the recently
constructed ‘‘epidemic’’ of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (adhd)
(see, for instance, Kramer 1997; Healy 1997, 2002). This move, I argue on the
basis of my analysis of the emergence of the upstream diagnostic ensemble as
key corporate actors in the practice of medicine, stems not just from a desire
on the part of pharmaceutical companies to enlarge markets but also from a
manifestation of the pharmaceutical industry acting as its own insurance indus-
try. The only way for big pharmaceutical companies to insure against diagnos-
tic encroachment on the domain of therapeutics is to shift the domain of what
counts as disease into earlier and earlier stages of its manifestation—to the
point, of course, that new diseases often get created, and old ones get signifi-
cantly redefined on the basis of shifting the moment that demands therapeutic
intervention. This is a rationality of ‘‘self ’’-governance—a larger cultural shift
in notions of when it is desirable to care for the self, through diagnostic testing
and therapeutic intervention—that in fact originates very much in a gover-
nance of selves by the complex of strategic actors that constitute the emerging
moment of postgenomic medicine.

158 Articulations
 I have focused here on the productive aspect of personalized medicine,
looking at what sort of technoscientific production it is, and what the various
stakes are for the producers. In the second part of the chapter, I will explore
how genomics quite literally translates to consumers as a set of scientific-
corporate practices and consumables, but also, more importantly, as scientific
fact. I continue by looking at the a√ects of genomics, as corporate venture and
as science, thereby highlighting the importance of understanding and theoriz-
ing risk as the defining heuristic with which to make sense of the way bio-
capital constitutes both business opportunity and subjectivity.

SNP Chips, Genomic Fetishism, and Polymorphic Subjects

I now explore the question of the relationship of epistemic shifts to the consti-
tution of subjects where scientific knowledge derives its authority from its
perceived objectivity, making this a question, similar to the one asked by
Joseph Dumit in his analysis of objective self-fashioning, of the relationship
between what he calls the objective body and the lived body (Dumit 1998). It
is a question that demands an understanding of the functioning of facts as
‘‘facts-in-the-world’’ (86).
My argument is that it is the interstices between epistemic shift and subject
constitution that need to be examined to understand the constructed and con-
tingent relationship between knowledge and subjectivity, in this case between
the subject (as in discipline) and the subject (as in constituted person) of
genetics. My question is therefore concerned with the mechanisms of articula-
tion of the ‘‘bio’’ and the ‘‘social’’ that allow emergent manifestations of bio-
sociality. I ask these questions around the node of snps.
I will start by making the distinction between the study of mutants and
mutagenesis. Mutants have always been important to genetics. But the ability
to generate mutants intentionally is quite a di√erent thing and has become
more and more directed, more pinpointed, through the course of the past
century. In a mutation, a gene gets knocked out. Before recombinant dna
technology, however, there was no way of knowing where in the gene the
mutation had occurred, and how—single base change, insertion of dna, or
deletion of dna. Gene cloning and sequencing therefore empowered muta-
genesis by allowing the knocked-out gene to be localized. This means that

Promise and Fetish 159

recombinant dna technology (rdt) allows the isolation and study of single
genes. Mutagenesis is not new, but the specificity and site-directedness that rdt
allows bring the gene into play as the mutated subject. While specificity is the
key idea here, the level of specificity operates at the level of the individual gene.
In other words, mutants now are not there to just be studied: they can
precisely, at the level of genetic engineering, be created.
A mutant subject cannot exist without the formulation of the correspond-
ing concept of the wild type. Now ‘‘wild type’’ is an interesting term: a term
that in its most simplistic guise is used to denote an organism that is not
mutated, but is often understood, by its very construction, to denote an or-
ganism as it is found in the wild. A wild-type organism is, however, very much
an artificial construct. Nature is extremely unlikely to have wild types (in-
deed, the very concept of a genotype that is not mutated is an anachronism,
since genotypes themselves have arisen as a consequence of both natural selec-
tion and mutation), only a range of uncontrolled and uncharacterized mu-
tants, some with a greater selective advantage than others. ‘‘Wild-type’’ strains,
therefore, like so many other constructions of the laboratory, are analytical
tools rather than replicas of nature, as their name would have us assume.
Equally, and more important for the argument here, they are essential analyti-
cal tools in a world of mutagenesis, where the mutant needs to be in opposi-
tional relationship to a ‘‘normal’’ referral point, of which the mutant is an
error. But a mutant, further, is an error of a particular type—a type that has
value attached to it. Mutants are not just di√erent from wild types; they are
deviants from the wild-type norm.
A wild type, therefore, is not a ‘‘normal’’ entity, in the sense that it is not an
entity that one would normally find in nature. But it is a norm. A norm,
according to Georges Canguilhem, ‘‘does not exist, it plays its role which is to
devalue existence by allowing its correction’’ (Canguilhem 1989 [1966], 77).
A norm is also, as Jacques Derrida points out, an equivocal concept, since ‘‘it
encompasses both the concept of moral, ethical, political law as well as the
concept of factuality. The norm is also sometimes imposed as a fact, in the
name of which one normalizes precisely’’ (Derrida 2002b, 199). A wild type
serves as the reference point compared to which mutants are devalued.
Mutants are studied to understand relationships between gene structure

160 Articulations
and function. A far-fetched, but certainly not untrue, extension of this func-
tion in the context of the laboratory-clinic interface is that mutants can thus tell
scientists of disease. A state of not being well is identified, studied, and treated
as a disease because people get sick and tell doctors about their disease. A way
of understanding disease without requiring people to fall ill first is to use
model organisms—so scientists create mutants (or study appropriately exist-
ing ones) so that abnormalities can better be detected and understood when
manifested as human disease. The mutant helps advance knowledge about
normal organisms. And that is where the distinction between the normal and
the norm can be teased out: a mutant needs a wild-type nonmutant in order
for it to be a mutant, but the insights into normality that the mutant provides
are not necessarily facets of ‘‘normality’’ that any particular wild type actually
exhibits—it is an idealized normality that is only itself defined in terms of the
‘‘pathological’’ mutant, a normality that is defined not in terms of natural
occurrence but in terms of absence of pathology. In other words, a mutant
serves to tell us how a nonmutant would not work, rather than telling us how a
wild type works. Lab mutants, therefore, operate on a terrain of normality
versus pathology and have attached to them the (generally negative) value of
deviance with respect to a referent norm. The minute one grants that genes,
and pathways, interact with one another, one must acknowledge the existence
of feedback e√ects mediated by various components on the activities of others.
Mutants, as metaphorical constructions, and genes, as conceptual vantage
points, o√er vital perspectives on biological systems, but these are at best
partial perspectives that pose as complete.
One limitation, then, of a mutant or single-gene view of the world is that
phenotypes tend to get equated with the existence of single genes, rather than
with their interactions with others. The other limitation is that one needs a
phenotype in the first place to get talking. In the language of mutants, if you
do not have a phenotype, you do not have a conversation.
The shift from classical to molecular genetics accords a new place for, and
understanding of, mutants: from anomalous organisms that help understand
evolution to specifically altered genes that help simulate deviance in order to
understand normality. But when one goes beyond the study of model organ-
isms to the understanding of diseases in humans, many of the imperfections in

Promise and Fetish 161

the mutant’s-eye view of the world could be damning imperfections. Even
without entering the nature-nurture debate, the fact that most diseases are
polygenic makes it impossible to evolve an understanding of human disease on
the basis of human gene information that does not take into account the
multiple biological interactions responsible.
There is a discontinuity in molecular biology that allows this necessary
discontinuity in perspective, and that is the snp. At one level, the discontinuity
from mutant to snp is one that has technological causes and consequences:
snps become possible and feasible markers because of the Human Genome
Project, but they are simultaneously landmarks that make human genome
sequencing both easier and potentially more lucrative (in terms of helping
generate pegs on which the translation from gene sequence to therapy can be
made). There is a subtle change in perspective that snps bring about from
mutants. An equation of one mutation with one phenotype in the former case
gets subtly altered to become an equation of a number of variations with the
probability of a particular phenotype. snps, therefore, bring about discursive
and conceptual shifts in the language and understanding of molecular biology.
Further, snps bring a di√erent perspective to light, a perspective that has to do
with risk rather than deviance. snps talk about susceptibilities and predisposi-
tions, rather than abnormalities or aberrations. The key di√erence between
mutations and snps is one between deviation and di√erence. Obviously snps,
unlike mutants, do not show a strict correlation between individual phenotype
and genetic aberration. A human who is considered in every respect to be
healthy could well have variations at the nucleotide level, but these variations
do not constitute deviance against a constructed standard of normality—they
do, however, constitute the possibility of risk, of future pathology. A snp is
not pathology but anomaly: something that, according to Canguilhem, can
‘‘shade into disease but does not constitute one’’ (1989 [1966], 140).
snps are not about the simple correlation of a mutation to its phenotype:
they are about variations in genomes, rather than di√erences in genes; and
variations within and between whole populations, rather than di√erences be-
tween a ‘‘normal’’ and a ‘‘mutant’’ individual. In terms of level, therefore, snps
provide a peculiar bifocal perspective. On the one hand, the immediate level of
analysis is even smaller than the gene, it is the nucleotide; but on the other

162 Articulations
hand, it is an analysis that can only be undertaken when the nucleotide is set in
the context of whole populations. Few snps are likely to be involved in disease,
the way a mutation is involved in giving rise to an aberrant phenotype: what
snps allow is the identification of patterns of inheritance that a√ect health.
This implies a contradiction at the very heart of the sorts of knowledge that
personalized medicine relies on, a contradiction that has to do with the fact
that this is a knowledge gained from an increasingly molecular understanding
of life itself. The more things get reduced to their molecular components,
however, the more one needs to rely on statistical, population-based data to
‘‘individualize’’ therapy. This means that one can individualize therapy only on
the basis of population classifications. These are classifications that are ex-
tremely di≈cult to construct, as Jenny Reardon’s work on the history of the
Human Genome Diversity Project shows (see Reardon 2001). In fact, what is
at stake from the beginning is the question of what in fact ‘‘populations’’ are, as
opposed to ‘‘races,’’ or other forms of ethnic categorization, in order to be
subjects for genetic analysis.
These dilemmas of classifying populations, and defining what sorts of cate-
gorizations need to be assumed as ‘‘populations’’ in the first place before the
act of classifying within those categories can take place, are particularly evident
in India, where something like race, as a ‘‘natural’’ unit within which to classify
populations, does not have the same ready-made social-scientific valence as it
does in the United States. Classifying populations for genetic studies on the
basis of caste is equally fraught, both politically and epistemologically, and
is made more complicated by the fact that kinship patterns, which would
profoundly a√ect the purported genetic ‘‘homogeneity’’ of the population in
question, vary widely between di√erent parts of India (North Indian commu-
nities being traditionally more exogamous than South Indian communities).
And yet classifying populations for genetic studies is essential for a genomic
endeavor, such as that of the Indian state as driven by cbt, which has identified
population genetics as the way to establish India’s presence in global genomic
knowledge production. Research at cbt has population genetics as its cor-
nerstone, which means that researchers at cbt really need to be able to define
what populations are in order even to begin to tackle the scientific agenda that
they have set for themselves.

Promise and Fetish 163

 Such definitions, I discovered, are usually made by taking recourse to the an-
thropological survey of India’s voluminous atlas People of India (Singh 1992).
However, sometimes more random and violent classificatory methods are
adopted. Thus I encountered one project that claimed to be an attempt to dis-
cover the genetic di√erences between Aryans and Dravidians, categories that
are not merely politically fraught (especially when expressed in those very
terms) but also, in the real world, quite di≈cult to establish, since they exclude
a wide range of non-Brahmin, non-Dravidian people who might well trace
back to ‘‘Aryan’’ and ‘‘Dravidian’’ (or some combination of both) roots. The
dna samples of ‘‘Aryans’’ and ‘‘Dravidians’’ that this particular researcher was
collecting, further, came from students who were identified as belonging to
one or the other category in nearby Delhi University: a particularly cosmopoli-
tan site for sample collection, in all probability teeming with donors containing
all manner of genetically hybrid dna. Six months into the project, this re-
searcher, himself a Brahmin (and thereby, I suppose, of the population cate-
gory ‘‘Aryan’’) abandoned it because he could not find genetic di√erences of
statistical significance between the two groups. Instead of acknowledging this
as a possible consequence of the genetic similarity between di√erent population
groups, as Richard Lewontin (1993), for instance, argues, this researcher
indicated his frustration that the samples probably came from ‘‘genetically
impure’’ people, descendants of such—to the researcher—unthinking ances-
tors who intermarried across these wonderfully convenient (and probably for
the researcher, sacrosanct) population binaries. It was hard to discern whether
this researcher felt greater contempt because his experiments could not provide
elegant answers to the fundamental genetic di√erences between Aryans and
Dravidians, or at the thought that the Aryan forebears of his experimental
subjects might have been ‘‘contaminated’’ by Dravidian blood.∞∫
While much of this chapter focuses on genetic determinism as individualized
(an idea that plays out especially in regimes of personalized medicine),
the purpose of this story is to show that myths of genetic homogeneity
among populations are an equally powerful constituent of this determinist
knowledge-producing enterprise. Indeed, this tension between the genetic
myths that underlie population genomic projects that seek ultimately to be
vehicles of personalized medicine, and the individualized risk of genetic deter-

164 Articulations
minism as a consequence of regimes of personalized medicine that imply
personalized dna diagnostic profiles, is seen equally powerfully in the con-
troversial case of the Icelandic Health Sector Database of DeCode Genetics.
DeCode was a company that was pitched as unique because its dna samples
came from the ‘‘genetically homogeneous’’ Icelandic population. On the one
hand, the myth of the value of genetic homogeneity for population genet-
ics experiments has been questioned by entities such as the Irish company
Hibergen, which claims that it can still generate population genetic informa-
tion as valuable as DeCode’s even though the Irish population is less geneti-
cally homogeneous than the Icelandic is supposed to be.∞Ω The idea has further
been questioned by population genetics enterprises such as cbt, which bases
its business model on the assumption, in contradiction to DeCode, that the
genetic heterogeneity of the Indian population, coupled with large Indian fam-
ily sizes and as yet very little genetic counseling, allows cbt to do the sorts of
extensive linkage analyses across families that are just not possible to the same
extent in places like Iceland, Ireland, or the United States. On the other hand,
the myth of genetic homogeneity itself seems to be getting eroded by the sorts
of knowledge DeCode has started producing, which suggests, rather as the
experiments of the cbt researcher I mentioned do, that more contaminating
mischief was probably happening in the Icelandic ports with sailors of non-
Icelandic stock than the Icelandic myths of genetic homogeneity are willing
to admit.
Of course, the purpose of this argument is not simply to show how classi-
ficatory categories may take recourse to mythical and ideological conceptions
of pure population histories that are debunked by the very impure stories that
the dna tells. It is also to show the epistemic violence that would be enacted
when these classificatory artifacts might start operating as scientific fact (see
Bowker and Star 2000)—a violence that might very well have both been
enacted, and been more than simply epistemic, had the cbt researcher in fact
claimed to find genetic di√erences between Aryans and Dravidians.
But a little bit more about discontinuity—how do discontinuities, and
shifts in concepts, metaphors, and perspectives, occur? One way I have alluded
to is the technological. But another way of looking at discursive shifts within
science is by locating them in the context of discursive shifts outside science, as

Promise and Fetish 165

Ludwig Fleck’s studies on the course of syphilis research do (Fleck 1979
[1935]). A similar relationship between macrocultural anxieties and the rhe-
torical practices of science might be posed for the risk discourse surrounding
snps by situating them in the contemporary societal context of what Ulrich
Beck calls the ‘‘risk society.’’
In his book Risk Society, Beck (1986) describes how contemporary society
can be visualized not in terms of the class-based logic of wealth distribution
but in terms of a new inverse logic of risk distribution. Two ideas here are
significant in the context of this chapter: first, the importance in contemporary
(at least Western) society of having a knowledge of the risk one is at; and
second, the importance of the breakdown of traditional class alliances and a
concomitant individuation of society. Although the risks of disease that snps
foretell are not specifically risks of modernization, the importance of snps
highlights the pervasive influence of risk discourse in late modernity. Indeed,
comparing the risk discourse around snps with the risk discourse that Beck
traces shows how the discourse that arose in the 1960s and 1970s around
environmental issues has been displaced by one intensely associated with life-
style and genetics.
A number of facets of Beck’s vision of risk society play interestingly with a
snp perspective on the world. For Beck, risk society is a society that always has
potential catastrophe within its calculus—the ‘‘exceptional condition,’’ accord-
ing to him, ‘‘becomes the norm’’ (Beck 1986, 24), as indeed is the case with
snps, where variability, rather than a constructed ‘‘normality,’’ is the norm.
Second, according to Beck, ‘‘science’s monopoly on rationality is broken’’
(29). And so with snps: snps do not tell us the truth about a human condition
as much as they express probabilities of how that human condition might
evolve in the future—snps ultimately operate within a framework of proba-
bility statements. For Beck, risk society has ‘‘no perfect system, no perfect
human being’’ (30); and indeed, snps do not have room for wild types.
The other important perspective is the individuation of contemporary risk
society, in which there are no ‘‘natural’’ class-based alliances. The risks associ-
ated with possible disease are intensely individual risks, and theoretically each
individual has his or her own profile for risk or probability of illness that could
be calculated from a snp profile.

166 Articulations
 The therapeutic intervention that is envisaged by snps is personalized medi-
cine. As the contemporary discursive terrain of knowledge production is also
inevitably the capitalist terrain of value generation, each probabilistically inter-
pellated polymorphic subject becomes not just a target of possible interven-
tion but also a consumer-in-waiting. Moreover, the possibility of personalized
medicine is insurance (for the patient, against future illness), just as the always
already existent patient-as-consumer is insurance for the pharmaceutical com-
pany. As Francois Ewald (1991) has argued, the concept of risk is deeply tied
into the concept of insurance, to the extent that risk itself is capital. In other
words, snps are implicated in two distinct types of risk discourse: the patient’s
risk of future disease (the individuation that Beck speaks of) is inseparable
from the pharmaceutical company’s risk of high investment in therapeutic
development that must be realized in an eventual commodity.
My argument so far has been that a particular discursive-epistemic shift
allows a reconfiguration of subject categories away from normality and pathol-
ogy toward variability and risk, thereby placing every individual within a prob-
ability calculus as a potential target for therapeutic intervention. There is,
however, an abstraction at play here, one that depends on the fetish of scien-
tific fact, as follows.
The fetishism of scientific knowledge operates by mechanisms similar to
Marxian commodity fetishism.≤≠ Indeed, the moment of mystification through
fetishism is less through the ‘‘illusory’’ appearance of scientific knowledge as
true than through the appearance as natural of something that is contingent
and socially constructed. I call this mystification of scientific knowledge as a
natural thing-in-itself that merely awaits ready-made discovery rather than the
material-semiotic-conceptual outcome of real historical processes of knowl-
edge production epistemic fetishism.≤∞
The ideological power of epistemic fetishism comes from the fact that
the mystification that elevates a statement established by rigorous scientific
method into that natural thing-in-itself, the Scientific Fact, is invisible. Ge-
netic determinism acquires the status of scientific ‘‘fact’’ at the same time that
scientists hasten to tell us that snps are merely a set of probability statements.
The irony—and power—of epistemic fetishism is that probability statements
start operating with determinate legitimacy. Probability statements therefore

Promise and Fetish 167

acquire performative force. When confronted with the question of what one
does when confronted with a probability statement, the absence of an obvious
response allows the probability statement to harden into a reified statement of
prophecy. Therefore it is a fetishism that is at once an operation of naturaliza-
tion (the denial of the history of construction of a statement) and an operation
that, while naturalizing the statement, shifts it from being a statement of
association to one of causality.
Yet statements alone are often necessary yet insu≈cient to in-form subjects,
which require material allies. It is the articulation of the deterministic state-
ment to or as a representational device, the dna chip, that ties the statement
not just to the constitution of facts but to the constitution of subjects.
‘‘Preventive medicine’’ is an assemblage of technologies, business models,
and health management practices that has diagnostics as central to its calculus.
One of the many things genomics promises us, as I have been arguing, is the
possibility of diagnostic development without the concomitant development
of therapeutics. In itself, the dna chip is a decoding device, one that will allow
association between gene expression and disease predisposition and will there-
fore be used to develop diagnostic tests, and some of its most promising, and
potentially profitable, uses stem from this fact.
My analysis of epistemic fetishism so far owes much to Donna Haraway’s
concept of gene fetishism (see Haraway 1997). Gene fetishism, operating as it
does in a capitalist framework that naturalizes gene-as-property, is a capital-
ist fetish and yet is distinct from commodity fetishism. For Haraway, the
moment of the fetish is not just the naturalization but the becoming corporeal of
the gene as not just a thing-in-itself but a thing-in-itself that stands in for
and completely represents what is essentially a relationally constituted subject
(whether gene or organism). I would like to take Haraway’s notion a little
further, to argue that gene fetishism is a form of subjective fetishism, in which
the fetishism of the object (which is simultaneously, in the case of snps, the
chip, the information on the chip, and the fact represented by the information
on the chip) operates not by alienation—the assumption of a transcendental
thing-in-itself status—but by interpellation.≤≤
It is through the constitution of a polymorphic subject that the ideological-
scientific ‘‘fact’’ of genetic determinism gets constituted. However, this sub-

168 Articulations
ject constitution occurs in an epistemic and ideological space in which the
determinants—information, representational device, and subject—are always
already overdetermined as ‘‘naturally’’ potential commodities. In other words,
the oppositional tension between commodity fetishism as alienating from sub-
jective association, and noncapitalist (‘‘precapitalist’’) fetishism as intensely
subject associated, implodes through scientific-capitalist technologies of rep-
resentation such as snps, snp databases, and dna chips. Subjects get con-
stituted through genetically determined probability statements simultaneous
to their constitution as future probable targets of individual therapeutic inter-
vention. In the latter case, they are constituted as capital subjects—as (future)
buyers of (future) therapies. Thereby the ideology of the inevitability, benefi-
cence, and naturalness of the pharmaceutical market as the means to therapy is
constituted simultaneously with the constitution of subjects and of scientific
facts. Genomic fetishes are market(able)s.
To explore the notion of fetishism further, I analyze an extended quote from
William Pietz:

If the notion of fetishism is to have any useful specificity, it must refer to objec-
tive phenomena that are valued with an exceptional intensity by individuals or by
a society in general. The history of the discourse about fetishism suggests that
fetishes may be conceived as excessively valued material objects upon which the
very existence and identity of an individual, cultural group, or society, is experi-
enced as depending. This would in turn suggest that a critique of fetishism should
begin with a materialist phenomenology of historically particular fetish objects.
The embodiment relations and institutional structures articulated by such inquiry
into socially valued objects should then follow two paths: first, a Marxian analysis
of such objects should locate their excessive valuation in the conflicts and contra-
dictions between the structures of social power reified in the multiplicity of institu-
tions that compose a given social formation; second, the intensely personal invest-
ment of individual identities in such objects should be studied by relating them
to those arguments and those dramatized scenarios of the libidinal imagination
wherein people express their own understanding of the ground of their own self-
worth (or lack of it). That is, the critique of fetishism should begin with value
objects and then trace these forms of value to objective structures of social power
and to subjective conceptions of personal worth. (Pietz 1993, 558–59)

Promise and Fetish 169

 There are two imploding articulations of fetishism that are completely reso-
nant with the imploding articulations of value in a political economic and
epistemic structure such as biocapital. These concern the Marxian notion of
commodity fetishism and the Freudian notion of fetishism.
An analysis of fetishism must begin by acknowledging two important ideas.
The first is that while the fetish is a mode of abstraction, it has to be under-
stood and traced in historical, materialist terms. Indeed, fetishes are abstrac-
tions of the material, referring to the ways in which mundane material objects
are imbued with mystical, magical power. And thus the second is that fetishes
are lively, especially when the objects of fetishism—in this case, of capital,
commodities, and scientific facts—are themselves as emergent and at stake as
they are.
The ‘‘objective phenomena’’ that are valued in genomic fetishism are those
that provide capitalism (as a system and as a set of material objects of currency)
and science (as episteme and as a set of facts, in this case about ‘‘life itself ’’) with
their supreme authority. These are phenomena that are valued with equal
intensity, albeit in di√erent ways, in the United States and India. In the United
States, the fetishism of both the free market and scientific fact occurs by their
naturalization, the free market as the only successful political economic forma-
tion of our times, and scientific fact as always already ‘‘true’’ rather than con-
tingent and provisional. In India, the fetishism of both manifests in the ways in
which they become objects of explicit desire. The ‘‘excessively valued’’ objects,
in both cases, are simultaneously material and abstract—commodities and a
free market system or imaginary; tangible information, biological material,
therapeutic objects, research facilities and ‘‘culture of innovation.’’
What Pietz argues for in a critique of fetishism is a ‘‘materialist phenomenol-
ogy of historically particular fetish objects.’’ In other words, a useful handle on
which to base a critique of fetishism is to locate the fetish in an emblematic
object that might itself be the object of fetishism or somehow represent the
fetishes whose critiques are at stake. In this chapter, one such object that I have
used is the dna chip.
What is so useful about the dna chip as an object through which to study
genomic fetishism is that, as an instance of what Donna Haraway (1997)
would call a constitutive ‘‘material-semiotic’’ object of biocapital, the dna chip

170 Articulations
provides multiple grounds and directions for analysis. Material-semiotic ob-
jects, as Haraway shows, cannot simply be described as objects-in-the-world
by referring to their objective properties, but nor can they be analyzed without
serious attention to those very properties. The dna chip, for instance, would
not be what it is if it were not miniaturized, not a silicon wafer substrate, or
not a template for hybridization because of dna molecules stuck to its surface
by a proprietary photolithographic process, not least because this material
nature of the chip allows it to be patented and made a commodity of knowledge
production. Equally, the dna chip points simultaneously in two directions
that a critique of fetishism needs to consider—‘‘embodiment relationships’’
and ‘‘institutional structures.’’
Pietz mentions a number of terms essential to a critique of fetishism that,
when applied to genes, genomes, dna chips, venture science, genomics,
or drug development, point nicely to the implosion of capitalism with ‘‘life
itself ’’ that I am tracing in my analysis. These terms include ‘‘valuation,’’
‘‘institutions,’’ ‘‘personal investment,’’ ‘‘individual identities,’’ and ‘‘libidinal
imagination.’’
Value refers simultaneously to capitalist surplus value generation and to the
ethical and moral values that operate in the realm of the normative. However,
epistemologies, especially when they are explicitly about knowledge of ‘‘life’’
or ‘‘humanness,’’ also have considerable implications for configuring individ-
uals as subjects of particular sorts. When the outcome of an emergent episte-
mic configuration is something like personalized medicine, the stakes for indi-
vidual identity formation and subjectivity are evidently acute.
Therefore, as Pietz concludes in the quoted passage, the implosion of these
di√erent regimes of value—of the free market and of the life sciences, in this
case—relates simultaneously to ‘‘structures of social power’’ and ‘‘subjective
conceptions of personal worth.’’
On the one hand, the chip reveals distinctive markers of genetic traits or
predispositions for diseases; at the same time, it is acknowledged that there is
no direct or simple cause-and-e√ect relationship between the markers and
their statistically corresponding genetic traits or disease predispositions. As
Marx already identified, the reification occurs not just because of the use value
of the chip but because of its potential for exchange, in this case, specifically, its

Promise and Fetish 171

nature as a promissory instrument involved in the risk-laden raising of venture
capital without which the current biotechnology research cannot proceed.
Indeed, it is impossible to disentangle the nature of the scientific ‘‘fact’’ pro-
vided by the chip—of predispositions to future illness—without looking at
such ‘‘fact’’ as itself an authoritative form of information about dna sequence
variability between individuals and populations, where the logic of diagnosing
such future illness is completely intertwined with the logic of the diagnostic
and preventive medicine industries as business models. If genomic fetishes
have everything to do with both the scientific and the market frameworks
within which they are generated, then life, in the techno-corporate worlds of
biocapital, is always already a business plan.

Consumer Power and Capital Subjects

I wish now to emphasize the importance of generating a more elaborate
theory of consumption without reducing capitalist dynamics today to the
dynamics of consumption. Specifically, I argue for the need to understand new
modes of consumption of surplus, see whether and how surplus consumption
is a defining dynamic of biocapital, and further position risk distribution as
itself a perverse form of surplus consumption.
I begin my analysis by recounting Marx’s analysis of surplus production. The
key source of exploitation that Marx identifies in the capitalist system is its
generation of surplus value. To understand how surplus value leads to exploi-
tation, one must first understand that the fundamental economic contradic-
tion that Marx is trying to resolve is the question of how an exchange of
equivalents can lead to a generation of surplus, and then to understand Marx’s
concept of labor power.
That it is labor power rather than labor that the worker exchanges with the
capitalist is crucial because labor power, as creative potential, is not predeter-
mined value—it has the potential for generating surplus ingrained within it.
Therefore the apparent act of equivalent exchange—worker’s labor for capi-
talist’s wages—has hidden within it an element of nonequivalence, because
wages are fixed remuneration, but the labor, which is actually labor power, is
the potential for the creation of value that is over and above the money ex-
pended in wages.≤≥ Surplus value, ‘‘in general, is value in excess of the equiva-

172 Articulations
lent’’ (Marx 1973 [1858], 324; hereafter cited in the text as Grundrisse). Wages
therefore constitute for the capitalist productive consumption:

Living labor belongs just as much among capital’s conditions of existence as do raw
material and instrument. Thus it reproduces itself doubly, in its own form, [and]
in the worker’s consumption, but only to the extent that it reproduces him as
living labor capacity. . . . The payment of wages is an act of circulation which pro-
ceeds simultaneously with and alongside the act of production. Or, as Sismondi
says from this perspective—the worker consumes his wages unreproductively; but
the capitalist consumes them productively, since he gets labor in the exchange,
which reproduces the wages and more than the wages. (Grundrisse, 676)

And further:

If the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in
order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of
the labor day is forced labor; surplus-labor. (Grundrisse, 324)

Especially when there is a reserve labor force, wages can tend toward the
theoretical minimum amount of that which the worker needs to sustain him.
As long as the worker is further not given enough to be able to not work, labor
power is constantly renewable. This is how, therefore, the exchange of equiva-
lents leads to the creation of surplus.

By virtue of having acquired labor capacity in exchange as an equivalent, capital has

acquired labor time—to the extent that it exceeds the labor time contained in labor
capacity—in exchange without equivalent; it has appropriated alien labor time with-
out exchange by means of the form of exchange. . . . The use-value of labor capacity,
as value, is itself the value-creating force; the substance of value, and the value-
increasing substance. In this exchange, then, the worker receives the equivalent of
the labor time objectified in him, and gives his value-creating, value-increasing
living labor time. (Grundrisse, 674; italics in original)

Marx therefore distinguishes between necessary and surplus labor-time, the

former being the labor-time required for the worker to reproduce his means of
existence, that is, the labor-time that goes into the production of use values.
Everything over and above that is surplus labor-time and leads to surplus value

Promise and Fetish 173

for the capitalist. In order to generate maximal surplus value, the worker is
(theoretically) only remunerated with enough wages to maintain his subsis-
tence; the attempt of the capitalist is always to maximize surplus labor-time.≤∂
It is here that the exploitation of the worker takes place, in the creation of
surplus value.
If the first step in developing an understanding of ‘‘consumption’’ rele-
vant to biocapital (and I purposely hold consumption, for the time being, in
quotes) is an understanding of surplus value from the productive process as
being the node of exploitation of the worker, then the second step is to under-
stand what is meant by subject, which, after all, does not at all necessarily mean
worker. It is this gap between political economic, mainly Marxian, analyses of
labor (as somehow having to do with class, proletariat, relations of produc-
tion, and so on), and Foucauldian analyses of subjectivity, that needs to be
bridged if one is to attempt, as I have been doing, a theorizing that is equally
attentive to a Foucauldian politics of ‘‘life, labor, and language’’ as it is to a
Marxian politics that emphasizes relations of production. In other words, one
could say that the relationship between consumption and production is that
consumption provides a subject for the object of production. Thus there is a
coming together of questions of labor and subjectivity in the dialectical rela-
tionship of production to consumption.
In this context, I move back to talk about risk, the defining heuristic around
which the consumer subjectivity of personalized medicine takes shape. It be-
comes important to explore how, as we move toward a diagnostic regime with
the patient-in-waiting as always already a consumer-in-waiting, the question is
not what ‘‘new subjectivity’’ is created in the process (as if that ‘‘subjectivity’’
can be defined entirely with reference to itself) but rather what changes occur
in the entire system of normative structures that combine to create a subject as
consumer, subjected to corporate evaluations and (their own and others’) risk
calculus. For this, it is important to talk about risk in terms of some of the
questions I posed in the previous chapter regarding vision and hype.
Fundamentally, risk is implicated in a dialectical relationship between
prophecy and contingency. Prophecy here means two things. First, it is a way
of calculating contingency, through risk-benefit analyses, calculations of insur-
ance premiums, investment decisions based on ‘‘due diligence,’’ and so on,

174 Articulations
when the patient-consumer subject’s risk of future illness can only be situated as
risk when it is acknowledged that it is a risk that is calculated in the midst of a
whole range of calculations of risk that see risk as capital. Second, it is a means
of taming contingency, at least partly by conjuring a tendential future through
the prophecy, very much as I described the operation of hype in the previous
chapter. Therefore the calculation of risk as a mode of prophecy, which is
always already a process of prophesizing as a mode of coming to terms with
risk, could be about getting investors to invest in companies through investor
pitches and story stocks but could also, in the same way, be about getting
patients-in-waiting to undertake preemptive or prophylactic actions on the
basis of diagnostic tests.
There are all sorts of risks to a company developing drugs that need to be
adequately calculated and tamed. These include the possibility that a person
might never develop a particular symptom and become a patient, and thereby
never become part of the market that consumes a particular drug; that a drug
in the pipeline might fail to get developed in the first place for the diagnosis
because of a failed clinical trial; or that a particular drug that gets developed
does not become the prescription of choice for a particular patient (market
competition).
In other words, a diagnostic test, which is a marker of an individual’s risk of
future illness, is also a counter to o√set the drug development company’s risk
of limited market size (not enough patients with a disease), limited market
share (too many other drugs for that indication), and failures in drug develop-
ment or adverse events after marketing. By changing the equation from a
‘‘healthy’’ patient to a ‘‘patient-in-waiting,’’ by suggesting that every person, no
matter how healthy, is possibly someone who might fall ill, the potential
market for a drug is enlarged from ‘‘diseased’’ people to, conceivably, everyone
with purchasing power, just as the domain of the therapeutic is enlarged
progressively further back toward prophylactic uses consequent to the mo-
ment of diagnosis.
I make the argument here that this enlargement of the domain of the thera-
peutic, and of potential consumer markets, is enabled by the sorts of knowl-
edge that genomics provides, and by the ways in which genomics inserts into a
distinct regime of medicine called preventive medicine. However, the impetus

Promise and Fetish 175

to move toward a testing society and enlarge the market is evident in market-
ing strategies of biotech and pharmaceutical companies even without explicit
recourse to genomic epistemologies or technologies. This is seen, for instance,
in the marketing strategies of the so-called lifestyle drugs, the most profitable
of which are cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Lipitor. Joseph Dumit ana-
lyzes such marketing strategies as part of what he calls a ‘‘pharmaceutical
grammar’’ (Dumit 2003).
Therefore an enlargement of the therapeutic moment toward the diagnos-
tic, and of therapeutic markets to include ‘‘patients-in-waiting’’ rather than just
‘‘diseased’’ patients, is not at all restricted to genomic-derived therapeutics. My
argument here is that genomics, whose own grammar is articulated by repre-
sentational devices such as the dna chip, allows, by virtue of operating in
probability statements and configuring all subjects as patients-in-waiting, a
subject configuration that completely reinforces the drug development com-
panies’ need to show consumers-in-waiting and thereby to both create for
themselves and prove to their investors the existence of future markets for
their therapies. In other words, what genomics allows is an epistemic rationality
for a market discourse.≤∑
The key to the calculus of personalized medicine is that risk minimization
and prevention are not dictated by the discriminatory practices of employers or
health management organizations, or by the expert (and thereby, it is implied,
forcible) interventions of physicians, but by patients themselves, who neces-
sarily have to be configured as rational actors in the way that advertising
conceives of them thus, and have to be given the appearance of ‘‘free choice’’
among a highly constrained set of options that are available, in any case, only
to those who occupy the class position from which to exercise such ‘‘free’’
choice. Diagnostic tests and preventive or therapeutic options, in the business
models of personalized and preventive medicine, become consumables in ex-
actly the same way that soap or perfumes are. The dna chip is precisely such
a technology that creates ‘‘free’’ (in the utilitarian sense of having rational
choices of self-governance) subjects of uncertainty, who are subjected to a
rationality of perpetual possible consumption, and a rationality that simulta-
neously demands ‘‘rational’’ self-governance—a governance itself that is ef-
fected through further consumption.

176 Articulations
 In this situation, then, one confronts questions of what Foucault calls gov-
ernmental rationality, or governmentality (Burchell et al. 1991). After all,
‘‘rational’’ consumer choice, as assumed by corporations selling to those con-
sumers, cannot a√ord to be quite as banal or simplistic in its assumptions of
consumer rationality as rational choice sociology or political science can, since
the very future of the company is at stake if consumers act ‘‘irrationally.’’
Indeed, there are clearly many ways in which people can respond to the re-
sults of genetic tests, as responses to Myriad’s breast cancer tests for the brca
genes has shown. Throughout this book I mention actors—including venture
capitalists, entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical companies, biosocial agents, policy-
makers, and patients as/and consumers—who need constantly to calculate
their futures precisely because of the di≈culty of calculating them. The impor-
tant question is how such governances articulate at and through di√erent
institutional sites, national contexts, and historical and strategic conjunctures.
The consumer subject of biocapital is a form of neoliberal subject, no doubt,
but it is important to remember that it is the epistemology of biocapital—what I
have, in shorthand, referred to in the previous section as genomic fetishism—
that is involved in this subject constitution.
Personalized medicine or genomics or drug development is not the teleo-
logical outcome of technoscientific progress, as scientists like Francis Collins
and Victor McCusick portray it, but is ultimately an assemblage of tech-
nologies and epistemologies that are coproduced in tendential fashion along
with the political economic grounds for their articulation, grounds that are
overdetermined by global relations of capital and by the hegemony of the free
market.≤∏ I try in this book to stay attentive both to the structural constraints
that form these grounds and to the strategic and contingent articulations that
give them shape.

Conclusion
I have been arguing that biocapital implies an implosion of an emergent
political economic regime with an emergent epistemic one, and in this chapter
I have placed the question of the epistemic and technological implications of
genomics at the forefront of analysis. This also continues my concern with
language and the discursive, where I suggest that scientific fact, just like corpo-

Promise and Fetish 177

rate promissory articulation, is a particular type of performative discourse that
carries with it its own authenticity and authority by virtue of its factuality. That
this factuality ties simultaneously into information about ‘‘life itself ’’ and into
an enterprise of drug development that is overdetermined as corporate implies
reconfigurations in subjectivity, even a di√erent grammar of ‘‘life,’’ as credible
futures we can all invest in.
This brings to the fore an analytics of risk, more broadly a need for cal-
culation that is always already dually inflected—calculations by patients/
consumers-in-waiting entwined with calculations by corporations. It is the
relationship between these two forms of calculation that this and the previous
chapter together attempt to put into relief. As Niklas Luhmann points out,
‘‘Modernity has influenced probability calculations just in time to maintain a
fictionally created, dual reality. The present can calculate a future that can
always turn out otherwise’’ (1998, 70). In the case of personalized medicine,
this calculation is much more explicit, and also much more vexed, as the ethical
dilemmas around genetic counseling make evident.≤π
In the case of personalized medicine, the phrase ‘‘a future that can always
turn out otherwise’’ implies two simultaneous yet distinct figurations. The first
is that, since the statement of genomic fact such as that foretold by the dna
chip is simply one of probability, the actual outcome is, in any given instance,
ultimately contingent. For instance (as is already well documented), while the
test for brca genes (markers for the risk of breast cancer) is the most popular,
and most hyped, of genomic diagnostic tests, it is possible for people who
have these genes to not develop breast cancer (though it is impossible to
evaluate that ‘‘not’’ against the probabilistic statement of the diagnostic test
beyond a ‘‘not yet’’—the possibility of developing the disease always remains
inscribed within the probability calculus of a person who has tested positive
for these genes), just as it is possible for people who test negative on a brca test
to develop breast cancer. Therefore it is quite possible for a future to always
turn out ‘‘otherwise’’ from the probability indicated by a diagnostic test, even
without the test having been somehow erroneous.
If the first reading of Luhmann’s phrase points to the constant element of
contingency in a statement of probability, the contingency that ultimately
makes the probability statement not be a statement of prophecy, then the

178 Articulations
second points to the calculability of life that I have been arguing for. Personal-
ized medicine can always make the future turn out otherwise, because it indi-
cates the possibility or necessity of action that could make the future turn out other-
wise. This action could be prophylactic therapeutic intervention (thereby
enlarging the domain of the therapeutic, and increasing the market for com-
panies developing drugs), already seen with cholesterol-lowering drugs, for
instance, or through lifestyle changes. In other words, personalized medicine
can make the ‘‘future turn out otherwise’’ by functioning as a eugenic technology.
This ability to explicitly calculate a future, to give it a quantifiable ratio-
nality, is the temporal inverse of the phenomenon of corporate promissory
conjuration I described in chapter 3, which involves conjuring a future to
create the present, instead of calculating in the present to create a particular
future. Of course, there is an explicit risk calculus in conjuration, as well,
especially when corporations or investors sink huge amounts of capital into
ventures based on the belief that the promises of the future will in fact be
realized. And of course, those futures could turn out otherwise as well, and the
forward-looking statement is one form of insurance to protect against the
consequences of that.
Luhmann argues that probability provides a ‘‘provisional foresight.’’ I have
argued that the moment of fetishism is when this provision is substituted for
an understanding of determinacy, when probability reifies into prophecy, as it
did in Richard Gibbs’s speech on single-gene diseases that I recounted earlier
in the chapter. Meanwhile, Derrida (2002b) reminds us that being situated in
provisional worlds brings with it an obligation.
Derrida’s deconstructive method is easily misread as a failure to respond, a
failure to make decisions or e√ect closure. Rather, what deconstruction de-
mands, as Gayatri Spivak (1976, 1985, 1988) points out, is the importance of
acknowledging, and making explicit, the di≈culty of closure, the slippery
character of texts, analytic structures, or ethical dilemmas, in ways that make it
imperative to act in full knowledge of the provisional nature of one’s actions.≤∫ The
aim of this chapter is to show how the provisional, risk-laden, probabilistic,
indeed always deferred, nature of the operation of both scientific and corpo-
rate discourse in biocapital, and of the fetishistic maneuvers that attempt to
stabilize these into firm, risk-minimizing statements of prophecy, as not de-

Promise and Fetish 179

ferred but eternal and without history, operate. This analysis is a provisional
intervention to denaturalize these maneuvers of purification. Because it is
within the space provided by provisional facts and probable futures that our
lives are being configured.
This book is configured throughout by a simultaneous consideration of
both the ‘‘economic’’ and the ‘‘epistemic,’’ where the epistemic in particular is
almost always articulated in writing, as discourse, as inscription. In other
words, while the economic always already pertains to regimes of value, the
epistemic always already pertains to the book. Meanwhile, value is always
already configured as both capital and moral.
It is therefore impossible to analyze and study the economic, especially
when the system in question is capitalist, without locating it squarely in the
context of at least two other major historical and ideological formations. The
first is religion, especially Christianity; the second is nation.
Capitalism, religion/Christianity, and the nation are, of course, three of the
prime institutional and ideological edifices of modernity, and one of the rea-
sons they have become such edifices is because they are, simultaneously, in-
stitutional and ideological. The relationship between capitalism and Chris-
tianity and their coproduction has been famously analyzed by social theorists
such as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin (Weber 2001 [1930]; Benjamin
1996 [1922]), and indeed their mutual implication is suggested in the double
sensibility of the word ‘‘value.’’ However, like capitalism, Christianity is hardly
immutable, and if Weber’s Protestant ethic, as I argued in the previous chap-
ter, is being replaced by a neoliberal capitalist ethic of the irrational exuberance
of innovation, then Christianity itself might be said to have transformed,
certainly in the United States, to an aggressive, salvationary, ‘‘born-again’’
form.≤Ω
Meanwhile, the relationship of the imagination of nation to the rise of
capitalism, particularly print capitalism, has been famously documented by
Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]). At the same time, and in a fashion that, as
Arvind Rajagopal (2001) argues is itself completely mediated, nationalism
and religious consciousness rea≈rm and reinforce each other in a fashion that
is, across religions, evangelical in form.
The purpose of this book is not just to analyze the coproduction of episte-

180 Articulations
mic and economic regimes with respect to one another but to situate these
emergences in the context of understanding larger social structures and ide-
ologies that are themselves emergent and at stake. This continues my emphasis
on articulations, which, in chapter 3, focused on the discursive articulations of
corporate public relations, and in this chapter focused on the ways in which
these articulations in turn articulate with science as a discursive enterprise of
fact production. In the next chapter, I explore the ways in which biocapital is
embedded in salvationary and nationalist tropes and imaginaries, by making
the argument that in the United States, one can explicitly see biocapital in
terms of a ‘‘born-again’’ messianism, while in India, what becomes explicit is
the relationship of these emergent assemblages in terms of concerns and de-
bates around nationalism. This is not an attempt to set up a relativist binary of
‘‘salvation’’ versus ‘‘nation’’ between the United States and India but rather
one, influenced by Weber’s analysis of the multiple causalities that underlie
emergent social forms, that shows how the grounds that condition the imag-
inaries of global techno-capitalist regimes are themselves shifting and at stake.

Promise and Fetish 181

5. Salvation and Nation
Underlying Belief Structures of Biocapital

I begin this chapter with two illustrative tales of national pride, one Indian
and one American. In addition to the high-tech software and biotech pro-
fessionals who are the most powerful and visible part of the Indian diaspora
in Silicon Valley are a large number of Sikh taxi drivers. Their often fierce
sense of nationalism was reflected in a conversation I had with one of them
as he drove me to a friend’s house near Berkeley. As I spoke to him initially
in Hindi, his heart immediately warmed to me. I learned that he had moved
from Amritsar just three years previously and was pining for home. He asked
me whether I planned to settle down in the United States, and I replied that
while I would probably end up doing so, my heart was still in India. At
this, he turned around, smiled broadly, and said, ‘‘Han bhai. Is behanchod
desh mein reh rehke khoon bhi safed ho jaata hai’’ (Yes, brother. Staying in
this sisterf———ing country too long turns even one’s blood white). He re-
fused to charge me for my ride, even though ferrying another Indian around
must hardly have been a novelty for him in an area that has a huge concentra-
tion of Indian expatriates. And yet, as he said, ‘‘Apne mulk ke aadmi se kaise
paise le sakte hain?’’ (How can I take money from someone who is from my
country?).
For my second story, I shift setting to reflect on the recent spate of scandals
in corporate America, through an account of a forum at the Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard University, entitled ‘‘Corporate Fraud and Rattled
Investors.’’∞ The speakers at this forum included Jon Corzine, Democratic
senator from New Jersey and former ceo of Goldman Sachs; Richard Bree-
den, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under the presi-
dency of George Bush (Sr.); and Catherine Kinney, copresident of the New
York Stock Exchange.
Unanimous among all the participants was the view that the corporate
scandals by no means reflected a systemic failure. On the one hand, they
pointed to the exceptional nature of the crisis; on the other hand, they insisted
that no amount of legislation would make the problem of corporate fraud go
away—this latter because corporate fraud, they claimed, is a moral problem,
not a systemic one. The contradiction in saying that something is simulta-
neously exceptional and inherent was never reflected on.
Clearly, then, there was something reassuring for all the participants, who
represented a spectrum of ideological and political positions, in emphasizing
that corporate scandals were a consequence of a moral rather than a systemic
breakdown. This tendency can be attributed to two reasons: one, the discur-
sive structures of morality, salvation, and redemption that could be called into
account by such a diagnosis; and two, the larger implications of admitting
systemic failure could thereby be sidestepped. Diagnoses of moral failure al-
low the identification of crises in, and the reduction of crises to, the specific
personae and actions of individuals (or corporations). They also point to the
always existing possibility of redemption, thereby implying that white-collar
criminals are always on the verge of repentance and reform.
More pertinent to a diagnosis of nationalism, however, are the implications
that stem from acknowledging systemic failure in the case of scandal, from
reading them as structural lapses rather than as aberrations. Admitting to
systemic failure is not just admitting to a failure of free market capitalism but
acknowledging, as sec chairman Breeden constantly emphasized, a failure of
free market capitalism that is uniquely laden with American values, and a
free market capitalism that is uniquely positioned toward garnering America’s
global power. In other words, structural diagnoses that undermine a culturally
particular, ritualized manifestation of free market excess are viewed as under-
mining not just a system of political economy but a national value system. In
contrast to the kind of ‘‘naturalized’’ nationalism that this episode reflects,
nationalism in India at this historical juncture is a sentiment both more openly
expressed and more regularly interrogated.

Salvation and Nation 183

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites
In this chapter, I look at the belief systems within which biocapitalist vision
and hype are embedded, specifically in religion and in nation. Inspired by Max
Weber, I attempt first to generate a typology of salvationary undercurrents and
manifestations of biocapitalism—first, by looking at the multiple (and mu-
tual) coproductions of religion, science, and capitalism that occur; second, by
situating these productions in performative sites of speech and ritual; and
third, by theoretically analyzing the discursive and rhetorical structures of
salvation and nation that underlie life science and capitalism.
This chapter, then, attempts to generate typologies of salvationary mani-
festations of biocapital in the United States and of its nationalist manifesta-
tions in India. There are multiple levels or registers at which salvationary as
well as nationalist imagination and discourse operate. For instance, capitalism
is not just a formation that is conditioned by religion (as Weber argues in The
Protestant Ethic), but also a religious phenomenon. Indeed, one could ap-
proach this through the dual meanings of the word ‘‘conversion,’’ which, on
the one hand, has a religious definition, indicating wholesale transformations
in religious belief, and, on the other, refers to the hardly momentous transfor-
mations of use value to exchange value. Salvationary discourses, which are
often embedded in, and disseminated through, ritual, are paternalistic, cultic,
and libidinal.≤ Therefore salvationary discourse and practice are also explicitly
gendered in multiple ways.
Nationalism, as Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]) famously argued, is the
imagination of a community, and it inflects di√erently when the nation in
question is a postcolonial entity such as India, whose very existence as a nation
in the world was born of a modernist imaginary that was formed in ways
simultaneously inspired by, and opposed to, the colonial power.
For much of the first forty years of India’s independence, the conception of
‘‘nationalism’’ was still largely formulated in terms of secular anti-imperialism.
But in the last fifteen years, this comfortably hegemonic understanding of
nationalism as something natural, common in sentiment to all Indians (who
in this conception are marked, after all, by their consciousness as postcolonial
subjects), and generally secular-progressive, has come under increasing attack.
Political developments that have helped constitute this increasingly ambiva-

184 Articulations
lent, contested position for Indian nationalism can, in many ways, be traced to
the breakdown of the e√ortless pan-Indian hegemony of the Congress Party,
the dominant party of India’s freedom struggle.≥ For instance, there has been
increased political movement for greater federal autonomy for states within
the Indian union, and consequently ‘‘regional’’ parties, mainly representing
particular states/or regions of India, have grown to be major political players.∂
Identity politics, often built around caste, have been playing an increasingly
prominent role in the Indian polity as well. And a cultural Hindu nationalism,
which was a constituent element of Indian politics throughout the freedom
struggle (albeit a suppressed one relative to the Congress’s secular national-
ism), has grown more prominent, as indicated by the rise to power in 1998 of
a coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(bjp, or Indian People’s Party).∑ In the midst of these changes (and certainly
in many ways coproductive of them) has been India’s aggressive new program
of economic liberalization, marked by an ambivalent attitude of attraction and
repulsion toward the West, represented now by the United States rather than
Great Britain.
In other words, it is possible to speak of biocapital as salvationary in the
United States but nationalist in India, but not because of some essential ‘‘cul-
tural di√erence’’ between the two locales. There are historical and material
reasons for this di√erence. For one, discursive, ritual, cultic expression is a
constitutive element of American technoscience and corporate culture; for
another, nationalism’s meaning in the present conjuncture of cultural resur-
gence and globalization is up for grabs in the Indian polity today. That it is
even possible to make the statement ‘‘the United States : salvation :: India :
nation’’ is not a little incongruent. After all, it is a religious nationalism whose
resurgence is reshaping the grounds of Indian politics today. At the same time,
it is evident that an explicit, aggressive nationalism is increasingly becoming a
defining feature of American culture and policy.
Of course, as with all the other concepts I have used to define rubrics for the
chapters in this book, the terms ‘‘salvation’’ and ‘‘nation’’ are not meant to
function as binaries at all, but rather as dialectic counterparts to each other.
The consolidation of the Hindu Right is a movement not just about religious
identity but about Indian national identity. Its attempt is less to create some

Salvation and Nation 185

sort of ‘‘global’’ Hindu consciousness (except insofar as such consciousness
can translate into questions of what it means for India to be a secular state)
than it is an interrogation of, and a challenge to, a particular conception of a
nation-state as it has historically evolved. At the same time, American national-
ism, especially in the guise of the Bush administration, is explicitly messianic
in its overtones. Religion is about national identity (in India), at the same time
as national consciousness becomes messianic (in the United States).
I begin by showing how the conception of drug development as a miracu-
lous enterprise pervades its stories, and how stories about the miracles of
pharmaceutical development constantly crop up at each ‘‘revolutionary’’ mo-
ment in the industry’s history. These stories are not abstract and disembodied
structural figures but have to do with real lives that new miracle cures have
saved (in the linear progressive historical renderings of science, these miracles
are, of course, always subsequently deemed as having been inadequate). Con-
sider, then, the following three stories, the first two recounted by Barry Werth
(1994) in The Billion Dollar Molecule, and the third by Cynthia Robbins-Roth
(2000) in From Alchemy to ipo.
The miraculous story of the use of penicillin during World War II had as its
key moment the drug’s administration in 1942 to a woman who was dying of
streptococcal fever and not responding to sulpha drugs. But, says Werth: ‘‘At
3.30 Saturday afternoon, when she received her first shot of Merck’s penicillin,
her fever was 105 and she had ‘well over’ fifty bacteria per cubic centimeter of
blood. By 4 the following morning, her temperature was normal. By Monday,
her blood was sterile. She was still alive in 1990 and living in Connecticut’’
(Werth 1994, 123–24).
Later in that decade, it was cortisone that became the miracle drug. Says
Werth: ‘‘In September 1948, Merck shipped six of its ten grams of cortisone to
the Mayo Clinic for the treatment of a twenty-nine-year-old woman so crip-
pled with rheumatoid arthritis that she couldn’t roll over in bed. The woman
had already received massive doses of penicillin, streptomycin, gold salts, and
sera with no improvement. Three days after her first injection, she was able to
raise her hands above her head. Four days later, she went shopping, declaring,
‘I have never felt better in my life’ ’’ (Werth 1994, 129).
Robbins-Roth starts From Alchemy to ipo with the story of Betsy Patter-
son, diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (nhl), who was su√ering as

186 Articulations
much, if not more, from her chemotherapy regimen as from the disease itself.
Consequences of the chemotherapy, which did succeed in pushing her cancer
into remission, included a premature menopause, diabetes, severe folic acid
deficiency leading to anemia, and peripheral nerve damage. Eighteen months
later, another spot showed up on a chest scan, threatening yet another battle
with chemotherapy. It was at this point that she decided she wanted to try
Rituxan, a new monoclonal antibody treatment for nhl that had been devel-
oped by idec Pharmaceuticals. As a consequence of the Rituxan treatment,
according to Robbins-Roth (2000, 6–7):

The nodes in her neck were completely gone, and those in her back and groin were
disappearing and were no longer painful. CT scans in June prior to her second dose
continued to show a substantial reduction in her tumors.
This great response was not accompanied by toxicity. And there were few side
e√ects. . . .
Biotechnology has completely changed to way we discover and develop new
drugs and has allowed us to help patients with previously untreatable diseases.
Stories like Betsy’s are one reason so many people have invested their time, money
and careers in biotech.

The purpose of these renderings is neither to pour scorn on, nor to express
cynicism toward, these stories, but rather to point to their constant structure
of miracle, a structure, further, that is founded on the inadequacy of previous
therapies (even though they too were once miracles). It is a structure of linear
progress that is embedded and embodied in specific salvationary stories, he-
roic rescues of individual, extremely sick patients (that all the ‘‘rescued’’ pa-
tients in these stories are women is a further feature worth noting).∏ It is a
structure of the type ‘‘If you relent and submit to penicillin or cortisone or
Rituxan (each at the time of these stories relatively experimental therapies),
then you will be saved.’’ It is not the trope of public health, in which therapy
intervenes to prevent the spread of plagues or epidemics. In other words, the
symbolic capital for the drug development industry does not come from the
story of ridding Africa of aids. Further, these stories describe not just cures
but resurrections; what is at stake in these stories is not just survival, or getting
better, but living life to the full, again.π
If drugs as instruments of salvation echo one structure of biocapital as

Salvation and Nation 187

reflected in these three origin stories, then markets as instruments of moral
purpose have been equally articulated as part of the missionary enterprise since
the nineteenth century. Around the time that Marx was writing about the
theological nature of the commodity, for instance, David Livingstone was
undertaking his expeditions in Africa with the firm belief that commerce and
Christianity went hand in hand. The mid-nineteenth century, indeed, marked
the coproduction of a metropolitan imaginary of Africa as a site for both
evangelization and raw materials to feed the productive demands of the Indus-
trial Revolution, and indeed endures today (as seen, for instance, in the e√orts
of the Christian Coalition’s media magnate Pat Robertson in evangelizing and
mining in western Africa [see Roth 2002]).
Thus the trope of drug development in the United States is not the trope of
public health. Here again is potential for incongruence with respect to India,
which, as a relatively poverty-stricken country that has followed socialist wel-
fare state policies for much of the first forty years since its independence, has
tended, at a formal and popular level, to conceive of drug development (even
if not always explicitly) as a way of meeting public health goals. Once again,
this incongruence is a consequence of distinct national, historical, and institu-
tional contexts. And incongruence here manifests not so much between a U.S.
‘‘salvationary’’ trope and an Indian ‘‘public health’’ trope as it does between the
Indian imitation of an American culture of innovation and the actual divergent
manifestations of these imitative attempts on the ground. Even these attempts
at imitation are in many ways out of joint with patent regimes in India, which,
before the nation became a signatory to the World Trade Organization, were
structured in ways that configured Indians less as sovereign consumers of
drugs and more as a ‘‘public.’’ Even if drug development in India, as in the
United States, has always tended to be a private enterprise, Indian patent laws
have allowed the reverse engineering of generic drugs (by allowing only pro-
cess, not product, patents on drugs), thereby allowing free market competi-
tion and keeping Indian drug prices among the lowest in the world.
The attempt to bring about a culture of innovation in India, both by con-
cerned state and market players within India and by nonresident Indian entre-
preneurs in the United States, contains within it the germ of a contradiction,
when such a culture, always already neoliberal at its core, comes into conflict

188 Articulations
with a value system that privileges therapeutic access as a public good of sorts
(albeit one provided by the market). Indeed, India’s patent regime is very
much at stake as India has become a signatory to the wto, a patent regime that
much more closely resembles American rather than Indian intellectual prop-
erty structures.∫ India’s decision to join the wto is not something that I
explore in great detail in this book, but I mention it here as a stellar example of
the contradictory desire and ambivalence of the Indian nation-state, business
community, and polity toward globalization. On the one hand, a regime that
is likely to be detrimental to the Indian pharmaceutical industry and likely to
raise drug prices is seen by many as an example of American neocolonialism
calling forth an anti-imperialist, nationalist indignation; on the other hand, at
the same time, there is India’s desire to be a global player, also a nationalist
desire, leading to an embrace of a culture of innovation and its associated
transnational regimes like the wto.
In other words, a value-laden ideology such as innovation manages to be
globalizing and apparently homogenizing in its application but in fact calls
into account di√erent registers of salvationary and nationalist discourse and
consciousness depending on the sites of its manifestation. Further, because
this ‘‘homogenizing’’ globalization is in fact occurring between locales that are
situated far apart on a global axis of asymmetry, innovation is not likely to be
realized in uniform or expected ways. Therefore I show in this chapter how,
while attaining a culture of innovation is the rationale o√ered by many Indian
actors who embrace global techno-capitalism, the route to its potential realiza-
tion is contract work for Western companies, work that is not innovative and for
which intellectual property resides with the contracting agent.
The overarching tension between, on the one hand, a consciousness of
colonialism that sensitizes state policy regarding unequal exchange relations,
and on the other hand the post-1990s determination to become a major player
in the global market system, plays itself out at the level of everyday work
practices; state policy statements, initiatives, incentives, and regulations (such
as the Department of Biotechnology guidelines regarding the travel of genetic
material from India discussed in chapter 1); and the struggle between self-
reliance and the use of science and technology to solve local problems (the
Gandhian, Nehruvian, and Indian Marxist development ideologies) versus its

Salvation and Nation 189

use to leverage the global playing field. To juxtapose the salvationary articula-
tions of biocapital in the United States to its overtly nationalist ones in India is
an invitation to take seriously the ways in which di√erent historical terrains—
in the Indian case, marked particularly by colonialism and a subsequent four
decades of state socialism—lead to di√erential manifestations of apparently
homogenizing ‘‘global’’ regimes and practices. In India, such contradictions
are symptomatic of its postcolonial condition of, in Lawrence Cohen’s phrase,
‘‘as if modernity’’ (Cohen 2003).
Crucial actors that link American and Indian techno-capitalist worlds, that
indeed attempt to configure Indian high-tech worlds ‘‘as if American,’’ are
nonresident Indian (nri) entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley. The category
nri was o≈cially coined by the Indian government in 1973 through the For-
eign Exchange Regulations Act, thereby recognizing Indians abroad, through
formal systems of state classification, as a distinct group with a clear incentive
structure set up for them to reinvest capital back in India. Indeed, I argue that
citizenship for nris is defined almost solely in terms of their ability to repatri-
ate capital. This is partly because the Indian government, until 2002, did not
allow dual citizenship. The 1973 act, however, also recognizes a category called
‘‘person of Indian origin,’’ which is anyone who has at any time held an Indian
passport or is the female spouse of such a person (male spouses of women of
Indian origin are not considered to be of Indian origin), and provides similar
investment incentives for these people as it does for nris who are Indian
passport holders (Ramachandran 1992; see also Rajagopal 2001, 241–42).
Further, the formal citizenship for even nris who possess Indian passports is
somewhat nominal, as they are, rather perversely, unable to vote in Indian
elections unless they are physically present in India at the time of elections or
are government o≈cials stationed in a foreign embassy. Therefore citizenship
for nris is defined solely in terms of their ability to repatriate capital, and the
Indian state has a quite conscious agency in shaping such a definition. Con-
versely, the repatriation of capital, for nris, becomes the defining act of citizen-
ship (whether they are formally still nris or have abdicated Indian citizenship
to become merely ‘‘persons of Indian origin’’). Capital, quite literally, becomes
the social bond that links Indians abroad to their homeland, but it works as
such a bond only because there are other, less structural, ties already in place.

190 Articulations
 There are four sites, broadly conceived, that I situate together in this chap-
ter. The first is a patient advocacy group for a rare genetic pigmentation
disorder, pseudoxanthoma elasticum (pxe). The advocacy group is called pxe
International and is based in the United States but networked throughout the
United States and Europe. What makes this group particularly interesting is
the way in which it is always already predisposed to framing itself as if corpo-
rate, and how this corporate framing is a consequence of a firm belief in the
free market on the part of one of its founders, Patrick Terry, a belief that goes
hand in hand with the fact that he is an evangelical Christian. This has led not
just to pxe International’s being an organization that adopts market strategies
and tactics in its negotiations with corporate actors, but also to Terry’s co-
founding of a genome company, Genomic Health, with Randy Scott, who
founded Incyte Genomics and has already figured in this book.
In form, this account is uncannily similar to accounts of India’s flagship
public-sector genome lab, the Centre for Biochemical Technology (cbt), nar-
rated in chapters 1 and 2. There too is a not-for-profit entity framing itself as a
market player to leverage global market terrains, and in the process also spin-
ning o√ an associated start-up, Genomed. The di√erence is that while in cbt’s
case, its relationship to its strategies is marked by an ambivalent nationalist
desire to resist American global hegemony while embracing it, in pxe Inter-
national’s and Terry’s case, it is marked by an unbridled faith in the free market
and in Christianity, both of which are value systems shared by Scott. In both
cases, the associated start-up reflects the configuration of subjectivities in each
context—in Genomed’s case, Indian subjects as experimental subjects who get
recruited into clinical trials; in Genomic Health’s case, U.S. subjects as sov-
ereign consumers. This is indicated by Genomic Health’s business model,
which claims that it is a ‘‘consumer genomics’’ company.
My second set of sites consists of sites of speech and ritual. Conferences are
key sites at which unfolding dynamics and emergent networks of techno-
capitalism can be traced. Ritual elements of industrial genome conferences are
parties, which also mark a certain Silicon Valley start-up corporate culture.
These parties are explicitly libidinal sites of extravagant expenditure and excess
consumption and often signify the gambling and deep play of casino capital-
ism. I narrate stories about these parties to point to the ritualistic, cultic

Salvation and Nation 191

expressions of capitalism, which lead to the performative creation of brand
value and vest power in the bodies of particular corporations. This is not just
important in interesting investors and consumers but essential in fostering
loyalty among the employees of these companies, not just to the ‘‘business of
saving lives’’ they are engaged in, but to the causes of the specific corporations
by which they are employed.
While talking about the India/nation side of the equation, I return to talk
about the Centre for Biochemical Technology (cbt) in terms of a larger
institutional context. This is the context of India’s Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research (csir), an umbrella organization of forty national re-
search laboratories and institutions that is at the forefront of engineering
India’s scientific priorities toward more global, market-driven agendas. I look
at the global context within which these labs do their research, one that is very
much stratified and unequal in favor of the West, a situation that engenders
much nationalist indignation among Indian scientists working in these labs.
At the same time, the orientation of research agendas in these labs is very much
toward the global, with a clear articulation of the desire to be like the global
Other signified by the United States.
A driver of these changes is the current director general of csir, Ramesh
Mashelkar. The institution that he came from, the National Chemical Labora-
tories (ncl) in Pune, was an early mover in the Indian technoscientific estab-
lishment’s desire to go global. I narrate stories of ncl here, paying attention to
the multiple contradictions inherent to its desire to become a global player in a
situation of radical global asymmetry. I contrast that with a story from another
csir lab, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ccmb) in Hydera-
bad, which suggests a very di√erent articulation of nationalism and national
interest, one that is oriented much more directly toward a state socialist idea of
meeting the needs of the Indian population through a technoscientific agenda
that focuses on local and national needs while embracing global technologies.
Crucially, these alternatives are not between science and antiscience, or an
embrace of nationalism versus its repudiation. Rather, both points of view
place a modernist faith in the progressive potential of science, one that has
been consistently hegemonic since India’s independence, and both are ex-
plicitly concerned with national interest. Susan Buck-Morss (2002) argues

192 Articulations
that the apparent oppositions of capitalism and communism as they emerged
throughout the twentieth century in fact represented di√erent articulations of
the same modernist impulse in ways that made them uncanny (if incongru-
ent) mirror images of each other. One can make a similar argument with
respect to the global free market versus state socialist impulses in Indian sci-
ence, whose negotiation remains an explicit tension in csir labs today.
My fourth site is Silicon Valley, and specifically Silicon Valley nonresident
Indian entrepreneurs, almost all of whom were educated in state-subsidized
Indian universities and research institutions and are key actors in repatriating a
culture of innovation back to India. I describe these entrepreneurs, and the
entrepreneurial organization they have set up (most notably the indus Entre-
preneurs, or tie), in juxtaposition to other nri groups that are involved in the
repatriation of capital from the United States to India, the most active of
which are Hindu nationalist organizations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(World Hindu Forum, or vhp). A major figure I discuss in the context of tie
is Kanwal Rekhi, one of tie’s founders and arguably the best-known Indian
entrepreneur in the United States. While I have corresponded with Rekhi in a
number of contexts,Ω he functions less as a traditional ethnographic informant
and more as a public figure in these narratives, much in the manner Randy
Scott does.∞≠

PXE International and Genomic Health

I begin this section by referring back to Randy Scott’s speech that I described
in chapter 3 in the context of the stories of miraculous therapeutic intervention
I have recounted in this chapter. Like these stories, Scott’s pitch for Incyte,
couched as a pitch for genomics (where genomics meshes into Genomics for
Life), is an origin story, revolutionary and paternalistic; all attributes that go
hand in hand with a performative of futurity.
The paternalism that inhabits these miraculous tales is not simply a part
of their rhetorical structure. Sometimes that rhetorical structure can be em-
bodied in specific corporate ventures that are explicitly, sometimes painfully,
salvationary. The story of Patrick and Sharon Terry, pxe International and
Genomic Health, in which one of the costars is Randy Scott, is indicative of
this. The story of pxe International is a story of many things: of biosocial

Salvation and Nation 193

communities, of intellectual property, and of the e√ect of the Internet. Here I
tell it as a story of the salvationary promise of biocapital.
Patrick Terry used to be in the construction business, and got involved in
biomedicine when he and his wife discovered that their two children had
pseudoxanthoma elasticum (pxe), a rare genetic pigmentation disorder that
usually leads to blindness by the mid-twenties. Terry therefore got into science
not through the normal routes of formal training but as a layman who was
forced to take an interest in it. He calls his a ‘‘perspective informed by experi-
ence.’’∞∞ He and his wife found out as much as they could about pxe, net-
worked with other parents of pxe-a∆icted children in both the United States
and Europe, and started a patient advocacy group, pxe International.
In addition, Pat Terry is one of the cofounders, along with Randy Scott, of a
biotech company called Genomic Health, whose vision, according to Scott, is

to build a new arm to the healthcare system. New genomic technologies will
enable the world to characterize every patient’s disease and health status as a
complete genomic package. Every disease has a molecular basis and some level of
genetic-encoded response. Individuals respond to therapy based on the molecular
alterations of their disease and their own genetic code. Genomic Health’s mission
is to one day provide physicians and patients with an individualized molecular
analysis that enables the treatment team to utilize relevant treatment guides for all
diseases. Our ultimate goal is to make personalized medicine a reality and to
dramatically improve patient care.∞≤

One of the things the Terrys have done is negotiate agreements with com-
panies like Genomic Health, to which pxe International members donate dna
samples for research, whereby the patient advocacy group shares in the intel-
lectual property that the company generates.
Patrick Terry starts his talks by laying out all the things that he is—parent,
pxe International administrator and Genomic Health cofounder, researcher
(it is interesting to note that he does not emphasize his Christianity in the
formal structure of his talks but often does so immediately in personal conver-
sation, or even in discussions after the formal component of his talks).∞≥ It is a
style that completely mirrors Scott’s, who often starts his own presentations
with a similar outline of his multifaceted set of involvements, responsibilities,

194 Articulations
and motivations. As a part of his work, Terry is both a typical and a unique
example of a venture scientist. He is involved heavily in policy activities,
through an alliance of genetic disease patient advocacy groups called the Ge-
netic Alliance. Through pxe International, he is involved in a worldwide e√ort
to initiate, conduct, and fund pxe research. Much of that is through the estab-
lishment of research collaborations, such as those just mentioned, which in-
volves the need to negotiate intricate contracts, alliances, and understandings.
All of this, however, stems from Terry the parent. pxe International is a pa-
ternalistic venture, not in any abstract discursive sense but in terms of the actual
structure of its genesis. In addition, Terry claims that his alliance with Scott had
everything to do with their shared beliefs, in terms of their libertarian bend
toward the free market and their conversant religious beliefs (Scott, as men-
tioned earlier, is an evangelical Christian, like Terry). Scott is, according to
Terry, ‘‘a regular guy, a super guy, a nice guy, a family guy.’’∞∂ It forms the basis
of a trust that Terry does not necessarily feel toward other businesspeople, and
there are those who he feels have betrayed pxe’s cause after indicating interest.
Terry and Scott merge their belief in Christianity with their belief in the
market. Terry strongly believes in the market not just as the route to thera-
peutic production but as the route to therapeutic knowledge and dispensation.
What Genomic Health is about, as much as or more than a wet-lab research-
based company, is empowering consumers by providing them with ‘‘action-
able therapeutic information.’’∞∑ The goal is nothing less than to foster what
Terry calls a ‘‘consumer genomic revolution.’’ Terry thinks in terms of ‘‘con-
sumers’’ and ‘‘targeted therapeutic interventions’’ rather than ‘‘patients’’ and
‘‘cures’’: he does not like the normative overtones of the latter terms. What
he also does not like is the role of the physician as expert gatekeeper, which
he feels hinders the patient-consumers’ ideally individualized quest for self-
knowledge. He thinks, therefore, of medicine in salvationary terms, but he
also thinks that the market has to intervene for medicine to change in ways that
can enable it to attain its promise of salvation. While articulating his belief in
the market, Terry also performs this belief.
Further, pxe International does not just operate as an institutional structure
that acts as a formal negotiating party: it acts quite literally as a networked
biosocial community, with all the peer pressures attendant on small, intimate

Salvation and Nation 195

communities. Terry, for instance, says that the community uses peer pressure
to ‘‘push good habits’’ such as getting members to stop smoking. Terry’s
biography is an exploration of the relationship between the market and subjec-
tivity, as the grieving father becomes an entrepreneur, who is also a political
figure and a religious figure, forcing us, therefore, also to ask what concepts
of family are embedded in these entrepreneurial-religious-political-capitalist
lifeworlds.
The case of Genomic Health, the company that Terry and Scott have co-
founded, is suggestive of some of the arguments that I am trying to make, in
terms of salvation, promise, performance, and the market. To analyze Geno-
mic Health, it is important to revisit Scott’s modes of prophecy. When Scott
was pitching Incyte, for example, at the Institute of Genomic Research (tigr)
industrial conference in Miami in 1999, it was an investor pitch where his po-
tential consumers were pharmaceutical companies. With Genomic Health, his
potential consumers are laypeople, the patients and consumers-in-waiting that
I have talked about in this and the previous chapter. This leads to an entirely
di√erent understanding, di√erent timelines, analogies with the computer in-
dustry, and a coincidence with Terry’s line about patients and consumers.∞∏
In his pitches for Genomic Health, Scott divides the history of genomics
into decades—the 1980s, when the first companies brought products into the
market based on classical dna e√orts; the 1990s, an era of industrialization and
high-throughput technologies; and the first decade of the new century, which
he calls the era of consumer genomics, where merging biological information
with Internet capabilities will be key. In other words, the driving assemblages
of emergent ‘‘postgenomic’’ medicine, in Scott’s opinion, are biological in-
formation (such as diagnostics), communications technologies that mediate
such information as it travels to lay patients (the Internet), and the conse-
quent networking of biosocial communities such as patient advocacy groups.
It is a vision that has as its kernel the sort of consumption power that is
evidenced by groups such as pxe International.
Scott thus has a vision of ‘‘consumer genomics’’ that is completely entwined
with his vision of Genomic Health as a company, a vision that sees patients
directly buying access to information and technologies, thereby seriously min-
imizing the role of physicians. Pharmaceutical companies, in this vision, are

196 Articulations
still involved in therapeutic development, but Scott realizes that the lag be-
tween the development of diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities creates an
ethnographic window, one that is absolutely critical to the existence of Geno-
mic Health as a company.
Scott outlines his notion of consumer genomics as follows:

Genomics is inherently personal. This is not about big industrial units that are
bringing out products for other companies.∞π Every one of us sits here with a
genome, and a genome is our own particular story. My family has its story . . . they
were a perfectly normal family, they thought they had no genetic disease, no
genetic defects. . . . [But] no matter how healthy we may think we are, ultimately
we will all face the reality of our genetic faults, and the diseases that are coming at
us in the future. So we are all in this together.∞∫

In this one quote, Scott points at many of the arguments I have worked
through in the course of this and the previous chapter. He encapsulates his own
visionary biography, superimposed on the history, as he sees it, of genomics—
moving away from and beyond the vision of Incyte (which he leaves at a mo-
ment when its own business model threatens it with obsolescence), a move-
ment that is portrayed as naturally following the course of the history of a
science that is always already a corporate endeavor. But it is also a personal voy-
age, an individuation whose limitations are immediately evident, because it is
an individuation that cannot be made sense of without being placed in larger
population contexts. Scott adroitly avoids the fundamental di≈culties of classi-
fying populations that I have pointed to in the previous chapter—di≈culties
that are an acute scientific and business reality for those who invest in popula-
tion genomics as their vision of, and route to, future monetary and therapeutic
salvation. He automatically uses the family as the basis of his relevant popula-
tion unit—a unit, of course, that is comfortably Christian, moral, and value
laden, for one who himself is driven considerably by his Christian faith. Ulti-
mately everyone is enrolled in a Christian odyssey toward his or her respective
genetic days of reckoning, but in the process, as Scott managed to do for his
employees at Incyte (as I show later in the chapter), he conjures up the image
of a community, the community of patients-in-waiting, who are always already
consumers-in-waiting. Lest we forget this voyage is overdetermined by the

Salvation and Nation 197

market, Scott immediately proceeds: ‘‘So the issue is how we bring these
products to the market, how we bring them to the consumer.’’∞Ω
Stories such as those of Terry and Scott highlight the rhetoric and language
of salvation as it manifests as underlying belief structure, as market enterprise
and business model, and as therapy/medicine/health. They show the co-
constitution of highly individualized stories of personal motivation, calling,
and human interest with the structural messianism inherent to the market,
science, or nation. Saving lives melds into saving a company’s corporate inter-
ests or, in the case of India, making a ‘‘Third World’’ country a ‘‘global player.’’
Meanwhile the sacralization associated with the business of life and death
melds into the sacralization mediated through the fetish of the commodity
that simultaneously, as Marx shows, alienates it from human association while
making it the mediator of social bonds.
While the social power of the enterprise of the life sciences emanates from
the implosion of these two sources of the sacred, it still does not explain the
social power of individual corporate entities, that lead, among employees of
life science corporations, not just to loyalty to the cause of eradicating disease
through the market development of therapeutic products, but to loyalty to
specific companies. It is this latter question, of how life sciences and life science
corporations both acquire performative salvationary force, that I explore next.

Parties
Jean-Joseph Goux, in an analysis of the value system of neoliberal capitalism,
says that ‘‘whereas the profane is the domain of utilitarian consumption, the
sacred is the domain of experience opened by the unproductive consumption
of the surplus’’ (Goux 1990, 207–8).
The salvationary potential of biocapital resides in the very nature of the
enterprise of drug development, being as it is in the business of making sick
people better. And yet this alone is insu≈cient to make drug development a
salvationary enterprise of the sort that it is in the United States. For that, the
therapeutic potential of drug development has to be articulated with other
belief systems, especially the neoliberal faith in free market innovation. In
other words, the salvationary potential of biocapital has to do not just with the
value accruing from ‘‘bio’’ but also from the value accruing from ‘‘capital.’’ This

198 Articulations
relationship of capital to the theological was recognized by Marx to exist even
in the days of the Industrial Revolution, but it acquires di√erent performative
force when the magic, as in the case of high-tech innovation, involves pulling
rabbits out of hats rather than just generating infinite surplus.
While capitalism, as Marx famously suggests in his analysis of commodity
fetishism (Marx 1976 [1867]), has always been theological,≤≠ the explicit
treatment of the relationship between capitalism and Protestant Christianity,
of course, has been provided by Weber (2001 [1930]). If the ‘‘spirit’’ of
capitalism could persuasively be said to have been animated by a Protestant
ethic, then the spirit of biocapitalism, certainly in the United States, could be
said to be animated by a ‘‘born-again’’ ethic. I take inspiration here from
Weber’s demonstration in The Protestant Ethic that the connection between the
Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism occurred historically, and at a place
in the social structure that tends to hive o√ other forms.
Weber does, however, set up a particular, contextually situated dichotomy
between asceticism and mysticism in Economy and Society (Weber 1978 [1968],
541–56). It is the collapse of this dichotomy that is so important to trace—if
mysticism is, in Weber’s terms, ‘‘world-fleeing’’ (might we say thus in the case
of science in the guise of Merton’s norms—abstract, knowledge, truth?), and
asceticism is ‘‘world-serving’’ (the symbolic capital of drug development, as
being in the business of saving lives), then the mystical and ascetic aspects of
Merton’s science and Weber’s capitalism respectively collapse most evidently
in venture science.≤∞
I argue here for the impossibility of purifying accumulation and surplus
value generation in (bio)capitalist worlds, especially in the United States,
without serious attentiveness to the apparently irrational expenditure of the
neoliberal free market, similar to the potlatch of ‘‘archaic’’ societies described
by Marcel Mauss (1990 [1954]), but di√erent from it in the millenarian and
ultimately goal-directed (in ways overdetermined by market ideologies) form
of this excess.
Essentially, it is this recalibration of Weber in the light of contemporary
capitalism, while remaining faithful to the methodological form of his analy-
sis, that I attempt in this section. Goux, whom I quoted earlier, is an inspira-
tion to me here, as on the one hand he reads the neoliberal ideologue George

Salvation and Nation 199

Gilder’s enthusiasm for free market innovation, and on the other draws on
analyses of capitalism by Georges Bataille (1988 [1967]), who argues for a
‘‘general theory’’ of economics that postulates that capitalism’s ‘‘fundamental
impulse’’ is expenditure.
On the one hand, Bataille’s totalizing reduction of capitalism to a funda-
mental, singular logic is precisely the maneuver I resist throughout this book,
and my juxtaposition of the United States to India is one means to resolutely
resist the idea that capitalism has a singular logic (though it undeniably has
hegemonic and subordinate logics at di√erent stages of its history). On the
other hand, I do find it very useful to pay attention to the importance of
‘‘irrationality,’’ exuberance, expenditure, and excess, not as aberrations but as
constitutive to the forms of capitalism that I trace, certainly in the United
States. More importantly, these are the forms of excess that make capitalism,
and specific corporate entities, the cults that demand to be bought into. The
cultic power of specific corporate entities is a form of social power that un-
deniably works through a performative of futurity—hype and public rela-
tions—but that again cannot just be understood by attributions of cynicism.
There is the necessity of mystification that occurs through ritualized modes of
performance.
For actors like Randy Scott and Patrick Terry, biotech has an element of
calling that Weber points out was introduced by the Reformation (Weber
2001 [1930]). But this is a calling coupled not to asceticism but to expenditure,
to worldly pleasure. Even if such excess is not practiced by born-again figures
like Scott and Terry themselves, it is a part of a certain ritual structure of
corporate biotech. And yet it is a ritual structure of excess that is hardly
irreligious, if one is to understand religion in the sense that Cli√ord Geertz
(1973) articulates it, as a source of power that derives its authority from the
enactment of ritual.
I recount two examples of this now. These are especially marked in the
American situation and reflect an allegiance similar to that of allegiance to
sports teams. It is, however, an allegiance that involves not just a certain degree
of time and emotional or monetary expenditure but a devotion of labor to the
corporate cause. Further, there are certain companies that are able to build
what might be called ‘‘cultlike’’ images around themselves, a consequence both

200 Articulations
of their visionary status and of the way in which that visionary status is articu-
lated in hegemonic ways to foster loyalty.
My first story is from an industrial genome conference organized by the
Institute of Genomic Research (tigr) in Miami in 1999. If any one company
stole the show at this conference, it was Incyte. They had sent out letters and
pamphlets to attendees beforehand; Incyte tv was a closed-circuit tv channel
that the company had arranged in all the attendees’ hotel rooms, giving Incyte
added visibility.
A central event at which this conference crystallized as an ‘‘Incyte’’ con-
ference was at the concluding party. I was with Puneet,≤≤ an Indian graduating
with a master’s degree in computer science, who had spent much of the con-
ference looking for jobs in a bioinformatics, genomics, or pharmaceutical
company. At the party, he was in his final frenzy of collecting and collating
job o√ers. Earlier in the day, he had been o√ered a job by Pangea Systems, a
Bay Area bioinformatics company,≤≥ and that evening Pangea’s main rival,
Neomorphic, had come up with an o√er, too. Puneet had actually done an
internship with Neomorphic earlier in the year and had many friends and
attachments there, which made him ambivalent about going to work for Neo-
morphic’s direct competitors. Nonetheless he was now saying that he would
rather join Pangea because they were a bigger company.
But further conversation had to be restricted as an extremely loud brass
band started playing and the festivities really began. We met James Kirk, an
employee at Incyte, and Puneet endeared both of us to him by telling him with
unabashed enthusiasm how Incyte had completely stolen the show at the
conference. This was clearly a feeling that the Incyte people shared, and it was
evident from the multitude of cheerful light blue T-shirts sponsored by Incyte
that they were feeling extremely cocky about the way things had gone. Indeed,
the relative performances (in both senses of the word) of Incyte and its major
rival, Celera, at the conference were evident just from the size of the con-
tingents of each company present at the party. At this point, there were hardly
any Celera dark blues to be seen against the Incyte light blues.
The rest of the evening was dance, music, spectacle—and what a lot of
it! This really was a big party, and there was clearly a sense of celebration,
abandon, confidence, aggression about this group of people. These were pow-

Salvation and Nation 201

erful and happy people, and they knew it. In the middle of an extremely
crowded dance floor, Puneet met the one Incyte person he had been looking
for throughout the conference: a friend of his brother’s, Sid (‘‘Squid’’) Col-
lins. And for all his e√orts, all his anxieties, all his attempts to woo the Incyte
people with his accomplishments and his background, all he really needed to
do was meet Squid—the minute Squid realized that Puneet was his friend’s
brother, he o√ered him a job at Incyte.
Was Puneet happy. This was what he had been waiting for. Neomorphic and
Pangea and Curagen were all very well, Roche and Millennium were enticing
and worth thinking over, but this moment was all about Incyte, and Squid’s
o√er had made Puneet a part of that moment. And indeed, the party seemed
increasingly to be about Incyte—they were the ones present and taking over.
Puneet’s story brings me to the issue of brands: how is it that a company’s
name can be so attractive that it makes people forget individual relationships
and principles just to be a part of that name? How is it that people can be so
completely a part of a name that they can mold their actions and characters
into the actions and characters signified by that name (and here the question
of these multiple corporate ‘‘cultures,’’ at once individual and yet totalizing,
comes up)? And yet shift allegiances so easily that when they get a better o√er
from a better name, they shift themselves not just physically but in so many
other intangible ways as well? How is it that Puneet could change sides so
many times, in two days, between companies that were mutual rivals, just at
the prospect of belonging to one side or the other? So somehow, in some
intangible way, value had been added to the Incyte brand. In pure Marxian
terms, this is surplus value of a sort, but it is not easy to completely capture in
simple Marxian categories of value, either. What is this value that is born of the
fetish of intangibles, of excess, of visions, of futures, that is located neither in
persons nor in things but in trademarks and company names?≤∂
The final set of announcements was a public acknowledgment of the shadow-
boxing between Celera and Incyte throughout the conference, as a woman
representing the absent Craig Venter (then ceo of Celera) took digs at Scott,
which Scott, now in complete control, rebutted with ease. Now the finale was
clearly Randy Scott’s moment of triumph, and the moment when he could
show it o√. As he walked onto the stage, the air was filled with chants of

202 Articulations
‘‘Randy! Randy!’’ On the other side, the few brave darker blue shirts were
mustering a few halfhearted taunts and jibes. Puneet was by now very much a
part of the light blues, swept away by the Incyte frenzy, a chanting and com-
pletely assimilated fragment of the corporate collectivity that Incyte at this
moment, in this place, was.
Scott gave a toast. To the genomics community. Because, as he said, ‘‘There
is not a single person in this room who’s in genomics for themselves. They’re
in genomics for Life.’’
As I walked away, I passed Scott as he was being led out onto the dance floor
by a young blonde woman. My last glimpse was of Scott’s ginger dance steps,
hands clasped behind his back, a light blue handkerchief sticking out of his
back pocket. A happy, powerful, and triumphant man.
My second story, about Genentech, was told to me by a former employee,
whom I will keep anonymous. I do not transcribe the story verbatim but
rather will recount the gist of it.
Genentech had just won a patent infringement case, and to celebrate, they
called all of their two thousand employees into a makeshift tent constructed on
the premises in order to make the announcement. As soon as the announce-
ment was made, according to my informant, the entire tent broke into a
standing ovation (which my informant could not understand, since, as she
said, most of them had ‘‘pretty crummy jobs’’), after which the company
threw a party, with lots of food, music, drink, and rose petals being strewn
from the makeshift stage. After an adequate amount of revelry, the employees
were all called out of the tent to witness a fireworks display put on by the
company. Since Genentech is in South San Francisco, just north of San Fran-
cisco International Airport, it became an urban myth in the company that
Genentech was able to stop flights into and out of the airport for fifteen
minutes while it put on its own fireworks display. My informant herself would
not have been surprised if that had been the case; what she was more im-
pressed by was the ostentatious display of extravagance on the part of the
company, and invincibility felt by its employees, who completely bought into
the company’s extravagance as a matter of course. In the process, a corporate
aura and a sense of belonging to a larger cause—which was not simply the
cause of eradicating disease but also the activist cause, in itself, of commit-

Salvation and Nation 203

ting oneself to Genentech—were inscribed. The calling, in biocapital, thereby
comes both from the symbolic capital accruing from being in the business of
‘‘life itself,’’ and from capitalism—being part of a specific, embodied, corpo-
rate ethos that itself gets constructed through ritual excess. This leads to a
therapeutic salvationary discourse that finds itself completely entwined with
faith both in the market writ large and in specific corporate entities.
Indeed, as suggested by the story of Incyte’s party, a performance marked by
excess is a ritual mode of inscription of a corporate presence in the lives of its
workforce, where a larger question of branding is at stake. Indeed, the back-
drop to the Incyte party at tigr 1999 was a party thrown by Celera at the same
venue in 1998, which was on Miami beach and signified the 1998 conference as
a Celera conference (this occurred in the aftermath of Craig Venter’s an-
nouncement that he would sequence the human genome before the public
researchers). Indeed, it was Celera’s first act of public display since its forma-
tion earlier in 1998, and it was the tigr party, as much as Venter’s announce-
ment regarding the genome sequence in May 1998, that in some material,
embodied sense catapulted Celera into a certain sort of public vision as the
company that was racing to sequence the human genome.
That the 1999 party had managed to turn that year’s proceedings into an
Incyte conference was clearly not lost on tigr, which, after all, was an organi-
zation that had close links to Celera at the time.≤∑ Sure enough, at the tigr
conference in 2000, Incyte was conspicuous by its absence from the organiza-
tional scene of such revelry. This was because, as I learned from an annoyed
Incyte employee, tigr had not allowed them to stage any of the major con-
ference parties and had not allowed them to advertise as easily as they had
done the previous year. For much of the 2000 conference, Incyte was reduced
to advertising its presence through giant blimps flying overhead.
Celera, meanwhile, needed not just to register its presence but to do so
in a manner more audacious and spectacular than Incyte had the previous
year; and preventing Incyte’s spectacular publicity from having an easy outlet,
through the organizational agency of tigr, was clearly only half the battle
won. Therefore Celera, who organized the 2000 tigr party, did so at the Villa
Vizcaya, an Italian Renaissance-style villa and gardens filled with art and an-
tiques, which had been built as a winter estate of the industrialist James Deer-

204 Articulations
ing in 1916. Included as part of the evening’s festivities were a live band and
plenty of food and alcohol.
If, on the one hand, reducing the ‘‘religious’’ aspects of capitalism to a
dour austerity fails to take into account the actual and excessive forms through
which capitalism operates, then on the other, it is too simple to reduce this ex-
cess to an ‘‘irrationality,’’ which is all too easily done, especially today (2004),
especially in places like Silicon Valley, where such exuberance is disdainfully
marked o√ as an ‘‘aberration’’ of the [Link] boom, as somehow only spec-
tacle, from which we have returned to the ‘‘reality’’ of rational accumulation.
And yet such forms of excess are always undergirded by forms of rational
calculation, just as rational accumulation in capitalism is always undergirded
by excess—excess and rational accumulation are dialectically intertwined com-
ponents of capitalism. Therefore the head of sales of a bioinformatics com-
pany, with me at the 2000 tigr party, was completely unimpressed with its
extravagance, to the extent that he saw it as a perfectly sound and fiscally
conservative sales and marketing decision. After all, he told me, it is much
cheaper to advertise one’s presence in dramatic fashion to many potential
investors and customers in one place, especially if it is a place they have happy
memories of and at which they are not explicitly being sold something, than it
is to make individual sales calls across the world to each one of them.
How such modes of explicit consumption can be situated in the context of
the reemergence of scandal as central to the dynamics of contemporary corpo-
rate America (Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and the like) is an important ques-
tion to ask. Excess consumption is a central aspect of sites of speech such as
industrial biotech conferences, and in addition to the major conference par-
ties such as those sponsored by Incyte and Celera were other smaller parties
that occurred every evening in what was, primarily, an industrial trade show.
Perkin-Elmer, for instance, had organized a casino for conference participants
at the 1999 tigr conference, and these parties are not just sites of corporate
excess, consumption, but also quite explicitly libidinal sites. I am reminded,
for instance, of one inebriated Perkin-Elmer employee I met at the casino
party, who, in the midst of a series of advances to the various women at the
party, found the time to confide to me that his company’s real aim was to take
over the world. Instead of dismissing such statements as alcohol-induced gib-

Salvation and Nation 205

berish, I would like to point, again, to the sense of invincibility that such
modes of ritual performativity foster among their participants, an invincibility
that translates into making sacred the source of such power, the corporation.
Of course, corporate scandals are always framed in terms of delinquent
morality, and therefore as aberration. Such a framing thereby allows the every-
day business of excess to continue, unscathed and unstopped. The dialectic
relationship of the sacred is not to its binary opposite, the profane, but to its
dialectic counterpart, the scandalous. Sacred power can only arise from the
constantly deferred but always present risk of scandalous misappropriation—
the very excess that lends sacred power to the corporation or enterprise at sites
and moments of surplus consumption carries within it the risk of the recogni-
tion of that excess as somehow aberrant, abhorrent, immoral, scandalous. By
deferring such recognition, of course, the corporation or enterprise in ques-
tion gains not only an aura of power and invincibility but also an ethical
legitimacy, as not therefore immoral or scandalous—simply powerful, the cult
that demands to be bought into. Performativity provides material force, which
gets consecrated in the body of the corporation, but especially in its name,
brand. Hence the relevance of Derrida’s questions regarding what is in the
name, what it is we do when we act in the name of something (religion, for
instance, but here also of science, of nation, of capitalism, of specific corpora-
tions) (see Derrida 1995, 2002a). And further, says Derrida, the very pos-
sibility of such faith that we can act in the name of (religion or, I add, science,
nation, capitalism, corporation) has (today at least, and in the ways that faith
gets mediated through performativity and ritual), as its condition of pos-
sibility, the technical. As he puts it:

The technical is the possibility of faith, indeed its very chance. A chance that entails
the greatest risk, even the menace of radical evil. Otherwise, that of which it is the
chance would not be faith but rather program or proof, predictability or provi-
dence, pure knowledge and pure know-how, which is to say annulment of the
future. Instead of opposing them, as is almost always done, they ought to be
thought together, as one and the same possibility.≤∏

I have already referred to the pervasive salvationary discourse that underlies

the enterprise of drug development in the United States. There are two ways

206 Articulations
in which ‘‘the technical’’ can be read into such discourse. The first is one that
Derrida himself is intimately concerned with, which is the way in which faith
is mediated, that is, disseminated through technologies of the media. The
corollary to biocapital here would be the symbolic capital of the drug develop-
ment industry as being in the business of ‘‘food, health, and hope,’’ and as
articulated through the salvationary potential of particular therapeutic mole-
cules (which are configured as objects that can simultaneously generate well-
ness among their consumers and instantiate them as consumers with free
choice), which depends in large measure on the discursive and media appara-
tus that allows a fashioning of such a message.
There is a broader way in which ‘‘the technical’’ becomes the possibility of
faith, as suggested by my description of the dna chip in the previous chapter. I
showed there that some technologies themselves work as ‘‘technologies of
representation,’’ by virtue of their being what Donna Haraway (1997) calls
‘‘material-semiotic’’ objects. Here the technical object both mediates and is
itself the object of faith. It mediates faith by virtue of being the thing that rep-
resents, provides a portrait of, one’s predisposition to future possible illness.
But it also represents, stands in for, the ‘‘individual,’’ who is represented by his
or her genes, which in turn is represented by the dna chip.≤π By functioning
simultaneously as portrait and as proxy, the dna chip becomes an object of
faith, a fetish. Indeed, the fetish exists in the becoming-proxy (as in represen-
tative of individual ‘‘identity’’) of that which is just a portrait of an individual’s
nucleotide profile.
Derrida points to the ‘‘chance’’ of technically mediated faith, thereby also
calling into account all the forms of risk that I argued for in the previous chap-
ter. Specifically, the two forms of risk that I outlined were that of a patient-
consumer’s future probable illness as foretold by genomics, and of a com-
pany’s high-risk capital investment in a drug that might never be realized,
or that might not garner su≈cient market revenue to make the investment
worthwhile. But there is a third form of risk that entails a cultic faith in the
salvationary potential of technoscience, or a market system, or, especially,
specific corporate entities that claim to uphold value systems in all senses of the
word, and that is the risk of ‘‘scandalous misappropriation.’’
One of the defining features of this current conjuncture of American capital-

Salvation and Nation 207

ism has been the spate of corporate scandals that have rocked Wall Street over
the last couple of years. While the drug development marketplace has so far
been comparatively, though not entirely, unscathed by these scandals, I take
them seriously as a tendential manifestation of particular currents in capitalist
value systems, and as not irrelevant to understanding the underlying belief
systems that animate biocapital.
Technoscience, especially when it concerns the ability to manipulate and
intervene in ‘‘life itself,’’ is risky even without situating it in the context of its
free market emergence. The trope of science run wild is an old romantic trope
that has constantly reinvented itself since the Industrial Revolution, and the
specter of Frankenstein (Shelley 1992 [1831]) remains as strong today as it did
at the time of its writing. The therapeutic promise of genomics is always
already haunted by its eugenic promise. Even if scientists take pains to dis-
tinguish the ‘‘good’’ eugenics of new genome technologies from the ‘‘bad’’
eugenics of the Nazi era,≤∫ the trope of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
(Huxley 1998 [1946]) remains as potent as that of Shelley’s Frankenstein. In
other words, if the magic of innovation lies in its potential to pull rabbits out
of hats, then that magic holds within it the fear that the rabbits might, in fact,
turn out to be demons. While I refuse to subscribe to, or repudiate entirely, the
fears attendant to new biotechnologies (just as I refuse to do either regarding
the hype attendant to them), I do wish to take them seriously as dialectic
components of the political economies I am trying to trace.
In addition to the potential ‘‘evils’’ inherent to the technologies themselves,
though, are the ‘‘evils’’ of their misappropriation. ‘‘Misappropriation’’ here
refers not just to their ‘‘misuse’’ in reference to an accepted norm, as Nazi
science, for instance, could be argued to be,≤Ω but also to its misappropriation,
where ‘‘appropriation’’ is specifically a term concerning ownership, exchange,
and representation. In other words, not only do new technologies, and per-
haps particularly new biotechnologies, contain the possibility of horrific emer-
gences consequent to the possibilities of creation and manipulation inherent
to the technologies themselves, but they also contain all the dangers attendant
to the sacralization of purported representative bodies (in this case, often
specific corporations, or the ‘‘free market’’ writ large) that allows acts of ex-
cess, or other forms of inappropriate behavior, on the parts of such ‘‘sacred’’
institutions.

208 Articulations
 Derrida once again points to the importance of temporality, which has been
a constant theme in my arguments. The very possibility of a future, certainly
for either a capitalism built on future promise, or a technoscience built on its
potential for salvationary innovation, lies in the fact that they are indetermi-
nate, even if tendential in many ways. It is this indeterminacy that leads to the
fetishistic maneuvers of, for instance, reifying statements of probability into
statements of prophecy; but this very indeterminacy also leads to the faith that
is placed in institutions and belief systems such as the nation, the free market,
religion, fact, or individual corporate entities—institutions and belief systems
that promise, in their own ways, a coming to terms with the future that
technologies like genomics predict in new ways.
Therefore I have argued here for the fetishism of the symbolic capital of the
biotech and pharmaceutical industry as being in the business of saving lives,
imploding into the fetishism of capitalism, fetishes that become reified into
belief systems and power structures through the constant re-performance of
ritual. In the process, the sacred is literally incorporated into the body of the
corporation. And yet the suspicion that this is a particularly American mode of
spectacular capitalism begs the question of the missing nationalism in these
stories—especially since it is precisely the explicitness of nationalism that is so
marked in the Indian stories of technoscience and globalization. It seems
particularly ironic that what is silent or invisible in such situations of corporate
excess is the particularly American nature of this excess, especially consider-
ing the overt and spectacular display of nationalism that is so constitutive of
American public life. I suspect that this ‘‘missing’’ nationalism is not a case of
American techno-capitalism not being animated by nationalist sentiments, but
rather that the question of what constitutes nationalism is less questioned and
less at stake in the United States than it currently is in India.
The other side of the comparative question also needs to be asked here, if
briefly—is this a uniquely American mode of performative ritual excess? Cer-
tainly such forms of excess are not immediately evident in India. Is this simply
a consequence of ‘‘cultural di√erence,’’ or is it because biotech has not yet
arrived in India the way it has in the United States? Answering such a question
would begin at least partly addressing the question of the specificity of such
excess to biocapital, since, as I have argued, such forms of (potentially) scan-
dalous excess are hardly restricted to the drug development marketplace in

Salvation and Nation 209

American corporate culture. Meanwhile, in the United States, to some extent,
the biotech industry is already, in many ways, a very similar (if smaller-scale)
version of the pharmaceutical industry: while the upstream-downstream ter-
rain of drug development represents a real hierarchical di√erentiation between
the power and resources these two types of companies have, the biotech indus-
try is established enough now that it has itself begun the process of drug
development. Indeed, there is a distinct market pressure for upstream com-
panies to move further downstream. The di≈culties they face in doing so
point to the stark power di√erentials between the two types of companies, but
the fact of the intimate rhetorical and market association of biotech with drug
development means that the salvationary symbolic capital associated with, say,
a Merck is very much associated with the upstream biotech industry as well.
The other di√erence between the United States and India that is worth
marking here is that the visible locus of new biotech innovation in India is still
the state rather than private industry, and hence the regime of symbolic capital
that needs to be tapped into is quite di√erent from one of investors and
consumers. That nationalism is the explicit mode of biocapitalist articulation
in India is a function not just of particular historical contexts but also of this
distinct institutional context.
Therefore, on the one hand, we have messianic actors, such as Scott and
Terry, as well as the corporate messiahs such as Incyte and Genentech, who are
forging one set of visionary biocapitalist agendas. But let us recall that the
commodity itself is theological: it is imbued with mystical and religious force.
When that commodity is a therapeutic, it becomes salvationary. The drug’s
magic does not simply stem from its use value as an object that makes sick
people better, but arises from the modes of abstraction that allow drugs to be
commodities. Further, the promise of medicine, as mediated by the drug, does
not need to be articulated: it is a promise that is inherent in the mundane
objects, which are, as Marx put it, full of ‘‘metaphysical subtleties and theolog-
ical niceties’’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 163). The social life of drugs, as com-
modities, is defined both by their cultural life (the di√erent cultural contexts
within which drugs travel and are consumed) and by their imaginary life
(imaginaries that drugs both operate within and help create).
In addition to messianic actors and theological commodities is what Der-
rida calls a structural messianism—‘‘a messianism without religion, even a mes-

210 Articulations
sianic without messianism, an idea of justice’’ (Derrida 1994, 59), which is the
promise that science holds for human emancipation.≥≠ This is a structural
messianism that is as much a part of the foundational ideology for post-
independence India, enshrined in Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous description of
science and technology as the ‘‘temples of modern India’’ (Nehru 1958), as it
is a part of Randy Scott’s rhetoric. The questions for comparison, then, are
questions of how such structural technoscientific messianism articulates with
other structures of promissory imagination, such as, in the case of Indian
technoscience, the nation.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

I begin here with two quotes. The first is from India’s first prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking at the Indian Science Congress in 1938: ‘‘It is
science alone that can solve these problems of hunger and poverty, of insanita-
tion and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast
resources running to waste of a rich country inhabited by starving people.’’
The second is from the manifesto of the Congress Party for the first national
government, declared in 1945: ‘‘Science in its instrumental fields of activity has
played an ever-increasing part in influencing and molding human life. . . .
Industrial, agricultural and cultural advance, as well as national defense de-
pend on it. Scientific research is, therefore, a basic and essential activity of the
State and should be organized and encouraged on the widest scale’’ (both
quoted in Krishna 1997, 236–37).
As is quite clear from these quotes, Nehru and the Indian National Con-
gress, the major nationalist party in the anti-imperialist struggle (and the party
that has ruled postcolonial India for forty-four of the fifty-six years since India’s
independence), accorded a huge importance to science and technology in
India’s development. Indeed, one of the central features of the Congress-led
struggle for independence was that it was very much tied into an intellectual
struggle against colonial science policies that stifled the growth of local techno-
scientific institutions. V. V. Krishna explains colonial science in India as being a
‘‘planned activity from the metropolis,’’ where ‘‘the colonies were assigned the
subordinate tasks of ‘data exploration’ and application of existing technical
knowledge, while the theoretical synthesis took place in the metropolis. De-
void of its intellectual essence, the goal of scientific practice in the colony was

Salvation and Nation 211

not the advancement of science . . . but the exploration of natural resources,
flora and fauna to feed to intellectual and industrial ‘revolution’ in the metrop-
olis’’ (Krishna 1997, 238).
Two things emerge here: the first, that the Indian state’s anxiety over what it
sees as expropriation of genetic resources from India for commercialization in
the West is an ethical-political issue of some sensitivity that has its basis in firm
historical, material colonial relationships. The second point is the emergence
of India in the 1990s as a major contract research site for Western corpora-
tions, especially in software, data mining, and back-end corporate activities—a
labor dimension to global ethical-political questions that exists beyond bio-
capital alone, of course. This development is a central part of contemporary
global relations between the industrialized West and rapidly industrializing
‘‘Third World’’ countries like India and China.
These are issues that manifest themselves not only in structural relations of
production but also in the everyday lives of scientists in Indian molecular
biology labs, who still feel slighted that only ‘‘me-too’’ work that reproduces
conceptual advances already made in the West gets accepted for publication in
top Western journals, whereas novel conceptual work invariably tends to be
met with suspicion. A scientist at the Centre for Biochemical Technology
(cbt), where I did some of my fieldwork, for instance, had this to say:

Getting things accepted in the international community is a problem. . . . Anything

new, I think they feel we are not competent to propose a hypothesis or . . . they
would be more demanding in terms of data, in terms of amount of work done. . . .
It is very disheartening, actually.

We had a person . . . who works abroad on schizophrenia, and he works with a

professor who I think is from South Campus. . . . He came to our lab and he was
trying to find out whether we could work together with them. He comes to our
lab, he sits over here, and he says, ‘‘Whatever you are doing, you give us your
samples, we will reproduce the same work abroad and then you will have an easier
way of communicating your paper because nobody will accept any of the data that
you send from here.’’ And he is taking samples from India and doing the same
analysis abroad. He has the cheek to come in our lab and say that we will not
believe your data unless we produce the same thing abroad.≥∞

212 Articulations
 The perceived bias does not just have to do with the acceptance of cutting-
edge results in academic publications abroad. It also has to do with the poor
quality of materials and reagents with which Western companies supply In-
dian researchers, setting up a vicious cycle in which Indian labs produce less-
legitimate results partly because they (at least sometimes) have reagents and
kits of spurious quality sold to them, and consequently become a dumping
ground for such kits because the work produced is less legitimate and power-
ful than work emanating from Western labs. The same researcher at cbt,
which is engaged in the sorts of high-throughput genome research that many
Western labs perform, had the following disclosure to make:

We went for a kit that Amersham had come up with . . . which was a resin-based
kit, and what we were finding was that for four months we struggled and we were
thinking . . . and at that time our sequencing facility was also getting set up and
every time we would set up the reaction, we found that their results were very
inconsistent. That at times the system worked, at times half of it worked and at
times nothing worked. Then one day we did it with Qiagen and we found that
whenever we were using Qiagen columns, it was much better than the Amersham
column. Then we found that the Amersham kit actually kills the sequencing reac-
tions and Amersham people knew about this and they were not selling this in the
U.K. and they sold it to us here.≥≤

In other words, getting work evaluated in objective, unbiased ways, and

being sold reagents of the same quality as the ones sold to researchers in the
West, are, quite explicitly, ‘‘ethical’’ questions for the work being done in
molecular biology labs in a country like India.
At one level, then, there are ethical articulations as they emanate from, and
manifest themselves in, everyday work practices; at another level there are the
ethical-political articulations of the postcolonial Indian state, often manifested
through policy statements and initiatives. Some context on the framing of
science policy in postcolonial India, albeit brief and sketchy, would be infor-
mative in shedding light on the ways in which biotechnology policy today gets
shaped by institutional actors such as cbt, and scientific-political actors such as
cbt’s director, S. K. Brahmachari.
An important historical frame in which to locate Indian genomics, the

Salvation and Nation 213

history of Indian molecular biology, and the larger political contexts that have
coproduced Indian technoscience writ large is the history of the Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (csir). Much of the history of the csir has
been a failed one, at least in terms of r & d productivity, and in terms of
fulfilling its mandate, which is to facilitate technoscientific commercialization.
Established in the 1940s, csir is a behemoth of forty research laboratories and
institutes spread all over India. Although federally funded, these laboratories
constitute an autonomous structure governed by the director general of the
council, as well as the individual directors of each institute, and supervised by
the Ministries of Science and Technology, Finance, and Human Resource
Development.
The csir has been a major vehicle for transforming Indian science and
technology since 1990 into a body that is in tune with India’s new project of
economic liberalization and globalization (see Turaga 2000 for an overview of
these changes). The transformation of the csir began with the recommenda-
tions of a committee chaired by the csir’s current director general, then direc-
tor of the National Chemical Laboratories (ncl), Ramesh Mashelkar (see
Mashelkar et al. 1993). The Mashelkar committee suggested changes in the
incentive structure for csir scientists to provide them with explicit economic
incentives that until the 1990s had been largely lacking.
Mashelkar’s global vision for csir involves generating external, nonfederal
revenue, increasing annual earnings from overseas r & d, developing licens-
able technologies (of which there were none in 1994), and obtaining foreign
patents and using them to fund operational expenditures. Indeed, Mashelkar’s
mantra for the csir explicitly replaces ‘‘Publish or Perish’’ with ‘‘Patent, Pub-
lish, and Prosper’’ (see Council for Scientific and Industrial Research 1996).
Uday Turaga, in his enthusiastic overview of the globalizing changes sweep-
ing the csir throughout the 1990s, refers to its earlier, pre-Mashelkar commit-
tee avatar as a ‘‘wastrel,’’ because it did not link its research proactively to the
marketplace. However, this hides the still live tension between the Mashelkar
orientation (which Turaga subscribes to, and S. K. Brahmachari at cbt fol-
lows) and another orientation that links research to ‘‘national needs’’ that are
explicitly framed in more local terms.
Mashelkar’s vision is not criticized only by those who would oppose the

214 Articulations
global to the national or local. Manjari Mahajan, for instance, is a science
policy expert whose criticism of Mashelkar is not a criticism of globalization
per se but a criticism of a mode of globalization that she feels will in fact lead to
less-e√ective global competitiveness.≥≥ Mahajan feels that Mashelkar is too
focused on applied research without appreciating enough the value of basic
research as it translates into applications (something that, in the case of drug
development, is foundational). Indeed, Mashelkar wishes to change the very
name of csir from ‘‘the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’’ to ‘‘the
Council for Scientific Industrial Research.’’ And yet, says Mahajan, the latter
has always at some level been a better reflection of csir’s mandate (rather than
a new visionary articulation), and also the cause of csir’s failures, because
Indian industry has traditionally never been willing to take up the technolo-
gies that csir institutes have provided them. What this accent on application
at the cost of basic research has led to, according to Mahajan, is an ossified
csir, with labs doing old work and not keeping up with advancements in the
field. For example, many csir labs are still doing classical breeding experi-
ments while the rest of the world has started doing molecular breeding. Maha-
jan thinks that csir will continue to fall into disrepair if its focus does not shift
to basic research. Of course, institutes like cbt are not so ossified precisely
because the csir is too diverse a body for any ‘‘vision’’ to apply uniformly
across all its institutes. Therefore, even though Brahmachari believes quite
strongly in Mashelkar’s vision, cbt is one of the csir labs whose individual
mandate is basic research, and is therefore trying—perhaps almost too hard
for some of its scientists—to keep up with the latest global advancements in
molecular genetics and genomics.
Mashelkar himself sees his use of the ‘‘and’’ in a slightly di√erent light from
Mahajan. (However, she is correct in her diagnosis that what he hopes to do is
collapse the distinction between basic and applied research in ways that basic
research always already translates into applied priorities—thereby putting un-
der erasure the notion of basic research itself—and that those applied pri-
orities are naturally assumed as being commercial priorities.) Mashelkar sees
his erasure in the following terms:

This name of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. I do believe that it’s
got this message incorporated, that we’re supposed to do scientific research, we’re

Salvation and Nation 215

 supposed to do industrial research. The only problem is of that ‘‘and.’’ So we did
pure scientific research which has no industrial relevance, or we did industrial
research which had pretty little scientific base, because we were doing in a reverse-
engineering mode in a protected environment. So the other thing that I have tried
to do is to remove that ‘‘and,’’ by saying ‘‘scientific industrial research,’’ where
industrial research is done at cutting-edge science, and remove that confusion.
Because I believe in what Louis Pasteur says, that there is science, and its applica-
tion, there is nothing like ‘‘basic science’’ and ‘‘applied science.’’≥∂

Mapping on to this collapsing of ‘‘basic’’ and ‘‘applied’’ science is the col-

lapse between ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘technology,’’ which are often taken to corre-
spond to the basic/applied dichotomy. While Mashelkar’s reasoning reso-
nates with the sts usage of the word ‘‘technoscience,’’ Mahajan argues for the
strategic importance of keeping that distinction alive. Indeed, the distinction
between science and technology is clearly articulated in India’s 1958 Science
Policy Resolution (Government of India 1958), independent India’s first such
formal and comprehensive document, which concedes the potentials for the
application of science but also considers ‘‘technology’’ as something tempo-
rally distinct and following from basic ‘‘scientific’’ activity. What is at stake in
this semantic game is not just a conceptual false dichotomy between science
and technology that needs to be collapsed (which is the sts motive in trou-
bling this binary), but also the fact that this dichotomy ties into a host of
others that arise from the perception of this dichotomy and operate in certain
ways as a consequence. Therefore the way Mashelkar collapses science and
technology, basic and applied, is a way that collapses institutional demarcation
as well and suggests (as was suggested implicitly in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act
passed by the U.S. Congress, thereby laying the grounds for venture science in
the United States) that the purpose and rationale for academic research is to
generate knowledge that can be commercialized.
The case model of the Mashelkar approach as criticized by Mahajan, indeed,
is not cbt but Mashelkar’s own former institute, ncl, and its alliance with
General Electric (ge) to provide contract research services: an arrangement
that ge has declared as a model for its external r & d alliances (Mashelkar
1999). And yet it is precisely this model of doing contract work for foreign
companies without sharing in their intellectual property that mirrors Krishna’s

216 Articulations
assessment of colonial science described earlier, whereby Indian labs exist
primarily to perform work that has been designed in the metropolis, which
again is where the maximum value gets realized. In other words, there is a
fundamental contradiction between the Mashelkar committee’s vision to gen-
erate external, nonfederal revenue (generated through contract work) and its
vision to generate intellectual property (which can happen only through work
for which ownership resides with the Indian institute).
Some of these tensions are articulated by the current director of ncl, S. Siva-
ram, whom I interviewed in 2001 when he was still deputy director of the
institute. Sivaram himself sees contract work not as an end in itself but as a
means, first, to get initiated into standards and work practices—such as, for
instance, workplace safety conditions—that are established in other parts of
the world; and second, as a means to enter into tacit networks that can subse-
quently be formalized into strategic alliances and collaborations. He is none-
theless acutely aware of the asymmetries embodied in relationships such as
ncl’s with ge, asymmetries that have everything to do with India’s post-
colonial condition, but also with the ways that states chart their strategic
involvement in global commercial politics, with profound impacts on the
abilities of public institutions such as ncl to negotiate contractual market
terrains. Therefore, Sivaram says:

See, today, ge comes here, walks in and works with me. I cannot come and work
with just anyone. . . . It’s a question of asymmetric axis. It’s basically all about the
competitiveness of nations. Today we are not bothering in this country, but U.S.
surely bothers about it. Europe bothers about it, Japan bothers about it.≥∑

The challenge therefore becomes for Sivaram explicitly one of moving be-
yond a dependence on contract work for revenue generation and toward a
culture of indigenous innovation. It is precisely this move that is not given
enough attention by many other Indian state and private actors, located both
in India and in Silicon Valley, who believe that globalization is simply about
increasing foreign direct investment in India, as an end in itself, rather than
as a means to e√ect certain types of technoscientific advances and social de-
velopments. Sivaram distinguishes contract research from entrepreneurial sci-
ence thus:

Salvation and Nation 217

 Contract research is to solve somebody else’s problem. So you get paid for it. It’s a
service. It is like a consulting service. Contract research is nothing but a kind of
consulting service, except that it is somewhat higher valued. . . . But when you do
contract research the ownership rests with the contractor, the ownership does not
rest with you, so you really have no stake in that development. You get current
income, but you don’t get future income. . . . I will be dealing in both. I can’t be
only surviving on future promises, I need to have current resources at the same
time. But to depend only on current resources is also not fair. We need to have
some eggs in the basket for the future. . . . And I think the rate of entrepreneurship
generation in science today is insignificantly low.≥∏

And, of course, contract research has its own set of challenges:

The di≈cult thing is to sustain the relationship. To get a contract is not di≈cult but
to sustain the relationship is quite di≈cult. Even with the multinational contracts.
Yes, yes, sustaining is di≈cult. The leadership changes are very frequent. And
there are philosophical di√erences between people as to what can be done and
what should be done. And therefore as the leadership changes, the philosophy
changes.≥π

Sivaram therefore explicitly sees ncl as reaching a phase change, where the
phase of contract research needs to give way to a phase of entrepreneurial
research—not because of any ideological angst about doing work for Western
multinational corporations but because of the structural reasons that pressure a
shift away from contract work that have to do with the tensions inherent to a
dependence on economic forces and strategic decisions made elsewhere for
continued revenue generation. The move beyond contract research, for Siva-
ram, is dictated by the very exigencies of the contract research relationship,
which translate into ways in which being a ‘‘global player’’ fails to be in the ‘‘na-
tional interest.’’ This failure is due to the asymmetries of global equations and
relationships that have to be negotiated as a means to fulfill global desires. The
Gandhian-Nehruvian–Indian Marxist opposition of the national to the global
breaks down completely, yet questions of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and
global inequity refuse to go away. And the solution, ironically, is seen to lie in
the ability to more aggressively leverage global market instruments, the very
instruments that cause a deferral of India’s global ambitions.≥∫

218 Articulations
 According to Mashelkar, there are two aspects to the essence of csir: to
‘‘advance knowledge, and to use it for the good of the people.’’ Further: ‘‘How
do you relate to the good of the people? Through economic and social de-
velopment. And how do you contribute to that economic development? By
contributing to industrial research.’’≥Ω
In the following vignette, I indicate how ‘‘the good of the people’’ gets
conceived in India in ways other than globally competitive market science.
This account of a scientist at Hyderabad’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular
Biology still shows how huge faith is pinned on the potential of science for
human emancipation, but by means other than market mechanisms.
Satish Kumar is the archetypal left-leaning scientist, a member of a dying
breed that makes some very old points that are perhaps vital correctives in this
very new moment. He holds on to the fact that India has been unique in
applying science policy with specific public objectives in mind,∂≠ and those
needs have not vanished yet—indeed, far from it. These are objectives that are
very di√erent from the market-driven Mashelkar objectives and are perhaps
not even entirely resonant with Nehruvian objectives (though they have been
pursued in what might be called the ‘‘Nehruvian era’’ of Indian science pol-
icy). Kumar is acutely aware of the confusion between the pressure to do
science with social values and the pressures of the marketplace. But he feels
there is no need to play the game of the West, because India still needs to focus
on food security and health.
If the first myth is the myth of the technoscientific marketplace as in itself
and unaided the panacea to the country’s developmental ills, then the second
myth, according to Kumar, is that technology will solve all of India’s prob-
lems, since, as he says, ‘‘technology is not politically neutral.’’∂∞ Kumar feels
that India’s priorities should be to solve problems like providing drinking
water and improving investment in, and quality of, food crops, animals, and
health care. He sees in the current regime of biotechnology a continuation of
colonization by remote control. This is because India still ‘‘buys their bio-
chemicals, follows the agenda set by them, and our best scientists immediately
publish in those journals that most Indian universities can’t a√ord to buy.’’∂≤
He emphasizes the importance of publicly funded health care and agriculture
systems. In the case of agriculture, for instance, he feels that Indian scien-

Salvation and Nation 219

tists could focus on generating drought-resistant crops rather than creating
pesticide-resistant crops. Kumar feels there has been total confusion over what
India should be doing with regard to genomics, which means that he is at odds
in his thinking on the matter with Brahmachari, who believes that he knows
exactly what India should be doing as far as genomics is concerned.
When I pointed out that the thrust of India’s science policy has changed
from self-reliance to innovation, Kumar wondered why innovation and self-
reliance cannot both be attained simultaneously. He sees innovation as a
tool to attain self-reliance and does not see why one has to choose between
the two. What he is against, therefore, is not innovation or development of
‘‘global’’ science per se, but knee-jerk imitation. He strongly feels that govern-
ment agencies should not change their focus from the fact that they exist for
the people.
Kumar’s own work in tune with this is to create a genetic map of the bu√alo.
Even though this is in his own words an ‘‘unglamorous’’ project, he thinks it is
important as a scientist to start by asking, ‘‘What if I’m successful with what
I’m doing?’’ Keeping that in mind, Kumar feels that research e√orts in geno-
mics should concentrate on mapping and sequencing pathogens rather than
playing around with population genetics (which is the buzzword for people
like Brahmachari). Indeed, Brahmachari himself started his own demand for
India to enter the genomics fray in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the
suggestion that the ideal project to initiate India’s genome e√orts would be to
generate a map of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This intention has now been
sacrificed by Brahmachari himself at the altar of human population genomics.
The fundamentals, according to Kumar, are not going to change, and those
fundamentals are that over the next fifty years, you cannot take people o√ the
land. Even wealth creation, he argues, ultimately has to be addressed in terms
of the people on the land. Scientists in the lure of the market, however, pre-
tend that only one section of the population exists, the urban. Whatever your
politics, says Kumar, you cannot divorce your work from the fact of the exis-
tence of your people.
His own research, as mentioned, involves first creating a genetic map of the
bu√alo, a project that took him three years to obtain funding for. This is
unique work because conventional knowledge of animal population genetics

220 Articulations
has not found application in India. The second strand of Kumar’s work in-
volves documenting bu√alo biodiversity at the dna level, with the objective of
actually knowing the existing genetic resources in order to prioritize conserva-
tion of diverse resources. His idea is to feed his results back through coopera-
tives to landless peasants who depend on livestock for their livelihood. Doing
bu√alo genomics is in some ways easier than human genomics because of the
di√erent priorities in animal genomics compared to human. With animals,
knowing the whole genome is not essential: one needs only to target specific
traits such as milk production, and Kumar’s plan is to work with the peasants,
through the medium of cooperatives, to pursue research that can target the
traits essential to enhancing productivity of milk in order to most benefit those
he sees as his primary ‘‘consumers.’’∂≥
Kumar, then, is attentive to the mechanics of how to get scientific advances
down to places where they can help marginal people. On the other hand,
people such as the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, or
the Silicon Valley Indian entrepreneurs who are trying to establish an entre-
preneurial culture in India, or Mashelkar himself all believe that scientific
advance will somehow ‘‘trickle down’’ on its own if the market is allowed free
rein. Brahmachari, the director of the cbt, di√ers slightly from these positions
in believing that science should be in the hands of the state (while himself
claiming to be ‘‘for’’ globalization), as a resource for the public good. The key,
however, is that the entire spectrum of scientist and policy positions is ani-
mated, quite explicitly, by nationalism—though the meanings of that word
are implicitly, in each case, quite di√erent.

Silicon Valley NRI Entrepreneurs

I now examine nationalism’s relationship to globalization and to capital, as in-
formed by Indian entrepreneurial and venture capitalist communities (many
of whom operate or network out of and into Silicon Valley). In the process, I
highlight how the Indian nation, in the context of these actors, becomes one
way of ‘‘linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together’’ (Anderson
1991 [1983], 36). Even if a range of actors whose views are broadly in conso-
nance might have similar underlying visions (that of India ‘‘going global,’’ or
developing an ‘‘entrepreneurial culture,’’ both of which, I argue, are some-

Salvation and Nation 221

times, and sometimes not, the same thing), their own strategic and tactical
conceptions, combined with the institutional constraints and formative ped-
agogies that provide them with their situated perspectives, serve to di√erenti-
ate their modes of action, leading to a range of ways in which India in fact
‘‘goes global’’ or ‘‘becomes entrepreneurial.’’
I begin by talking about two major nonresident Indian organizations with
powerful presence in the United States, one of which has something to do
with biotechnology, the other apparently nothing at all. The former is the
indus Entrepreneurs (tie), and the latter the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World
Hindu Forum, or vhp).
tie’s mission is the ‘‘advancement and nurturing of entrepreneurship.’’∂∂
Established in 1994 in Silicon Valley, the organization now has a presence in
North America, Europe, and India. The story of tie, and of its related and
younger o√spring focusing on life science entrepreneurship, the Entrepre-
neurial Pharmaceutical Partners of the Indian Continent (eppic), is, at one
level, the story of a venture capital approach to governance. A thicker analysis
of organizations such as tie or eppic, of course, would have to comprehend
them as part of the assemblages that constitute the Indian diaspora, as part of
Silicon Valley as a particular locale, and as part of a certain sort of social
movement that, like any governmentality, cannot bring about formal political
economic change without being driven itself by conceptions of broader social
change. The vhp, on the other hand, is a much older organization, founded in
1964, its purpose being the global dissemination of Hindu values and the
strengthening of Hindu networks around the world. Not surprisingly, the
vhp has risen to public prominence and grown in stature during the 1990s,
along with the rise of Hindu nationalism as a mainstream political force in
India, but also with the rise of nri communities becoming powerful and vocal
political actors in Indian a√airs in their own right.
tie’s conception of change is very much based in its vanguard elite, Indians
who have made it big in American entrepreneurial worlds and therefore act
both as role models and as networking nodes for other aspiring subcontinental
entrepreneurs. tie’s objectives are threefold, to ‘‘foster entrepreneurship and
nurture entrepreneurs; provide a networking platform for its members; [and]
help members integrate with the mainstream community.’’∂∑

222 Articulations
 At one level, these objectives, of nurturing what is simultaneously a com-
munity, a cause, and a way of life, eerily echo the focus and activities of
organizations like the vhp. Further, both tie and the vhp go beyond simply
spreading ideology to actively participating in creating capital flows between
the United States and India, in circuits closely tied to India’s ruling corporate-
political elites. The vhp in America, for instance, has been singularly involved
in channeling funds back to the Hindu nationalist movement in India. tie,
meanwhile, aims not just to foster an Indian entrepreneurial community in the
United States but to transpose to India the sorts of cultures and mechanisms
of innovation that typify high-tech entrepreneurial capitalism in places like
Silicon Valley. There are also structural and cultural similarities in the way the
two groups function organizationally, through seminars, lecture tours, men-
toring and counseling, and operating projects back in India.
There is, however, a crucial di√erence between the belief systems of the two
organizations. At the risk of an apparent digression, it is necessary to explore
this di√erence a little to lay the ground for further analysis of the way India is
envisioned by entrepreneurial communities such as tie. This di√erence has to
do with the fundamentally exclusionary ideology of organizations like the vhp,
which therefore have to be able to innovate for themselves accessible modes of
grassroots functioning. tie, on the other hand, is ideologically inclusive and,
as part of its mission, explicitly claims respect for religious, ethnic, and politi-
cal diversity. Indeed, while most tie management and members are from
India, there is a play on words in the name of the organization itself: indus
represents not just the confluence of India and the United States but also the
river that flows through Pakistan, has tributaries in India, is considered the
cradle of subcontinental prehistoric civilization, and forms the basis for a
water treaty between the two countries that is almost sacred in its symboliza-
tion of the links between them even in times of great diplomatic stress. tie
believes that its success stems from its ‘‘single-minded focus on the mission of
advancing entrepreneurship and on its unrelenting value that successful entre-
preneurship eschews all culture, religious, and political boundaries.’’∂∏
Leaving aside for the moment both the impossibility of an entrepreneurship
without culture and the contradiction of an organization that is explicitly
formed on the basis of ethnic and geographical identification as ‘‘eschewing’’

Salvation and Nation 223

such boundaries, I tell the story of Kanwal Rekhi, a founder and former
president of tie, and arguably the best-known Indian venture capitalist in the
world. Rekhi’s biography is the classic one of the poor outsider who made
good in the American melting pot. Of Sikh parents, and born in Rawalpindi
(current-day Pakistan), Rekhi moved to the United States in 1967 as an engi-
neer, got laid o√ thrice in the early 1970s, and finally moved to San Jose, where
he realized the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial dream. He cofounded an ex-
tremely successful computer company called Excelan, which merged with
Novell in 1989, and then moved on to become a highly successful venture
capitalist and angel investor. Rekhi was one of the generation of early (1980s)
nri entrepreneurs who learned from experience that while there were an
increasing number of Indian software professionals (usually highly educated
and highly qualified) coming to the Valley, there were very few who were
actually in management positions or starting their own companies. A major
reason for that, of course, was the Catch-22 that all entrepreneurs find them-
selves in when first trying to start a company with venture capital money
without significant entrepreneurial or vc contacts: Rekhi himself, for instance,
was constantly turned away by vcs while trying to start Excelan because he did
not have the ‘‘right management team.’’ Rekhi read that, probably accurately,
as meaning that there was no white person on his team. This was the situation
that he hoped to rectify not by fighting against the closed networks that
ultimately served to perpetuate a form of racial-ethnic discrimination but by
becoming ‘‘as white as the whites’’ by forming his own sets of networks and
mentoring relationships that would foster a community for the next genera-
tion of aspiring Indian entrepreneurs.
Rekhi’s ambitions, however, are far from merely local, and far from merely
being about enabling Indian professionals to be successful in the United States.
He dreams, indeed, of changing India, of turning it into an innovative and
entrepreneurial society. These are visions that are based firmly in an idea of
meritocracy and vanguard intellect. Himself a product of an Indian Institute
of Technology (iit), the prestigious set of institutions that are the training
grounds for most of Silicon Valley’s Indian software professionals, he sub-
scribes completely to the iit belief that this group is the best of the best. In
other words, an organization like tie, which is deeply inflected by the views of

224 Articulations
Rekhi and those like him, is, in spite of its religious and cultural inclusiveness,
precisely not the sort of grassroots organic movement that the vhp is: these are
entrepreneurs who truly believe that change can come from the top, that they
represent the top, and that they can change India on their own steam. In terms
of strategies and tactics, therefore, tie and vhp believe in completely inverted
fields of hegemonic action.
In addition to this strategic-tactical binary of exclusive-grassroots versus
inclusive-vanguard are related binaries in conceptions of community and fam-
ily. The vhp, like any fundamentalist religious movement, is deeply family
centered in its focus. The entrepreneurial ideal type, however, is that of the
Lone Ranger, and indeed the risks of starting a company are so great that it is
deemed exponentially harder to do so when the entrepreneur has other people
to provide for. Most male Indian professionals who come to places like Silicon
Valley from institutions like iit, indeed, do come as bachelors and invariably
‘‘make good’’ before they return to India to get married. The mantra of entre-
preneurialism that tie espouses, and indeed seeks to establish as a way of life in
India, is intensely centered around a vision of a community that is formed by a
more American vision of networked individuals, not, as in the vhp’s case, a
community of strong patriarchal families.
tie transposes back to India, then, ways of starting companies that are
normal in the United States, and the financial and institutional backing to
follow those ways. Rekhi, for instance, has set up a start-up incubator at iit
Bombay, a model of corporate incubation in university settings, where the
university provides entrepreneurs with subsidized space and some funding to
see them through the earliest stages of company formation, in a way that is
quite typical of models followed at a number of U.S. universities. As he says:

The people who are at iit Bombay, the professors and the students, they wouldn’t
have thought of being start-ups, so we brought this notion in. . . . You know,
just . . . bringing this tradition of entrepreneurship—like they have at Stanford,
like they have at mit—to Indian universities. The Indians . . . followed the British
model, by and large [for universities]. There is the notion of being very pure
[and] non-commercial in your studies. In the U.S. there’s a big notion of how do
you use your knowledge very quickly to create wealth, create jobs? So we’re bring-
ing this concept to India now.∂π

Salvation and Nation 225

 Such a conception as Rekhi’s does not see ideology as something that is
spread or di√used but sees it literally as a thing, plantlike, perhaps, that can be
packaged, physically transported, and deposited on new soil, where it will take
root, spread, and grow. Notions are ‘‘brought in,’’ like a laptop, and one can
almost imagine Rekhi declaring his notions at customs as he flies into Bombay.
Related to this faith in vanguard individualism as the engine for economic
growth is, not surprisingly, a disdain and contempt for the state:

India took a wrong, a left turn, about 50 years ago and became socialist. It was a
tragic mistake India made, and it’s paying for that one. . . . One of the messages
that I deliver when I travel there is [that] entrepreneurs are the only hope. They
are the wealth creators, job creators of the society. They are the locomotives which
will pull the whole train along, which is a new concept for India because the . . .
mindset under Nehru, Gandhi was central ownership of industry.∂∫

Indeed, at a meeting of eppic that I attended, one member talked of a recent

visit to Bangalore where a high-level state o≈cial asked him how the state
government could assist in setting up entrepreneurial ventures, and he re-
sponded that the best way the government could help would be by staying as
far away from them as possible. While this entrepreneurial community pro-
fesses a neoliberal philosophy, it does not take into account a fundamen-
tal contradiction that dismantling the state requires a huge amount of state
intervention.
For Rekhi, spreading the free market is no less a calling than it is for Randy
Scott or Patrick Terry. However, this is a calling explicitly of nation rather than
religion—but a national calling that reflects what in the previous section,
quoting Derrida, I called a ‘‘structural messianism.’’ Rekhi talks about himself
and his comrades thus:

We see ourselves as missionaries now. The Indian independence movement in the

’20s was led by the Indians who came back from England. They came to India
[where there was] no thought of lawful society, liberal society, and they applied
those concepts, and that was the basis of our freedom movement, in the ’20s
and ’30s.

Essentially what we’re doing [now] is the economic freedom movement for
India.∂Ω

226 Articulations
 The question of the motivation for nri groups to get involved in channel-
ing capital back to India is not just one of ideology or philanthropy and further
cannot be explained simply by the ‘‘guilt’’ of nris who feel they ‘‘owe’’ some-
thing to their home country, as many Indians in conversation often postulate.
Rekhi himself is quite contemptuous of explicitly ‘‘philanthropic’’ entrepre-
neurs. For instance, a group of entrepreneurs that I know pitched their busi-
ness idea to him, in which a part of their business plan promised to set aside
5 percent of their profits for the development of science and technology in
India—something that, one would imagine, would be in consonance with
Rekhi’s own ambitions. Rekhi was openly disdainful of the idea and chided
them that they were supposed to be starting a business, not a charity. Easy
psychological attributions of feelings of guilt as being the motive force for
channeling capital back to the country are likewise little more than conjecture
and fail to take into account the larger structural forces that create such feelings
of obligation to one’s home country. The virtually free college education pro-
vided by the Indian state is one such factor, which in this case functions with
the obligatory force of the gift.∑≠ Rekhi himself acknowledges the quality of
the highly subsidized education that iit graduates receive, which makes his
contempt for the state even more ironic. These are obligations that I argue are
part of a new set of legal and incentive structures constituting citizenship and
structures of feeling.
Of course, what is repatriated by members of organizations such as tie is
not simply capital but also expertise, in an odd quasi inversion of that oft-
repeated malady of Indian technoscience, ‘‘brain drain.’’ There is thus a con-
fluence of repatriated capital, labor, and imaginaries. Labor, because there is an
increased incidence of Indians who have gone abroad for graduate or postdoc-
toral study or work returning to India to further their careers; imaginaries,
because the ‘‘expertise’’ that is repatriated is not simply formal technical exper-
tise (which, after all, is garnered in abundance and in quality by these profes-
sionals at institutions like the iit before they leave India) but cultural ideals like
entrepreneurship, ideals that get reflected in mimetic institutional structures,
but also in larger urban landscapes. Hyderabad, which, along with Bangalore,
has been the favored city for the repatriation of capital and expertise to set up
high-tech industries in India (initially mainly information technology, but
now increasingly biotechnology as well), has designated six hundred square

Salvation and Nation 227

kilometers of land called ‘‘Genome Valley,’’ explicitly conjuring an image, and
thereby, it is hoped, eventually a reality, of an entrepreneurial technoscientific
haven on the model of Silicon Valley.
As my account of csir shows, though, it is not just nris who have techno-
scientific imaginaries about India. Such imagining is very much at the heart of
the public Indian scientific establishment as well, especially in cutting-edge
high-tech fields such as genomics. The question, then, is how nri (and re-
ciprocal ‘‘local’’ Indian) technoscientific imaginaries are at odds, or not, with
nri (and reciprocal ‘‘local’’ Indian) cultural-religious imaginaries, such as
those of the vhp and the bjp, and how ‘‘nationalism’’ di√erentially inflects
these di√erent sets of actors.
Nationalism exists in many di√erent varieties—a self-evident observation,
perhaps, but one that is all too easily overlooked when a particular brand of
nationalism becomes the dominant discursive form through which one is
expected and allowed to express allegiance for the nation. Secondly, these
varieties do not simply polarize into two opposed varieties, an anti-imperialist,
secular, ‘‘Congress’’ nationalism versus a culturally aggressive, Hindu, ‘‘bjp’’
nationalism. In places like Silicon Valley, and for expatriates in particular,
nationalism is often necessarily defined as an inchoate a√ective ‘‘love’’ for one’s
country and people, but it is also defined in relation to the American Other.
The modes of articulation of this relationship are starkly di√erent in the case
of, on the one hand, the cab driver whose story I narrated at the start of this
chapter, and on the other hand, organizations like tie. Both recognize them-
selves as racially marked, even in the absence of an explicit self-admitted racial
violence that is so much a feature of everyday life for South Asian expatri-
ates in, for instance, Britain. While the cab driver distances himself from the
‘‘white-blooded’’ American (under which category he might include the In-
dian who does not speak to him in Hindi), tie, as part of its institutional
mandate, seeks to identify with the Americans, play their game, be ‘‘whiter
than the whites.’’ This is clearly stated in the organization’s objectives, one of
which, as mentioned, is to ‘‘help members integrate into the mainstream com-
munity.’’ The way tie seeks to deal with minority status is by becoming such a
model minority that they stop being recognized as minorities anymore.
Not surprisingly, Rekhi has been an activist lobbying for the relaxation of

228 Articulations
U.S. immigration restrictions on Indian high-tech professionals. He has be-
come actively involved with the Immigrant Support Network (isn) to help
foreign high-tech workers lobby to change immigration laws. But again, the
way Rekhi involves himself is by projecting American interests, and himself as
an American, rather than by addressing issues such as racial disparity or dis-
crimination. For instance, he said, ‘‘My generation came here and became
strong Americans. We were productive citizens, creating wealth and jobs for
society, everybody was a winner. This whole new thing worries me because it
ties people down, disenfranchises them economically . . . and I am worried
that this will not produce a strong American economy or help entrepreneur-
ship. So my point is to raise awareness that this situation is not very healthy for
society, and if the U.S. needs engineers, it must step up and o√er them a fairer
deal’’ (quoted in Din 2001a).
And of course, the cost of easing restrictions on high-tech model immi-
grants has to be a tightening of restrictions on those who are not professionals.
In this interview, Rekhi continues:

When immigrants were first allowed in the ’60s, they were engineers and highly
skilled people. Then there was family reunification, and parents and brothers and
sisters were allowed in. All of a sudden, primary immigration of professionals
became secondary immigration of taxi-drivers. . . . That secondary immigration
was of very poor quality, and that caused a backlash. For one engineer, you’d get
ten others. It’s time to go back to the original setup, where you allow professionals
and only their spouses and children, not one’s brothers, sisters, parents. . . . The
U.S. cannot take everyone in the world. I brought my brother and sisters here,
don’t get me wrong, but none of them turned out . . . if you let things continue,
you get an endless loop of poor quality immigration.∑∞

These remarks are well in keeping with the highly individualized visions of
meritocracy that tie repatriates to India as its ‘‘entrepreneurial culture.’’
Joseph Dumit (1998) talks about the formation of identities by scientific
fact through his notion of ‘‘objective self-fashioning,’’ a notion that I engaged
with in the previous chapter as I discussed genomic fetishism. Identity in
technoscientific capitalism, however, is shaped not just by the knowledge
provided by technoscience, but by the hybrid de- and relocalizations that

Salvation and Nation 229

often accompany global knowledge production enterprises. tie entrepreneurs
therefore engage in a subjective self-fashioning, which is a mimetic American
self-fashioning that does not just confine itself to ‘‘nonresident’’ locales but
is repatriated in the form of imagined constructions such as Hyderabad’s
Genome Valley. Further, it is a form of self-fashioning in the image of the
American Other that already exists, before the act of repatriation, in the In-
dian middle-class consumer population, fed as it is on America in every form
through satellite television and the flooding of its markets with foreign con-
sumer goods.
While objective self-fashioning is, at one level, a highly individualized and
individualizing form of identity formation, it is also a form of identity forma-
tion that often occurs, or subsequently manifests itself, as collective social
movements, such as patient advocacy groups. Therefore it is a mode of collec-
tive individualized identity formation that, on the one hand, often propagates
beyond the individual through media such as the Internet. It is also, on the
other hand, often the preserve of those who have recourse to the ‘‘culture of
no culture’’—scientific fact shapes identity not just because it is deemed su-
premely authoritative but also because it is deemed to be somehow outside
culture. Sharon Traweek refers to the culture of high-energy physicists as
being a ‘‘culture of no culture,’’ which she describes as ‘‘an extreme culture of
objectivity . . . which longs passionately for a world without loose ends,
without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder—for
a world outside human space and time’’ (Traweek 1988, 162). By allowing the
authority of science to mold one as consumer (rather than scientist), objec-
tively self-fashioned subjects take on an identity that is perceived to be su-
premely objective.
The notion of a ‘‘culture of no culture’’ has been used in a very di√erent
sense, however, by Ruth Frankenberg (1993) in her analysis of racial-cultural
self-identifications of white women, based on interviews with women in north-
ern California. The space of no culture here is the privilege of not being racially
marked that accrues to a dominant culture that does not have to define its
identity in relationship to another race but can assume itself as normative. If the
‘‘culture of no culture’’ represents objectivity when the identity-forming agent is
science, then it is normative when the identity-forming agent is race.

230 Articulations
 The question for an analysis of biocapital then becomes the following: given
that there is no shortage of American companies targeting the consumer ca-
pabilities of the middle class in India, one would imagine that the problem-
atic of understanding emergent forms of biosociality in comparative context
should not be the question of how biosocial communities such as pxe Inter-
national and Genomic Health emerge as articulate (and articulated) entities in
the United States. Rather, it should be the question why such biosocial ar-
rangements that depend on a consumer market of precisely the sorts of net-
worked individuals envisaged by organizations such as tie have not emerged in
India in spite of their mimetic e√orts. In other words, why have the importa-
tion and repatriation of corporate technoscientific cultures of production to
India not led (as yet, at least) to the same kinds of biosocial emergences
as these productions do in the United States? Why has the subjective self-
fashioning of both the productive entrepreneurial community (and its allied
state actors) and the consumer middle class, as explicitly ‘‘Americanized,’’ not
led to a salvationary objective self-fashioning in the image of corresponding
American identity formations through processes of production and circula-
tion of facts, technologies, and commodities? It is in asking the question of a
failure of homogeneous emergence in spite of the explicit attempts by many
actors to reproduce such homogeneity that one comes up against the impor-
tance not just of nebulous attributions of cultural di√erence, but also of the
di√erent salience of precisely those cultural and ideological categories, such as
nation and salvation, that completely imbricate, and thereby di√erentiate,
‘‘cultures of no culture’’ as capable of being understood and made sense of only
through cultural analysis.
In other words, entrepreneurial ‘‘cultures’’ emerge from complex institu-
tional, material, and semiotic assemblages, which in the United States, for
instance, involved the coming together, at a certain historical moment, of
legislative changes (such as the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act); legal precedents (such
as Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which allowed patents on genetically engineered
microorganisms in June 1980); technological advancements (recombinant
dna technology); changing business terrains (the emergence of venture capi-
tal as a serious force in enabling technoscientific research); and business events
that either anticipate or respond aggressively to these changing events (for

Salvation and Nation 231

instance, the hugely successful Genentech ipo in October 1980). Thus the
question of the failures of homogeneous imitation that I pose can be answered
in terms of the fact that while one can replicate components of an assemblage,
it is not so easy to replicate their stratified dynamics or their structural con-
junctures. To assume that India in 2002 will replicate the United States in
1980 is ultimately to buy into a deeply ahistorical discourse, because the mate-
rial relations of production, the institutional relations, and the larger socio-
economic contexts are simply not comparable.

Conclusion
At one level, this chapter is about salvation and nation in two locales of radical
asymmetry, the United States and India, when it is impossible to separate the
two concepts in any oppositional fashion. But it is also a chapter about the
radical asymmetry between the two locales. A fundamental point that I am
trying to make is that what constitutes ‘‘the global’’ is an American free market
imaginary, one that has retained certain value systems historically but is itself at
stake, emergent, and inflected with salvationary and messianic overtones. It is
the articulation of particular imaginaries as global that makes American-style
free market innovation an object of desire in places like India, but also makes it
an ambivalent object of desire. It is the hegemony of American imaginaries,
whether of the free market, property regimes, or sovereign consumers, that
makes countries like India articulate their national interests in terms of being
able to buy into that imaginary, but also makes them selectively resist or
attempt to remodel those imaginaries, attempts that are themselves born of a
simultaneously modernist and nationalist desire.
So far in this book, I have explored, through di√erent ethnographic and nar-
rative strategies, multiple theoretical issues concerning biocapital—exchange
and value, life and debt, vision and hype, promise and fetish, salvation and
nation. These are issues and concepts that constantly merge into each other. It
is di≈cult, nonetheless, to locate all these issues in one location or another,
because while the sites and processes I have traced are globally interconnected,
they are so in ways that manifest in particular, incongruent manners in di√erent
locales. In many ways, therefore, this book performs George Marcus and
Michael Fischer’s call for multisited ethnography as a means to follow and

232 Articulations
make sense of mobile, transnational, interconnected, emergent worlds (Mar-
cus and Fischer 1986; see also Marcus 1998). It also heeds Akhil Gupta and
James Ferguson’s (1997) warning about the lack of necessary or direct corre-
spondence between particular field sites and the ‘‘field’’ being written about in
contemporary ethnographies, between the ‘‘where’’ and the ‘‘what’’ of anthro-
pological analysis. In other words, it is impossible to write about global pro-
cesses of exchange simply by localizing them to their manifestations at particu-
lar field sites; but it is equally impossible to appreciate the complexities of these
global processes without making them specific, since for all the hegemonic
potential of globalization today, it does manifest in particular, tendential ways
in particular, tendential places. Multisited ethnography, in that sense, is not
unlike quantum physics—localizing the velocities and the positions of globally
mobile actors and processes is impossible to do simultaneously and constantly
requires shifting perspective from one to the other, ‘‘global’’ to ‘‘local,’’ ‘‘the-
ory’’ to ‘‘ethnography,’’ without privileging one over the other as definitive.
In my final chapter, I make such a shift in perspective to write perhaps the
most explicitly ‘‘ethnographic’’ chapter of the book through the story of a San
Francisco–based start-up, GeneEd.

Salvation and Nation 233

6. Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups
The Story of an E-learning Company

A project such as this, not surprisingly, brings with it a host of ethnographic

challenges. A major challenge has to do with access, in an environment that is
often defined from the ground up by its secrecy. This is especially a problem
in the United States, where secrecy as part of corporate culture is cultur-
ally sanctioned and legally institutionalized. Corporations are understandably
wary of researchers like me who will be traveling to a range of other sites,
including possibly visiting their competitors. In addition, corporations are
very careful about regulating what gets said about them, their public relations
apparatus often being sophisticated and forming a central component of their
corporate strategic apparatus.
I received a range of responses from various companies to which I tried to
get access, including three of the best-known genome companies. Millennium
Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, refused to even give me a tour
of their facilities, citing reasons of lack of time. Celera Genomics, the contro-
versial company that raced the public Human Genome Project to sequence the
genome, was willing to give me a tour but wanted to know exactly what the
purpose of my visit would be. When I explained my research project, their
investor relations person said, ‘‘Oh, I get it! You want the media tour, not the
investor tour!’’ thereby letting on that Celera’s pr apparatus is so evolved as to
be compartmentalized into ‘‘media’’ and ‘‘investor’’ components.
Incyte Genomics, based in Palo Alto (unlike Millennium and Celera, which
are both East Coast companies), was in contrast by far the most open of the
three major genome companies, and I received a wonderful and extremely
informative tour of their premises. In addition, Incyte executives that I have
met have always been willing to spend lots of time talking to me, suggesting
that cultures of openness and secrecy are established at the top and permeate to
become normative corporate behavior—‘‘corporate culture,’’ if you will. This
di√erence might to a certain extent simply reflect a more laid-back, informal,
and friendly West Coast attitude compared to the hard-nosed formality of the
East Coast. Having said this, when I pressed Incyte with a request for doing
longer-term ethnographic research there, I was asked to send a research pro-
posal so that it could be vetted by Incyte’s team of sixty lawyers (in a company
whose strength at the time was seven hundred). Needless to say, I never saw
my proposal again or heard back from Incyte.
It is, of course, much easier to negotiate with a company that has twenty
people as opposed to one that has sixty lawyers, since in the former case the
ceo often has a definitive say in deciding on issues such as access to a traveling
ethnographer. This makes me no less grateful to the people at GeneEd, the
company whose story I tell in this chapter, for the time and information they
gave me. Before meeting with them, however, I had engaged in lengthy nego-
tiations with another Bay Area start-up called Neomorphic. I met with a
number of people in their management team, all of whom were intrigued, if
cautious, regarding my proposal, but was finally denied access when Neo-
morphic got bought up by A√ymetrix, making it overnight part of a company
of 750 from being a whole one of 25.
Indian corporations, while keen to protect their confidential information,
do not adopt their American counterparts’ attitude of extreme defensive-
ness. Getting formal approval to conduct research at cbt nonetheless proved
fraught, this time not because of the concerns of the defensive American
corporation but because of the concerns of the defensive Indian state, as made
operational by its bureaucracy.
S. K. Brahmachari, the director of cbt, was open to my doing ethnographic
research there. My presence was also accepted by the director general of the
csir, Ramesh Mashelkar, who was the ultimate authority to sanction my
access. And yet doing the paperwork to actually get access at cbt was an
intricate and frustrating maneuver that highlights the bureaucratic contexts in
which Indian institutions work; the security concerns of the Indian state; and

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 235

a whole local political economy of red tape that is of some importance to grasp
if one is to adequately understand India’s path to globalization in ethno-
graphically informed ways.
The formal paperwork at cbt had to be negotiated with the person in
charge of their Business Development and Marketing Group, a man called
Pawan Gupta.∞ I had initiated correspondence with Brahmachari more than
two months before I was due to start my fieldwork at cbt, because he had
warned me that it would take time to get all the clearances, especially from
the Ministry of External A√airs (mea), since I qualified as a ‘‘foreigner’’ on ac-
count of my American institutional a≈liation. I had been assured by Brah-
machari the week before reaching India that all the clearances had been ob-
tained. Here was Gupta, however, who was clearly ignorant of any of these
happenings and decided to go about reinventing the wheel.
Gupta started o√ by saying that I needed to get both mea clearance and
security clearance. I told him that Brahmachari had already obtained these.
Gupta said, How can Brahmachari obtain these on his own, he has to go
through proper channels (which meant Gupta). So I was told that I could not
start tape-recording conversations until Gupta himself had sorted out clear-
ance issues, and he suggested that until then I just have ‘‘broad’’ conversations
with various people so that I could decide whom I wanted to formally inter-
view later. I told him that I had by then had ‘‘broad’’ conversations with people
three times over (since I had made earlier shorter visits to cbt, when I talked
to a number of people there o√-tape. Also, Brahmachari had arranged that
I give a talk to the entire institute explaining my work and what I wished
to achieve). Further, I had already drawn up a list of people I wanted to
interview, and Brahmachari had formally approved that list. None of this, of
course, was good enough for Gupta, who kept talking about security consider-
ations, and about how he would be in trouble if I turned out to be a Pakistani
spy. Gupta then telephoned someone in Ramesh Mashelkar’s o≈ce to consult
with him. This other person made it clear that I would have to get all the
clearances and that getting them would take a lot of time.
Gupta then started looking over a nondisclosure agreement I had drafted,
and ruminated over the document for twenty minutes. As a part of any eth-
nographic agreement that I draw up with my informants, I tell them that they

236 Articulations
will get transcripts of on-tape interviews for review, in order to address pro-
prietary concerns. Gupta said that getting transcripts for review was all very
well, but there might be written notes that I took that would not include what
was in the tapes, and that cbt would like to see those too. I made it clear that
showing him written notes was impossible, and a clear violation of my pro-
fessional ethics, but that I would be willing to provide cbt with a written
synopsis of what I had observed at the end of my time there.
Gupta then had an assistant draw up a list of people I could talk to, even
though Brahmachari had already formally approved the list that I had come up
with. Needless to say, Gupta’s list was much more selective than mine. Gupta
then asked his assistant to e-mail the people on the list he had made, to sound
them out about the questions I was likely to ask, and to ensure that they gave
‘‘proper’’ answers.
I spent the next morning in continued negotiations with Gupta, who was
suddenly much friendlier, since he had spoken to Brahmachari and realized
that, as I had been insisting, all the paperwork had indeed been done. How-
ever, friendly, it was evident from the outset, did not mean productive. Gupta
had wanted me to e-mail him a copy of the agreement that I had drafted, since
he did not want to retype it all. This I had done the previous day, but he still
had not received it. I told him that I would e-mail it again from the Centre, but
I could not follow through because the servers at the Centre were down all
day. No more progress.
The following day, I did manage to get the agreement e-mailed to Gupta,
but by the end of the week I found that he had still not signed it, because he
was not the person vested with the authority to do so. The only person who
can sign agreements of this sort in a public institution like cbt is their admin-
istrative o≈cer, and cbt did not have one. A new one was supposed to join the
following week, which ended up delaying the whole process by another week.
Once the new ao did join, Gupta insisted that it would only be fair to give him
a few days to review my proposal before being asked to sign it.
Finally, two weeks after starting at cbt, I got the agreement signed. This,
however, was no simple feat, but rather a protracted ritual. Gupta outlined the
projected modus operandi for me to follow, since as far as he was concerned
the moment of signing the agreement was the time when I actually started my

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 237

research at cbt. This modus operandi involved my having to report every
move to Gupta’s assistant, so that Gupta could constantly monitor who I
talked to, and when. The agreement itself had to be signed on judicial stamp
paper, because plain paper agreements in India are not legally valid.
Gupta and I then went up to see the new ao, a rather pleasant man called
Ramanathan.≤ But that did not make him any less bureaucratic. While Rama-
nathan was not trying to obstruct the signing any further, it was clear that he
was quite perplexed by this agreement, and it was clearly not the sort of thing
he was used to encountering. More than anything else, it was evident that he
wanted to cover his back in case anything went wrong, and kept saying that
people should not later put him on the spot and ask him questions if anything
went wrong. Therefore he wanted me to pass on to him not just the transcript
but also the actual physical audiotape after recording, which seemed to me a
bit excessive.
Ramanathan had meanwhile ordered tea for all of us from the canteen. The
waiter from the canteen brought tea in plastic Nescafe cups, and Gupta threw
a fit at him. He said that the canteen had no business sending tea in plastic cups
to the room of an o≈cer such as the ao, and insisted that the canteen manager
be summoned. He then ticked o√ the canteen manager for his impropriety, in
public, and threatened to fire him if proper deference was not shown to the
o≈cers in the future (deference here meant that tea should always be served in
the ancient, chipped bone china cups that one gets in government o≈ces,
rather than in plastic cups).
Gupta then decided that he would continue to make things hard for me, so
after all these conversations, and in spite of the fact that Ramanathan had had
two days to read my proposal and all the paperwork, he insisted that I once
again describe my project to them. Fortunately, Ramanathan was as keen to
end the conversation as I was, and just wanted to go ahead with the signing.
The actual signing itself was quite a ritual, since each person’s signature had to
be countersigned by a separate witness. This meant quite a congregation for
tea in Ramanathan’s room. But the job was finally done, and I was finally ready
to o≈cially roll.
I mention these stories to point to the situations that ethnographers have to
face when access is not just a question of personal intrusion into lived individ-

238 Articulations
ual or community lives but a question of access to information, which is always
already overdetermined as something that can be commodified, that is valu-
able and sensitive, whether by corporations or by the state. While at some level
Gupta was acting di≈cult, at another he was merely playing an institutional
role that in all likelihood would have been played out in similar ways (though
perhaps in less antagonistic fashion) by others in his position. Having said
this, though, I will point out that the level of petty bureaucracy that prevails at
cbt is a function both of its institutional culture and of its location in Delhi,
notoriously the most bureaucratic city in India.≥ As also seen with the di√erent
cultures of openness and secrecy between West Coast and East Coast biotech
companies in the United States, it is evident that place matters, leading to
di√erences even within entrenched and institutionalized normative behavior.

Grounds, Arguments, and Sites

Many of the defining di√erences between biotech and pharmaceutical com-
panies are a consequence of the di√erences between companies that are oper-
ated, or have operated for a significant portion of their history, in ‘‘start-up’’
mode—often (though not always) venture capital financed, high risk, small,
innovative, and managerially supple—and those that have the capital reserves
and organizational depth of an established corporation. Meanwhile, as India
moves to a ‘‘culture of innovation’’ that explicitly attempts to imitate the
Silicon Valley model, start-up dynamics, especially as they exist and play out in
Silicon Valley, become central.
In this chapter I trace some of these dynamics, and the political economic
terrains faced by start-ups, by telling the story of a start-up that is in some ways
emblematic, and in other ways atypical, of the ‘‘romantic’’ start-up narrative.∂
GeneEd is an e-learning start-up in San Francisco, cofounded by two Indians,
that sells life science courses to biotech and pharmaceutical companies. There-
fore GeneEd’s story is also a story of nonresident Indian entrepreneurs in
Silicon Valley and provides a situated perspective on the drug development
marketplace as seen from the vantage point of a company that sells to both
upstream biotech and downstream big pharmaceutical companies.
In the process I hope, once again, to show biocapital, relentlessly, as emer-
gent processes. The perspectives that I provide in this chapter are very much sit-

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 239

uated perspectives. Situated perspectives serve a political function, as Donna
Haraway has forcefully argued (Haraway 1991). In anthropology even more
so, and the importance of reflexively situating the perspective that one is
writing from and about (which may or may not be the same thing) is in-
creasingly obvious. This is accentuated by the fact that in this book I choose to
investigate the systems of techno-capitalism from the inside: trying to get into
the belly of the corporate beast that I have politically often thought about in
adversarial terms. The ethnographic challenge here is to be able to narrate my
multiple (usually corporate) subjects’ perspectives with respect and under-
standing without abandoning the right, or the ability, to be critical.
GeneEd is an e-learning company. E-learning is a mode of online course
preparation and a substantial industry in its own right. The company was
incorporated in 1997, though it really only started operating as a full-fledged
company in early 2000. It sells online courses relating to the life sciences to
biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
E-learning in the life sciences is a small but growing market niche, but many
companies sell courses to physicians to educate them about emergent life
sciences or therapies, while others educate lay consumers. GeneEd is relatively
unique in (for now) exclusively targeting biotech and pharmaceutical com-
panies as its customers. This means that GeneEd has a particularly invested,
and well situated, perspective on the upstream-downstream terrain of drug
development, a terrain that has had significant consequences for GeneEd’s
own development as a company.
GeneEd provides situated perspectives not only on the drug development
marketplace but also on Silicon Valley, on entrepreneurship, and on trajec-
tories of the Indian diaspora. A start-up is an emergent form of life in both
senses of the term: it is both an emergent entity and an emergent sociality of
action.∑ The question of corporate identity—what, or who, or who all, con-
stitute(s) a corporation—troubles me throughout this book. A start-up al-
lows some insights into a definition. Start-ups, literally, are emergent entities:
every day that they survive is a triumph, often against great odds; their days are
numbered, quite literally, by the amount of cash they have left in the bank.
GeneEd develops two types of courses. The first are catalog courses, which
are textbook courses developed on specific topics such as bioinformatics,
microarray technology, or cardiovascular diseases. The second are custom

240 Articulations
courses, which are specifically tailored for particular customer needs. Initially,
many of the custom courses were tailored catalog courses that could be ac-
cessed on customers’ Web sites. For example, an important early client for
GeneEd was Celera Genomics, whose Web site had a genomics tutorial that
was created by GeneEd. This was, in e√ect, GeneEd’s own catalog course on
genomics, tweaked to highlight Celera’s achievements. Increasingly, however,
customers requested custom courses for in-house use. As GeneEd’s clients
shifted from being small biotech to big pharmaceutical companies, a major
example of such in-house use was sales force training regarding the company’s
products or technologies, which is an essential and otherwise relatively labor
intensive activity for pharmaceutical companies. Not surprisingly, as GeneEd
consolidated itself as a well-known name in the life sciences e-learning indus-
try, it started to depend increasingly on custom rather than catalog courses for
the bulk of its revenue. But it must be remembered that GeneEd was not
entering a marketplace with a product that its potential customers already
knew they needed. Rather, GeneEd had to convince their customers of the
value of e-learning as much as they had to convince them of the qualities of
their particular e-learning packages.
In this chapter, I wish to highlight some of the themes explored in this
book, through stories of a particular corporate site, rather than ‘‘theorize’’
them. While GeneEd is not o√ered as a compendium of these themes, it
nonetheless o√ers a fascinating, situated vantage point on a number of issues
and terrains I am concerned with.
Most central to this chapter is the question of entrepreneurship and starting
up companies. This is important at two levels. First, the biotech industry is
itself a ‘‘start-up’’ industry, both because of its relatively recent history and
because most biotech companies do follow the classic high-tech start-up trajec-
tory of an academic professor developing a technology in a university, raising
venture capital funds, and starting his or her own company. Biotech famously
operates in a start-up culture, as recounted by Cynthia Robbins-Roth in her
accounts of Genentech (Robbins-Roth 2000), Paul Rabinow in his account of
Cetus (Rabinow 1997), and Barry Werth in his account of Vertex Pharmaceu-
ticals (Werth 1994).∏ Second, a start-up culture, especially a Silicon Valley
start-up culture, is precisely the culture that Indian companies and public labs
are trying to incorporate in their own functioning. Entrepreneurship, then, is

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 241

both a cultural form and a form of subjectivity, and it is this relationship
between the two that I am trying to trace here.
The principle of entrepreneurship is that there is a tried and tested formula
for starting companies, and it is this formula that is taught, for instance, in
management courses relating to starting up new (especially high-tech) com-
panies.π And yet, not surprisingly, actual stories of start-up companies are as
varied as the companies themselves, a lesson that is equally strongly communi-
cated in management pedagogy. This is the incongruence of ‘‘theoretically’’
learning how to start companies—on the one hand, there is the ‘‘correct’’
approach that is enshrined by authors such as Sahlman, while on the other
there is the case study approach, emphasized by most mba programs, which
highlights the actual variations in start-up stories.
One sees a similar sort of incongruence as India attempts to incorporate
a start-up culture into its technoscientific establishment—on the one hand,
there is the American formula, Silicon Valley; on the other, the radical in-
congruence of actually starting up such a culture on the ground, a process full
of particularities. In this sense, GeneEd is a typical start-up only by virtue of its
being atypical. Through the stories I narrate, it is clear that however much the
company may claim to subscribe to ‘‘tried and tested’’ formulas or buck them,
there is always a pressure to do things according to the pedagogical norm, just
as actual events invariably pan out otherwise. The best example of this is
GeneEd’s constant, and so far unsuccessful, attempts to raise venture capital
money—something that the company’s ceo, Sunil Maulik, is extremely am-
bivalent about, at least partly because it will lead to his having to relinquish
considerable hold over the company, but something that he constantly at-
tempts to do nonetheless. In the context of GeneEd’s being a typically atypical
start-up, I tell a number of stories that all emphasize the particularities of
GeneEd’s own historical emergence while nonetheless showing how these
emergences occur in the shadow of, and are shaped by, capitalist logics that are
themselves at stake through emergent corporate entities.

Beginnings
GeneEd was conceived in the early 1990s, to the extent that even before the
existence of the World Wide Web, one of the company’s founders, Sunil Mau-

242 Articulations
lik, conceived of the possibilities of using the computer to teach science. Born
in Bombay, Maulik grew up in England, where he studied biology before
moving to Brandeis University for a Ph.D. After his degree, he moved in
the late 1980s to Silicon Valley to join a company called Intelligenetics. In-
telligenetics was a ‘‘bioinformatics’’ company before bioinformatics existed.
Maulik’s contemporaries at Brandeis thought he was crazy. It was still rela-
tively unusual to leave academics to do research in a company at that time; but
more than that, who would ever do biology in a company that only had
computers? From Intelligenetics, Maulik moved through a series of other
companies before ending up at Pangea Systems (which subsequently became
Doubletwist before going out of business).
It was during this time that Maulik met Salil Patel. Of Indian descent, Patel
spent his early childhood in Uganda before his family became one of the many
Ugandan Indian refugee families who moved to England because of their
persecution at the hands of Idi Amin. In England, Patel grew up with many
other refugee families in Greenham Common, the site of a U.S. Air Force base
made famous by antinuclear demonstrators during the 1980s. Patel did a
Ph.D. at Stanford and a postdoc at Caltech before joining a biotech firm to do
research on angiogenesis in order to develop gene therapy.
In his spare time, Maulik used to teach seminars on bioinformatics, often
at evening colleges and university extension schools, and once they became
friends, Patel would occasionally stand in for him. They both shared and
developed together a love for teaching, which blossomed in Maulik’s mind
into a corporate opportunity. Bioinformatics was just becoming big; it would
be the future. Why not start a company to teach bioinformatics? And why not
teach it on the Web, in order to reach a really wide audience?
It was easy for Maulik to think of leaving a job to start his own company. He
typified the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Divorced, he did have a child to
support, but not a traditional nuclear family structure to seriously distract him
from the manic commitment and risk that any entrepreneurial activity entails.
In any case, Maulik, again fitting the Silicon Valley stereotype made famous by
Jim Clark (the founder of Netscape), was someone who dared to think dif-
ferently. Maulik is extroverted and fun loving, and he enjoys talking about his
ideas for a company—precisely the sort of person that financial communities

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 243

in any other place and at any other time in history would immediately have run
away from. In Silicon Valley, he was perfect ceo material.
It was a lot harder for Patel to leave his job and jump into the world of
entrepreneurial unknowns. In addition to the commitments of marriage, he
had grown up being a scientist: relatively shy, passionately committed to his
research, and not, in his own mind, at all an entrepreneur. Only his friendship
with Maulik and his love of teaching made Patel even seriously consider jump-
ing ship. GeneEd, therefore, was founded and incorporated as far back as
1997, but the company really remained in a state of limbo for the next couple
of years as Maulik and Patel balanced their new company with their exist-
ing jobs. During this time, in Maulik’s terms, GeneEd lacked the ‘‘activation
energy’’ to function as a real company doing real business on its own.
Starting a company often requires some form of crisis to make the risk
worthwhile. For Patel, it was a progressive disenchantment with his current
employer, a disenchantment that really stemmed from the type of scientist that
he is. Patel has a firm belief in science—in the truths it provides, and in the
ways it must be performed—that harkens back to an era of positivism and
loyally reflects Merton’s norms of science, an ethos that seems strangely out of
place in today’s postmodern venture science environment that thrives on the
ability to be cynical. Patel’s almost myopic principle that science is about the
quest for truth encountered considerable friction from the everyday activities
of an aggressive biotech company.
Patel, in any case, was not terribly happy with the way his former company
was managed, an unhappiness that clearly proved to be a learning experience
as he moved on to become a manager of a company himself. He was involved
in gene therapy work that was constructed as the company’s flagship project,
and yet he was given meager resources and only four researchers under him.
After a year of working on his project, his team reported generally negative
results, which he took to the management, advising them to drop the project
altogether. The next day, the company put out a press release announcing the
stunning advances they had made toward gene therapy, using as examples the
sorts of seriously troubled projects such as Patel’s that the company was actu-
ally pursuing (or considering not pursuing). This public relations stunt got
them the desired publicity and allowed their stock prices to shoot through the

244 Articulations
roof at a time when stock markets were highly responsive to the slightest hint
of promise. In Patel’s belief system, however, this piece of what in many circles
might be admired as clever marketing was nothing other than scientific fraud.
His disenchantment, increasingly, was not just with the way the company was
being managed but with the form of life that the company stood for. Maulik’s
entreaties to join him were looking more and more attractive. What finally
gave Patel the courage to make the jump was the support of his wife Tejal, who
insisted that he should do what gave him satisfaction, rather than simply what
brought home the proverbial bacon.
Maulik, meanwhile, was running the idea of GeneEd by John Couch, the
ceo of Pangea, where Maulik was at that point in charge of business develop-
ment, and was generally getting Couch’s blessings. As far as Couch was con-
cerned, anyone who could go out and educate other biotech and pharmaceuti-
cal executives about bioinformatics was in e√ect creating informed customers
for companies like Pangea. By December 22, 1999, the company incorporated
two years previously had slowly gathered enough momentum to appear ready
to go on the road. Maulik had been promised money by venture capitalists and
had made eight job o√ers. On that day, he threw a party for the new employees
to celebrate the ‘‘beginning’’ of GeneEd.
The real beginning, according to both Maulik and Patel, happened neither
when GeneEd was incorporated, nor when they made these initial hires, but
on the day after the party, December 23, when Maulik, in the midst of a
hangover, was informed by the venture capitalists who had promised him
funding that they had decided not to give it to him after all. This was the crisis
that provided Maulik with the activation energy to really get GeneEd started,
as he was faced with no money and eight employees as a single parent who had
maxed out four credit cards. The option remained to return to Pangea and
resume his job there, but the withdrawal of the vcs’ commitment made Mau-
lik determined, more than ever, to convert what he was by now convinced was
a very good idea into reality.
Over the next few weeks, Maulik went into money-raising frenzy. He called
up a couple of his friends who had struck gold in the [Link] boom and were
toying with the idea of doing some angel investing.∫ His friends asked him if
he needed money in the next few months. No, said Maulik, he needed it in the

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 245

next few days. Meanwhile, Maulik was on the road trying to sell what GeneEd
had to o√er in terms of products, and was receiving expressions of inter-
est from biotech companies like Celera Genomics. Maulik also approached
Celera’s Silicon Valley rival Incyte, not just as a customer but as an investor.
Like John Couch at Pangea, the management at Incyte was enamored with the
idea of a company that would e√ectively be educating the industry about
products it made and services it o√ered, and agreed to invest $500,000 in
GeneEd.
One Saturday morning when Maulik was spending time with his mother,
he received a call from a friend saying that he should make a pitch to Ernest
Mario, ceo of Alza Corporation, a Silicon Valley biotech company (since
bought by Johnson and Johnson) that made improved drug delivery sys-
tems. Getting an appointment with Mario for that very afternoon, Maulik
drove unshaven to Alza’s headquarters. He strolled through Alza’s spacious,
fountain-bedecked grounds into Mario’s huge executive suite and talked him
into investing another $500,000 in GeneEd. Within the next few weeks, Mau-
lik, who had really been looking for about $500,000 in total to get his company
going, had $2.25 million, and not a cent of it venture capital money. His failure
to obtain venture capital funding has had serious long-term consequences for
GeneEd’s corporate culture, allowing it to be molded by the personalities of
the management and employees, but also making it acutely dependent on
constant sales in order to stay afloat: the sort of desperate fiscal discipline and
pressure to produce, innovate, and sell that most [Link] companies, flush
with millions of dollars of venture capital money, never had to deal with. I will
have more to say about some of these pressures, and the culture they have
given birth to. For the time being, however, GeneEd had emerged.
As mentioned earlier, GeneEd sells its courses to both small biotech and
large pharmaceutical companies. It is therefore extremely invested in the drug
development marketplace, which is the space that I am trying to elucidate.
GeneEd is not a neutral site: no situated observation site can be. By selling to
both small and large, biotech and pharmaceutical, upstream and downstream
companies, however, GeneEd’s worldview is more encompassing than those
of these companies themselves, who tend to view marketplaces and market
logics very much through a situated perspective that discursively constructs

246 Articulations
terrains and logics as only existing the way a given company sees things. One of
my arguments throughout this book is that capitalism draws its sustenance,
and encounters its resistance, from the multiple contradictions of the mar-
ketplace; for biocapital, many of those contradictions play out between bio-
tech and pharmaceutical companies. GeneEd is able to ‘‘see’’ those contradic-
tions in a more complete, though by no means less self-interested, manner
than many companies that are actually in the business of making drugs, be-
cause GeneEd’s business strategy depends on such a nuanced understanding
of the upstream-downstream terrain of drug development.
A start-up’s location is itself important to identify. Biotechnology is a form
of venture science. Genomics in particular, taking place as it is in the midst and
aftermath of the [Link] boom, has as central to its calculus entrepreneurs
and venture capitalists. GeneEd itself is not a company funded by venture
capital, though not for want of e√ort. It is nonetheless very much a company
at the heart of venture science.
The particular location of this company in geographical terms adds to its
interest. Being in San Francisco, GeneEd is a Silicon Valley company, and yet
not a Silicon Valley company. Location does count for start-ups, and being in
places like, especially, Silicon Valley enables the creation of networks and
contacts that are of prime importance in hiring the best workers and man-
agers, being in corridors of conversation with investors, and being able to
easily access customers and collaborators. It is much harder to be a start-up in
Kalamazoo, Michigan. GeneEd is very much a product both of its times and of
its place. And yet that place is not alongside a freeway in Palo Alto, Fremont,
Santa Clara, or San Jose but in a run-down part of San Francisco south of
Mission Street. Within two blocks’ walk, one can reach a rather trendy part of
San Francisco’s shopping district; an ornate Hispanic church; a community
kitchen where homeless people get fed; a cafe-cum-laundromat where one can
have lunch while washing one’s clothes; a bakery that sells X-rated cakes; and
a transvestite nightclub. GeneEd initially shared its o≈ce building with a
company that manufactured jeans.Ω Many of GeneEd’s employees, including
Maulik, live or have lived in the Mission district and share in the general
community concerns over the progressive corporatization of their locality.
That GeneEd is a part of that corporatization is an irony that is acutely

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 247

felt within the company. GeneEd’s Silicon Valley is not the Silicon Valley of
strip malls and suburban villas that most northern Californian biotech com-
panies inhabit, or even that other sought-after biotech locality made famous
by Genentech, South San Francisco (which calls itself ‘‘the Industrial City’’).
Maulik and Patel are both of Indian descent, both grew up in Britain, and
have both lived in Silicon Valley for over a decade. There are stories of friend-
ship and of hybrid backgrounds in their biographies. As is the case with many
start-ups, the founders’ biographies leave a significant mark on the culture,
identity, and even (perhaps unwittingly) corporate strategy of the company
they create. The Indian entrepreneurial community in Silicon Valley is one of
the central links in this book between the drug development worlds of India
and the United States. Maulik and Patel both belong to, and yet by virtue of
their British upbringing are distinct from, that community.
In terms of being a site of knowledge production, GeneEd is an inter-
disciplinary space that reflects the centrality of interdisciplinary border cross-
ings in the scientific-corporate worlds that I am studying. GeneEd’s courses
are physically designed by a team of graphic designers (who mostly have no
advanced training in the life sciences and so pick up their biology on the job);
their computers are maintained by programmers, and content is provided by
Maulik and (mainly) Patel, who are both biologists. Indeed, my own func-
tion, in exchange for the access I was given, was to deliver a weekly seminar on
the history of biology to the entire company in order to get the employees
aware of, and talking about, issues in the life sciences. These seminars proved
to be fascinating ethnographic moments for me.

Access
I first met Sunil Maulik at one of the many receptions that define industrial
genome conferences, in September 2000. After an engrossing initial conversa-
tion, I met him again on a trip to the Bay Area in November of that year, when
he was in the midst of dealing with a company that wanted GeneEd to design a
bioethics course for them. By this time, I had broached to Maulik the idea that
I might do fieldwork at GeneEd. Maulik was open to the idea and arranged for
me to give a talk at GeneEd as a way of introducing myself to the other people
in the company to see how they felt.

248 Articulations
 In my talk, I provided a quick overview of science studies and cultural
anthropology, how the two came together, how they met in my work, and
how I expected GeneEd to fit into it. I actually thought I would have to do a
lot of explaining about the last part, as GeneEd is not a genomics company,
and I expected them to be preoccupied with the question of how they would
fit into a contemporary (which generally gets understood as linear) history of
genomics. On the contrary, they seemed to assume that GeneEd would quite
obviously fit into a story such as mine, and in fact picked up on a lot of the
history I was giving to ask me questions, something I had not really expected.
I received many questions and comments on my summaries of science stud-
ies literature. For instance, they really took on Bruno Latour and actor-
network theory, and Salil Patel in particular really wanted me to explain how
actants work (being quite readily convinced at the outset that science is basically
a recruiting exercise!).∞≠ Maulik meanwhile wanted to know what I thought
scientists’ motivations were, since scientists constituted GeneEd’s consumers,
and thus the company really needed to understand what drove them. In other
words, I was already being co-opted into GeneEd’s interdisciplinary enterprise
as a marketer.
After the talk, the employees went around the table introducing themselves,
and then Maulik stood up and started what he called a ‘‘values and visions’’
session. Apparently the management (which at that point consisted of Mau-
lik, Patel, Paul Eisele [the chief operating o≈cer, a much more senior man
who was steeped in years of sales and marketing experience in the enter-
tainment industry], and Barry Giordano, the vice president of sales) had sat
down together and tried to come up with a series of core values for the
company. This was an acknowledgment and a reflection of the fact that the
relationships between their primary markets (executives of other biotech and
pharmaceutical companies) and their secondary and tertiary markets (which
really could be anyone, including other biotech and pharmaceutical com-
panies, but also lay consumers as the company made its courses more acces-
sible to laypeople) were so complex. Maulik started by talking about an article
in the New York Times (January 31, 2001) on direct-to-consumer advertising to
parents of children with respiratory syncytial virus (rsv), put out by the
biotechnology company MedImmune, in order to highlight GeneEd’s com-

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 249

plicit and complicated relationship with the marketplace that the company is
so invested in.
Even though GeneEd itself is in no way involved in direct-to-consumer
advertising,∞∞ issues like these point to situations that directly confront it as
‘‘value’’ questions, in both senses of the word. This is because GeneEd is
caught in a peculiar dialectic between being an education company and an
advertising company. In the former role, it creates its own, supposedly ‘‘neu-
tral,’’ education packages: neutral in the way a textbook would be neutral,
drawing on generally known scientific literature to create the packages. But
much of GeneEd’s immediate revenue comes from doing contract work for
other companies. In these cases, GeneEd does not provide the content, only
the form. Therefore situations such as the MedImmune advertisements imme-
diately highlight the need to question and critique what is meant by ‘‘public
education.’’ Further, these are not hypothetical situations: GeneEd had already
developed an antibodies course and had already been approached by one of
MedImmune’s competitors to develop courses that they could use.
So Maulik talked about GeneEd’s values. There is a tension in that word
itself which reflects the tensions in GeneEd’s complex relationships with its
primary and secondary or tertiary markets. These values, as mentioned earlier,
were initially outlined by the company’s four executives, and Maulik was now
opening them up for discussion by everyone else. Eisele summarized some of
the ‘‘internal’’ values by saying that basically GeneEd wanted to be a company
that allowed its employees to ‘‘have a life.’’ One of the younger workers men-
tioned the need for the company to have an ethic, to have ‘‘unbiased opinions’’
on ethical issues. Patel immediately scorned the possibility of such a thing as
‘‘unbiased opinion’’ and said instead that they needed to have at their disposal
‘‘enough information to make up our own minds.’’ Maulik now introduced
the central tension for the company, that half of their courses are customized
for companies. The question then becomes what to do when the company has
ethical conflicts. The question, as Maulik posed it, was ‘‘Should it be the
company’s business to walk away from business?’’
A graphic designer immediately translated the hypothetical company with
which GeneEd might have ethical conflicts into an ‘‘evil company,’’ and
then immediately into the hypothetical case that Monsanto might approach

250 Articulations
GeneEd for business.∞≤ She said that companies like Monsanto, whether re-
garded as ‘‘evil’’ or not, should be allowed to say (through the medium of
GeneEd) whatever they wanted to. She did not think it was unethical to work
with a company whose business plans or projects were controversial. Her
argument was for a company’s free speech.
Eisele, however, said that GeneEd’s walking away from a company did not
deny that company its free speech. A visiting bioinformatic programmer said
that it was important for a company like GeneEd to maintain its credibility.
Patel said that in fact one of the first suggestions making the rounds among the
executives was to prepare courses on genetically modified foods, but that he
was personally disinclined because it was such a polarized issue, and GeneEd
did not want to get caught in the middle. Maulik then asked the central
question: Is it GeneEd’s role to rule on the content? Do we want to be a cen-
sor? Patel admitted that GeneEd had already developed a number of custom
courses in which the content was not a hundred percent honest, or was some-
how misleading. Eisele argued that in these cases GeneEd was the messenger
and not the message. Again, therefore, the central question being contended
with here was: Is GeneEd an education company or an advertising company?
Maulik arrived at the in many ways happy (albeit easy?) compromise that
‘‘if we get lots of money from pharmaceutical companies, we can redistribute
it.’’ He then suggested that 5 percent of GeneEd’s time and resources would be
used to contribute to nonprofit sources. He also, in that vein, mentioned the
possibility of being involved in technology transfer to developing countries,
and of course all sorts of possibilities exist for a company like GeneEd in a
place like India.
So that was the conclusion of the values and visions session. Maulik then
took me aback by asking everyone publicly and in front of me what they
wanted to do with me, whether I should be invited back for a longer-term
interaction. I suggested that this might be a conversation better had in my
absence. One designer said she would be happy to have me back if it meant
free lunch again. Generally, everyone seemed receptive, though it was sug-
gested that they eventually decide through secret ballot. But Maulik was very
upfront about the fact that he certainly wanted me back, and was equally
upfront about the fact that it was his ego prompting him to be written about as

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 251

much as anything else. On the other hand, both he and I realized that I might
be valuable to him precisely because his consumer base is potentially anyone,
and he knew that I might give him access to consumers such as patient groups,
social scientists, and other scientist-businesspeople, and that I might also be
invaluable in helping him think through ways of moving into India. This was
always already a complicit ethnographic relationship.∞≥
What remained at GeneEd, then, was negotiating the terms of access, espe-
cially as they related to confidentiality. After two weeks of negotiation, we
finally agreed on a fourteen-point, legally binding nondisclosure agreement,
modified from one of their standard templates to fit an academic ethnography.
It required me to respect GeneEd’s confidential information but allowed me
to write or speak about their nonproprietary information for academic pur-
poses. On the strength of this contract, I was given full access to the company,
including their weekly management operations meetings and their company
financial documents.

Labor
There are two ‘‘labor’’ stories that I recount about GeneEd. The first has to do
with the management structure of the company, which, when I first spent time
there in 2001, had only one woman in the management team. The second has
to do with the graphic designers who design GeneEd’s e-learning courses, the
‘‘workers’’ of the company.
The management team of GeneEd in mid-2001 was pretty much its found-
ing management team. Its cofounders, Sunil Maulik and Salil Patel, were the
chief executive o≈cer and chief scientific o≈cer respectively. Paul Eisele, a
more senior man with years of experience in the entertainment industry, was
the chief operating o≈cer; and Barry Giordano, an old friend and past boss of
Maulik’s, was both an investor in the company and its vice president of sales.
Directly reporting to Patel was Cynthia Kilroy, who had joined a few months
after GeneEd started operations. She was in charge of product development.
While Patel’s job was to actually develop course content, Kilroy’s job was to
coordinate the development of that content into a visual, online e-learning
course by the graphic designers, in consultation with the client if the course in
question was a custom course. Kilroy had started her career as a software

252 Articulations
developer, went on to manage projects for health care organizations, and then
spent five years doing consulting at Arthur Andersen.
Being a project manager at GeneEd in 2001, of course, was very di√erent
from consulting in one of the ‘‘big six’’ firms, because one of the defining
features of working in a start-up is that it is impossible to rigidly enforce a strict
division of labor: it is often essential for everyone in the company to multitask.
In these early days of GeneEd, therefore, Kilroy saw herself as a ‘‘chameleon,’’
doing whatever needed to be done on a particular day: a job description that
fitted most of the GeneEd employees, from Maulik downward.∞∂
The fact that Kilroy was the only woman on the management team, of
course, was quite significant for her work situation at GeneEd. Most di≈cult
for her at the time was her relationship with the two salespeople, Giordano
and Mark Greenbaum, who were both experienced at sales and felt that Kilroy
needed to prove herself. Of course, there was a certain amount of territoriality
involved, in the very way GeneEd sold its product. GeneEd constantly made
‘‘sales and science’’ pitches. Their idea was that one of the salespeople would
always be accompanied by either Maulik, Patel, or Kilroy, first of all to lend a
certain gravitas to the impression they conveyed, as a ‘‘serious,’’ ‘‘scientifically
oriented’’ company, and also because their products were technically quite
complicated, making it useful to have someone who was involved in a prod-
uct’s development there to explain it. Following up with the client also in-
volved a delicate division of labor. The product developers interacted with the
client to ensure that the courses (especially if they were customized) were
developed to the client’s satisfaction, while the salespeople had to stay atten-
tive to closing the deal and to opening up other possible deals with the same
client (as well as with others). The potential for one group of people stepping
on the other’s toes was significant, especially as issues of seniority, experience,
and gender were superimposed.
Kilroy was extremely attentive to the gender dynamics in her interaction
with the sales force, as she said:

This is the first place I have ever worked where Salil and Sunil came to me and said,
We don’t like the way X is treating you and we’re going to take care of it. I don’t
want it to sound the way it’s going to, but it’s probably because I’m the only
woman on the management team and I think some of the sales guys probably get

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 253

 away with things and treat me like crap, and I just have no respect for that. . . . And
I think I played into some of that because I let those guys fight for me. I’m pretty
outspoken and stu√ but I can go nervous and sit at the back, and when I get more
nervous, I get more spelling mistakes in my e-mail and I wasn’t taking the time and
then they didn’t have the respect.∞∑

Nonetheless there was no doubt in Kilroy’s mind that a start-up still pro-
vided a more egalitarian system than what normally prevails in big companies
in the American corporate world:

Like I said, I come from a huge consulting house that was very male-dominated. It
was plain they strategically picked all women to interview me and had a partner
that I was reporting to that was a woman. The problem is that for me when I look
back now, while I had made the decision to go there because there were a lot of
women, it’s definitely still an old-school, old-boys’ network.

Kilroy’s opinions are hardly atypical, and they have recently become the
sorts of opinions that have been the center of conversation in corporate Amer-
ica, consequent to the publication of the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s 2002
survey Creating a Life, which argues for the incompatibility, for women, of
having a high-powered corporate career with having a family. Kilroy’s own
way of dealing with this situation is to

just prove myself and simply claim I’ve been smart enough that I’ve always wound
up being able to do a good job. And then sometimes there is an opportunity, where
you’re kind of joking around the table and you can make a joke of what people
know, that you know what they are about and then hopefully then they will look at
their behavior and then realize.∞∏

Of course, as a manager, Kilroy had herself to be sensitive to people-

management issues, especially since she, more than anyone else, formed a
direct bridge between the management and the designers who designed the
courses. And here too the situation at GeneEd underwent a change as the
company’s clientele changed.
GeneEd started o√ primarily o√ering online e-learning courses on various
life-science-related topics to people in the industry. The company designed a
series of what were called catalog courses, which were basically generic text-

254 Articulations
book courses on a number of aspects of emergent life science, such as, for
instance, bioinformatics or microarray technology. GeneEd also designed cus-
tom courses. Initially, these courses were often animated presentations that
would go onto a company’s Web site, such as Celera’s genomics ‘‘tutorial,’’
which was designed to highlight Celera’s achievements. Predictably, custom
courses were proving to be better revenue earners than catalog courses, when
the target market was largely people who were in the industry already, and
GeneEd spent most of its time designing these customized courses. It was
Kilroy’s job to allocate responsibility for the courses to the designers and to
ensure their proper execution.
By mid-2001, it was clear that the designers were the indispensable labor
force for the company. Indeed, there was not a group of what could be called
‘‘workers’’ independent of them. All the content was provided almost single-
handedly by Patel, Kilroy’s job was to ensure follow-through on projects, two
salespeople handled the West Coast and East Coast respectively, one systems
administrator made sure the computers were working properly, Eisele ran the
nitty-gritty operational aspects of the company, an o≈ce manager assisted
with whatever tasks needed help, and Maulik went out and sold the company’s
vision to prospective investors and customers. It was the group of (at the
time) four designers who really executed the creation of the courses.
Kilroy felt that her job at the time was very much to be a mentor to the de-
sign team. Further, whole courses were allocated to specific designers, which
meant that each designer was able to imprint his or her own artistic style on
the course. Course allocation was a strategic exercise for Kilroy, as she tried to
match each designer’s artistic temperament to the requirements of the client.
This meant that there was lots of room for artistic creativity. For instance, one
of the graphic designers, Cyane Rollins, described her work, and the division
of labor, to me in the following terms in mid-2001.

cr: We have a project manager who keeps an eye on all of our schedules and an eye
on projects down the line and then she’ll allocate these projects to us and watch our
schedules and keep tabs on our progress. We as developers work under her and
work for Sunil, and because we’re so small, it’s not obviously very hierarchical. We
have me down here and Salil and Sunil up there, which is great because I have
plenty of room for feedback, and they listen to our feedback, which I think is great

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 255

 on their part. It’s great because I feel they listen to us and then make changes or
whatever or help us out, but also it’s good for them too because we have ideas.
They are sort of looking at the more business and marketing side and we are
looking at the more technological side—what’s out there, how can we improve,
what we’re doing, that sort of thing. So that we have this little ecology. That’s why
I think this is a little ecological system. And that’s pretty much the main thing—
there’s the management and then there’s the project manager and then there’s
developers and then there’s the hipaa Department and then Robin, and I think
that we’re also working side by side. . . .
We [developers] critique each other and rely on each other for feedback, but
when we get a project, we pretty much work on that from start to finish ourselves,
and it’s good because it’s good to know. . . . You know you’re beginning to know
this stu√ from the top, you’re beginning to learn, and we know how to do anima-
tion and how to load it, what flaws and bugs might happen. The downside of that
is that I know a lot about bioinformatics and drug design but I know nothing
about microarrays or the other courses that other developers are doing and it takes
a while to learn those courses. So that’s one downside, and I don’t know, I mean, it
seems like . . . we’re all seeing, I think in the future we’ll see our goal because we all
have di√erent strengths, which is great. . . . You know like Jill has her 3-D model-
ing, and Jerry and Jill are very into the action scripting, and Tara has traditional
animation which she brings to the table, and I have the educational background
and then I have video stu√, so that’s something that I could use. So we all have the
di√erent things that we’re interested in and we can bring them together to the
table. And between us . . . maybe it’ll be in the future that, I don’t know . . . I’m
thinking that it could be really cool if one of us becomes a real expert in one area,
and then we start dividing up in that way.
But right now it’s working perfectly well the way we have it.
ks: So do you see a more defined sense of rules and responsibilities since you have
joined?
cr: I think it’s very defined now. I think it is very defined now.∞π

In other words, even in 2001, a year and a bit into the functioning of
GeneEd as a fully operational company, the designers were beginning to see a
certain amount of streamlining in the company’s operations, but it was a
streamlining that still left considerable agency to each designer to design his or

256 Articulations
her own courses. There was also a perceived sense of collegiality, what Rollins
referred to as an ‘‘ecology,’’ whereby both middle and upper management were
accessible not just to mentor the designers but to receive feedback from them
that could drive the company’s decisions.
A number of things have changed for GeneEd structurally since then. The
biggest change came in the summer of 2001, when GeneEd landed Astra
Zeneca, a big pharmaceutical company, as a customer for a series of in-house
courses such as sales force training. Astra Zeneca is a company of fifty-five
thousand people, orders of magnitude larger than any of the biotech com-
panies for which GeneEd had developed courses until that time. This meant
three things for GeneEd.
First, there was the possibility of a sustained buy-in. A successful execution
on their initial assignments, they knew, could lead to GeneEd being given
other assignments by other divisions of the company. There was a chance to
grow their market even within a single company, in a way that had never
existed when GeneEd was developing courses for their biotech clients. Sec-
ond, there was a possibility of gaining brand recognition within the phar-
maceutical industry. Even though the GeneEd brand was visible on many bio-
tech Web sites, for instance, that was hardly enough of a selling point to ensure
that big pharmaceutical companies would be interested in giving them busi-
ness. As Maulik always liked to point out, the di≈culty—and the challenge—
of selling a company like GeneEd’s products is that one has to convince the
customer not only that GeneEd o√ers the best product on the market but also
that it’s a product the customer needs in the first place. Getting the Astra
Zeneca project gave GeneEd a toehold in the market of big pharmaceutical
companies. Third, the amount of work that now had to be done to simultane-
ously implement the Astra Zeneca courses, continue their custom courses for
other clients, and continually improve their existing catalog courses meant
that it became essential to further streamline the process of course creation.
The way GeneEd did this was to develop what the company called ‘‘learning
objects’’: modules or vignettes of courses that might already have appeared in
their other courses, which could exist as independent objects in a searchable
database, which could then be pulled out and inserted into a new course. In
other words, GeneEd was shifting away from being a design company that

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 257

would craft individual customized courses as if each was the creative product
of a single graphic designer, to being a knowledge management company that
would generate courses by an assembly line cutting and pasting of existing
course modules (with, of course, the development of new course vignettes or
modules as and when necessary).
Once a course becomes a collection of independently assembled objects, it
becomes vitally important to standardize those objects. One just could not
have a course that was put together by objects from previously designed
courses that each had a distinct artistic signature. Very quickly, therefore, the
role of the graphic designer stopped being one of artistic creation and became
one of industrialized assembly. This did not even need a conscious strategic
change of direction: it was simply the consequence of scaling up the enterprise
and growing the company.
In the process, however, Maulik realized that the very assemblage of learn-
ing objects and the software infrastructure needed to support them and make
them searchable was, independent of the content of the objects, itself a set of
software applications that had value. In other words, while GeneEd, as an
e-learning company, could sell courses to clients, it could also, as a knowledge
management company, sell software applications to other e-learning compa-
nies. What this led to was an increased dependence on programmers.∞∫
Therefore, largely as a consequence of selling courses to downstream big
pharmaceutical companies instead of upstream biotech companies (who, as
more big pharmaceutical companies became interested in GeneEd, became
less and less a source of significant value), the entire work structure changed
within a year. Suddenly it was the programmers who were doing the glam-
orous work, while the designers were merely assembling content.
Robin Lindheimer, who had been hired as a systems administrator in 2001,
had by 2002 been promoted to manager of information technology. Just the
challenge of automating processes as the company grew was for him a major
programming challenge. While earlier Lindheimer had felt that his role was
‘‘just that of a plumber,’’ he now felt that he was ‘‘dealing with the technology
of GeneEd rather than with the technology of the world that helps you run an
o≈ce.’’∞Ω He saw the company moving in a direction where selling courses
would become incidental to developing salable software.

258 Articulations
 Indeed, GeneEd in 2002 had the sort of glamour—of doing something
‘‘cool’’ while doing something ‘‘good’’—for programmers that it had held for
graphic designers in 2001. Chris Palmer, a programmer who chose GeneEd
over two other job o√ers, compared it to choosing to work at Apple rather
than at Microsoft, where ‘‘Microsoft is just another job. Whereas Apple is a
mission that people believe in, a community of far-thinking researchers that is
a part of the business culture. That means a much better product—a product
in which the labor of love has been put into it. It’s a product that’s better than
good enough, it’s actually great, and that has an economic e√ect and a personal
e√ect.’’≤≠
Conversely, and unsurprisingly, the graphic designers by 2002 felt increas-
ingly stifled and unenthused, as evidenced by the following quotes (all kept
anonymous):

It’s harder now for each designer to express herself. There are tensions between the
individual creativity of graphic designers and the requirements of a corporate
structure. Therefore, working here is not that creatively fulfilling. . . . I rarely see
Cynthia on a day-to-day basis.

The content is much more modular. We are more conscious of the process now. It
takes a lot of energy to keep people interested and motivated. From the developers’
side, our creative license as artists is missing. Earlier, we could create entire projects
ourselves. . . . I don’t know what Cynthia does.

A change to bigger projects has meant a more streamlined process. We’re not
responsible for whole courses now. Streamlining and e≈ciency means less creativ-
ity for the artist. It’s not good for the artists because the job isn’t artistic anymore. I
think most of the artists would have left if the economy was better. The company
has become more hierarchical. Earlier, there was a pancake structure, anyone who
had an idea got listened to. Now that’s not the case anymore. . . . We’ll probably get
funding, get bigger, and have more growing pains.

There is considerable freedom in terms of how I want things to look in terms of

graphics themselves. But in terms of the interface, templates have been created
which can’t be redesigned. As an artist, I get bored really easily. I’m a graphic
designer rather than an instructional designer. I try not to let the boredom show,

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 259

 but it does. There’s not a lot of interaction with the other developers. I miss
that. . . . There’s no communication with management, and rare interactions with
Cynthia. The instructional designers are the bottom of the totem pole. We were
really important when the company was a start-up. [The designers] pretty much
made or broke the project. I enjoyed smaller-scale projects more, because I had
more freedom, I could bring more design sense to bear. . . . The biggest frustration
is being held down by management.≤∞

In other words, the loss of artistic license, which was felt without exception
among the graphic designers at GeneEd, was accompanied by the loss of the
company’s nonhierarchical management structure. It was also accompanied,
not surprisingly, by an increased dispensability of individual designers. In-
deed, this was almost logical. As one designer told me, almost the only way the
company could have motivated designers was by constantly hiring new and in-
experienced designers who would be motivated because they would be learn-
ing how to design on the job. Of course, that would compromise the quality of
design, a quality that itself was becoming increasingly incidental and pre-
packaged. Sure enough, in May 2002, the company laid o√ two of its de-
signers, one of whom had been with the company since its inception.
This dispensability was felt not just by the designers; it was echoed by the
management. Therefore Kilroy, who in 2001 was explicit about the impor-
tance of mentoring the designers, and about her own central role in that
mentoring process, was by 2002 admitting that there was now a line between
management and ‘‘sta√ ’’ (in 2001, she was still referring to them as ‘‘design-
ers’’). But then, she felt: ‘‘That’s not a bad thing. I don’t think I have to be
friends with the sta√. Getting rid of people is not a bad thing. . . . I don’t miss
anything about the start-up phase. Now it’s not just about creativity but about
software development. Possibly a lot of the present people won’t work in the
new model.’’≤≤
There were necessary changes in the management structure as well, as
GeneEd grew out of being a start-up and into being a ‘‘real corporation.’’ What
earlier used to be termed ‘‘sales’’ became the much more grandiose-sounding
‘‘business development.’’ Heading that was a new middle manager, Glenn
O’Classen, who comes from a family steeped in the pharmaceutical indus-
try (his grandfather had built a pharmaceutical business), which meant that

260 Articulations
O’Classen had many contacts in that world. In the process, GeneEd had to lay
o√ their vice president of sales, Barry Giordano.
This was probably one of the most painful moments for GeneEd as a com-
pany, not least because Giordano was part of the founding management team
and an early investor. Perhaps even more, he was Maulik’s old friend, a close
friendship that has probably terminally ruptured as a consequence of the lay-
o√, which Giordano took very badly. Maulik, who is very good at wearing the
ceo mask when he needs to, rationalized the decision as inevitable, since
GeneEd was not getting the customers it needed to stay afloat. Indeed, even
after the Astra Zeneca deal, GeneEd’s revenue situation remained extremely
precarious for much of fall 2001 and early 2002, since the company never had
reserves of venture capital money to fall back on. Thus, a number of people in
the company felt that the exit of Giordano, who had di≈cult relationships
with both Kilroy and Eisele, was both necessary and good for the company.
This was not, however, a uniform sentiment in the least. While Giordano
had certainly not shown much sensitivity in dealing with fellow women man-
agers, as in Kilroy’s case, there were many others in the company, men and
women, who felt that he was precisely the sort of mentor that they just did not
have anymore. They felt that O’Classen was too immersed in business de-
velopment to bother about fostering mentoring relationships with those who
reported to him, and in any case, those were relationships that could best
be developed by someone senior who had been in the company from the
beginning.
Meanwhile, Patel had moved from San Francisco to start a new GeneEd
o≈ce in New Jersey. This was necessitated by the fact that GeneEd was shift-
ing its clientele away from biotech companies toward the pharmaceutical in-
dustry, and the corporate headquarters of almost all the big pharmaceutical
companies are on the East Coast. If the place of being in San Francisco mat-
tered immensely to GeneEd’s existence and identity as a start-up, then that too
was completely at stake once big pharmaceutical companies became the major
customers.
If Giordano’s mentoring was missed by some, it was nothing compared to
the way Patel was missed. Every single employee I spoke to, without even
being asked the question, told me that he or she missed having Patel around.

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 261

 Patel is in many ways a corporate anomaly, driven by a system of personal
values that refuses to buy into the sort of hardheaded cynicism—what might
politely be called ‘‘flexibility’’—that is almost constitutive of American ‘‘corpo-
rate culture.’’ This does not mean that Patel is romantic or naive—far from it.
What it does mean is that, first, he has a commitment to truth (which makes
him uncomfortable even with sales forecasts and investor pitches, which by
definition cannot possibly be ‘‘truthful’’ events); second, he is deeply com-
mitted to teaching; and third, he is deeply committed to fostering an ethical
relationship with his employees. While this does not stop him from support-
ing management decisions to, for instance, lay o√ certain employees, it also
means that he would never be caught talking about their dispensability as part
of the changing priorities for the company. It is his position of pragmatic
principle that has earned him such respect in the company.
This means, on the one hand, that he spent a lot of time mentoring the
graphic designers. This was not simply because he felt that mentoring was
important for their well-being, or that of the company, but because, at the end
of the day, the reason why he agreed to risk leaving a secure job to start this
company with Maulik was because Patel loved teaching.
While Maulik was equally respected as a teacher, his job description as ceo
ensured, even before GeneEd shifted its client focus, that he was more absent
than present in the everyday running of the company. His job was always to
sell the idea of the company outside, especially to potential investors; and
Patel, for as long as he was in San Francisco, complemented Maulik perfectly
by being the ‘‘resident’’ founder, translating the corporate vision into everyday
work practices, providing precisely the inspiration and motivation that so
many of the employees felt was lacking once Patel moved east.
But he also provided a certain managerial stability, often being the mediator
in di≈cult relationships such as Giordano’s with Kilroy or Eisele. He showed
both sensitivity and evenhandedness and was a stickler for procedure. This
made Patel easier for the middle management to relate to than Maulik, whose
ability to sell the company outside the company came precisely from an ab-
sence of these qualities, came from his ability to think on his feet, act on the
spur of the moment, make o√-the-cu√ remarks, take risks. As Eisele says:
‘‘Sunil jumps the chain of command all the time, which drives his managers

262 Articulations
crazy. It’s a challenge not having Salil here. Sunil’s mercurial; Salil’s the Rock
of Gibraltar.’’≤≥
In other words, shifting the client base from small biotech to big phar-
maceutical companies, a process that started with the Astra Zeneca contract
and has expanded since, had profound consequences for GeneEd as a com-
pany. It changed the company from a content provider to a software company;
from a ‘‘start-up’’ that was constantly bootstrapping to a ‘‘real company’’ that
had more stable revenue flows; from a company with a bunch of gifted artists
with room for self-expression to one with a group of dispensable designers
and excited programmers. It changed the very critical mass of the company,
which increasingly started depending on its New Jersey operation to leverage
pharmaceutical sales. It changed the management structure of the company,
and the way management interacted with employees. Indeed, in April 2002 I
spent an afternoon at GeneEd, where I read out some of my accounts of
GeneEd’s emergence. After my talk, one of the employees told me, ‘‘I didn’t
recognize what you were talking about. I was saying to myself, This isn’t
GeneEd. And then I thought, maybe that was GeneEd a year ago. It seems so
long ago, I’ve forgotten it now.’’≤∂
What I want to emphasize constantly, however, is not just an attribution of
credit or blame to individual people or circumstances that have made GeneEd
evolve in certain ways, but rather to a deeper structural logic, of a start-up
‘‘growing up’’ into a corporation, that leads to certain tendential outcomes.
This is not to say that this evolutionary path for GeneEd was in any way
predetermined, or not the outcome of strategic, contingent, occasionally even
lucky, events. It is to say that had those contingencies not occurred, the ‘‘al-
ternative’’ GeneEd would not have remained a happy-go-lucky, selling-to-
biotech, artistically expressive start-up but would have run out of funds and
ceased to exist. There is a logic of capitalism that pushes toward growth in
certain ways, that necessitates streamlining, dispensability, and standardiza-
tion, and that pushes against all those qualities of exuberance, innovation, and
risk taking that allow start-ups to start up in the first place, and also to create a
certain type of community that everyone, management and employees alike,
can buy into and feel part of. It is this logic, perhaps, that explains the man-
agerial inertia of big pharmaceutical relative to small biotech companies, an

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 263

inertia that is often hugely profitable; and it also perhaps explains why success-
ful entrepreneurs, such as, most famously, Jim Clark (the founder of Silicon
Graphics and Netscape), become ‘‘serial’’ entrepreneurs instead of staying on
to manage and grow the company they have founded. It is, most starkly, a
logic that in its acting out shows the alienation of the workers from the
products of their labor, which Marx diagnosed as fundamentally symptomatic
of capitalism a century and a half ago.

Performance and Conjuration

I now recount stories from GeneEd that relate to my arguments in chapter 3
about vision and hype. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which the
everyday operations of (high-tech) start-ups, confronting as they do the ne-
cessity of selling stories of the future to create the present that enables them to
go into that future, function in a discursive terrain of truth telling, a truth that
is under erasure, undoubtedly operates on grounds for intentional deception,
but can neither be dismissed as ‘‘simply hype’’ or cynicism nor be established as
a lie. It is an ambiguous type of nontruth whose ambiguity resides in the
temporal structures within which forms of start-up discursive performance
operate. The question that arises when the start-up is involved in scientific
knowledge production, and therefore is trading in an enterprise of supremely
authoritative fact production, relates to the ways in which such acts of fact
production articulate with the truths of corporate pr.
Salil Patel, as mentioned earlier, shows an almost idealistic adherence to,
and belief in, the truth of science, a belief that exists in some tension with his
role as manager of a start-up company that has to improvise and be flexible
with its discourses, albeit without ever explicitly lying. Indeed, that he could
not quite escape this mode of ‘‘lying’’ at GeneEd, in spite of his own best
intentions to be ‘‘honest,’’ was made quite clear on at least a couple of in-
stances: once, in the values and visions session described earlier, when Patel
admitted that he knew that at least one of the custom e-learning courses
GeneEd was building (a course that as chief content editor Patel had a signifi-
cant hand in designing) had ‘‘lies’’ in it; and again at a semiannual reception
that GeneEd threw for its investors, where the company made a pitch about its
current situation and promised an exciting future, and where again Patel felt

264 Articulations
squeamish about the fact that such pitches were not entirely ‘‘truthful.’’ In fact,
Patel felt uncomfortable about aspects of the pitch that could not possibly be
statements of truth, such as sales forecasts, which are precisely that: forecasts,
based on reasonable intuition, necessarily subjective and subject to all sorts of
contingencies that could lead to outcomes radically di√erent from those fore-
cast. In other words, even calculating what is essentially incalculable had, for
Patel, the manifestations of a ‘‘lie,’’ with the same moral connotations that
lying intentionally in a scientific paper would have.
This is precisely the conflict between Patel the scientist and Patel the busi-
nessman, subjectivities that are increasingly conflated as venture science be-
comes naturalized, but that are not at all unique to Patel. Indeed, in The Billion
Dollar Molecule, Barry Werth (1994) recounts in great detail precisely such
conflicts among many of the early management of Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Thus, on the one hand, it is important to tease out the di√erent categories of
the performative discourse of the truth, which is what Derrida does in ‘‘His-
tory of the Lie’’ (Derrida 2001 [1995]). On the other hand, it is important to
simultaneously stay attentive to the institutional groundings from which such
discourses emanate and within which they operate, especially when, as in the
case of venture science, the germ of conflicts of interest is always already
inherent. The notion of conflict of interest is a normative notion that draws
attention to the possibility of nontruth emanating as a consequence of the
institutional space from which statements might emanate. It is, indeed, one
that has for many years functioned as a good watchdog that has allowed only a
certain mode of truth accountability to operate in techno-corporate discourse.
Sunil Maulik has many things to say about vision, and one of the first is that
being visionary is being interdisciplinary in a profound sense—not just allow-
ing di√erent disciplines and perspectives to cohabit in some bland acknowl-
edgment of mutual tolerance, but actually putting what might be considered
incompatible regimes of knowledge, and their practitioners, into the same
enterprise, where the very success of that enterprise depends on these various
forms of knowledge articulating in productive, and often unpredictable, new
ways.≤∑ Second, for Maulik, being visionary involves not recharting paths
that he has already been treading. He says: ‘‘As a person, the type of company
I would want to start wouldn’t have been a nuts-and-bolts company; it

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 265

wouldn’t have been a ‘They are making clones, let’s make clones. They’re
sequencing the genome, let’s sequence the genome.’ It was a company that was
going to do what nobody had done before.’’≤∏
However, having the vision to do something that has not been attempted
before is not su≈cient to ensure a successful enterprise. Maulik, in words that
resonate with some of my arguments from the previous chapter, goes on to
argue for evangelism as a third component of vision:

Because a company is visionary . . . it does not make a business a success. In fact

some people are going to argue that it almost ensures business failure because it is
hoisting something new into a business climate. So not only do you have to
convince people to buy your product, you have to convince people that the prod-
uct is worth buying in the first place. So in a sense you’re attempting to answer a
question that nobody has thought of asking you. So first you have to convince
them that there is a question worthy of answering, and then you have to convince
them that you’re worthy of answering it using your particular product or service.
And in that sense, what GeneEd is doing, e-learning, is I think a bit of evangelism
and missionary selling. First you have to convince them that they have the prob-
lem, and then you have to convince them that you are the only company who can
solve their problem. That leads to the other side of vision, which is that visionary
companies have a certain cultlike image attached to them, and there’s a certain
degree of brainwashing attached to the idea of vision, and it is that you create the
market by basically . . . by not just the force of one person’s personality but by the
force of a group personality which you try to foster and create and build, and then
you find the champions of the industry and people who can mouth the same
words. So after a while it becomes a self-sustaining entity, and then you’ve got this
culture, this sort of drum beating of people, ‘‘This is the next way,’’ ‘‘This is the next
way,’’ ‘‘This is the next way.’’≤π

Vision, in this third conception of Maulik’s, is ideology, in a manner very

similar to that in which Marx conceives of religion as ideology in The German
Ideology. But fourth, Maulik compares vision to a set of guiding principles, ‘‘a
set of principles that are far-fetched, but not too far-fetched that people can’t
believe in them if they stretched their minds su≈ciently.’’≤∫ Vision, then, serves
simultaneously as imagination and as prescription, as an ambitious statement

266 Articulations
that says, ‘‘We’re going to draw a line in the sand, we’re going to do something
nobody has ever done before, it’s going to be a mission, it would be crossing
the Sahara with one bag of water,’’≤Ω but implicitly indicates to those who have
a stake in realizing the vision how this improbable goal might be reached. It
is in this sense that vision, in the ways that Maulik articulates it, is di√erent
from hype.
The question of the distinction of vision from hype is one that I have tried to
trouble in chapter 3 by referring to hype as a type of promissory visionary
articulation that allows the conjuration of certain types of futures to create the
conditions of possibility for presents that allow those futures to materialize.
And yet in Silicon Valley in 2001 and 2002, the distinction between hype and
vision was acutely made manifest by entrepreneurs like Maulik, where hype
refers to that dematerialized and somehow false conjuration that was epito-
mized by the [Link] era—an ‘‘era’’ that was already, by mid-2002, spoken of
in firm historical terms as an ‘‘aberration’’ by the same people who had been
extolling its invincible capacity for continued growth, revolution, and creating
paradigm shifts just a couple of years previously.≥≠
There is no question, however, that this is a distinction of some importance
to GeneEd, which resisted calling itself [Link], a resistance that proba-
bly protected against the company’s obsolescence with the receding [Link]
wave. At least part of the reason why GeneEd was not caught up in the
[Link] frenzy was that the company really was conceived in a [Link]
era, having been incorporated in 1997. Thus it e√ectively incubated through
the [Link] years, somewhat befuddled by the [Link] goings-on around it.
As Maulik says:

Part of the reason GeneEd had such a long incubation period was that none of us
was really comfortable to really take that leap. The other part of it was [19]98–99
were two years when this extraordinary ferment was going on all around us, this
Internet boom, [Link] hysteria, and it did have an e√ect on us in the sense that
we were no longer sure if having this hard, well-thought-out, well-defined busi-
ness plan that called for so much market penetration and so much revenues and so
much time with so many products with so many people made sense anymore. A lot
of supposedly very smart people were telling us it made no sense. They said, Why
are you setting this up, create a large database instead . . . You know, things like

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 267

 that, like do not worry about revenues, use advertising and this . . . all kinds of
things. And all that went against all that I had learnt in the prior fifteen years, so it
was a very strange time to be considering starting a company. If you were a
Harvard mba who was twenty-four years old who didn’t have those previous
fifteen years of working experience, you might go, This is a great time to be start-
ing a company. But having learnt the careful business models of how to build. . . .
I’d worked for companies all my life, for a variety of small companies, and here
there were plans on the back of a napkin and now you get a company the moment
you see it, it was actually disconcerting.≥∞

In this portrayal, then, GeneEd is almost like a caterpillar in a time-warped

cocoon, insulated by its own pedagogical background against the ‘‘realities’’
that were now propounded as fundamental to start-up corporate dynamics. It
was a period when Maulik felt that GeneEd’s vision was being incubated,
suggesting that vision is not just a onetime articulation but an entire discursive
and material apparatus that needs nurturing and needs to be articulated with
strategies and tactics in many ways. Indeed, Maulik’s explicit assertion that
vision is not vision until it is articulated ‘‘in the way that people see that, oh
yes, I can see how this is going,’’≥≤ is an understanding of entrepreneurship as
explicitly hegemonic in the way that Stuart Hall understands hegemony (see,
for instance, Grossberg 1996). Maulik’s idea of a visionary is someone who is
involved in cutting, pasting, and synthesis; he thinks that tropes of romantic
genius inventors are somewhat bogus.
An important part of the entrepreneurial process is the relationship of the
start-up to venture capital funding. GeneEd was able to get companies such as
Incyte and Alza on board as early investors, instead of venture capitalists,
though not for want of e√ort at attracting the latter. In fact, as mentioned
earlier, Maulik actually had promises for vc funding that were withdrawn at
the last minute. He had therefore been let down badly by venture capitalists,
but it was a letdown that he felt ultimately made the company possible, made
it come out of its incubation period and gave it the activation energy necessary
to become a real company.
The first company to invest in GeneEd was the major Silicon Valley genome
company Incyte, whose founder, Randy Scott, has himself figured promi-
nently in this book. Typically, like almost any investment in high-tech capital-

268 Articulations
ism, this was made possible not by the superiority of GeneEd’s business plan
as much as by Maulik’s personal contacts at Incyte. It was, however, a fraught
investment on both sides, given Incyte’s own history of ups and downs with
Pangea, which was always a company that might have been Incyte’s competi-
tor. Maulik feels that what eventually carried the day at Incyte was the personal
credibility he had there, even though he had worked for a competitor. Trust
and credibility are subjective judgment calls that are absolutely central to the
dynamics of start-up worlds.
Getting Incyte as an investor, however, was always potentially a double-
edged sword, because there was the danger of GeneEd being seen as a com-
pany seeded by Incyte, which Maulik knew could have huge consequences for
the trust and credibility GeneEd might or might not have among potential
customers, many of whom would have to be Incyte’s competitors if GeneEd
was to succeed as a company. Maulik expresses his ambivalence thus:

A part of me didn’t want to take the investment because I was concerned that if we
were seen to be in Incyte’s pocket, nobody will accept our products. And the other
part of me wanted to take the investment from Incyte because I didn’t get an
investment from Pangea and I probably just wanted to thumb my nose at Pangea,
say to them that your biggest competitors are investing in me, why aren’t you, and
there was definitely some of that. And I think, again, the rationalization for the
investment—and it is a rationalization—is that we will take the investments from a
large variety of companies, and not be beholden to any one of them. Now that’s
easy to say and much harder to do. I mean, the fact is that there is always a little bit
of string that they can pull with us.≥≥

In fact, however, GeneEd managed to sign up Celera Genomics, Incyte’s

biggest competitor, as one of their first customers, and it was Incyte, not their
customer, who was put into a position of having to show trust. Maulik recalls
the moment when Incyte learned of GeneEd’s sale to Celera:

The day we were going to close our investment with Incyte . . . this was the day the
Celera Genomics Web site went live [with GeneEd courses on it], which we had
conveniently forgotten to tell Incyte about. So it’s five o’clock on a Friday after-
noon, it was a classic afternoon. Marion [Marra, vice president of corporate de-
velopment at Incyte], and Randy Scott and the two of us [Maulik and Barry

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 269

 Giordano, GeneEd’s vice president of sales at the time]. They said there were two
things we needed to discuss, there were some issues with this contract we needed
to get clearance on. And the second thing is—what the hell is going on with your
being on Celera’s Web site? What we said was, Take o√ your Incyte cap for a
moment, put on your investor cap. You should be glad we’re getting Celera Geno-
mics as a customer, just as we intend every other genomics company to be our
customer. And as an investor, that only enhances our value, and gives you return
on your investment. We’re doing business with companies of the stature of Celera
Genomics, and just from a monetary standpoint, every dollar that Celera Geno-
mics pays us is indirectly going back to you. So I think they do look at that
rationally.≥∂

GeneEd’s failure to attract venture capital funding had certain positive con-
sequences for the company. First, it forced a certain fiscal discipline on the
company that many richly funded start-ups in the [Link] era simply did not
have, to their eventual detriment. Second, it allowed Maulik to stay in control
of the company’s vision and execution in a way that would have been hard to
maintain had the founders’ ownership been significantly diluted by venture
capitalists at the start.
These were, however, fraught positives, and there were a number of times
when it seemed almost certain that GeneEd would run out of funds, and out of
business. It is impossible to get out of bootstrapping mode through sales
alone, and a certain significant amount of capital as cushion is probably essen-
tial for most companies. In addition, one of GeneEd’s initial investors had
invested in the company through a bridge loan, which meant that the invest-
ment was made on the condition that a further significant financing event
(such as venture capital funding) would occur within a stipulated period of
time, which was by September 2002.≥∑ If that financing event did not take
place, then the investment would be treated as a loan, meaning that GeneEd
would have to pay back a significant sum of money: significant enough to
bankrupt the company. In other words, if GeneEd’s drive for big pharmaceuti-
cal clients was constrained by the need for stable revenue, then the drive for
venture capital funding was dictated by the terms and conditions of previous
investment agreements.
Perversely, but not surprisingly, venture capitalists refused to invest in

270 Articulations
GeneEd when the company really needed funds, before it landed its big phar-
maceutical clients. By 2002, when GeneEd had pharmaceutical clients that
ensured a certain stability in revenue flows, the vcs were much more enthusi-
astic about investing. This highlights venture capitalist logic, contrary to intu-
itive perception, that suggests an enterprise of risk minimization rather than
risk taking. Indeed, Patrick O’Malley (2000), reading the work of the 1920s
economist Frank Knight, makes the distinction between risk and uncertainty,
the latter being the statistically noncalculable ‘‘risk’’ that is the source of entre-
preneurial creativity. One could, indeed, see the interaction of entrepreneurs
and vcs as being one in which entrepreneurs are involved with uncertainty,
while vcs calculate risks. Although calculating risk is most certainly taking a
gamble, it is done so that risk can be minimized.
Nonetheless, even though vc money was less of an urgent need for GeneEd
in 2002 than it was in 2001, the terms of GeneEd’s early bridge loan, combined
with a risk minimization logic that operates in the entrepreneurial world as
well (which states, emphatically, that you never turn down investment when
you get it, because you never know when or if you will get some later),
ensured that GeneEd returned to aggressively pursuing vc funding.≥∏
The person whose job was to explore that funding was Maulik, both be-
cause it is part of his job description as ceo and because as founder, he,
more than anyone else, provided the vision for GeneEd. Ironically, the person
whose job was most on the line if he succeeded in getting funding was Maulik.
This was for a number of reasons.
The first is an almost pedagogical insistence by venture capitalists that the
founder of a company should not be its ceo, a line that is constantly reiterated
in, for instance, business school classes on how to start new companies (in
spite of many successful examples of founders who have in fact successfully run
the companies they founded). The reason for this, largely, is that venture
capitalists like to have, on the one hand, a ‘‘professional’’ ceo: founders are
often the visionaries who get companies going, but one of the transitions a
start-up has to make as it grows into a ‘‘real’’ company is precisely a shedding
of the mercurial nature that made it a successful start-up in the first place.
While Maulik’s creative unpredictability could be an asset in a start-up with
a small management team, it could make for an increasingly volatile situa-

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 271

tion in a larger management team, spread across two coasts, with a number
of managers more senior and experienced at managing than Maulik himself.
The transition that vcs like to see is one from an idea-driven company to a
procedure-driven company, the latter often being precisely what successful
entrepreneurs run away from to start their own companies in the first place.
On the other hand, vcs also like to have a dispensable ceo, someone who can
be blamed and made the scapegoat if things go wrong, and thereby replaced.
From the point of view of the structure of capitalist versus worker, the ceo is
very much also a ‘‘worker’’ once the company gets venture capital investment.
At that point, the ceo is e√ectively an executor of a whole range of wills to
increase return on investment. While the company is still private, vcs look
ideally for a 60 to 70 percent return on their investment in the company, so
that they can in turn generate a 20 to 30 percent return on investment for the
investment funds that have invested money in the vc fund and still make a
profit. Once the company (ideally) goes public (this constitutes for the vcs
one of their ideal ‘‘exit strategies’’), ceos have a fiduciary responsibility to
their stockholders, which makes them answerable to Wall Street.
I am not, here, trying to portray the ceo as a weak victim of a greedy
capitalist system, especially since the incentive structures for ceos are often
grotesquely attractive. What I am trying to indicate is a certain constrained
field of action that these executives have to operate within once they become
answerable to other investors, private or public, in a way that they do not have
to be accountable if they are a non-vc-funded start-up like GeneEd has been.
It is often di≈cult to be both visionary and constrained tactician-manager, and
vcs therefore often prefer those roles to be filled by two di√erent people.
Often getting rid of a flailing ceo, if he or she is also the founder, is, for the vc,
throwing out the baby with the bathwater: they are reluctant to put the prime
visionary of the company in such a constrained position.
Indeed, Maulik himself reflects on this position of venture capitalists, and
their potential relationship to GeneEd, as follows:

There is a clear ‘‘formula’’ to vc success, based around a ‘‘tried-and-true’’ manage-

ment team, usually of the vcs’ own choosing, and one that has succeeded before.
There is also a clear formula for the profile of company that they will fund, typi-
cally one based around a well-developed University project, preferably from a

272 Articulations
 researcher that is well known and with a proven track-record of success. In this
way, all the ‘‘risk’’ and early groundbreaking hard work is done in an academic
environment under (usually) government funding, and the vcs are simply fund-
ing the commercialization.
Neither of these models applies to GeneEd. In some way, we may be ‘‘unfund-
able’’ from a vc perspective, simply because we don’t fit these pigeon-holes. I
believe GeneEd could be a very profitable company generating nice returns for its
investors, but I think this is irrelevant from a vc perspective (!). If the deal does
not fit the profile, they simply pass on the deal (they have hundreds more to
review, after all).
What does this mean for GeneEd’s culture? Obviously it is very di√erent from
Pangea/Doubletwist, which was the most vc-influenced company I have experi-
enced. But better? More successful? All I can say is that we are having lots of
fun, a talented and motivated workforce, and compelling and exciting products.
Doubletwist may go out of business too,≥π so there are no guarantees. Millennium
is interesting, their ceo, Mark Levin, comes from Mayfield Fund, but they clearly
are a deal-making machine. . . . My contact raves about Levin as a ceo she would
follow to the ends of the earth.
So what is my point? A big part of the corporate culture (for better or worse) is
dependent on the founders/ceo. If they are in sync, the culture is strong, if there is
conflict, this will be reflected in the organizational values.≥∫

In the case of GeneEd, Maulik’s position was further made vulnerable be-
cause of the changing client base toward pharmaceutical companies and the
consequent change in GeneEd’s critical operational locale to the East Coast.
Here, all the attributes that made Maulik so attractive to his initial angel
investors and his initial management and employee team, and made him so
much a part of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial stereotype of not fitting a
corporate American stereotype, become potential liabilities. East Coast busi-
ness, goes the normative belief, is run by serious, gray-haired, tight-lipped
white men in pinstriped suits, not by a young Indian immigrant who makes it
a point to start up a conversation with anyone whom he sits next to on an
airplane (he actually once managed to talk someone next to him on a flight
into a small investment in GeneEd before the plane landed), and whose invari-
ably bare-chested presence at parties was what gave one of his early angel

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 273

investors in Silicon Valley the confidence that his money was being soundly
wagered.
Everyone at GeneEd, to some extent even Maulik, does believe that in the
long term, GeneEd will have to be run by that industry caricature, the ‘‘gray-
haired pharmaceutical manager,’’ someone who has worked for years in a big
pharmaceutical company and is keen in his later years to do something more
‘‘risky’’ and ‘‘exciting,’’ and so brings his staid management style to a younger
company, thereby giving it legitimacy and an apparent seriousness of purpose
when it presents itself to its big pharmaceutical customers. Indeed, Maulik
himself has been claiming for the past four years that it is not his long-term
ambition to run a nuts-and-bolts company, that what he really wants to do is
to take GeneEd to a point where he feels that whoever runs it will have to run
it on the terms set by Maulik’s initial vision. What Maulik aspires to is not
management power as much as a legacy, at which point he claims that he wants
to retire on his stock options, sit on a beach, and write a novel.
Nonetheless, it is clear that no one knows, least of all Maulik, when he will
willingly pass the reins to experienced management; but it is fair to say that
whether or not Maulik’s desired point of exit coincides with the desires of his
investors will be a crucial determinant of how painful GeneEd’s future growth
will be. As of June 2002, Maulik’s potential investors (and the managers of two
companies that GeneEd, at that point, was potentially planning to merge
with) did want Maulik to continue running the company, a point in which, in
spite of his carefully stated indi√erence to being a long-term ceo, Maulik
clearly found huge amounts of a≈rmation.

Conclusion
I have ended this book with a series of stories about a start-up, GeneEd, that I
think is an emblematic institutional node in biocapitalist terrains, albeit per-
haps an atypical, maybe even somewhat marginal, one. Its particularities,
however, do not make its stories a digression from the grand narratives of
biocapital. Rather, it is completely constitutive of the multiple narratives,
discourses, institutions, practices, and events—the circulations and articula-
tions—of biocapital. In spite of the multiplicities of these circulations and
articulations, as I have argued throughout the book, GeneEd’s stories cannot
be reduced simply to stories of contingency.

274 Articulations
 Indeed, there are structural and cultural logics at play throughout these
stories. Many of these logics involve interactions between entrepreneurs and
venture capitalists, which always tend to result in entrepreneurs spending
lots of time, money, and energy seeking venture capital funds that they might
in fact feel extremely ambivalent about. These interactions also usually in-
volve venture capitalists adhering to a relatively conservative set of criteria and
guidelines for evaluating the companies that approach them for funding. In
spite of both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists sticking to rather formulaic
modes of interaction (or perhaps because of it), GeneEd’s history diverges
markedly from that of many high-tech start-ups, in that it is not funded by
venture capital but has grown ‘‘organically.’’
Similarly, there are certain discursive and performative operations, such as
the conjuration of futures through investor pitches or sales forecasts that
enable the present, that speak to the structural logics (that are always already
strategic and tendential rather than inevitable) that I have argued for in chap-
ter 3. These modes of discourse and performance are not just for external
consumption; they also, as Chris Palmer implied in an earlier quote, form the
grounds for GeneEd to foster a cultlike loyalty among its employees, another
structural yet always already strategic logic I explored in chapter 5. Indeed,
Sunil Maulik himself explicitly states that visionary articulations are meant to
foster cultic formations.
And yet there are other labor dimensions than the cultic, and here too
structural and tendential capitalist logics are at play. Specifically, there is the
alienation of labor as the company grows from its intimate, improvisational
start-up phase to become a more ‘‘mature’’ corporation, a form of growth that
threatens redundancy all the way up to Maulik himself, but one that every-
one, management and employees alike, nonetheless accepts as inevitable. This
alienation, while structurally inherent to capitalism as Marx diagnosed, is
equally the outcome of particular market terrains, in this case because of the
upstream-downstream terrain of drug development. Since downstream big
pharmaceutical companies represent a significantly greater market opportu-
nity for GeneEd than upstream biotech companies, there is a strategic pressure
to focus on big pharmaceutical customers. This leads to concomitant pressures
to standardize the courses developed by GeneEd, so much so that the courses
acquire a new name, ‘‘learning objects,’’ suggesting their standardization and

Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups 275

their becoming commodities. In the process, a business model whose value
depended on the creativity of graphic designers shifted to become one where
the designers became alienable, dispensable, replaceable units of an assembly-
line manufacturing process, while software programmers became the integral
creative center of the company, mere ‘‘plumbers’’ no longer.
This coexistence of the alienated with the cultic is an essential dimension to
labor issues in capitalism writ large and allows an analysis of capitalism as a
hegemonic, rather than a merely coercive, formation—and thereby a formation
that has enduring social power in spite of its multiple contradictions. Indeed, I
mentioned in my story of Genentech in chapter 5 my informant’s surprise at
the cultlike feeling of invincibility of Genentech employees despite the fact
that most of them had ‘‘pretty crummy jobs.’’ It is the multiple ways in which
magic imbricates not just the objects and discourses, but also the sites, of
capitalism that animate the fetishes of capitalism and provide it its performa-
tive force and social power.≥Ω
I have used GeneEd, in concluding this book, as an emblematic site through
which to explore and illustrate some of my larger arguments relating to bio-
capital. These arguments have related to the performative conjuration of
techno-corporate futures, the continued alienation of labor in high-tech capi-
talism (as Marx diagnosed for industrial capitalism), and the cultlike fetishes
that animate techno-corporate activity, especially in the United States.

276 Articulations
Coda
Surplus and Symptom

In conclusion, I return to this book’s originating claim: that biotechnology

represents a new face, and a new phase, of capitalism. This might seem to be a
di≈cult statement to sustain, because the coproduction of life and capitalism is
in itself not new. It is, historically, especially seen in the green revolutions of
the 1960s, leading to new methods and institutional arrangements of agricul-
tural production, new discourses and strategies around the management of
risk, and new safety and lifestyle concerns as articulated by an emergent en-
vironmental movement. Both states and corporations were involved in such
reorganizations.
Biocapital thus does not represent a new phase of capitalism in a temporal
sense. Instead, as I argued in the introduction, my sense of the relationship
of biocapital to systems of capitalism writ large is similar to Jean-François
Lyotard’s sense of the relationship of postmodernism to modernity—a con-
stitutive component of a larger set of institutions, regimes, and practices that
are themselves defined and exceeded by their incongruent components.
At the same time, there is an uncanny sense that something new is happen-
ing here. Part of this sensibility of novelty is due to the very discourse that sus-
tains biocapital—for instance, the hype that is such an integral part of the bio-
tech industry (and this hype itself, of course, is not necessarily such a new thing
but can be located within the very discursive ethos of American nation building
and nationalist consciousness). Another part of this sensibility is due to the fact
that there are new institutional and technological assemblages that are being
presented to us, new events that herald novelty. These include, to name some of
them I have talked about in this book, dna patents; the snp Consortium; the
ability to make sensible information out of biological material at speeds and
resolutions that were earlier inconceivable; global benefit sharing agreements;
biotech start-ups in India; knowledge parks; venture capitalism in high tech;
new arrangements for technology transfer between academe and industry; the
generation of the working draft sequence of the human genome; the [Link]
boom and bust; automated sequencing machines; dna chips; personalized
medicine; genomic-based diagnostic tests; pharmacogenomics; globally stan-
dardized clinical trials regimes; World Trade Organization–mandated trade
and intellectual property practices; nonresident Indian entrepreneurial com-
munities in the United States; patient advocacy groups; consumer genomics,
population genomics; and direct-to-consumer advertising. At the same time,
some very old patterns of resource extraction and global inequities persist, even
if they articulate or are resisted in new ways.
But a good part of the sensibility of novelty that we might experience is also
conceptual, as the humanities and social sciences attempt to keep pace with
events and emergences that are undoubtedly rapid, regardless of their novelty
or familiarity. Michael Fischer poses the challenge to, and potential of, anthro-
pological research in keeping pace with and making sense of what he calls
‘‘emergent forms of life,’’ where, he says, ‘‘life is outrunning the pedagogies in
which we were trained’’ (Fischer 2003, 37). The theoretical challenge, then, is
not to abandon these pedagogies, the conceptual inheritances with which we
formulate our explanations and descriptions, but to recalibrate them. In other
words, the question is, What work does old vocabulary do in the face of new
events and articulations, and when and with what sorts of new vocabularies do
we need to come to terms with them?
Michel Foucault, as I have mentioned at a number of points in this book,
argues for the constitution of the modern subject at the intersections of life,
labor, and language (Foucault 1973). All three have been distinct themes
throughout this book—life, especially, as the recalibration of life as a credible
future that can be invested in, life as a business plan (chapter 4); labor, espe-
cially, as the labor of consumption, of consuming as a sovereign consumer or
of being consumed as an experimental subject (chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6); and
language, as in the discourse of hype and hope, salvation and messianism

278 Coda
(especially chapters 3 and 5). But the question for Foucault remained one of
how these intersections rearticulate at di√erent moments in history to con-
stitute modernity as some kind of temporally intelligible (if not temporally
seamless) concept.
Paul Rabinow argues that Foucault, during the course of his writing, trans-
formed his initial understanding of modernity as an epoch into an understand-
ing that is based on ‘‘a new philosophic relationship to the present’’ (Rabinow
2003, 14). This relationship, according to Rabinow, is

one in which modernity was taken up not through the analytic frame of the epoch
but instead through a practice of inquiry grounded in an ethos of being oriented
toward the present, of contingency, of form-giving. Perhaps today one, but only
one, significant challenge of forging a modern ethos lies in thinking about how to
relate to the issue of anthropos. . . . What if we took up recent changes in the logoi
of life, labor, and language not as indicating an epochal shift with a totalizing
coherence but rather as fragmented and sectorial changes that pose problems, both
in and of themselves and for attempts to make sense of what form(s) anthropos is
currently being given?∞

The analytic problem of articulating biocapital as a novel form of capitalism

is similar to the problem of depicting modernity as an epoch that Rabinow
outlines here. A solution, as he indicates, is to resist an attempt at a totaliz-
ing formulation of a contemporary structure and instead to proliferate ac-
counts of the fragments that constitute (and, indeed, exceed and surprise)
such structures.
Rabinow, then, proposes a way to account for epochs, for those concepts of
structure that structure our own understandings of the presents we live in, in
terms of contingency. But there is a related analytic problem that is still at stake
and unresolved. This is the parallel problem Fischer poses, of understanding
emergence in terms of structure. In other words, if contingent, fragmented,
multiple reality constantly exceeds our structural boundaries, then at the same
time rapid, incongruent, emergent reality constantly calls for some kind of
conceptual grounding, however provisional, in a kind of structural frame-
work. Biocapital as a concept attempts, on the one hand, to point to the
insu≈ciency of capitalism as an explanatory structure for rapid emergences in

Coda 279
the life sciences and biotechnologies but, on the other hand, tries to provide,
through the vehicle of received theoretical inheritances, familiar words and
concepts through which to ground these emergences that otherwise threaten
to overtake our pedagogical limits.
Biocapital, then, is always already all too new and all too familiar; all too
specific to new emergences in the life sciences and all too general a symptom of
a rapidly mutating political economic structure that we call ‘‘capitalism.’’ I wish
to point to two themes that I believe need emphasis in order to go beyond the
argument that the emergence of a global commercial genomics has had struc-
tural e√ects driven by particular, sometimes new, forms of value creation and
exchange networks. The first is that new epistemic and technological assem-
blages such as genomics can only be understood through an analysis of the
market frameworks within which they are emergent. The second is the argu-
ment that an understanding of globalization needs an accounting of its bio-
political dimensions, but that equally, an understanding of biopolitics needs
an accounting of its global dimensions.

Subject to Surplus, or Symptomatic Speculations on Biocapital

Let me begin this section by referring to the story of Wellspring Hospital in
Parel, Mumbai, which was the subject of analysis in chapter 2. This is the story
of a hospital located in Mumbai’s mill districts that houses a genome start-up,
Genomed, which is seeded partly by a public institution, the Centre for Bio-
chemical Technology (cbt), and partly by a local pharmaceutical company,
Nicholas Piramal India Limited (npil). This is one of a number of attempts in
India that I have mentioned in this book that seeks to imitate an American
‘‘start-up culture.’’ A major research focus at Wellspring/Genomed is phar-
macogenomic drug response in clinical trials, and major proposed clients for
these clinical trials experiments are Western biotech and pharmaceutical com-
panies. The subjects on whom these experiments will be performed are, ac-
cording to scientists I spoke to at Wellspring, most often unemployed mill-
workers in Parel, an area that has, over the last twenty years, seen the dramatic
disintegration of the textile industry that formed the basis of the local econ-
omy for much of the twentieth century.
I argue that the experimental subjects in Parel are subject to speculation, where
speculation means, simultaneously, two di√erent things. On the one hand,

280 Coda
they are subject to the speculative enterprises of capitalism, both those of
Western companies seeking to outsource clinical trials and those of the Indian
state attempting to leverage global market terrains. In that sense, the story I
have told of Wellspring reflects an old story, of colonial expropriation of Third
World resources, where the resources in question are the genetic information
and medical records of the experimental subjects of Parel. What makes this
di√erent from a mere resource-mining exercise, however, is that these are
experimental subjects. As Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) has beautifully illus-
trated, experiment is a speculative exercise of a very di√erent register, a practice
of inquiry that is constantly open-ended. The experimental subjects of Parel
get incorporated, quite literally, into the implosion of these two forms of
speculative enterprise, having to do with the market, on the one hand, and
with the life sciences, on the other. It is a flavor of this implosion that I hope to
provide with the term ‘‘biocapital.’’
The logics seen in Parel point to one logic of biocapital, leading to certain
particular forms of subject constitution consequent to certain enterprises of
speculation. Let me now shift frames to another story I have narrated in this
book (in chapter 5), that of the Bay Area consumer genomics company Geno-
mic Health. The vision of consumer genomics as articulated by Randy Scott,
ceo of Genomic Health, sees the intertwining of diagnostic technologies that
will enable the generation of personalized, high-throughput biological infor-
mation at the genomic level with communications technologies such as the
Internet, leading to the emergence of networked biosocial communities. Con-
sumer genomics is a highly individualized practice, and the key here is that
every individual, because of his or her genomic risk profile, is a potential target
for therapeutic intervention. In this calculus, every individual is a patient-in-
waiting and, simultaneously, a consumer-in-waiting.
Here again, the subjects of consumer genomics are subject to speculation.
On the one hand, they (we) speculate about their (our) genetic ‘‘days of
reckoning,’’ the illnesses coming at them (us) in the future, and act in ways
relevant to that. Such action could, for instance, involve lifestyle changes, or
preventive or prophylactic therapeutic intervention. On the other hand, these
subjects are again part of a speculative market enterprise, constituting a poten-
tial market for companies like Genomic Health. The di√erence, however, is
that while the subjects of speculation in the Parel case are marked by their class

Coda 281
position as a consequence of being workers, and therefore subject to the class
logic of industrial capitalism, the subjects of speculation in Genomic Health’s
case are all of us, marked in this case as consumers, also consequent to class logic,
this time of late or postindustrial or neoliberal capitalism.
We are faced with a complication while talking about biocapitalist subject
configurations using the tools of Marxian political economy. This is that the
relationship we are faced with in contemporary biocapital is not that of the
capitalist to the patient-consumer but that of the corporation to the patient-
consumer, and where market value implies value for the corporation, which
depends on potential of the patient-consumer-in-waiting for therapeutic con-
sumption over and above that which is necessary owing to illness.≤
The corporation, conceptually, is a complicated beast. It is in itself a ‘‘capi-
talist’’ entity, but it is also answerable to ‘‘real’’ capitalists—who might be
venture capitalists if the company is private, or might be Wall Street investors
and stockholders if the company is public. If we are to extrapolate and use
Marx for our contemporary purposes, we are faced squarely with the ontologi-
cal question of what constitutes the corporation.
This is where reading volume 3 of Capital becomes interesting. It is at this
late stage of his work that Marx first deals with the place of speculative capital-
ism, and with the emergence of the corporate form as a constitutive institu-
tional form of capitalism. In fact, and most interestingly, Marx finds it very
hard to do so, and his writing about the corporate form treats this form as
somehow morally abhorrent. This is significant because throughout his writ-
ing Marx is arguing for a structural rather than moralistic analysis of capital
(and hence, for instance, his famous tirade against the Young Hegelians in The
German Ideology). I believe that this inability to deal with the corporate form
can be explained by the likelihood that Marx, by the time he wrote volume 3 of
Capital, was able to anticipate the (still emergent) corporate form in a manner
similar to that in which, more than a century later, Slavoj Žižek would read
capitalism. Žižek says:

The ‘‘normal’’ state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own con-
ditions of existence: from the very beginning capitalism ‘‘putrefies,’’ it is branded
by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want of balance: this is
exactly why it changes, develops incessantly—incessant development is the only

282 Coda
 way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental,
constitutive imbalance, ‘‘contradiction.’’≥

Žižek regards the mutations of capitalism as the means of its adaptation and
evolution to a higher form. Marx too realized toward the end of his writings
that this ‘‘higher’’ form was not necessarily the higher form of communism; it
could also be the higher form of the corporation. In other words, Marx was to
realize by volume 3 that the corporate or speculative form of capitalism could
in fact present an alternative, capitalist realization of the contradictions of mid-
nineteenth-century capitalism—and about this he could only feel discomfort
in moral rather than structural terms.
The specificity of biocapital as a biopolitical form of capitalism lies in the fact
that the symptom shifts away from disease manifestation and toward disease
potential. This happens through exactly the same logics whether we are con-
sidering emergent life science epistemologies such as genomics or emergent
pharmaceutical company tactics such as direct-to-consumer advertising.∂ This
indicates the implosion of the economic and epistemic that makes biocapital,
in my opinion, something more than just the encroachment of capital on a
new domain of the life sciences. Rather, the very grammars of the life sciences
and of capital are co-constituted; life becomes a business plan. And the symp-
tom is at the heart of this configuration.
My arguments here might appear to set up an incongruence, and it is one
that is of some relevance to the narrative form that this book has taken. This is
that the epistemology in question, which has indeed, I have argued, given
‘‘biocapital’’ its specific flavor, is that of the life sciences, especially as reflected
in emergent techno-epistemic assemblages such as genomics. Obviously these
are epistemologies that are inherently and in a direct way biopolitical. They
draw their authority from the fact that they are scientific and therefore, by
definition, universal. And yet, while the facts of genomics might indeed be
universal, the biopolitical manifestations of genomics, as I have shown, are
completely incongruent, manifesting in much ‘‘older’’ ways in India than they
do in the United States.
Indeed, we are faced with a peculiar conundrum if we analyze epistemolo-
gies such as genomics, within the institutional and political economic frame-
works that they both operate within and condition. While these epistemol-

Coda 283
ogies are placeless and universal by virtue of being scientific, the tactics of
involved scientific-corporate actors are situated, conditioned by particular
market regimes and legal, institutional, and policy frameworks. The task of
tracing the former grammar, which happens to be a biopolitical grammar, is
generally considered the domain of theory. The task of tracing the latter gram-
mar, the grammar of cultural particularities, is similarly considered the domain
of ethnography. The implosion of biocapital marks the implosion of a theoret-
ical diagnosis regarding new configurations of subjectivity by the life sciences
with an ethnographic diagnosis regarding new configurations of value genera-
tion by the American free market whose ideologies are increasingly globally
hegemonic, but whose manifestations, as I have tried to show throughout this
book, are hardly seamless in settings such as India.
Marx constantly argues for the importance of structural attentiveness in
spite of the constant reality of tendential, incongruous, agential reality. In
other words, incongruent manifestations of systems of exchange in India as
compared to the United States are not merely contingent ‘‘exceptions’’ to a
structural norm consolidated in the West. Rather, the exceptions are a con-
sequence of these structural norms, their very evidence. The ways in which
global systems of biocapitalist exchange—the explicitly Marxian concerns
with value—manifest in India also have to be analyzed in terms of structural
logics, even if (indeed, especially because) they are multiple, tendential, and
contradictory.
A similar challenge faces theorizations of biopolitics: How does one ac-
count for incongruent manifestations of biopolitical emergences, such as
modes of subject formation by emergent epistemological and institutional
assemblages, without reducing these incongruent emergences, simply, to at-
tributions of contingency? In other words, how can one theorize biopolitics
‘‘elsewhere,’’ in places that are not advanced liberal societies, but that desire to
be like them? The relationship of the sovereign American consumer described
in chapter 4 to the Indian experimental subject described in chapter 2, for
instance, is most reductively attributable to di√erences in economic standing.
The di√erence that I wish to mark here from such a direct structural argument
is that the Indian subject position is not just a consequence of subjugation to
hegemonic logics and dominant relations of production but exists because of

284 Coda
the desire, on the part of the Indian state, to buy into, and appropriate, these
hegemonic imaginaries for itself, and for its selves.
In other words, there are two sets of relations to stay attentive to between,
for instance, ‘‘India’’ and the ‘‘United States,’’ as two sites structuring this
analysis of ‘‘global’’ capital. The first, undeniably, are structural relations of
production. It matters to the ways in which biocapital manifests in tendential
fashion in the two locales that one of them is richer, stronger, and more
powerful than the other. Indeed, similar structural logics operate within the
United States, which is why the subjectivity of sovereign consumer does not
automatically accrue from genomics to racially marked subjects, for instance.
But the second, again, has to do with symptomatic relations, with the fe-
tish, this time of an American value system. This is a particular conception
of the free market that is enforced not just through ideological mechanisms
but through actual material structures, such as, for instance, World Trade
Organization–mandated intellectual property regimes, which are considered
across the board within India as regimes instituted to further American global
economic interests (even by those who argue that India should be a willing
and active participant in such regimes). And yet the ideal of the American free
market becomes the value system that Indian actors, whether they are entre-
preneurs based in Silicon Valley or state actors based in Delhi, desire to buy
into. Indeed, power di√erentials between the United States and India can no
longer be reductively attributed to di√erences in ‘‘facilities,’’ the standard rea-
son given by Indian scientists a decade ago for the relative impoverishment of
scientific output compared to that in the United States. Indian public biology
labs today have, or have access to, many of the state-of-the-art technologies
that compare to those of top American labs (just as American biotech com-
panies occasionally have leaky ceilings). The real power di√erential between
the two locales lies in the ways that global imaginaries get structured, where
doing science, and structuring the market in the image of America becomes the
driving motivation for Indian techno-capitalist actors, the inverse never being
the case. Indeed, it would be hard to suggest what a countervailing Indian
vision or imaginary for the conduct of either technoscience or political econ-
omy would be.
I do not wish to attribute this desire to be ‘‘as if American’’ to a Marxian false

Coda 285
consciousness. Indeed, as I argued in chapter 1, such Indian responses de-
mand instead what Rosemary Coombe calls an ethics of contingency, a will-
ingness to defer judgment on actions constrained by global inequities, but also
enabled by global desires, to a future that is yet to come. But I do wish to
diagnose a site of American global techno-capitalist hegemony, which resides
in the realm of the construction and sustenance of imaginaries that the rest of
the world, quite literally, buys into, even if in incongruent ways. It is because
the imaginaries of the American free market become such global objects of
desire—become symptomatic, indeed, of global power relations—that it is
possible to talk of a culturally particular practice of free-market value genera-
tion with the same degree of theoretical fluidity as a universal practice of
scientific knowledge production. The American free market is a peculiar beast,
indeed a unique beast, probably never replicated in exact fashion anywhere
else in the world. And yet, in spite of its absolute particularity, it exists every-
where; the world is built in its image. Ethnographic particularity becomes the
object on which social theory gets built for our times, just as other parts of the
world remain ethnographic locales.∑

Methodological Speculations
These concluding reflections, and this book, beg the question of theorizing
emergent political economic structures using ethnography. Specifically, they
ask questions of whose ‘‘postgenomic lives’’ are being constituted by bio-
capital, and who ‘‘we’’ are who are studying these emergences. George Marcus
and Michael Fischer’s call for anthropology as a form of cultural critique
takes seriously the ways in which a discipline formed to study ‘‘the Other,’’
‘‘elsewhere,’’ in fact holds much potential for having its insights repatriated in
order to study ‘‘our’’ cultures (Marcus and Fischer 1986), especially as sites of
ethnographic knowledge production proliferate globally in ways that cannot
easily be reduced to the old colonial binary of an Occidental center and an
Oriental periphery.
Fischer’s problematic as posed in Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropolog-
ical Voice is that received theories and concepts often prove insu≈cient to
contain and make sense of our rapidly emergent lifeworlds. Both techno-
science and capital are particularly lively sites of such rapid emergence. At the

286 Coda
same time, as Fischer would no doubt be the first to acknowledge, there is a
value to reading theory, and to experimenting with reading theory in the
context of new empirical emergence.
This is precisely what this book has attempted. I have tried to present a
series of situations, some in India and others in the United States, that on their
own lend themselves easily to particular reductive readings. Therefore it is easy
to talk about, for instance, Genomic Health, and argue consequently for the
novelty of our emergent techno-capitalist lifeworlds. It is equally easy to talk
about Parel, for instance, and consequently of the persistence of very old forms
and logics of subjection, alienation, and expropriation. One is a picture of the
complete novelty of biocapital, coexisting with another that is a picture of its
complete familiarity. Yet these two stories, and the others I have narrated,
inhabit the same worlds of biocapital, and indeed the sites that I describe are
linked by all manner of global techno-capital flows.
What I have attempted in conclusion, provisionally and in all too much of a
hurry, is to question a certain relationship of ethnography to theory. We live in
an intellectual milieu in which theory provides us with diagrams for under-
standing worlds present, past, and future, with advanced liberal societies in-
variably forming the templates on which these diagrams are formed; and in
which ethnography is postulated as ‘‘the corrective’’ to these universalizing,
homogenizing, and hegemonic theoretical tendencies, by claiming to force
attention on those sites that constitute the margins or peripheries of theory.
And yet this essential troubling of center and periphery is, necessarily, at least
at this time, impossible, because if ethnography’s function is to trouble taken-
for-granted assumptions about center and periphery, it is also, at the same
time, to describe those assumptions, to represent the reality of globally hege-
monic alignments as faithfully as possible. If my own subjective desire as
ethnographer and theorist is to be able to write an ethnographically attentive
social theory of emergent globalizing structures where a site such as India was
the crucible of theoretical formation, and the United States was the strange
ethnographic particularity, then such a desire is, in its sensibility, not that
distinct from the desire of the Indian state to be a global player. But like that of
the Indian state, it is a desire that is deferred to the future in the manner in
which Derrida speaks of it—l’avenir, the future that is to come, rather than

Coda 287
that which will be, the promissory future without whose conjuration there
will be ‘‘neither history, nor event, nor promise of justice’’ (Derrida 1994,
170). An unpredictable and tendential future, which in provisional, partial,
fragmentary, and uncertain fashion, subjects such as the life sciences and social
theory, value systems such as those of global capitalism and bioethics, and
institutions such as corporations, nation-states, and patient advocacy groups,
and indeed all of us who are interested in writing or reading books such as this,
are working toward.

288 Coda
 NOTES

Introduction
1. The book that Boguski was referring to was Paul Rabinow’s Making pcr. See Rabinow
1997.
2. Base pairs are the chemical bases that join complementary strands of a dna molecule via
hydrogen bonds.
3. For an insider account of the many things that happened, see Shreeve 2004.
4. For the most famous articulation of this point of view at the time of the fall of commu-
nism, see Fukuyama 1992.
5. For an elaboration of the notion of coproduction, see Jasano√ 1995, 1996, 2004; Rear-
don 2001, 2004.
6. The four criteria for patentability in the United States are novelty, inventiveness, utility,
and nonobviousness. In other words, for something to qualify as patentable, it must be
new, actually invented (and not simply discovered), useful, and not obvious to others
with prior experience in the field.
7. ‘‘Technoscience’’ is a terminology used by scholars in science and technology studies to
argue for the impossibility of considering ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘technology’’ as easy binary
counterparts to each other. I use ‘‘technoscience’’ through this book to refer interchange-
ably to the life sciences and to biotechnology, each of which influences and structures the
development of the other.
8. According to Cynthia Robbins-Roth (2000), 11 percent of all federal research and
development money was allocated to basic biomedical research, and the National Cancer
Institute alone was spending nearly a billion dollars annually on basic research by 1981.
9. Indeed, Buck-Morss (2002) notes that Marx always referred to capital, rather than
capitalism, as the phenomenon he was trying to make sense of.
10. For the notion of situated perspective, see Haraway 1991.
11. There are some significant di√erences between biotech and pharmaceutical companies,
which I elaborate on later in the introduction.
12. Marx 1974 (1894), 298.
13. This also echoes Gayatri Spivak’s 1999 argument with Fredric Jameson that postmod-
ernism is repetition rather than rupture.
14. Political economy itself was structured by emergent social formations, since political
economy was, in Marx’s opinion, a fundamentally bourgeois science. Once again, one
sees a coproduction between the ‘‘scientific’’ and the ‘‘social’’ as a diagnostic outcome of
Marx’s own critical method.
15. See Landecker 1999 for the way in which ‘‘biological’’ has increasingly come to function
as a noun and not just as adjective.
16. For definitive explanations and critiques of Foucault’s work, see Dreyfus and Rabinow
1983; Rabinow 1984.
17. For a key diagnostic analysis of late capitalism, see Jameson 2003 (1991).
18. It was only after completing this manuscript that I read Jason Read’s excellent recent
book, The Micro-Politics of Capital. While philosophical rather than ethnographic, and
not concerned with technoscience, Read’s method of reading Marx against Foucault has
close resonances with what I am attempting here. Read 2003.
19. Marx and Engels 1963 (1845), 19.
20. See Doyle 1997, 2003; Jacob 1993 (1973); Kay 2000; Keller 1995, 2002.
21. See Grundrisse (Marx 1973 [1858]) and Capital, Volume 1 (Marx 1976 [1867]) for
Marx’s labor theory of value.
22. Donna Haraway (2004) refers to this uncanny value of all exchange as ‘‘encounter
value.’’
23. For the vexed relationship between notions of ideology and fetishism in Marx, which he
diagnoses as a fundamental tension that grounds Marxian analysis of capital, see Etienne
Balibar’s essay ‘‘The Vacillation of Ideology in Marx’’ (Balibar 1994). For an argument
that Marx’s account of commodity fetishism inaugurates a symptomatic argument that
prefigures a Freudian or psychoanalytic notion of symptom, see Žižek’s essay ‘‘How Did
Marx Invent the Symptom?’’ (Žižek 1994). My use of the word ‘‘uncanny’’ here is
therefore not accidental but is a purposeful use of the Freudian concept. See also Maurer
2003 for an analysis of the ways in which systems of monetary and financial exchange are
uncanny.
24. Many thanks to Nick King for making this evident through a workshop he organized on
exchange networks in biomedicine called ‘‘The Moment of Conversion,’’ which put this
particular form of abstraction of this materialist process front and center in its analysis.
The conversations in that workshop were particularly invaluable in developing my argu-
ments in chapter 1.
25. See Deshpande 2003 for an articulation of the ways in which economics can be a na-
tionalist discipline.
26. This, I believe, is the simplification that actor-network theory, an otherwise extremely
provocative analysis of the mechanics of how technoscience functions, falls prey to. See,
for instance, Callon 1999 (1986); Latour 1987, 1988.
27. See Haraway 1997 for her description of the ‘‘onion of technoscientific practice.’’
28. For a useful, if somewhat glorified, account of the biotech industry, see Robbins-Roth
2000. For accounts of the pharmaceutical industry, see Mahoney 1957; Mann 1999.
29. This becomes particularly pertinent in the wake of the recent bioterrorism scares in the
United States, including the incidences of letters coated with anthrax spores in Septem-
ber and October 2001. At a venture capital conference that I attended in Boston at the
end of October 2001, there was unmitigated excitement among the venture capitalists I

290 Notes to Introduction

 met, who saw anthrax as a pure and simple business opportunity because it would focus
the attention of the Department of Defense on the biotech industry. See also Hoyt
(2002), who analyzes the role of the military-industrial complex in post–World War II
America in the innovation of vaccine development.
30. The most successful early biotech companies that have produced biopharmaceutical
products are Amgen (which has developed granulocyte colony stimulating factor [g-
csf] and erythropoietin) and Genentech (which has produced recombinant insulin,
tissue plasminogen activator [tpa], human growth hormone, and a-interferon prod-
ucts) (see Walsh 1998, 1–36, for a good summary, from which I have drawn for this
account).
31. I discuss this ipo and analyze this fundamental driving temporal structure of the biotech
industry in chapter 3.
32. There is a similar terrain in Europe, though the regulatory structure surrounding clinical
trials and drug marketing is significantly di√erent. These are consequential di√erences
for understanding the terrain of drug development in the two contexts, but this is not an
issue that I explore in this book.
33. This has predictably been labeled piracy by those with close ties to the U.S. pharmaceuti-
cal industry. However, it is hopefully evident from the formulation here that one could
just as well see this as allowing free market competition in therapeutic molecules simi-
lar to that allowed, even in the United States, in many commodities central to daily
consumption.
34. The di√erence of Reddy’s and drf from many U.S. biotech companies is that the former
are organizations run by some of the most experienced members of the Indian pharma-
ceutical industry, many of whom have been in the business for the last twenty or thirty
years, and therefore come much closer to the ideal type of the ‘‘gray-haired big phar-
maceutical manager,’’ the perceived managerial caricature of American big pharmaceuti-
cal companies. Indian pharmaceutical companies have not abandoned their generic
manufacturing business models. wto compliance just means that they need to restrict
their generic business to molecules that have gone o√ product patent. However, Indian
companies are slowly beginning to leverage their generic expertise to become competi-
tive in the generic markets of the West. While generic markets are far less profitable than
markets for drugs protected by patents, the ability to infiltrate Western generic markets is
potentially very lucrative for Indian companies hoping to get a global toehold. Indeed, a
few Indian companies, including Reddy’s, have established r & d divisions in the United
States. The emergent politics of generic drugs around the world is a particularly interest-
ing terrain that requires close study, and Cori Hayden (2004) has embarked on such a
study in Mexico.
35. For the notion of assemblage as it pertains to the analysis of technoscience, see Rabinow
1999.
36. The hgp used dna from about fifty donors, created libraries from them, and chose eight
libraries for subsequent sequencing. Celera used dna from twenty-one donors and chose
five libraries for subsequent sequencing. All eight libraries used in the hgp were from
male donors, while three of the five Celera libraries were from female donors. See
Gibson and Muse 2002, 20, for a diagrammatic representation of this.
37. The best account of the early days of the hgp is Cook-Deegan’s (1994). For definitive

Notes to Introduction 291

 historical accounts of Cold War Soviet science, see, for instance, Graham 1990, 1993;
Gerovitch 2002.
38. Some of the early model organisms to be sequenced were yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae),
roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans), and fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).
39. For a nice tabular summary of the stages of the hgp, see Gibson and Muse 2002, 14. See
also Collins et al. 1998 for a summary of milestones and further challenges for the hgp as
they existed at a time that could be considered the start of their race with Celera to
sequence the genome.
40. For which see also Geertz 1983, 68.
41. See also Marcus 1998 for an elaboration of the methodological strategies of multisited
ethnography.
42. The best way to proliferate analyses of various sites and forms of biocapital, I believe, is
through collaborative inquiry. To that end, I organized a workshop called ‘‘Lively Capi-
tal: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets,’’ which brought to-
gether leading analysts of the life sciences and capitalism from a range of disciplines
(primarily anthropologists, but also historians and literary theorists). The papers in this
workshop trace forms and practices of biocapital in a range of national locales, including
the United States, Mexico, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Nigeria, South
Africa, India, China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Even this, evidently, is a fairly limited list of
sites of analysis. The papers in this workshop are currently being gathered together for
an edited volume.
43. The majority of the stories in this book trace events occurring between 1999 and early
2002, when the bulk of the field research was done. I performed follow-up research at
various sites between 2002 and 2004 to trace the continuing changes occurring at a
number of sites that I had studied. Given the rapid nature of some of these changes, it
could be argued that this book is already something of a contemporary historical analy-
sis, a succession of snapshots of dramatic and emblematic but by no means static mo-
ments in the history of technoscientific capitalism in two national locales.
44. This draws on Donna Haraway’s notion of gene fetishism. See Haraway 1997.

1. Exchange and Value

1. This does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of the DeCode controversy, which
has been well researched and debated not just among American bioethicists but also
among American anthropologists. For contrasting positions on the controversy, see
Palsson and Rabinow 1999 and M. Fortun 2000. Michael Fortun’s book on the subject is
forthcoming. An extensive archive of the literature surrounding the DeCode contro-
versy is available on the Web site of the leading organization in opposition to DeCode,
Mannvernd ([Link]). Many thanks to Mike Fortun for conversations
that have taught me much about the DeCode controversy, and also to Skuli Sigurdsson,
whose indefatigable e√orts have been instrumental in the creation of this archive.
2. As Stuart Hall points out (see Morley and Chen 1996), articulation too (like value) is a
double-jointed word, implying simultaneously the ability to enunciate and make oneself
heard, and the process of linking together.
3. The idea of ‘‘qualitatively compressed time’’ might seem anachronistic but in fact reflects
the actual di√erence in modes of production—to the extent that new ways of doing

292 Notes to Chapter 1

 science emerge—from an increase in speed. This is reflected in the rapidly emerging
high-throughput industries, which require battalions of advanced automated instru-
mentation that itself gives rise to new instrumentation industries. A particularly strik-
ing example of the qualitative e√ects of time compression can be seen in the business
model and r & d activity of a San Diego–based company called Syrrx. Syrrx is a high-
throughput proteomics company that seeks to automate all the steps of protein docu-
mentation and analysis. In the process, it claims it has robots that can actually crystallize
proteins. Protein crystallization has always been one of the hardest things to do in
biological research and is often considered more of an art than a precise science. That
Syrrx believes it can automate such an intricate and unpredictable process is a testament
to how drastically high-throughput technoscience (or its desire) can change the nature
of scientific practice as much as it is to the rhetorical powers of a company capable of
dynamically selling itself to investors.
4. For the essay that ‘‘fathered’’ information theory, see Shannon 1948.
5. This is still occasionally the case, though many genome companies have increasingly
shifted their business models away from database generation toward functional geno-
mics, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical development. See the introduction for an
explanation of these terms and business models.
6. One might think, however, that the state, were it so willing, might have the muscle to
bring drugs to market. Historically, however, the state, and not just in the United States,
has been good at initial capital outlay that enables the development of private industry,
but has been bad at successful long-term execution on capital-intensive projects. There-
fore, while the idea of a ‘‘public-sector’’ pharmaceutical company might be tempting to
those who believe that the state should invest heavily in the development of accessible
therapeutics, this is likely to remain out of even the spectrum of options that states
generally explore. Further, in the United States, there exists an extremely strong phar-
maceutical company lobby in Congress. Therefore the American state has close relation-
ships with the pharmaceutical industry.
7. I am grateful to Alexander Brown for conversations that have helped me think through
these parallels.
8. A ‘‘snp’’ is a single nucleotide polymorphism. See the introduction for a definition of
these dna sequence markers.
9. A site at which this agitation, and dislike of Venter, was apparent was the 1999 Cold
Spring Harbor genome meetings. The phrases quoted were mentioned in talks given by
public researchers at these meetings. The reference to the worm genome was because the
public researchers were just coming out with the sequence of the roundworm Caenor-
habditis elegans, which was a major milestone at the time.
10. See also M. Fortun 1999 for an analysis of speed in genomics.
11. As Cook-Deegan (1994) points out, there was serious debate even within the nih O≈ce
of Technology Transfer regarding the patentability of these sequences. A major reason
why the nih felt that it was necessary to patent the sequences was defensive: they felt
that they would be in a vulnerable position if someone else patented the sequences
instead and thereby prevented their release into the public domain.
12. Venter himself was not at the nhgri but was working at the National Institute for
Neurological Disorders and Strokes (ninds).

Notes to Chapter 1 293

13. As it happens, both the hgp and Celera generated a working draft of the sequence at
roughly the same time.
14. Of course, the ‘‘o≈cial’’ summaries of this extremely contentious history are predictably
formal and dyspeptic. For instance, Francis Collins, head of the National Human Ge-
nome Research Institute, in a review article coauthored with Victor McCusick, a leading
public genome researcher at the Johns Hopkins University, written for the Journal of the
American Medical Association summarizing the implications of the genome project for
medical science phrases this history in the following terms: ‘‘By 1996, the complete
sequencing of several bacterial species and yeast led to the conclusion that it was time to
attempt sequencing human dna on a pilot scale. The introduction of capillary sequenc-
ing instruments and the formation of a company in the private sector promising to
sequence the human genome for profitable purposes added further momentum to the
e√ort. By 1999, confidence had gathered that acquiring the majority of the sequence of
the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome could be attempted. In June 2000, both the
private company and the international public sequencing consortium announced the
completion of ‘working drafts’ of the human genome sequence’’ (Collins and McCusick
2001, 541).
15. From Signals magazine, an online publication that analyzes biotechnology for execu-
tives, [Link], August 24, 1999. The genetic determinism in this quote is
particularly striking: while not directly relevant to this chapter, it is interesting to see
how it is precisely such deterministic language that is shed in, for instance, the promo-
tion of cloning. It is also striking to note how snps simultaneously seem to represent
information about individuals, populations, and the ‘‘globe.’’
16. The academic centers involved at the time the consortium commenced were the White-
head Institute for Biomedical Research, Washington University School of Medicine, the
Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Center, the Stanford Human Genome Center, and Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory. The list of pharmaceutical members of the consortium was even
more impressive and comprised AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ho√mann–
La Roche, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoechst Marion Roussel, Novartis, Pfizer, G. D. Searle,
and SmithKline Beecham. Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham have since merged
to form GlaxoSmithKline (gsk).
17. Quoted in Signals magazine, [Link], August 24, 1999.
18. Why Merck, in spite of being a prime mover, was not among the consortium’s ten
pharmaceutical company members is something I have been unable to ascertain. None-
theless, one might, in deference to Jacques Derrida, refer to the haunting of the snp
Consortium by Merck’s influence and initiative as the ‘‘Specters of Merck.’’ Thanks to
Nick King for this bad pun.
19. As Pierre Bourdieu insightfully remarks, ‘‘We need to be able to recognize as such the
strategies which, in universes in which people have an interest in being disinterested,
tend to disguise strategies’’ (Bourdieu 1999 [1975], 35).
20. Signals magazine, [Link], May 19, 1998.
21. [Link] [Link], accessed March 2000.
22. [Link] accessed March 2000.
23. Signals magazine, [Link], May 19, 1998.
24. Signals magazine, [Link], May 19, 1998.

294 Notes to Chapter 1

25. For the notion of obligatory point of passage, see Latour 1987.
26. Equally important and often overlooked, however, is the obligation that Mauss empha-
sizes to gift in the first place. A realization of such obligations when exported to the
corporate cause may not make new corporate activism seem less cynical, but certainly
points to a much more constrained agency for these corporations. A di√erence between
obligation and constraint is also important to tease out concomitant to their causal
equation—by ‘‘constraint’’ I mean the limitation of strategic fields with the ultimate aim
of maximizing profit, and therefore use the term specifically to define capitalist relations.
By obligation I refer to a more intangible system of socio-moral pressures that operate as
strongly in the societies Mauss describes as they coexist with the market in capitalism. A
standard utilitarian move is to collapse all obligations into constraint. Godbout and
Caille (1998) distinguish obligation and constraint as ‘‘a moral obligation, whose ex-
treme manifestation is an obligation arising from love, and constraint, which comes
from outside and at its extreme is embodied in physical force. Somewhere in the middle
is the contract, which provides a space that separates the gift from constraint, a space that
the market will enlarge, an intermediate type of social constraint that cannot, however,
exist unless it is grounded in a prior gift relationship’’ (151).
27. Indeed, as Georges Bataille (1998 [1967]) would argue, the importance of gifting in
capitalism is not just strategic but in fact a fundamental capitalist ‘‘impulse.’’
28. I am grateful to Bill Maurer for this reading of the gift that Godbout and Caille analyze as
distinct from the ‘‘archaic’’ gift that is the subject of Mauss’s analysis. Maurer reads
Godbout and Caille’s gift, which closely approximates the form of gifting I am talking
about, as being akin to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘‘history 1’’ (the histories of precapitalism
necessary to capitalism). He especially reads this in contrast to Marilyn Strathern’s
notion of the gift, which he sees as being akin to Chakrabarty’s ‘‘history 2’’ (which
exceeds and cannot be wholly co-opted by capitalism). See Chakrabarty 2000.
29. Academic research labs often aggressively pursue intellectual property protection. It is
just that, in the context of dna sequence debates, they have generally avoided doing so,
thereby framing themselves as committed to the ‘‘public domain.’’
30. Three seminal studies show the importance of public research to private innovation in
drug development. See Comroe and Dripps 1976; Maxwell and Eckhardt 1990; and
Stallings et al. 2001.
31. For an analysis of the process of commodification that I have drawn inspiration from
here, see Kopyto√ 1986.
32. For an analysis of relationships between public domain and private property in the
sphere of plant bioprospecting that inspired my argument here, see Hayden 2003. See
also Smith 2004 for a description of the fluid and contested nature of the public/private
boundary in the case of rice genomics.
33. For some useful literature on Moore, see Gold 1995 and Boyle 1997, 97–107. The best
historical contextualization of Moore that I have read is Landecker 1999.
34. One could conceptualize this by the following relationship: Rx genomic information =
genetic material + genotype information + medical information.
35. I have wrestled with the issue of whether to name this company, and I am still not sure
that my decision to keep it anonymous is the correct one. However, there are a number
of reasons why I have chosen to do so, and I think this extended footnote is of some

Notes to Chapter 1 295

 consequence in thinking through methodological questions surrounding the ethical
choices that one makes while doing corporate ethnographies.
Joseph Dumit ponders these questions seriously in his recent work on venture science
(unpublished), where he names two biotechnology companies and has therefore con-
sciously decided to avoid interviewing people at these companies. In this case, however,
I had already interviewed two people at Rep-X (one employee and one manager, one on
tape and one o√) before I learned of the company’s controversial situation in India that I
discuss in this chapter. At no point in the chapter do I draw on these conversations. As
Dumit has shown, it is both legitimate and a challenge to do corporate ethnography by
working from the public record in order to reserve the right to ‘‘tackle’’ certain actors.
While that is precisely what I have done in this chapter (using not just the public record
but public documents that Rep-X has had a significant hand in ‘‘spinning’’ to its own
advantage), the problem of how to ‘‘forget’’ my conversations at Rep-X is a lingering
one. I have decided to keep Rep-X anonymous until I have resolved that problem for
myself.
This is, as much as anything, an acknowledgment that anthropology is di√erent from
journalism, and one of the lines of di√erence is the relationship with informants. Jour-
nalism is adversarial by nature: the work is to ‘‘get’’ a story out of a subject, even if there is
a long-term relationship involved. The challenge for an anthropological account such as
this is to be ethical and nonadversarial, which is not to say noncritical. At the end of the
day, anthropologists write, in part, to their subjects, not just to their colleagues and
beyond.
Corporate ethnography involves writing about what is fundamentally a culture of
secrecy. It is possible to be fascinated by how and why things get made secret, without
necessarily feeling the obligation to make public what the subjects want kept secret. This
is precisely the opposite of the investigative journalist. On a basic level, the journalist
wants the ‘‘truth’’ that is ‘‘out there,’’ while the anthropologist wants, at least as one set of
perspectives without which one cannot understand the motivational or intentional side
of social action, something like the subject’s truth. This is a ‘‘truth’’ in Foucault’s sense of
‘‘the system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circula-
tion and operation of statements . . . linked in a circular relation with systems of power
that produce and sustain it’’ (Foucault 1980, 133).
One strategy I considered was going to Rep-X’s investor relations department to ask
for their comments on what I heard in India, but I decided against that journalistic tactic
as well. My sense is that if this really is a public relations disaster waiting to happen for
Rep-X, then there are strategies that can be employed in conversation with the involved
representatives of the Indian state—who are, after all, extremely articulate and media
savvy—in making that happen.
Finally, I believe that a number of people invested (in all senses of the word) in the
world I am studying will read this chapter with an eye that will see through most
attempts at keeping Rep-X anonymous. Also, any agreements I have with companies
where I have done longer-term work (this does not apply to Rep-X, where I had only a
couple of conversations) make it clear that I have the option of using the companies’
names unless they would explicitly prefer me not to. Until shown otherwise, I adopt the
methodological rule that the anthropologically interesting issues do not resolve into
‘‘dirty secrets’’ but are structurally interesting dilemmas.

296 Notes to Chapter 1

 I feel, in spite of that discomfort, that the story of Rep-X will be illustrative of situa-
tions I want to explain even if I do not directly locate it.
36. The name of the repository has been kept anonymous.
37. This quote was obtained from the Rep-X Web site. However, to preserve anonymity, the
exact citation has not been provided.
38. That even the ethical questions are unclear seems to be lost on most bioethicists, who
further believe they have most of the answers to these unarticulated questions. But that is
well in keeping with the American institutional desire to have systems run by bodies of
experts rather than through genuine public participation, and that is a topic for another
day. Nonetheless, see The Romance of American Psychology (Herman 1996), a disciplinary
study of the rise of ‘‘mind sciences,’’ which becomes perceived as o≈cially an expert dis-
course. This is a general post–World War II development in the United States. Thanks
to David Kaiser for pointing me to this reference.
39. This is also a quote linked to Rep-X’s Web site and therefore will not be cited to preserve
anonymity.
40. The exact citation is not provided to preserve anonymity.
41. I am particularly intrigued by the way in which this article makes dna sample delivery
sound like groceries being delivered. This could, from the tone of the article, be a
description of online grocery stores such as [Link] or [Link]. This is not
merely an interesting discourse; it is, I believe, a strategic one. After all, making contro-
versial activities seem mundane is key to naturalizing them.
42. Yet again, I will not provide the exact citation, which is taken from Rep-X’s Web site.
43. Marx and Engels 1963 (1845).
44. Donna Haraway, personal conversations with the author.
45. M. Fortun 2000, available at [Link]
html.
46. Fortun’s formulation draws deeply on notions of the ethical put forward by Jacques
Derrida. See, for instance, Derrida 2002b.
47. For analyses that put questions of ethics and value squarely in the frame of encounters,
whether they are global (and therefore transcultural) or across species, see, for instance,
Haraway 2004; Zhan 2005.
48. For a conceptualization of ethics that takes as its starting point the striated rather than
seamless terrain on which ethical-political emergence takes place, see Michael Fischer’s
notion of ethical plateaus (Fischer 2003). The disarticulation and incongruent nature of
the ethical grounds on which new biotechnologies emerge is hardly restricted to the
stories I outline here. Such disarticulation is, indeed, central to the ethical debates
surrounding DeCode that Fortun writes about, and that I briefly introduced this chapter
with. Another similar case is the failure of the public Human Genome Diversity Project
(hgdp). This attempt by the nih to document genetic variability among populations
stalled as a consequence of di√erent understandings of the ethical grounds for dna
sample collection held by the nih and by Native American populations. For accounts of
the hgdp, see Reardon 2001, 2004.
49. cbt has recently been renamed the Institute for Genomics and Integrative Biology
(igib), reflecting its current mandate of genomic research. However, since it was called
cbt throughout the period of my fieldwork there, I refer to it as cbt throughout this
book.

Notes to Chapter 1 297

50. Of course, neither of these is obvious or intuitive outside the constantly expanding
rationality of population genetics as a discipline and enterprise that discursively con-
structs populations as units that ‘‘naturally’’ exist to be genetically studied.
51. This section is based on conversations with Indian scientists and policymakers. Instead
of directly quoting specific conversations, I have summarized their general content and
will keep specific informants anonymous.
52. India is often referred to as ‘‘India Inc.’’ in the Indian business press.
53. The question of what constitutes ‘‘source’’ and what ‘‘invention’’ is, of course, a central
one in ip debates writ large and is not just confined to biotech. The question of what, if
anything, is distinct in the blurring of source and invention in biotech—other than the
obviously di√erent and dramatic political contexts that some of these biotech contro-
versies operate within—is of central importance, and something I am very much grap-
pling with.
54. I make these claims, again, based on conversations with Indian scientists and policy-
makers that I feel delicate about attributing directly to specific people. I do, however,
wish to acknowledge one person by name, who has helped me greatly both as an infor-
mant and in helping me think through some of the conceptual issues at stake here.
Manjari Mahajan is a student of science policy, who was briefly employed by S. K.
Brahmachari at cbt to help him think through some of the science policy issues that
emerged from genomics as a global practice, particularly as they pertained to ip issues.
Mahajan has been particularly keen that the Indian state assert claims for intellectual
property rights, rather than simply request benefit-sharing agreements with Western
companies (which is the model adopted by most Latin American countries, and a model
that Brahmachari, regardless of his personal feelings on the matter, feels might be the
more strategic model to pursue because it might antagonize foreign investors less),
because regardless of the possibly paradoxical framings of state-as-corporate-entity that
this might lead to, intellectual property rights are precisely that: they confer proactive
rights to exclude others from using ‘‘Indian’’ genetic material as they please, and they
protect against Western companies obtaining precisely such rights. Benefit-sharing
agreements, on the other hand, engage a terrain of (usually Western) corporate philan-
thropy rather than of rights. I thank Mahajan for these insights.
55. See, for instance, Victoria Bernal (2004), who traces the formation of an Eritrean na-
tionalist consciousness as a consequence of global networks that are constituted simulta-
neously by members of the Eritrean diaspora and by communications technologies such
as the Internet.
56. I narrate stories of Genomed in chapter 2.
57. For Derrida’s notion of deconstruction that this draws on, see Derrida 1976.
58. I think Coombe’s notion of a ‘‘cultural life’’ rather than a ‘‘social life’’ is of utmost
importance, because understanding the lives of commodities cannot simply be an at-
tempt to understand the circuits they travel as they are produced, circulated, and con-
sumed. Commodities, by definition, are mystical things, and it is impossible to divorce
their social life from an analysis of the imaginaries that they create, sustain, and traverse.
Hence the salience of the notion of ‘‘cultural life.’’ Coombe, indeed, is intimately con-
cerned with the imaginaries associated with intellectual property.
59. For an example of which, see my story of pxe International in chapter 5.

298 Notes to Chapter 1

60. Another American biotech company, AgriDyne, also received two U.S. patents for
the bioprocessing of neem, and W. R. Grace was issued patents for neem-based bio-
pesticides.

2. Life and Debt

1. See, for instance, ‘‘Suicides by Andhra Pradesh Farmers Continue,’’ The Hindu, June 10,
2004.
2. See [Link]/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCHIPAAY/UNPANO
[Link].
3. This is a theme that encompasses Foucault’s work. For his exposition specifically on
governmental rationality, or what he calls ‘‘governmentality,’’ see Burchell et al. 1990.
4. This is not only reflected in the governing ideologies of free market ideologues such as
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush but also has very much been the
mantra of ‘‘experts’’ of market globalization, as suggested by imf/World Bank structural
adjustment policies, or by publications such as the Economist or the Wall Street Journal.
5. For the notion of biosociality, see Rabinow 1992.
6. For background on the 1991 crisis, see National Council of Applied Economic Research
2001.
7. See Corbridge and Harriss 2003 (2000), 120. While part of the reason for India’s move
toward liberalization at the start of the 1990s was structural, part was very much ideo-
logical. A detailed account of the factors leading to a change in the economic rationality
of the Indian state is beyond the scope of this narrative. Nonetheless it is useful to point
out that some of the changes occurring in India at the start of the decade were a conse-
quence of what Sudipta Kaviraj (1997) calls an ‘‘elite revolt,’’ not just to four decades of
state socialism inspired by the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru, but also to increased social
mobilization among ‘‘backward’’ castes that was pronounced in the late 1980s. (The
term ‘‘backward caste’’ is o≈cially one of state classification. This includes Scheduled
Castes [known politically as Dalits, these are groups of people deemed untouchable in
the Hindu caste hierarchy] and Other Backward Castes, groups who are not Dalits but
still deemed socially and economically backward by the state.)
8. For a discussion of Marx’s distinction between commodity and commercial capitalism in
Capital, Volume 3, and its relevance to this analysis, see my introduction.
9. I am inspired here by Saskia Sassen’s consideration of how globalization ‘‘touches down’’
in di√erent localities (see, for instance, Sassen 2000).
10. See, for instance, Bell 1998; Kassiola 2003.
11. Unlike in the United States, public institutions in India are not allowed to be monetary
stakeholders in private enterprises. Instead, cbt holds equity in Genomed in the form of
intellectual property, where cbt will get a fixed share of any intellectual property Ge-
nomed develops. This in itself is imaginatively di√erent from the U.S. model for equity
holding in start-ups. The advantage of this model, according to the director of cbt, S. K.
Brahmachari, is that cbt’s intellectual property stake cannot be diluted even if Genomed
gets bought up by, or receives investment from, another entity, in the way monetary
equity would have been.
12. For an analysis of the decoupling of the nation-state in global food politics, see Gupta
1998.

Notes to Chapter 2 299

13. An important question is whether the relationship between regional parties and the
transnational facilitation of capital flows is applicable to other regional parties beyond
the Telugu Desam. A particularly instructive case is that of neighboring Tamil Nadu,
which has been influenced since the mid-1960s by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
(dmk) and its o√shoot and rival, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
(aiadmk). These parties, as the Telugu Desam has for the Telugus, have based their
ideology on Tamil regional identity while becoming important coalition players on the
national political scene.
14. While Naidu’s vision remains extremely attractive to investment communities based
both in India and in the United States, it did not to the Andhra Pradesh electorate, who
resoundingly voted him out of power in May 2004.
15. See, for instance, Hoare and Smith 1971.
16. The irony here is that Naidu himself could only be elected as chief minister for five-year
terms and, as just mentioned, has been voted out of power before his vision could be
successfully implemented.
17. This is not to say that there isn’t a growing venture capital industry in India. The amount
of venture capital investment in India increased from $3 million in 1995 to $342 million
in 2000 (United Nations Development Program 2001, 38).
18. This has been the central mantra of World Bank/imf structural adjustment policies all
over the world.
19. This phrase is a play on Sharon Traweek’s phrase ‘‘culture of no culture’’ to describe the
culture of high-energy physicists. See Traweek 1988.
20. According to the 1991 census data, the rural population of Andhra Pradesh makes up 73
percent of the state’s total population; there are 195.16 lakh (1 lakh = 100,000) agricul-
tural workers as opposed to 104.48 lakh nonagricultural workers (a ratio of nearly 2:1,
with the latter category including marginal workers).
21. I wish to be careful of making such predictions, especially since there has been innovative
biotech research coming out of Hyderabad in recent years. Most well known has been
the creation of a recombinant hepatitis B vaccine by the local biotech company Shanta
Biotechniques. Shanta is currently located in the Biotech Park, adjacent to the icici
Knowledge Park and conceived on similar principles. However, the research on the
development of the hepatitis B vaccine occurred while Shanta was being incubated on
the premises of an academic institution, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology
(ccmb). Rather than make pronouncements on the likely or unlikely futures of ventures
like the Park, I wish here merely to emphasize Naidu’s rationale for such ventures.
Naidu’s vision has not been the sole defining vision for the development of biotech in
Hyderabad, but it has undoubtedly been a vital and enabling vision, one that has fash-
ioned the priority and direction of biotech initiatives there to a significant extent.
22. The role of pedagogy, of course, is central here, which is why initiatives of Naidu’s such
as setting up the Indian Business School, modeled on the lines of American schools such
as Wharton, become an integral component of such emergent stratified assemblages.
23. Indeed, as just mentioned, Shanta Biotech’s development of its indigenous hepatitis B
vaccine occurred while it incubated at ccmb.
24. See Srinivasulu 2004. Srinivasulu claims that the recent electoral failure of the Telugu
Desam results from its failure to see the consequences of the changes it was bringing

300 Notes to Chapter 2

 about for the rural population of the state, coupled with a marginalization of the agrar-
ian sector. I wish to thank Venkat Rao for conversations on the history and politics of
Andhra Pradesh and its high-tech initiatives. Rao’s insights have been invaluable in
constructing this narrative.
25. All these figures are obtained from the 1991 Andhra Pradesh census, available at [Link]
[Link], and also from Andhra Pradesh Government 1997. If these figures are
adjusted for the relative population densities of Hyderabad city and the adjoining rural
districts, the disparities are not quite as stark and amount to a hospital ratio, for instance,
of roughly 4:1 between the city and the rural districts. Two things, however, trouble such
an easy calculation. The first is that the utility of hospitals relates not simply to the
number of people that they serve but also to their ease of access. It is not su≈cient to say
that hospitals serving a less dense population area can thereby be concomitantly fewer in
number than one serving a denser population area, because in the former case the
question of how sick patients in parts of the rural countryside far from hospital access
then becomes a central question for development. Further, there is the question of the
qualitative di√erence in hospitals and medical facilities in Hyderabad compared to its
surrounding districts, vital comparative parameters that census figures cannot indicate.
Indeed, hospitals in Hyderabad were seen by Naidu as an integral component of the
state’s tourism strategy, as he hoped to set up a number of ‘‘five-star’’ hospitals in the city
that could cater to rich patients from various parts of the country (and perhaps also from
other countries). He explicitly refers to the setting up of hospitals as a form of ‘‘health
tourism’’ (Naidu 2000).
26. Genomed Mumbai has now (as of 2004) moved to a larger industrial facility in New
Mumbai. However, Wellspring Hospital remains in Parel, a part of Mumbai whose
political history I outline hereafter in the text. The story that I narrate, therefore, traces
the particular situation of Genomed at the time I performed my fieldwork, 2001–2.
Although my account is already dated because of the rapidly changing nature of the
processes I am studying, I believe that it nonetheless allows me to highlight the struc-
tural logics and empirical specificities of biocapital ‘‘touching down’’ in India.
27. As briefly mentioned in the introduction, pharmacogenomics is the correlation of ge-
netics to drug response.
28. It is estimated that of every five drugs that enter clinical trials in the United States, only
one makes it to market.
29. Paradoxically, the more successful a drug is on the market, the greater the danger of recall
due to adverse events, because a statistically small percentage of adverse responses would
then get magnified to a numerically large number of people who experience negative side
e√ects. The most dramatic example of a postmarketing recall because of the magnified
e√ects of adverse responses in a statistically small percentage of people is the case of
Pfizer’s antibiotic Trovan, which was considered to be the best fluoroquinolone in its
class until the small percentage, but increasingly large number, of patients showing liver
failure as a side e√ect forced Pfizer to withdraw the drug from market.
30. Adriana Petryna is currently engaged in an ethnographic project that studies clinical
trials; see Petryna 2005. The best historical work on clinical trials is H. Marks 1997.
31. S. K. Brahmachari, interview with the author, January 7, 2002. The di≈culty of classify-
ing populations for population genetics is constitutive to its epistemology; see chapter 4

Notes to Chapter 2 301

 for an elaboration of this fact. See also Reardon 2001 for an account of the di≈culties
encountered by the Human Genome Diversity Project as a consequence of this.
32. Sudha and Lalit Deshpande (2003) show that the decline of the textile industry in
Mumbai actually started in the 1970s, before liberalization. They indicate that the last
five years of the 1970s saw the loss of 34,000 textile jobs, while the first eight years of the
1980s saw the loss of 88,000 textile jobs.
33. Neha Madhiwalla (2003) shows how the distribution of private hospitals mirrors the
distribution of elite residential areas. While Mumbai has among the best health coverage
in India, the distribution of this health coverage is expectedly very uneven and skewed
based on class.
34. My suspicion that what I describe is far from unique to Parel, even though Parel’s
political ecology might be unique, is suggested from conversations with Joao Biehl, who
has for a number of years ethnographically studied an hiv testing center in the Brazilian
province of Bahia. This is a center set up by the Brazilian state and is part of the widely
hailed Brazilian state intervention in the diagnosis and treatment of aids, which has
often been referred to as a model for other states to follow. On a recent visit to the center,
Biehl found that adjoining the center was a huge five-star hospital, set up by a major
multinational pharmaceutical company, that served primarily as an experimental site for
clinical trials. In this case, it was the people getting tested for hiv who served as the
population that could potentially be recruited into the trials in this hospital. Thanks to
Biehl for conversations about this.
35. The relationship of bodies as sites of medical intervention to local forms of indebtedness
is strikingly illustrated in Lawrence Cohen’s 1999 account of organ transplantation in
South India.
36. Datta Isswalkar, interview with the author, July 29, 2004.
37. In a similar vein, see also Susan Greenhalgh (2003) on China’s ‘‘unimaginable popula-
tions.’’
38. One way they could conceivably be ‘‘included’’ in such circuits is if their genetic material
and information was collected for population genetics experiments of the type being
done by cbt/Genomed.
39. This is in contrast to the configuration of unmarked advanced liberal subjects of geno-
mics, who are, as I argue in chapter 4, configured as sovereign consumers.
40. See Balibar 1995 for a theoretical exploration of the relationship between subjectivity
and citizenship. See also Mamdani 1996.
41. Of course, the Indian (and Pakistani) nation-states were themselves formed along with
the catastrophic events of the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two nations. It
was, however, religion rather than biology that undergirded this citizenship order.

3. Vision and Hype

1. Balasubramanian 2002.
2. This account of Doubletwist’s rather sorry but extremely entertaining history is recon-
structed from conversations with former employees, who are both kept anonymous and
not directly quoted.
3. Quote given by Williamson on Incyte tv, a closed-circuit tv channel that was covering
the 1999 tigr conference and airing it to the rooms of its participants.

302 Notes to Chapter 3

 4. I keep the firm anonymous, since I believe that the contours of this story, and the role
venture capital has played in the lives of [Link] start-ups, can be conveyed without
specifically naming the firm involved.
5. Bellenson and Smith, meanwhile, started another company in 1999 called DigiScents,
which managed to get featured on the cover of the November issue of Wired magazine
that year. This was a company that had nothing to do with biotech, and the products
intended included the ‘‘iSmell’’ (a computer peripheral that would emit fragrances to
enhance a user’s multimedia experience), ‘‘ScentStream’’ software to drive iSmell, and
the ‘‘Scent Registry,’’ a licensable digital database of thousands of scents to sell to de-
velopers of Web sites, games, movies, advertisements, and music. In April 2001, Digi-
Scents laid o√ all seventy of its employees and closed up shop after failing to attract
enough venture capital funding to go beyond developing a prototype.
6. See the introduction for Marx’s distinction between the two.
7. This is not to say that the stock market does not play a role in the lives of Indian
companies. It is just that the metric by which Indian companies tend to be judged,
even on the Indian stock market, is based less on speculation than on tangible material
indicators.
8. See Comaro√ and Comaro√ 2001 for a collection of essays dealing with what they call
millennial capitalism.
9. Dumit, unpublished essay.
10. For Merton’s account of the normative structure of science, based on the four norms
of universality, disinterestedness, communism, and organized skepticism, see Merton
1973 (1942).
11. This is consistent with Weber’s famous argument that the role of the Protestant ethic in
the small churches and denominations of North Carolina textile towns was business
credit made by moral creditworthiness—the very function of sect organization was to
enforce a moral creditworthiness. Also, the bidding among Jains in India for the honor
of sponsoring ritual acts is a di√erent but similar way of asserting business creditworthi-
ness, often way beyond their actual means. The moral economy called into account
in such situations of credibility/incredibility resembles that of the Balinese cockfight
(Geertz 1973). Thanks to Michael Fischer for discussions about Weber’s analysis of
creditworthiness, and for pointing out the analogy to Jains.
12. Merton 1973 (1942). Of course, the corporatization of technoscience puts some of these
norms more at stake than others. Clearly, the norm of communism is often violated
when science gets increasingly commodified. Also, the norm of scientific disinterested-
ness is clearly at odds with that of corporate interest in maximizing market value from a
technoscientific enterprise.
13. Among the most controversial of these arrangements is Novartis’s funding of the Col-
lege of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley.
14. I have had one brief, perfunctory conversation with him that he himself is unlikely to
remember.
15. Scott was also invited to present at a session on the ethical, legal, and social implications
(elsi) of dna patenting in the Cold Spring Harbor Genome meetings of 1999 that I
attended. These meetings have constituted the ‘‘o≈cial’’ annual gathering of the public
hgp, and 1999 was the year when the public researchers’ animosity toward Craig Venter

Notes to Chapter 3 303

 and Celera Genomics was at its height (see chapter 1). Scott was then chief scientific
o≈cer of Incyte, which happened to be Celera’s biggest and most direct competitor at
the time.
16. Disclaimers such as the one put out by Incyte while announcing a collaboration with the
Huntsman Cancer Institute to study the role of genes in the diagnosis, treatment,
and prevention of cancer, which says: ‘‘Except for the historical information contained
herein, the matters set forth in this press release, are forward-looking statements within
the meaning of the ‘safe harbor’ provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform
Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that
may cause actual results to di√er materially. For a discussion of factors that may cause
results to di√er, see Incyte’s sec reports, including its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q
for the quarter ended June 30, 1999. Incyte disclaims any intent or obligation to update
these forward-looking statements.’’ See [Link]/news/1999/[Link].
I expand on such statements later in the chapter.
17. See also M. Fortun 2004 for the role of promise in genomics.
18. See Robbins-Roth 2000.
19. What I have described so far is what Werner Hamacher (1999) refers to as ‘‘spectreality,’’
which is a gesture toward the impossibility of separating the ‘‘real’’ from the ‘‘conjured,’’
when at the same time the ‘‘real’’ is conjured, and the ‘‘conjuration’’ lays the grounds for
the failure of the ‘‘real’’ to be realized.
20. It fascinates me that a number of biotech leaders in India are women. In addition to
Mazumdar (now Mazumdar-Shaw), for instance, there is Viloo Patel, the founder and
ceo of Avesthagen, another Bangalore-based biotech company. The ceo of the icici
Knowledge Park, whose story I narrated in chapter 2, is also a woman, Deepanwita
Chattopadhyaya, as was the head of India’s Department of Biotechnology from 1995 to
2004, Manju Sharma. I cannot hazard the reasons for this, though it could be because of
a gendering of occupational roles, with a large number and proportion of women in
India going into the life sciences at the school and college level. Scarcely any of the U.S.
biotech companies that I have mentioned in this book—a notable recent exception
being Celera Diagnostics, the postgenomic reincarnation of Celera Genomics—are,
to the best of my knowledge, headed by a woman. Of course, this rise of women
to leadership roles coexists in India with some extremely low women’s development
indices, and the existence still of everyday atrocities against women in the home and
workplace. This reflects the contradiction that Amartya Sen draws between wom-
en’s well-being and women’s agency (Sen 1999, 189–203). The conscious nurturing
of female entrepreneurial talent in India is reflected in initiatives such as the recent
setting up in Chennai of a women’s biotech park by the M. S. Swaminathan Research
Foundation, with the explicit goal of encouraging female entrepreneurs in the life
sciences.
21. This quote is taken from Business India, December 8–21, 2003, 67. I draw my brief
historical account of Biocon in this paragraph from this article.
22. Ibid., 64.
23. Indeed, Mazumdar-Shaw herself is into the vision game and heads the Karnataka state
Vision group on biotechnology. This is, in a sense, Karnataka’s, and Bangalore’s, equiva-
lent of Andhra Pradesh’s Vision 2020.

304 Notes to Chapter 3

24. This is based on a conversation that I had with a senior Biocon manager on June 16,
2004. I keep him anonymous.
25. Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, available online at [Link]
divisions/corpfin/33act/[Link].
26. For the evolution of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s regulation of the
forward-looking statement from 1933 to the present, including a discussion of the land-
mark 1995 act, see M. Fortun 2004.
27. This is available online at [Link]/news/1999/[Link].
28. Derrida talks about the lie as distinct from error in ‘‘History of the Lie.’’ See Derrida 2001
(1995).
29. Of course, this incalculability could be said to function even in noncorporate scientific
contexts, such as academic grant applications. The di√erence between the two lies in the
di√erent relationships between promise (which tends toward the contract) and vision
(which tends toward the imaginary). Even if the stated aims in, for instance, a scientific
grant proposal are not examples of a legal contract, there are often elements in place that
evaluate progress toward milestones and objectives as part of the condition of the grant.
And, of course, the imaginary that is called into account in the corporate vision is
embedded in a rhetoric and grammar that has everything to do with the institutional
context of the market, and it is this relationship of institutional context to rhetorical
structure that forms the basis of my argument in this chapter.

4. Promise and Fetish

1. For a description of snps, see chapter 1.
2. The Sanger Centre in the United Kingdom has also sequenced about a third of the
genome, making it the other major contributor to the public sequence.
3. Getting access to the Whitehead is about as di≈cult as getting access to a biotech
company. Unlike the biotech companies, the Whitehead’s fears are not about an anthro-
pologist having access to proprietary information but about the amount of time an
anthropologist’s presence might waste there. I was therefore formally refused permis-
sion to do extended participant observation at the Whitehead by one of the lab super-
visors at the functional genomics center. This makes me particularly grateful to the
postdoc who took the time to show me around the center on her own initiative.
4. Indeed, another company that makes chips for biomedical applications, Caliper Tech-
nologies (based in Mountain View, California), explicitly calls its products labs-on-
a-chip (or LabChip).
5. Hybridizations onto A√ymetrix chips are performed using a proprietary technology
based on photolithography, which is a process of transferring shapes onto the surface of
silicon wafers, and is used in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
6. Of course, such sites also immediately trouble Lander’s extremely public image as a
‘‘public’’ scientist opposed to private genome companies patenting gene sequences. It
must be mentioned here that Millennium, while broadly speaking a genome company,
does not have the generation of sequence databases as its primary locus of value but
rather concentrates on more downstream parts of the value chain and is ultimately trying
to become a drug development company itself. Thus there is no business contradiction
in Lander’s opposition to gene patenting as a ‘‘public’’ scientist while being on the board

Notes to Chapter 4 305

 of a genome company. Rather, his opposition to aggressive gene patenting companies
like Celera and Incyte could be seen as being not just in the interests of public researchers
but also in the interests of Millennium.
7. For the notion of obligatory passage point, see Latour 1987.
8. ‘‘Subject’’ is one of those nice double-edged words that always already point in two
complementary directions. It implies both a discipline and an individually or collectively
constituted subjectivity. Thus there are subjects such as the life sciences and their various
specialties and subspecialties; and there are human subjects of various sorts (subjects of
the king, political subjects, and so on). As Etienne Balibar (1995) emphasizes, the latter
meaning of ‘‘subject’’ (as individually or collectively constituted subjectivity) is itself an
inherently contradictory term. On the one hand, it implies subjection—the subject as
disciplined. On the other hand, it also implies agency, the subject that is not merely an
object.
9. The most well known of these situations is the controversy regarding the availability of
anti-retroviral therapy to aids-ravaged Africa, which, according to activist groups, is in
considerable measure due to price-gouging techniques of big pharmaceutical compa-
nies. Once again, in this situation, Indian pharmaceutical companies, which as of now
operate on a distinct, albeit still capitalist, value terrain to U.S. companies, have emerged
as strategic actors that denaturalize and destabilize hegemonic market terrains. Most
notable is the o√er by the Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company Cipla of generic anti-
retroviral drugs to southern Africa at a fraction of the price charged by U.S. and Euro-
pean pharmaceutical companies. This o√er is seen by those companies as an infringe-
ment of their intellectual property, as ‘‘piracy,’’ but the extent to which they can suc-
cessfully challenge such Indian companies is constrained by the pr disaster that could
arise from being seen as aggressively protecting market interests in the midst of a devas-
tating epidemic. Yet again, it is interesting to see how global biopolitical terrains and
situations of health and illness, life and death, are overdetermined by market strategies
and corporate fights. I do not describe the Cipla story in greater detail in this book, but
there is no question that stories of such companies and actors are central to a striated
understanding of global biocapitalist terrains.
10. This latter understanding is given particular credence by the works of sociobiologists
such as Richard Dawkins (see, for instance, Dawkins 1976).
11. For example, look at the following titles of articles and correspondence in a single
September 2000 issue of Nature Genetics: ‘‘Mutations in mkks cause Bardet-Biedl syn-
drome’’ (Slavotinek et al. 2000); ‘‘Methylation of the cdh1 promoter as the second
genetic hit in hereditary di√use gastric cancer’’ (Grady et al. 2000); ‘‘Domain-specific
mutations in tgfb1 result in Camurati-Engelmann disease’’ (Kinoshita et al. 2000); ‘‘A
defect in harmonin, a pdz domain-containing protein expressed in the inner ear sensory
hair cells, underlies Usher syndrome type 1c’’ (Bitner-Glindcicz et al. 2000a); ‘‘A reces-
sive contiguous gene deletion causing infantile hyperinsulinism, enteropathy and deaf-
ness identifies the Usher type 1c gene’’ (Bitner et al. 2000b); ‘‘Mutations in mkks cause
obesity, retinal dystrophy and renal malformations associated with Bardet-Biedl syn-
drome’’ (Katsanis et al. 2000); ‘‘The common ppar Pro12Ala polymorphism is associated
with decreased risk of type 2 diabetes’’ (Altshuler et al. 2000); ‘‘Heterozygous germline
mutations in bmpr2, encoding a tgf-receptor, cause familial primary pulmonary hyper-

306 Notes to Chapter 4

 tension’’ (Lane et al. 2000); ‘‘Mutations of the gene encoding the protein kinase A type
I-regulatory subunit in patients with the Carney complex’’ (Kirschner et al. 2000);
‘‘Autosomal recessive lissencephaly with cerebellar hypoplasia is associated with human
reln mutations’’ (Hong et al. 2000); ‘‘Mutations in myh9 result in the May-Hegglin
anomaly, and Fechtner and Sebastian syndromes’’ (Seri et al. 2000); ‘‘Mutation of
myh9, encoding non-muscle myosin heavy chain A, in May-Hegglin anomaly’’ (Kelly et
al. 2000). ‘‘Nf1; Trp53 mutant mice develop glioblastoma with evidence of strain-specific
e√ects’’ (Reilly et al. 2000); and ‘‘Identification of the gene causing mucolipidosis type
IV’’ (Bargal et al. 2000). This is a total of fourteen articles linking single genes to disease,
out of a total of thirty articles published in the entire issue. Some of the words are a little
more innocuous: two groups merely associate genes with particular diseases; one group
says that strains with a particular mutant develop x disease; one group says that a mutation
underlies y disease; two mutations result in a disease, and another three mutations are
merely [seen] in those diseases. But five mutations are claimed to cause diseases.
12. For an exhaustive analysis of the social consequences of classificatory maneuvers, see
Bowker and Star 2000.
13. Dumit 1998, 88–89.
14. It should further be emphasized that this unmarked ‘‘Western (neo)liberal’’ subject is
likely, though again not necessarily, white. The racial dimensions and implications of
epistemologies and technologies such as genomics are immense, and I have not gone
into their analysis in this book. For more on this essential topic, see, for instance, Duster
2003; Kahn 2000; Montoya 2003; Reardon 2001, 2004.
15. This argument owes much to conversations with Lawrence Cohen, for which many
thanks. The phrase ‘‘biopolitics elsewhere,’’ and the posing of the question in the terms I
use at the end of this argument, are largely his formulations.
16. These steps are summarized from Collins and McCusick 2001.
17. I consistently noted during my fieldwork that it was the corporate actors who had a
better conception of these ethnographic windows than public scientists, since it is the
corporate actors who are often forced to take account, however problematically, of
society.
18. As Jonathan Marks (2001) shows, the e√orts to demonstrate continuity in the genes of
Jewish priests have been equally troubled, yet registered as a ‘‘success.’’
19. Based on a conversation with one of the cofounders of Hibergen, Patrick Vaughan.
20. For Marx’s section on commodity fetishism in Capital, Volume 1, see Marx 1976 (1867),
163–77.
21. Of course, the power of epistemic fetishism cannot be divorced from its functioning
as truth-claim; rather than using the apparent ‘‘truthfulness’’ consequent to epistemic
fetishism of the scientific fact as the explanation, however, it is precisely such a function-
ing as truth-claim that I wish ultimately to explain. See also Donna Haraway’s notion of
‘‘epistemological fetishism’’ in Haraway 1997. My account is deeply informed by Hara-
way’s argument.
22. Interpellation is the process of self-recognition that Louis Althusser (1994 [1970])
describes as forming the grounds of the operation of ideology. In Althusser’s rendering,
the classic example of interpellation is when a passerby, hearing a policeman shouting at
someone indeterminate, recognizes herself as the subject being hailed. It is a process of

Notes to Chapter 4 307

 insertion into an apparatus of preexisting power, a call and a recognition of a call that can
only operate within a framework of institutional structures that provide the agent who
hails with authority, and make the agent hailed a subject to the voice of authority. At that
moment, in Althusser’s argument, the person who is hailed becomes a certain sort of
subject, of the state, without even explicitly being called out to (indeed, it is quite
possible that the subject of the policeman’s hailing is someone else altogether). Inter-
pellation, then, is the process by which an individual recognizes herself as a subject as a
consequence of being inserted into a certain power structure (in this case, of the relation-
ship of citizen to state) and a certain knowledge regime (in this case, the tacit knowledge
of the power structure, which is expressed here through an abstraction).
23. And even if one were paid ‘‘enough,’’ the nature of the work is still forced, because the
worker is working for what the capitalist will pay.
24. I use male pronouns here, because Marx uses them when referring to workers.
25. Of course, this is again a particularly American manifestation and occurs simultaneously
with the struggle for access to drugs in places such as aids-stricken Africa, where a very
di√erent pharmaceutical grammar is operational. While Dumit quotes a leading neuro-
surgeon as saying that being on five drugs, in his opinion, is an absolute minimum
(Dumit 2003), the work of scholars such as Kristin Peterson shows how fraught the
issues surrounding access to drugs are in places such as Nigeria, consequent equally to
logics of global capitalism (Peterson 2004). India, by virtue of simultaneously being a
‘‘Third World’’ country and an emergent ‘‘global player,’’ does not seem to manifest
either of these extreme grammars, at least not at this time. Instead, as shown in chapter 2,
the Indian subject of genomics tends to be configured as an experimental subject, again
consequent to logics of global capitalism.
26. See Collins and McCusick 2001.
27. See Rapp 2000 for wonderful, embodied accounts of some of these dilemmas.
28. Similarly, it is this refusal to reify the provisional into a solid, prea≈rmed ethics of
intervention that Rosemary Coombe highlights the importance of when she refers to an
‘‘ethics of contingency’’ (Coombe 1998, 5). See chapter 1 for my use of Coombe’s notion
in this regard.
29. I am not saying here that born-again Christians are in any way fundamentally aggressive,
but rather that evangelical Protestantism, which makes explicit a moment of transforma-
tion of consciousness into Christianity as a moment of definitive, unquestionable re-
demption, represents a certain form of Christianity, one that is certainly more mille-
narian than the ascetic Protestantism that Weber describes, and perhaps one that is more
consonant with the millenarian celebration of risk, gambling, innovation, and excess that
marks neoliberal capitalism.

5. Salvation and Nation

1. Organized by the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, September 16,
2002.
2. For ways in which religion can be understood as a cultural system through ritual prac-
tices, see Geertz 1973, 87–125; for an argument about capitalism as cultic, see Benjamin
1996 (1922).
3. During the freedom struggle, this party was called the Indian National Congress, sig-

308 Notes to Chapter 5

 nifying its pan-Indian hegemony and its subscription to the cause of the nation, both of
the Indian nation whose freedom it was fighting for, and of the modernist conception of
nation that it was very much fighting to uphold.
4. An example of such a political formation is Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam party,
which I described in chapter 2.
5. For an ethnographic exploration of the bjp’s rise to prominence and power, and espe-
cially the ways in which this has been mediated by television, see Rajagopal 2001. The
bjp-led coalition was voted out of power in May 2004.
6. For longer accounts of the pharmaceutical industry that equally subscribe to this idea of
the history of drug development as being one of linear progress, see Mahoney 1959;
Mann 1999.
7. Thinking about the salvationary tropes of drug development gets at the very question of
the historical and cultural genesis of use value, which, as Marshall Sahlins (1976) points
out, gets naturalized in Marx. Naturalizing use value makes comparison di≈cult, because
ultimately the use value of an object outside a system of commodity exchange can be seen
as irrelevant. It is, in fact, the very di√erent use values of drugs in, for instance, the
United States versus Africa (lifestyle drugs in the former versus drugs for survival in the
latter), use values that are completely functions of the political economies in which they
are situated, which become vital to stay attentive to.
8. By the end of 2004, Indian pharmaceutical companies have had to become wto com-
pliant, implying that they cannot reverse-engineer any new drugs developed after that
date.
9. Including a secular-progressive activist context, as Rekhi has lent his voice in opposition
to the exclusionary and often violent politics of Hindu nationalist organizations in India.
10. For a discussion of which, see chapter 3.
11. [Link].
12. This is stated on Genomic Health’s Web site at [Link]
message. htm. This was Genomic Health’s focus in the months following their founding
in 2000. By 2004, the company’s focus has shifted specifically to cancer genomics. The
messages on their Web site have changed to reflect this.
13. Observations based on two talks that I have attended given by Terry at very di√erent
forums—at a presentation at a conference on property issues in biotechnology, given
primarily to academics and policymakers, and to a class at Harvard Medical School,
given primarily to medical students. He followed the same structure in the two, highly
similar talks and was equally open to talking about his religious faiths and beliefs in
discussion and conversation after the talks.
14. Quote from personal conversations with Patrick Terry, May 2001.
15. [Link]. While Terry was one of the founding members of Genomic
Health, he is not currently (as of August 2004) on their board of directors. This account,
therefore, is based on the relationships forged between Scott and Terry, and between
Genomic Health and pxe, in 2001, and does not necessarily reflect either their personal
or institutional relationships at present.
16. I draw my account of Scott’s pitch for Genomic Health from a talk given at a session on
postgenomic medicine at the 2001 Genome TriConference, an investor conference held
in San Francisco, on March 7, 2001.

Notes to Chapter 5 309

17. This, of course, is exactly what Incyte was.
18. Randy Scott, talk given at the Genome TriConference, San Francisco, March 7, 2001.
19. Ibid.
20. Marx points to the commodity as being ‘‘full of metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties’’ (Marx 1976 [1867]), 163.
21. For Merton’s normative structure of science, see Merton 1973 (1942). For Joseph Du-
mit’s notion of venture science, and how it puts Merton’s norms at stake, see chapter 3.
22. Not his real name.
23. The company since then changed its name to Doubletwist and subsequently went out of
business. For their story, see chapter 3.
24. Bataille would argue that this mode of excess is a fundamental playing out of what he
calls ‘‘general economy,’’ which he argues is marked by expenditure as a sign of the
surplus consumption that is the fundamental logic and driving force of capitalism. See
Bataille 1988 (1967). See also Coombe 1997 for the ways in which corporate brand
names, trademarks, and similar images create certain types of popular imaginaries as a
consequence of their lack of place.
25. Venter was heading tigr at the time that Perkin-Elmer approached him to run Celera;
tigr was still being headed in 1998–99 by Venter’s wife (then) and fellow genome
scientist Claire Fraser.
26. Derrida 2002a, 83 (italics in original).
27. For a distinction between the two meanings of representation, as portrait and as proxy,
see Spivak 1988.
28. See Silver 1998; Ridley 2000; see also Mendelssohn 2000 for a description of what he
calls the ‘‘eugenic temptation.’’
29. Indeed, Merton’s outline of the normative structure of science was explicitly in response
to the dangers of Nazi science (Merton 1973 [1942]).
30. Derrida talks of this structural messianism in relation to Marxism, but then Marxism
itself was explicitly regarded by its practitioners as scientific, and much of Marxism’s
potential for emancipation did stem for Marx from the fact that he believed his account
of political economy to be properly ‘‘scientific.’’
31. Interview with a scientist (kept anonymous), Centre for Biochemical Technology, Janu-
ary 7, 2002.
32. Ibid.
33. Mahajan was hired by Brahmachari to help him with the policy initiatives that he was
involved in—the sort of deregulated and imaginative hiring that would not have been
possible in a pre-Mashelkar era. This account is based on conversations had with her in
January 2002.
34. Ramesh Mashelkar, interview with the author, July 20, 2001.
35. S. Sivaram, interview with the author, June 13, 2001.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. This is also seen in my example, in chapter 1, of India’s attempt to regulate genetic
expropriation through property mechanisms and market contracts.
39. Ramesh Mashelkar, interview with the author, July 20, 2001.
40. This is, of course, not entirely true, since countries like the Soviet Union, China, and
Cuba have always done so.

310 Notes to Chapter 5

41. Satish Kumar, interview with the author, August 6, 2001.
42. Ibid. Meanwhile, Brahmachari sees East-West inequity in the fact that Indian researchers
are unable to immediately publish in those journals that Indian universities cannot
a√ord. There are also now companies that are beginning to supply the reagent market
locally, and cbt itself, indeed, was set up with this aim.
43. One would think that this is the sort of research that would have been done in a lab of the
Indian Council for Agricultural Research (icar), and Kumar feels that the reason why it
has not is because icar has basked for too long in the glory of the green revolution,
which completely ignored the animal sector.
44. [Link].
45. [Link]/library/[Link].
46. [Link].
47. In an interview to [Link], available at [Link]/SPECIALS/2000/virtualvil
lages/story/india/interviews/[Link].
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. My total college fees for a three-year undergraduate degree, inclusive of tuition, accom-
modation, and utilities such as electricity, amounted to about Rs 720, which, at the
exchange rate of the time, would be roughly $25. Meanwhile the United Nations De-
velopment Program (undp) 2001 Human Development Report estimates that an annual
resource loss for India from software professionals who migrate to the United States is
$2 billion, if one calculates the amount of state investment that is put into most of their
higher education.
51. As might be expected, Rekhi’s comments, made in April 2001, created quite a contro-
versy, with heated debate ensuing in online Indian newsgroups and discussion groups.
In May, Rekhi issued the following clarification on his remarks: ‘‘The raging debate
about my views regarding secondary immigration were taken out of context. I hold no
views about who should be or who shouldn’t be allowed in. I am too much of a free
marketer to worry about the quality of one profession over the other. I did make a
distinction between primary and secondary immigrants, in that primary immigrants
come on their own merit and compete like hell to survive on their own. Secondary
immigrants often were sponsored brothers and sisters who were not qualified like pri-
mary immigrants and needed a lot of help to adjust here. Incidentally, I am somewhat of
an expert here, having sponsored five brothers and their spouses over a 15 year period. I
am not against family re-unification at all. Is an endless loop of sponsored brothers and
sisters family re-unification?’’ (quoted in Din 2001b).

6. Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups

1. Not his real name.
2. Not his real name.
3. For instance, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ccmb) in Hyderabad, a
csir lab with an almost identical mandate to cbt’s, is marked precisely by the absence of
this type of bureaucratic hierarchy that is directed not just against outsiders like myself
but also against cbt’s own scientists. ccmb’s more cooperative and egalitarian, and less
bureaucratic, culture is a function both of its location in Hyderabad and of the man-
agerial practices of its founding director, Pushpa Bhargava, who, according to scientists

Notes to Chapter 6 311

 at ccmb, ensured through personal example that bureaucratic one-upmanship would
not be tolerated. An interesting hypothetical question to consider would be how similar,
or di√erent, cbt’s culture might have been under Brahmachari had it in fact been in
Hyderabad, not Delhi.
4. See, for instance, Lewis 1999, which recounts the story of Jim Clark, the founder of
Netscape, in many ways the archetypal start-up of the recent [Link] boom.
5. For the use of ‘‘emergent forms of life’’ as a theoretical heuristic to open up questions of
the study of rapidly emergent structures using ethnography, see Fischer 2003.
6. These three accounts, which all agree on the particularities of biotech start-up culture, in
fact represent three quite distinct genres of writing about biotech. Rabinow’s is the
most academic and conceptual, Werth’s is a popular-science account that reads like a
thriller, and Robbins-Roth’s is a feel-good investor manual written by a biotech industry
consultant.
7. An exemplary ‘‘textbook’’ for starting companies is Sahlman et al. 1999.
8. This is a particular form of ‘‘benevolent’’ investing that is contrasted to venture capital-
ism in the generally smaller amounts invested, and in the investors’ generally lower
expectations for incredibly high returns on their investments. Venture capitalists ideally
like a 60 to 70 percent return on their investment and usually take over a significant
chunk of the company from the founders in return for their largesse.
9. GeneEd moved to fancier quarters in spring 2004, after four years in this o≈ce.
10. See Latour 1987.
11. Most custom courses developed by GeneEd are either for use on their clients’ Web sites
or, increasingly, for sales force training within the company.
12. The emblematic status of ‘‘Evil Company’’ that Monsanto has acquired in activist circles
is interesting enough; even more interesting is that it has done so in corporate circles, as
the benchmark either to avoid or to be distanced from.
13. Ethnographers are, after all, increasingly being used in the corporate world, especially in
Silicon Valley high-tech companies such as Intel.
14. Indeed, on a typical day that I spent with Maulik, he followed up a meeting with a
potential investor with a trip to Costco to buy plants for the o≈ce.
15. Cynthia Kilroy, interview with the author, May 24, 2001.
16. Ibid.
17. Cyane Rollins, interview with the author, May 14, 2001.
18. While the designers were, strictly speaking, also programmers, in that they needed to be
comfortable with programming (mainly in Flash and xml), GeneEd’s transition to
becoming a knowledge management company saw a bigger role for more ‘‘traditional’’
software programmers, who were not responsible for the creative or artistic component
of the output.
19. Robin Lindheimer, interview with the author, March 28, 2002.
20. Chris Palmer, interview with the author, March 28, 2002.
21. Each of these was told to me by a di√erent graphic designer, in a series of interviews
conducted between March 28 and April 2, 2002.
22. Cynthia Kilroy, interview with the author, April 1, 2002.
23. Paul Eisele, interview with the author, April 1, 2002.
24. I keep this employee anonymous. Quote from an interview with the author, April 2,
2002.

312 Notes to Chapter 6

25. Needless to say, I feel there are profound lessons here for purported interdisciplines like
sts, which often end up, in academic spaces such as sts departments, being carefully
negotiated multidisciplines, with great care taken not to brainstorm across disciplinary
preserves so that each component discipline’s ‘‘sanctity’’ can be ‘‘respected,’’ and a certain
amount of peaceful coexistence maintained. The productivity of corporate spaces such as
start-ups and new technoscientific endeavors such as bioinformatics comes precisely
from the willingness to take the risk of encroaching on another’s disciplinary turf and
thereby creating the conditions of possibility for new forms of knowledge, strategy, and
cohabitation to emerge. The parallels of multidisciplinary endeavors to the now highly
critiqued notion and practice of multiculturalism, which allows, in the name of political
correctness, an unquestioned coexistence of di√erent cultural and religious beliefs and
practices and their institutionalization, without adequately posing the ‘‘thick’’ questions
of the historical genesis and political contexts of these ‘‘cultural forms,’’ and further
reifying the individual ‘‘cultural’’ components of a multicultural assemblage into ho-
mogeneous entities, need to be further examined. Perhaps corporate technoscience can
provide some salutary lessons for progressive praxis after all.
26. Sunil Maulik, interview with the author, May 15, 2001.
27. Ibid. The parallels to Susan Harding’s description of the forms of discursive and ritual
performance involved in ‘‘brainwashing’’ people into born-again Christianity by evan-
gelicals such as Jerry Falwell is striking (see Harding 2000).
28. Sunil Maulik, interview with the author, May 15, 2001.
29. Ibid.
30. The question of whether the [Link] era was indeed something that can so easily be
dismissed as an ‘‘aberration’’ is, of course, an important one to ask. Indeed, such a
dismissal stems from a deeply ahistorical supposition that the [Link] era marks, for the
first time, a manifestation of capitalism in such an explicitly ‘‘excessive’’ mode. And yet
one in fact sees the same forms of excess, albeit concentrated in di√erent institutions
(primarily Wall Street and investment banks rather than in Silicon Valley and high-tech
venture-capital-funded industry), in the 1980s. Michael Lewis’s accounts of both, in
Liar’s Poker and The New, New Thing respectively, in spite of a definite enthusiasm for
Silicon Valley over Wall Street, provide a wonderful perspective from which to com-
paratively situate key institutional sites of excess in these two historical moments (Lewis
1989, 1999).
31. Sunil Maulik, interview with the author, May 15, 2001.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. These words were written in June 2002. The conditions of the bridge loan were subse-
quently renegotiated.
36. Since the time of first writing, and over the next year (2002–3), GeneEd reached an
advanced stage of negotiations with a number of vc funds before having the vcs pull out
at the last minute once again. Maulik again justified the aggressive pursuit of vc invest-
ment while he was pursuing it, and rationalized that it was ultimately beneficial for
GeneEd that the investments did not materialize once it became clear that they would
not do so. As of August 2004, GeneEd remains a non-vc-funded entity.
37. Doubletwist has since gone out of business.

Notes to Chapter 6 313

38. Sunil Maulik, correspondence with the author, November 20, 2001.
39. Of course, the fetishistic or cultlike dimensions of capitalism hardly manifest in uniform
ways, or even in ways that necessarily lead to an enthusiastic buying in to the capitalist
cause. At the end of the day, however ‘‘crummy’’ a job at Genentech might be, it is still a
highly privileged site of labor in global capitalism. The fetish or cult of capitalism,
especially in more marginal or subaltern sites, could often operate in ways that are still
powerful but construct an aura of fear or hysteria rather than desire. For instance, see
E. P. Thompson’s account of the making of the English working class (Thompson 1966
[1963]), a process that he shows involved millenarian, religious, cultic, and fetishistic
performance in ways that provoked a submission through the creation not of desire but
of a ‘‘chiliasm of despair.’’ Michael Taussig similarly shows how the making of South
American working classes through forced proletarianization was accompanied by the
fetishism of capitalism as the devil, as the cult to be submitted to rather than bought into
(Taussig 1980).

Coda
1. Rabinow 2003, 14.
2. This relates to Joseph Dumit’s notion of ‘‘surplus health’’ (Dumit 2004).
3. Žižek 1994, 330.
4. For the latter, see Dumit 2004.
5. These arguments are hardly specific to the American free market but are relevant to a
range of theoretical questions that inform our times. For instance, I am constantly
amazed that democratic political ‘‘theory,’’ in political science departments around the
world, gets synthesized through an understanding of American interest-group politics
(and occasionally, increasingly, by European grassroots politics), while the democratic
political mobilizations (both representative and grassroots) of the world’s largest de-
mocracy, India, get relegated to area studies.

314 Notes to Coda

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Žižek. London: Verso.
———. 2004. The ongoing ‘‘soft revolution.’’ Critical Inquiry 30 (2).

326 References
 INDEX

Abbott Laboratories, 53 tics of Andhra Pradesh, 300 n.20; suicide

actor-network theory, 249, 290 n.26 rate in, 77; the Park, and involvement of,
acute lymphocytic leukemia (all), 140 84, 85. See also Naidu, N. Chandrababu
acute myelogenous leukemia (aml), 140 angel investments, 245–46, 273–74, 312 n.8
A√ymetrix company, 110, 139, 142, 235 annotated sequence information, 49
Africa: aids treatments and, 144, 306 n.9, anthropology of science, 4. See also ethno-
308 n.25; evangelism in, 188; snps from graphic research
dna donations and, 50; use value of drugs anti-retroviral therapy, 306 n.9
and, 187, 188, 309 n.7 AP Industrial and Infrastructure Corpora-
AgriDyne, 299 n.60 tion Ltd., 88
aids treatments, 144, 302 n.34, 306 n.9, 308 Applied Biosystems (abi) company, 30
n.25 applied science policies, 219–21, 310 n.40
Alinsky, Saul, 52 articulation, as double-jointed word, 292 n.2
All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazha- asceticism, 199, 308 n.29
gam (aiadmk), 300 n.13 Asian people, snps from dna donations and,
All India Institute of Medical Sciences, 94 50
Althusser, Louis, 6, 307–8 n.22 Astra Zeneca, 257
Alza Corporation, 246 attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
American Indian people, dna sample collec- (adhd), 158
tions from, 50, 297 n.48
Amgen company, 291 n.30 Bahia, 302 n.34
Anderson, Benedict, 180 Balasubramanian, D., 107
Andhra Pradesh Eye Disease Study Bangalore, 127, 304 n.20,21
(apeds), 107 Bataille, Georges, 113, 200, 295 n.27, 310
Andhra Pradesh Industrial Development n.24
Corporation Ltd., 88 Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, 6, 12, 30, 216
Andhra Pradesh state government: imf/ Beck, Ulrich, 166
World Bank structural adjustment policies belief systems: asceticism, 199, 308 n.29;
and, 92; indebtedness and, 77; popula- conferences as speech and ritual sites, 191–
tions, and e√ects of technoscience culture 92, 200–206, 313 n.30; cult-like loyalty
created by, 99, 302 n.38; population statis- and images, 200–201, 275, 276, 314 n.39;
belief systems (continued) biosociality, concept of, 145–46, 159, 194–95
evangelism, 188, 266, 313 n.27; messia- biotechnology industry: alliances between
nism, 123–24, 181, 210–11, 310 n.30; mil- pharmaceutical industry and, 53; bioethi-
lenarianism, 199, 308 n.29. See also fetish- cal issues and, 67, 297 n.48; biosociality
ism; religion concept and, 194–95; capitalism and, 42;
Bellenson, Joel, 109, 303 n.5 corporate pr and, 115; cult-like loyalty
Benjamin, Walter, 180 and images, 200–201, 275; defining fea-
Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), 70, 228 tures of, 42; disjuncture of production
Bhargava, Pushpa, 311–12 n.3 and circulation, 9; expenditure and excess
Biehl, João, 99, 302 n.34 in, 199, 200–206, 209–10, 310 n.24;
Billion Dollar Molecule, The (Werth), 123, expressed sequence tag (est), 51; facilities
186, 265 for research in India and, 89, 300 n.21;
biocapital: defined, 78–79, 111, 112, 136; female ceos in, 304 n.20; fetishism of
history of, 72; rationale for term, 6–7; symbolic capital and, 123, 209; First
summary of institutional and technologi- World–Third World asymmetry and, 67,
cal assemblages, 277–78 297 n.48; gender issues and, 254, 304 n.20;
Biocon company, 127–28 haplotypes and, 157; history of, 5–6, 21–
bioethical issues: biopiracy and, 73–74, 291 23, 112–13, 291 n.30; hype, and value of
n.33; biotech industry and, 67, 297 n.48; excess in, 113; India and, 27, 89, 300 n.21;
clinical trials and, 93, 96–97; corporate ‘‘life itself ’’ and, 142, 178, 208, 278; mate-
values and, 250–51; DeCode Genetics rial culture, and impact on, 138–42; mes-
and, 60–61, 297 n.48; ethical, legal, and sianism in, 123–24, 181, 210–11; misap-
social implications (elsi) of dna patent- propriation, and evils inherent in, 208;
ing, 303–4 n.15; ethical-political terrain neem-derived products, 74, 299 n.60; pro-
and, 93, 96–97; GeneEd company and, tein crystallization and, 292–93 n.3; public
250–51; genetic variability information as enabler of private research and, 56;
and, 50; genomics information and, 57; start-up model and, 239, 241; study of, 4;
global market terrains and, 66; hgp and, temporality issues and, 152, 209, 307 n.17;
297 n.48; information ownership and, 64– theology and, 123–24; truth and, 115;
66; moral vs. ethical distinction, 65–66; venture capital and, 6; Weber on element
naturalizing acts and, 63, 297 n.41; nih of calling in, 200. See also corporations; spe-
and, 297 n.48; nonmarket values and, 41; cific corporations and companies
population genomics experiments in Ice- Biotech Park, 300 n.21
land and, 40; Rep-X and, 62–64, 295–97 bioterrorism, 290–91 n.29
n.35, 297 n.38; truth and, 115 Boger, Joshua, 123
biopolitics: ethical-political terrain and, 93, Boguski, Mark, 1
96–97; governance, 80, 97; local vs. global Bourdieu, Pierre, 294 n.19
political ecologies, 83, 285–86, 314 n.5; Bowker, Geo√rey, 165
modern life, and impact of, 12–14, 79, 99, Boyer, Herbert, 5
278–79; Naidu, and ideology of gover- Braga, Carlos, 75
nance, 86–89, 93, 100, 300 nn.14, 16, 19, Brahmachari, S. K., 95, 117–18, 220, 221,
21, and 22; structural relations of produc- 299 n.11
tion and, 284–85; U.S. free market value Brave New World (Huxley), 208
generation and, 285–86. See also political Brazil, 302 n.34
issues Breeden, Richard, 182–83

328 Index
Bristol-Myers Squibb, 140–41, 142 sequences and, 2; Perkin-Elmer and, 30,
Buck-Morss, Susan, 7, 192–93 310 n.25; salvationary promise of biocapi-
bu√alo, genetic map of, 220–21 tal and, 204–5; speed issues, and Human
Business India, 127 Genome Project vs., 48
Center for Functional Genomics, 138–39
Caille, Alain, 55, 295 n.26, 295 n.28 Centre for Biochemical Technology (cbt):
California Supreme Court, 60 bureaucratic hierarchy and, 239; clinical
Caliper Technologies, 305 n.4 trials and, 93; ethnographic research, and
Canguilhem, Georges, 160, 162 access to, 235–39; Genomed company,
capital: cities, and role in capital flows in and involvement of, 93; genomics and, 68,
global market terrains, 84–85; economic 297 n.49; intellectual property and, 84,
issues and, 9–10, 239, 246; flows between 299 n.11
United States and India, 193, 227; Indian Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology
regional parties, and relationship to capital (ccmb): applied science policies and,
flows, 300 n.13; organization of corpora- 219–21; bureaucratic hierarchy and, 311–
tions and, 239, 246 12 n.3; description of, 91, 107; genetic
Capital (Marx), 8, 97, 282 map of bu√alo research, 220–21; global
capitalism: biocapital as new phase of, 7–12, market terrains and, 192; hepatitis B vac-
277–80; biotech industry and, 42; capital- cine and, 300 n.21; Indian nationalism
isms, 7, 289 n.9; Christianity, and relation- and, 192
ship to, 180, 195, 199; commodity fetish- Cetus Corporation, 22
ism and, 143, 198, 199, 210, 276, 310 n.20; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 295 n.28
coproduction of life sciences and, 4, 6, 11– Chakravarti, Aravinda, 51
12, 20, 290 nn.14 and 26; corporate pr Chatterjee, Partha, 82
and, 136; cult-like loyalty and images, 200– Chattopadhyaya, Deepanwita, 304 n.20
201, 275, 276, 314 n.39; fetishism of, 276, Chernobyl survivors, 102
314 n.39; free market, 183, 285–86, 291 Christianity: capitalism, and relationship to,
n.33; gifting and, 295 nn.27–28; high- 180, 195, 199; evangelism in Africa and,
tech, 84, 86, 113; hype and, 136; implosion 188; messianism in biotech industry and,
of life sciences and, 116, 136, 303 n.12; 123–24, 181, 210–11; Protestant, 113,
industrial, 86; labor issues and, 252–54, 199, 303 n.11
255–57, 275, 276; modern thought about, circulatory processes, 77, 80, 97, 103. See also
3; multiple and mutable forms of, 7, 10– exchange; value
11, 31–32, 59, 78, 200, 247, 276; nation- citizenship issues, 102, 302 n.41
state, and relationship to, 85, 180; novelty Clark, Jim, 243, 264, 312 n.4
vs. persistent forms of, 287; performative clinical trials: Centre for Biochemical Tech-
space and, 119, 121–25, 276, 303–4 n.15, nology and, 93; ethical-political terrains
314 n.39; religion, and relationship with, and, 93, 96–97; Genomed company and,
180, 184, 195, 199; social power and, 276 93, 191; inclusion-exclusion issues and,
Carnegie, Dale, 53 100–101, 302 n.39; volunteer subjects and,
Celera Genomics: ethnographic research, 97, 102, 280–81, 302 n.34
and access to, 234; GeneEd, and invest- Cohen, Lawrence, 190
ment by, 269–70; genetic variability and, Cohen, Stanley, 5
29, 291 n.26; Human Genome Project vs., Cold Spring Harbor genome meetings, 1, 2,
2, 29, 48, 49, 294 n.13; patentability of 303–4 n.15

Index 329
College of Natural Resources, 303 n.13 97 n.35; fraud in United States, 182–83;
Collins, Francis, 294 n.14; history of geno- gender issues and, 254, 304 n.20; gifting in
mics and, 294 n.14; National Human United States and, 34; and implosion of
Genome Research Institute and, 50; on economic and epistemic regimes, 142,
snps data, 51; therapeutic lag and, 152 177, 180–81; model for, 239, 246; research
commercial enterprises: commercialization sites for Western corporations in India,
of research in life sciences, 6; hype and 212; scandal in United States, 205, 206,
commercial value, 116, 303 n.12; prom- 208. See also biotechnology industry; spe-
issory biocapitalist futures and, 113; snp cific corporations and companies
Consortium and, 51, 52–53; vision, and cortisone, as miracle drug, 186
commercial value, 116, 303 n.12 Corzine, Jon, 182
commodification: capitalism, and com- Couch, John, 245
modity fetishism, 143, 198, 199, 210, 276, Council for Responsible Genetics, 40
310 n.20; of e-learning courses at GeneEd, Council for Scientific and Industrial
257–58, 275–76; exchange and, 75–76; of Research (csir), 192–93; applied
information, 239; speed issues and, 56 research and, 215; contract research and,
communication issues. See language and 214–17; csir 2001: Vision and Strategy,
communication issues 214; entrepreneurial research and, 217–
Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and 18; global market terrains and, 84, 211–
Engels), 7 16; innovation and, 220; nation-state and,
conferences as speech and ritual sites, 191– 74, 84; science and technology issues, 216;
92, 200–206, 313 n.30 vision of, 214, 219
consumption issues: risk and, 174–76; sacri- Creating a Life (Hewlett), 254
fice and consumption of workers, 98–99; csir 2001: Vision and Strategy, 214
subjects as sovereign consumers, 191, 278, currency, analysis of multiple forms of, 43
281–82; surplus production and, 113–14, Cytochrome P450 genetic profile, 94
172–74, 308 n.23; surplus value and, 174.
See also patient-in-waiting for drug Davies, Kevin, 51
development DeCode Genetics, 39–40, 60–61, 165, 297
Cook-Deegan, Robert, 48, 293 n.11 n.48
Coombe, Rosemary, 72–73, 83, 298 n.58, Deering, James, 204–5
308 n.28 Deleuze, Gilles, 93
Cooney, Charles, 127 Delhi, bureaucratic hierarchy and, 239
corporate activism, 52–55, 294 n.19, 295 Department of Biotechnology (dbt), Min-
n.26 istry of Science and Technology, 69, 304
corporate public relations (pr): biotech n.20
industry and, 115; capitalism and, 136; as depression, psychotropic drugs for, 158
hype, 116–17; promissory biocapitalist Derrida, Jacques: acts in name of something,
futures and, 115, 118; scientific facts and, 206; faith and technologies of media, 207;
135, 142 on norm, 160; on popular conception of
corporations: bioethics and corporate the lie, 133; provisional worlds and, 179;
values, 250–51; capital, and organization on speculations and the future, 123, 288;
of, 239, 246; corporate form and, 282; eth- structural messianism and, 210–11, 226,
nographic relationship to, 252, 312 n.13; 310 n.30; temporality and, 209; truth and,
and ethnographic research, 234–39, 295– 133, 265

330 Index
Deshpanade, Lalit, 302 n.32 intensive process and, 45–46, 94, 293 n.6;
Deshpanade, Sudha, 302 n.32 capital risk and, 94, 301 n. 28; cortisone
diagnostic tests: dna chips and, 140, 168; and, 186; Cytochrome P450 genetic pro-
pharmacogenomics industry and, 143, file and, 94; in Europe, 291 n.32; GeneEd
151; probability and, 178–80; risk issues company and, 246–47, 249–50; genetic
and, 143, 144, 175 e√ects on drug action, 153, 154; implosion
Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 6 of economic and epistemic regimes, 177;
DigiScents company, 303 n.5 India, and overview of, 25–27, 291 n.33;
Dilbert, 139 information ownership and, 55; as mirac-
Din, Suleman, 229 ulous enterprise, 186–87; penicillin as mir-
diseases and illnesses: adhd, 158; all, 140; acle drug and, 186; psychotropic drugs
aml, 140; anthrax spores, 290–91 n.29; for depression and, 158; public health
anti-retroviral therapy, 306 n.9; cancer, 6, and, 188; recall issues and, 95, 301 n. 29;
140, 177, 187, 289 n.8; depression, and reverse engineering of generic drugs in
psychotropic drugs, 158; genetic e√ects India and, 188, 309 n.8; risk issues and,
on, 153; hiv/aids testing and treatments, 143, 144; Rituxan as miracle drug and,
144, 302 n.34, 306 n.9, 308 n.25; medical 186–87; software industry compared with,
information, genotyping and, 61, 68, 295 45–46; United States, and overview of,
n.34; Myriad’s tests for brca genes, 177; 21–27; U.S. fda approval and, 93; use
non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma (HL) and value of drugs, 187–88, 309 n.7. See also
Rituxan as miracle drug, 186–87; phar- patient-in-waiting; pharmaceutical indus-
maceutical industry, and early stages of try; therapeutic development; upstream-
disease, 158; preventive medicine, 168; downstream terrain
Prozac, 158; pseudoxanthoma elasticum Dumit, Joseph: corporate ethnography and,
(pxe), 191, 194; public health issues, 188; 295–97 n.35; on objective self-fashioning,
rheumatoid arthritis, and cortisone as mir- 147, 159, 229; overdetermination of scien-
acle drug, 186; single-gene correlation for, tific research and, 114; surplus health and,
146–47, 153–54, 306–7 n.11; snps and, 314 n.2
162; streptococcal fever, and penicillin as
miracle drug, 186; syphilis research, 166; East-West issues. See First World–Third
Trovan (antibiotic), 95, 301 n.29 World asymmetry
dna chips, 139–40, 141, 207, 305 nn.4–5 economic issues: analysis of multiple forms
dna patenting, 303–4 n.15 of currency, 43; capital and, 9–10, 239,
[Link] era, 267, 312 n.30 246; indebtedness, 77, 80–83, 97; life sci-
Doubletwist company (Pangea), 108–10, ences, and e√ects of capitalist political eco-
245, 273, 313 n.37 nomic structures, 6; market logic, 33, 41–
downstream companies. See upstream- 42, 53, 57–59, 63, 72; Marx on political
downstream terrain economy, 7–12, 282; revenues and profits,
Dr. Reddy’s Foundation (drf), 26–27, 291 India answerable to, 112, 303 n.7. See also
n.34 expenditure and excess; market value
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (dmk), 300 Economist, 100
n.13 Economy and Society (Weber), 199
drug development marketplace: Africa, and Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The
use value of drugs, 187, 188, 309 n.7; anti- (Marx), 7–8
retroviral therapy, 306 n.9; capital- Eisele, Paul, 249, 251

Index 331
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological of, 44; U.S. Securities and Exchange
Voice (Fischer), 286 Commission (sec), 120, 132, 304 n.16;
Engels, Friedrich, 7, 16, 65, 266, 282 volunteer subjects and, 102
Entrepreneurial Pharmaceutical Partners of expenditure and excess: in biotech industry,
the Indian Continent (eppic), 222, 226 199, 200–206, 209–10, 310 n.24; at con-
entrepreneurship: conjuration of futures ferences as speech and ritual sites, 200–
and, 275; defined, 241–42; investment 206, 313 n.30; hype, and value of excess in
companies and, 268–71; Maulik and, 243– biotech industry, 113
44; nri and, 224–26, 239, 241; Patel and, expressed sequence tag (est), 51
244; principle of, 242; TiE and, 222–23,
225; venture capital and, 242, 245–46, Falwell, Jerry, 313 n.27
271–72 Ferguson, James, 233
ethics. See bioethical issues fetishism: of capitalism, 276, 314 n.39; com-
ethnographic research: access to companies modity fetishism and, 143, 198, 199, 210,
for, 234–39, 248–52; anonymity of sites 310 n.20; of genomic facts, 167–71, 307
and, 295–97 n.35; anthropology of science n.21; genomic fetishism, 143–45, 147,
and, 4; biocapital studies and, 30–33, 292 168–71, 207, 307–8 n.22; of symbolic cap-
nn.42–43; corporate ethnography and, ital of biotech and pharmaceutical indus-
234–39, 295–97 n.35; corporations, and try, 123, 209; U.S. free market value gener-
ethnographers, 252, 312 n.13; emergent ation and, 285–86
forms of life and, 240, 278, 279, 286–87, First World–Third World asymmetry: bio-
312 n.5; Fischer and, 1, 30, 278; Indian capital and, 75; biopiracy issues and, 73–
ethnographic sites, 33, 235–39; locality vs. 74, 291 n.33; biotech industry and, 67, 297
universality, 150, 232–33; local vs. global n.48; East-West inequities and India, 219,
political ecologies, 83, 285–86, 314 n.5; 311 n.42; research sites for Western corpo-
situated perspectives and, 239–40; social rations in India and, 212; ‘‘the Other’’
theory, and relationship to ethnography, and, 82–83, 286–87
287–88; ‘‘the Other’’ and, 82–83, 286–87; Fischer, Michael: on multisited ethnogra-
U.S. ethnographic sites, 33, 234–35 phy, 232–33; emergent forms of life and,
eugenic technology, 179, 208 278; Emergent Forms of Life and the
Europe: drug development marketplace in, Anthropological Voice, 286; ethical-political
291 n.32; snps from dna donations and issues and, 93; ethnographic research and,
Europeans, 50 1, 30, 278; on ethnographic study of ‘‘the
evangelism, 188, 266, 313 n.27 Other,’’ 286–87
Ewald, François, 167 Fleck, Ludwig, 166
Excelan company, 224 Foreign Exchange Regulations Act, 190
exchange: commodification and, 75–76; Fortun, Michael, 65–66
deconstruction and, 72; dialectic of mate- forward-looking statement: defined, 131–
riality to abstraction and, 17–18, 290 n.22; 32; fabrication of truth and, 120, 121,
Foreign Exchange Regulations Act, 190; 129–35, 304 n.16; temporality and, 134;
gifting and, 75–76, 80; global market ter- venture science and, 133–34, 305 n.29
rains and, 103; information ownership Foucault, Michel: on biopolitics and impact
and, 34, 75; market contradictions and, on modern life, 12–14, 79, 99, 278–79; on
39; market value, and processes of, 41; governmentality, 177; Order of Things,
public domain and, 34, 75; sites for study The, 13; truth and, 295–97 n.35

332 Index
Frankenberg, Ruth, 230 information, 49, 50, 60, 294 n.15; popula-
Frankenstein (Shelley), 208 tion of India and, 68; populations as units
Fraser, Claire, 310 n.25 and, 298 n.50
From Alchemy to ipo (Robbins-Roth), 186 ‘‘Genetic Technology and Society’’ con-
Frow, John, 73 ference, 39
Genomed company: Centre for Biochemical
Gandhi, Indira, 74–75 Technology, and involvement in, 93; clini-
Gandhi, Rajiv, 74, 82 cal trials and, 93, 191; Council for Scien-
Geertz, Cli√ord, 113 tific and Industrial Research, and involve-
Gelsinger, Jesse, 152 ment in, 84; Genomed Mumbai, 93, 301
GenBank, 1 n.26; history of, 71, 84, 299 n.11; Nicholas
GeneChip arrays, 139–40 Piramal India Limited and, 93
GeneEd company: as advertising company, Genome Valley, 77, 90, 228
250–51; angel investments in, 245–46, Genomic Health company, 191, 194, 281–
273–74, 312 n.8; bioethics and, 250–51; 82, 309 n.12
corporate capital investment and, 246, genomics: bioethics and, 57; defined, 2, 289
257, 263, 268–74, 313 n.35; description of, n.2; description of, 28, 47; eugenic tech-
239; drug development marketplace and, nology and, 179, 208; genetic information
246–47, 249–50; as education company, vs. human biological material, 60; genetic
250–51, 254–57; ethnographic research, map of bu√alo research, 220–21; genetic
and access to, 248–52; gender issues and, variability, 28–29, 291 n.36; genomic
253–54; graphic designers and, 248, 252, facts, 114, 156–59, 167–71, 307 n.21; ge-
276; history of, 242–48, 267–68; as nomics information, 57; history of, 2–3,
knowledge management company, 258, 29–30, 32, 292 n.38, 294 n.14; Icelandic
312 n.18; life science issues and, 248; loca- population genomics experiments, 39–40,
tion issues and, 247–48, 312 n.9; manage- 60–61, 165, 297 n.48; market frameworks
ment structure of, 246, 249, 252–54, 260– and, 33; moral value and, 56–57; over-
64, 270, 273–74, 312 n.14; product of, view of, 27–30; pharmaceutical industry,
240–41, 250, 312 n.11; programmers, and and genomics in public domain, 45; snps
role at, 248, 259, 276; situated perspective and, 28–29; speed issues and credit for se-
and, 246–47; as software designer, 257, quencing, 19, 48; technological advances
258, 263, 276; start-up model and, 242, vs. conceptual advances, 33; upstream
263, 267–68; upstream-downstream ter- drug development marketplace and, 23–
rain and, 240, 248; venture capital and, 24
242, 268, 270–71, 272–73, 313 n.36 genomics industry: implosion of economic
Genentech company: biotech research and, and epistemic regimes, 177; patentability
291 n.30; history of, 22; ipo and, 22, 119– of sequences and, 45; pharmaceutical
20, 125–28; salvationary promise of bio- industry, and relationship to, 45; public
capital and, 203–4 domain, and interactions with, 49–51,
General Agreements on Tari√s and Trade 54–57, 59, 117–18, 142, 303 n.13, 305–6
(gatt), 73 n.6; therapeutic lag and, 152; upstream-
General Electric (ge), 216 downstream terrain of drug development
genetic studies: drug response, 94–95; marketplace and, 44, 45, 293 n.5
genetic determinism, 144–45, 146; German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels), 16,
genetics of disease, 95; genetic variability 65, 266, 282

Index 333
Ghosh, Jayati, 82 Health Sector Database, 40
Gibbs, Richard, 145–46, 179 Healy, Bernadine, 48
gifting, concept of: capitalism and, 295 Healy, David, 144
nn.27–28; corporate activism and, 53, 295 Hegel, G. W. F., 15
n.26; description of, 55–56, 295 n.28; hepatitis B vaccine, 300 n.21
exchange and, 75–76, 80; snp Consortium Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, 254
and, 53; U.S. corporations and, 34 Hibergen company, 165
Gilder, George, 199–200 high-throughput gene expression studies,
Giordano, Barry, 249, 252, 253, 261 140, 141, 154
global market terrains: anti-retroviral ‘‘History of the Lie’’ (Derrida), 265
therapy and, 306 n.9; bioethical issues hiv/aids testing and treatments, 144, 302
and, 66; capital flows between United n.34, 306 n.9, 308 n.25
States and India and, 193, 227; Centre for Ho√mann-LaRoche, 61
Cellular and Molecular Biology and, 192; Holden, Arthur, 51
cities, and role in capital flows of, 84– Housman, David, 157
85; Council for Scientific and Industrial How to Win Friends and Influence People
Research and, 192–93, 211–16; exchange (Carnegie), 53
and, 103; indebtedness and, 83, 97; In- Human Genome Project (hgp): bioethics
dian state and, 34, 46–47, 67–71, 74–75; and, 297 n.48; Celera Genomics vs., 2, 29,
nationalism and, 70–71, 188–90, 192–93; 48, 49, 294 n.13; Cold Spring Harbor ge-
National Chemical Laboratories and, 192; nome meetings, 1; description of, 47;
territorial unit of nation-state and, 79 genetic variability, 28–29, 291 n.36; his-
Godbout, Jacques, 55, 295 n.26, 295 n.28 tory of, 29
Golub, D. R., 140 Human Genome Sciences, 51
Goux, Jean-Joseph, 198, 199–200 Huntsman Cancer Institute, 132, 304 n.16
governance issues, 80, 86–89, 93, 97, 100, Huxley, Aldous, 208
300 nn.14, 16, 19, 21, and 22 Hyderabad: bureaucratic hierarchy and,
Gramsci, Antonio, 88 311–12 n.3; Genome Valley, 77, 90, 228;
Great Britain, 305 n.2 high-tech capitalism and, 84; networks
Greenbaum, Mark, 253 between nonresident Indians and, 92; sta-
Greenhalgh, Susan, 99 tistics, 92, 301 n.25
Grefe, Edward, 52 hype: capitalism and, 136; commercial value
Grossberg, Lawrence, 268 and, 116, 303 n.12; corporate pr as, 116–
Grundrisse (Marx), 173 17; credibility-incredibility and, 114–15,
Gupta, Akhil, 233 118, 303 n.11; [Link] era and, 267; Dou-
Guyer, Mark, 51 bletwist company (Pangea), 108–10, 244–
45; innovation and, 111; as productive
Hall, Stuart, 292 n.2 mechanism, 110, 135; speculation and,
Halushka, M. K., 155 111; truth and, 251, 264–65; value of
Hamacher, Werner, 304 n.19 excess in biotech industry, 113; vision vs.,
haplotypes, 157 266–67
Haraway, Donna, 65, 168, 170–71, 240
Harvard-MIT Hippocratic Society, 39 Iceland, population genomics experiments
Hayden, Cori, 291 n.34 in, 39–40, 60–61, 165, 297 n.48
health issues. See diseases and illnesses icici Knowledge Park (the Park): female

334 Index
 ceos and, 304 n.20; history of, 83, 89–92; ern corporations in, 212; reverse engineer-
nonresident Indians and, 83; start-up ing of generic drugs and, 188, 309 n.8; and
model and, 84; state involvement in, 84, 85 science, role of, 211–12; start-up culture
illnesses. See diseases and illnesses in, 91, 97, 239, 242; subject position of
Immigrant Support Network (isn), 229 populations of, 68, 149, 150, 280–81; ‘‘the
Incyte Genomics (Incyte Pharmaceuticals): Other’’ and, 82–83; U.S. free market value
description of, 310 n.17; ethnographic generation and, 285–86; venture capital
research, and access to, 234–35; GeneEd, and, 88–89, 300 n.17; vision, in context of,
and investment by, 268–69; Institute of 111–12, 303 n.7; wto compliance and, 25,
Genomic Research conference and, 121; 188, 309 n.8. See also nation-state; specific
moral value of genomics and, 57; salva- cities; specific companies
tionary promise of biocapital and, 201–3 Indian Business School, 300 n.22
indebtedness, 77, 80–83, 97 Indian Council for Agricultural Research
India: applied science policies and, 219–21; (icar), 311 n.43
bias against scientists and research in, Indian Institute of Technology (iit), 224,
212–13; biocapital contexts in, 83; biotech 225
industry and, 27, 89, 300 n.21, 304 n.20; Indian state: biopiracy and, 73–74; defined,
comparison of biocapital in contexts of 68, 298 n.52; global market terrains and,
United States and, 20, 149–50; culture of 34, 46–47, 67–71, 74–75; intellectual
innovation and, 188–89; Dr. Reddy’s property and, 68–70, 298 n.54; market
Foundation and, 26–27, 291 n.34; eth- logic and, 69; medical information and,
nographic sites, 33, 235–39; female ceos 61, 68, 295 n.34; pharmaceutical industry,
in, 304 n.20; First World–Third World and history of, 25–27; property claims of
asymmetry and, 219, 311 n.42; and genetic natural resources and, 71; public domain
resources, expropriation of, 212; genetic vs. information ownership issues and, 73–
studies, and population of, 68; global mar- 74; start-ups vs., 71, 117–18; Vision 2020:
ket terrains and, 192–93; imitation of U.S. The Right to Sight, 107, 128. See also snp
start-up model in, 84, 239; intellectual Consortium
property and, 68–70, 189, 298 n.54; liber- Indus Entrepreneurs (tie), 193, 222–23,
alization in, 81–82, 299 n.7; Ministry of 225, 227
External A√airs, and clearance for field- Infinity Pharmaceuticals company, 117
work, 236; multiple levels and registers of information flow, 43, 57–58, 76
indebtedness, 81–82; nationalism and, information ownership: bioethical issues
182–86, 192–93, 201, 308–9 n.3; nonresi- and, 64–66; corporate agency and, 54–55;
dent Indian repatriation of culture of databases from corporate dna repositories
innovation from United States to, 193, and, 61–62; drug development market-
227–28; overview of drug development place and, 55; exchange and, 34, 75; ge-
marketplace in, 25–27, 291 n.33; patent nomics industry, and sequence informa-
issues and, 189; patient-in-waiting and, tion in, 45; Indian state, and public
149, 308 n.25; pharmacogenomics indus- domain vs., 73–74; life sciences and, 41;
try and, 93–95, 149; r&d facilities and, 26, market logic and, 58–59; nih and, 55;
214, 291 n.34; regional parties, and rela- Rep-X (Repository X) and, 46; snp Con-
tionship to capital flows in, 300 n.13; sortium and, 54; speed issues and, 41, 43–
remodeling of U.S. entrepreneurial cul- 45, 48–49, 51, 54, 56, 295 n.30. See also
tures and, 231–32; research sites for West- patentability of sequences

Index 335
information sciences, 3, 41 Lander, Eric, 117, 139, 305–6 n.6
innovation: biocapital, and technological, Lander lab, 139, 140
111, 113–14; Council for Scientific and language and communication issues: con-
Industrial Research and, 220; culture of, ferences as speech and ritual sites, 191–92,
188–89, 193, 227–28; hype and, 111 200–206, 313 n.30; information flow and,
Institute for Genomics and Integrative Biol- 43, 57–58, 76
ogy (igib), 297 n.49 Latour, Bruno, 147, 249
Institute of Genomic Research (tigr), 121, Ledley, Fred, 157
201–5, 310 n.25 legal issues: Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 6;
intellectual property (ip): Centre for Bio- Moore v. the Regents of University of Califor-
chemical Technology and, 84, 299 n.11; nia, 60, 63, 64; patentability and, 4–5, 289
cultural life of, 72–73, 298 n.58; Depart- n.6, 303–4 n.15; patent rights, 6; Private
ment of Biotechnology and, 69; dna chips Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995,
and, 141; dna samples for research and, 120, 132, 304 n.16
194; gatt and, 73; India and, 68–70, 189, Levin, Mark, 273
298 n.54; information flow and, 76; mate- Lewis, Michael, 114, 313 n.30
riality and, 72; Moore v. the Regents of Uni- Lewontin, Richard, 164
versity of California, 60, 63, 64; source vs. Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 313 n.30
invention and, 60, 72, 298 n.298; start-up ‘‘life itself ’’: biocapital, and transformations
model and, 299 n.11; United States and, of, 47; biotech industry and, 142, 178, 208,
55, 295 n.29; volunteer subjects and, 102; 278; as business plan for biocapital, 144,
wto and, 73, 74 278; scientific fact about, 135
interdisciplinary issues, 265, 313 n.254 life sciences: applied science policies, 219–
International Monetary Fund (imf), 82, 300 21, 310 n.40; biocapital, and relationship
n.18 to, 11–12; biological material vs. biolog-
Isswalkar, Datta, 98 ical information, 42; capitalist political
economic structures and e√ects on, 6;
Jains, 303 n.11 commercialization of research in, 6; co-
Jameson, Fredric, 11, 289 n.13 production of capitalism and, 4, 6, 11–12,
Jazwinska, Elizabeth, 155 20, 290 n.14, 290 nn.14 and 26; corpora-
Johns Hopkins University, 294 n.14 tization of bioscience, 4; GeneEd com-
Journal of the American Medical Association, pany and, 248; implosion of capitalism
294 n.14 and, 116, 136, 303 n.12; implosion of mar-
ket and subjects and, 281, 306 n.8; infor-
Kalow, Werner, 154 mation ownership and, 41; information
Karnataka state, 304 n.21 sciences, and evolution from, 3, 41; mate-
Kaviraj, Sudipta, 299 n.7 rialism, and e√ects on research in, 19;
Kennedy School of Government, 182 overdetermination and, 6; salvationary
Kilroy, Cynthia, 252–54, 260 force and, 198; science and technology
Kinney, Catherine, 183 studies (sts), 313 n.254; social power
Kramer, Peter, 144 and, 198
Krishna, V. V., 211, 212, 216–17 Linsky, Martin, 52
Livingstone, David, 188
L. V. Prasad Eye Institute (lvpei), 107 Luhmann, Niklas, 178
labor issues, 252–54, 255–57, 275, 276 Lyotard, Jean-François, 10, 11, 277

336 Index
M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, McCusick, Victor, 152, 294 n.14
304 n.20 Medak district statistics, 92
Madhiwalla, Neha, 302 n.33 medical information, genotyping and, 61,
Mahajan, Manjari, 215, 298 n.54, 310 n.33 68, 295 n.34
Marcus, George, 30, 232, 286 MedImmune company, 249
Mario, Ernest, 246 Merck, 51, 294 n.18
market logic, 33, 41–42, 53, 57–59, 63, 72. See Merton, Robert, 11, 114–18, 133, 199, 310
also Indian state; Rep-X; snp Consortium n.29
market value: bioethics, and nonmarket messianism, 123–24, 181, 210–11, 310 n.30
values, 41; creation of value and, 43; millenarianism, 199, 308 n.29
exchange processes and, 41; genomics Millennium Pharmaceuticals company:
and, 46; pharmaceutical industry and, 24– ethnographic research and access to, 234;
25; speed of generation of dna sequences, history of, 139, 141, 142; public domain,
and drug, 43, 292–93 n.3 and interactions with genomics industry,
Marks, Jonathan, 307 n.18 305–6 n.6; venture capital influence
Marshall, Eliot, 50, 51 and, 273
Martin, Emily, 4 Ministry of External A√airs (mea), 236
Marx, Karl: Capital, 8, 97, 282; on capital- Monsanto, 250–51, 312 n.12
ism, and alienation of labor, 275; com- Moore, John, 60
modity fetishism and, 143, 198, 199, 210, Moore v. the Regents of University of California,
310 n.20; Communist Manifesto, 7; corpo- 60, 63, 64
rate form and, 282; deproletarianization moral issues, 56–57, 65–66
and, 97, 98; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Motulsky, Arne, 154
Napoleon, The, 7–8; German Ideology, The, Mumbai: Genomed Mumbai, 93, 301 n.26;
16, 65, 266, 282; Grundrisse, 173; historical hospitals in, 96, 302 n.33; industrialization
and dialectic materialism and, 15–18; on and, 84; sacrifice and consumption of
political economy, 7–12, 282; on religion workers and, 98–99; textile industry, 96,
as ideology, 266; on structural attentive- 97–98, 302 n.32. See also Parel; Wellspring
ness, 284; surplus production and, 113– Hospital
14, 172–74, 282 mutagenesis, 159–60
Mashelkar, Ramesh, 75, 192, 214–17 mutants, 159–62
material culture, and impact on biotech Myriad’s breast cancer tests, 177
industry, 138–42
Maulik, Sunil: biography of, 242–43, 248; Naidu, N. Chandrababu: governance and
entrepreneurship and, 243–44; manage- ideology of, 86–89, 93, 100, 300 nn.14, 16,
ment structure and, 249, 252, 253, 262–63, 19, 21, and 22; health tourism and, 301
273–74, 312 n.14; on starting a company, n.25; state compensation for suicides and,
267–68; values and, 249–51; venture capi- 77; venture capital and, 88–89; Vision
tal and, 242, 245–46, 272–73; vision and, 2020, 77, 78. See also Andhra Pradesh state
249–51, 265–67, 275 government
Maurer, Bill, 295 n.28 National Center for Biotechnology Informa-
Mauss, Marcel, 55, 199, 295 nn.26 and 28 tion, 1, 6, 289 n.8
Mazumdar, Kiran, 127–28, 304 n.20,23 National Chemical Laboratories (ncl), 192
Mazumdar-Shaw, Kiran, 127–28, 304 National Human Genome Research
n.20,23 Institute (nhgri), 48–49, 50, 294 n.14

Index 337
National Institutes of Health (nih), 47, 48, Palmer, Chris, 275
50, 55, 297 n.48 Pangea company (Doubletwist), 108–10,
nationalism: biocapital as embedded in, 181; 245, 273, 313 n.37
global market terrains and, 70–71, 188– Parel, 84, 101, 301 n.26; union activity and,
90, 192; India and, 182–86, 192–93, 201, 98. See also Mumbai
308–9 n.3; National Chemical Laborato- Patel, Salil: biography of, 243, 244–45, 248,
ries and, 192; nonresident Indians and, 261–62; entrepreneurship and, 244; man-
227, 228; United States and, 182–83, 209; agement structure and, 262–63; truth and
Vishwa Hindu Parishad and, 228 hype issues, 251, 264–65
nation-state: capitalism and relationship to, Patel, Viloo, 304 n.20
85, 180; Council for Scientific and In- patentability of sequences: bioethics and,
dustrial Research and, 74, 84; natural 303–4 n.15; Celera Genomics and, 2; Dia-
resources, and claims of, 71; territorial mond v. Chakrabarty, 6; dna patenting,
unit of, 79. See also India 303–4 n.15; genomics industry and, 45;
Native American people, dna sample collec- Indian patent issues and, 189; information
tions from, 50, 297 n.48 ownership and, 2, 4; laws and, 4–5, 289
Nature Genetics, 146, 306–7 n.11 n.6, 303–4 n.15; nih and, 48, 293 n.11;
Nazi science, 208, 310 n.29 patent rights, 6; pharmaceutical industry
neem-derived products, 74, 299 n.60 and, 45; public domain and, 2, 4; snp
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 211 Consortium and, 51–53; wto and, 25,
Neomorphic company, 110, 235 189. See also information ownership
New Corporate Activism, The (Grefe and patient-in-waiting (consumer-in-waiting):
Linsky), 52 consumer genomics and, 196–97, 281–82;
New, New Thing, The (Lewis), 313 n.30 for drug development, 144, 148, 175–77,
Nicholas Piramal India Limited (npil), 1, 195, 308 n.25; India and, 149, 308 n.25;
84, 93 personalized medicine and, 144, 148, 175–
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118, 144 77, 195, 308 n.25; therapeutic develop-
nonresident Indian (nri) entrepreneurs of ment and, 144, 148, 175–77, 195, 308
Silicon Valley: capital flow from United n.25; United States and, 148, 195, 308
States to India and, 193, 227; entrepre- n.25. See also drug development
neurship and, 224–26, 239, 241; history marketplace
of, 190; nationalism and, 227, 228; net- penicillin, as miracle drug, 186
works between India and, 92, 190, 193; People of India (Singh), 164
objective self-fashioning and, 230; racial- Perkin-Elmer company, 30, 310 n.25
ethnic discrimination and, 224, 228–29, personalized medicine: contingency and,
230; repatriation of culture of innova- 178–79, 308 n.28; defined, 114, 151–54;
tion from United States to India, 193, implosion of economic and epistemic
227–28; structural messianism and, 226; regimes and, 177; patient-in-waiting and,
the Park and, 83; venture capital and, 88– 144, 148, 175–77, 195, 308 n.25; proba-
89 bility and, 178–80; risk minimization and
Novartis, 303 n.13 calculation and, 176, 178; snps and, 167;
Novas, Carlos, 14 therapeutic development and, 60
Novell company, 224 Petryna, Adriana, 102
Pfizer, 95, 301 n.29
Order of Things, The (Foucault), 13 pharmaceutical industry: corporation model

338 Index
 and, 239; disjuncture of production and preventive medicine, 168
circulation and, 9; early stages of disease Principles of General Economics (Bataille), 113
manifestation and, 158; fetishism of sym- private ownership of information. See infor-
bolic capital and, 123, 209; genomics in mation ownership
public domain and, 45; history of Indian Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of
state and, 25–27; market valuation and, 1995, 120, 132, 304 n.16
24–25; market value of genomics and, 46; production issues: biocapital, and structural
patentability of sequences and, 45; snp relations of production, 284; biopolitics,
Consortium and, 51, 52–53; snps and, 50; and structural relations of production,
speculation and, 24; speed issues and, 41, 284–85; consumption and surplus pro-
43–44; upstream-downstream terrain of duction, 113–14, 172–74, 308 n.23;
drug development marketplace and, 44– coproduction of capitalism and life sci-
45. See also drug development market- ences, 4, 6, 11–12, 290 n.14; coproduc-
place; therapeutic development tion of Christianity and capitalism, 180;
pharmacogenetics, 154 coproduction of life sciences and capital-
pharmacogenomics industry: defined, 153, ism, 4, 6, 11–12, 20, 290 nn.14 and 26; dis-
301 n.27; diagnostic tests and, 143, 151; juncture of production and circulation in
high-throughput methods for genetic pharmaceutical industry, 9; production of
analysis and, 140, 141, 154; history of, 5; scientific facts, 111, 114, 134, 147; surplus
India and, 93–95, 149; pharmacogenomic production, 113–14, 172–74, 282, 308
process, 154–58; subject position of n.23
Indian population and, 149 promissory biocapitalist futures: commercial
Pietz, William, 169, 170, 171 realization and, 113; corporate pr and,
Pinker, Steven, 145 115, 118; entrepreneurship, and conjura-
political issues: ethical-political terrains, 93, tion of futures, 275; ipos and, 119–20,
96–97; life sciences, and e√ects of capital- 125–28; persona and performative space
ist political economic structures, 6; local and, 119, 121–25, 303–4 n.15; reality
vs. global political ecologies, 83, 285–86, issues and, 125–26, 304 n.19; scientific
314 n.5; Marx on political economy, 7–12, facts and, 115, 133–34, 142; speculation,
282; Telugu Desam political party, 86–88, 24, 111, 123, 288; therapeutic realization
300 n.13. See also biopolitics and, 113; unpredictability of, 288; venture
polymerase chain reaction (pcb), 5 science and, 133, 305 n.29
populations: classification of, 163–66, 307 protein crystallization, 292–93 n.3
n.18; as consumers-in-waiting for drug Protestant Christianity, 113, 199, 303 n.11
development, 144, 148; genomic fetishism Protestant Ethic, The (Weber), 199
and, 143; implosion of market and sub- Prozac, 158
jects, 281, 306 n.8; as patients-in-waiting pseudoxanthoma elasticum (pxe), 191, 194
for drug development, 144, 148, 175–77, public domain issues: downstream com-
195, 308 n.25; subject position of, 68, 143, panies and, 55; exchange and, 34, 75; ge-
148–51, 306 n.8, 307 n.14; subjects as sov- nome sequence information and, 45; ge-
ereign consumers in United States, 191, nomics and, 45; genomics industry, and
278; and volunteer subjects for clinical interactions with, 49–51, 54–57, 59, 117–
trials, 97, 102, 280–81, 302 n.34 18, 142, 303 n.13, 305–6 n.6; Indian state,
Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 10 and information ownership vs., 73–74;
postmodernism, 11, 289 n.13 nih and, 55; patentability of sequences

Index 339
public domain issues (continued) India and, 212; vision, and original
and, 2, 4; pharmaceutical industry and, research, 265–66
45; snp Consortium, and genomics in, 46; Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 138, 281
speed issues and, 41, 43–44; temporality risk issues: calculation of risks, 178; con-
of therapeutic development and, 152, 307 sumption issues and, 174–76; diagnostic
n.17 tests and, 143, 144, 175; drug develop-
public health issues, 188. See also diseases and ment marketplace, 143, 144; risk distribu-
illnesses tion, 166; snps, and probability or risk of
public relations (pr), corporate. See corpo- disease, 166; start-up model and, 143
rate public relations (pr) Risk Society (Beck), 166
pxe International, 191, 194–96 Ritalin, 158
Rituxan, as miracle drug, 187
Rabinow, Paul, 145, 241, 279, 312 n.6 Robbins-Roth, Cynthia, 186, 241, 289 n.8,
Rajagopal, Arvind, 180, 190 312 n.61
Ramachandran, T. V., 190 Robertson, Pat, 188
Rama Rao, N. T., 87–88 Rollins, Cyane, 255–56
Rangareddy district, 92 Rose, Nikolas, 14
Reardon, Jenny, 163
recombinant dna technology (rdt), 5–6, Sahlins, Marshall, 309 n.7
22 salvation: acts in name of something and,
Rekhi, Kanwal, 193, 224–26, 227, 228–29, 206; biocapital in United States and, 181,
309 n.9 184, 185, 186, 194–200, 210–11; Genen-
religion: asceticism, 199, 308 n.29; biotech tech, and salvationary promise of biocapi-
industry and theology, 123–24; capitalism, tal, 203–4; messianism and, 123–24, 181,
and relationship to, 180, 184, 195, 199; 210–11, 310 n.30; sacred power and, 206;
as cultural system, 184; millenarianism, salvationary force of life sciences, 198; sal-
199, 308 n.29. See also belief systems; vationary promise of biocapital, 194–96,
Christianity 201–5, 309 n.15; typology of, 184
Rep-X (Repository X): bioethics and, 62– Sanger Centre, 305 n.2
64, 295–97 n.35, 297 n.38; ethnographic Shanta Biotechniques company, 300 n.21
research, and anonymity of, 295–97 n.35; Sassen, Saskia, 84–85
information ownership and, 46 science and technology studies (sts), 313
research issues: bias against scientists and n.254
research in India, 212–13; commercializa- Science Policy Resolution of 1958, 216
tion of research in life sciences, 6; Council scientific facts: about ‘‘life itself,’’ 135; bio-
for Scientific and Industrial Research and, sociality and, 145–46, 159; corporate pr
214–18; Dumit, and overdetermination of and, 135; correlation of snps with diseases
scientific research by the market (venture and, 146, 306–7 n.11; genomic facts and,
science), 114; facilities for research in 114, 156–59, 167–71, 307 n.21; objective
India, 89, 300 n.21; genetic map of bu√alo self-fashioning and, 147–48; production
research, 220–21; intellectual property, of, 111, 114, 134, 147; promissory bio-
and dna samples for research, 194; public capitalist futures and, 115, 133, 142
as enabler of private research, 56; research Scott, James, 99
hospitals, 68, 83–84, 93–94, 96, 301 n.26; Scott, Randy: consumer genomics and, 196–
research sites for Western corporations in 97; moral value and, 56–57; persona and

340 Index
 performative space, 119, 121–25, 303–4 theory, and relationship to ethnography,
n.15; salvationary promise of biocapital 287–88
and, 194, 309 n.15 software industry, compared with drug
Sharma, Manju, 304 n.20 development marketplace, 45–46
Shelley, Mary, 208 speculation, 24, 111, 123, 288. See also prom-
Signals, 49, 294 n.15 issory biocapitalist futures
Silicon Valley: [Link] era, 267, 312 n.30; speed issues: commodification and, 56;
software industry compared with drug credit for genomics and, 19, 48; drug mar-
development marketplace in, 45–46. See ket value of dna sequences and, 43, 292–
also nonresident Indian (nri) entrepre- 93 n.3; generation of dna sequences, 43;
neurs of Silicon Valley Human Genome Project vs. Celera Geno-
Singh, K. S., 164 mics, 48; information ownership and, 41,
single nucleotide polymorphisms (snps). 43–45, 48–49, 54, 56, 295 n.30; pharma-
See snps (single nucleotide ceutical industry and, 41, 43–44; protein
polymorphisms) crystallization, 292–93 n.3; public domain
Sivaram, S., 217–18 and, 41, 43–44
Small Industries Development Bank of Spivak, Gayatri, 179, 289 n.13
India, 88 Star, Susan Leigh, 165
Smith, Dexter, 109, 303 n.5 start-up culture, 91, 97, 239, 241, 242, 312
SmithKline Beecham, 51 n.6
snp Consortium: commercial enterprises start-up model: biotech industry as start-up
and, 51, 52–53; description of, 47–59; industry, 241; as emergent form of life,
genomics in public domain and, 46; gift- 240, 312 n.5; GeneEd company and, 242,
ing and, 53; history of, 54; information 263, 267–68; Indian imitation of United
ownership and, 54; market logic and, 53, States, 84, 239; Indian state vs. start-ups,
58–59; Merck and, 51, 294 n.18; paten- 71, 117–18; intellectual property and, 299
tability of sequences and, 51–53; phar- n.11; location and, 247–48; management
maceutical industry and, 51, 52–53 structure and, 246, 263–64; risk issues
snps (single nucleotide polymorphisms): and, 143; the Park and, 84
correlation of diseases with, 146, 306–7 Stefansson, Kari, 39, 40, 41
n.11; defined, 28, 50, 162, 293 n.8; from Strange, Susan, 113
dna donations, 50; genomics and, 28–29; Strathern, Marilyn, 295 n.28
information represented by, 294 n.15; subject position. See populations
mutants, and di√erence from, 162; per- Syrrx company, 292–93 n.3
sonalized medicine and, 167; pharma-
ceutical industry, and interest in, 50; risk Tamil Nadu, 300 n.13
or probability of disease and, 166 technoscience, 5, 289 n.7
social issues: biosociality, 145–46, 159, Teitel, Martin, 40–41
194–95; citizenship and, 102, 302 n.41; Telugu Desam political party, 86–88, 300
gender and, 253–54, 304 n.20; material n.13
culture, and impact on biotech industry, temporality issues: biocapital and, 111; bio-
138–42; objective self-fashioning of non- tech industry and, 152, 209, 307 n.17; Der-
resident Indians, 230; power, 198, 206, rida on importance of temporality, 209;
276; racial-ethnic discrimination of non- forward-looking statement and, 134; local
resident Indians, 224, 228–29, 230; social vs. global political ecologies, 83, 285–86,

Index 341
temporality issues (continued) place, 45–46, 293 n.6; comparison of bio-
314 n.5; therapeutic development and, capital in India and, 20, 149–50; corpora-
152, 209, 307 n.17; truth and, 134 tions, and gifting in, 34; Department of
Terry, Patrick, 191, 194–96, 198, 309 nn.13 Agriculture, 74; Department of Defense,
and 15 290–91 n.29; Department of Energy, 29;
theology: biotechnology industry and, 123– ethnographic sites, 33, 234–35; free mar-
24. See also belief systems; religion ket capitalism and, 183, 285–86, 291 n.33;
theology, biotechnology industry and, 123– free market value generation in India and,
24 285–86; gender issues at corporations in,
therapeutic development: consumers-in- 254; intellectual property and, 55, 295
waiting for, 144; databases and, 61; n.29; nationalism and, 182–83, 209;
description of relationships between mate- Native American people, and dna sample
rial and information, 295 n.34; dna chips collections, 50, 297 n.48; nonresident
and, 140; gene therapy and, 151, 152; ge- Indian repatriation of culture of innova-
nomics, and endpoint in, 143; patients-in- tion to India from, 193, 227–28; overview
waiting for drug development and, 144, of drug development marketplace in, 21–
148, 175–77, 195, 308 n.25; personalized 27; patient-in-waiting and, 148, 195, 308
medicine and, 60; promissory biocapitalist n.25; remodeling entrepreneurial cultures
futures and, 113; targeted therapeutics in India and, 231–32; research hospitals
and, 151–52; temporality and, 152, 209, and, 68; scandal in corporations and, 205,
307 n.17 206, 208; Securities and Exchange Com-
Third World. See First World–Third World mission (sec), 120, 132, 304 n.16; subject
asymmetry position of populations of, 68, 149, 150,
time issues. See speed issues 307 n.14; Supreme Court rulings, 6; use
Traweek, Sharon, 230, 300 n.19 value of drugs and, 309 n.7; venture capi-
Trovan (antibiotic), 95, 301 n.29 tal and, 112
truth: academic grant applications and, 305 upstream-downstream terrain (drug
n.29; bioethical issues and, 115; biotech development marketplace): description
industry and, 115; Derrida and, 133, 265; of, 48; downstream companies and, 47,
forward-looking statement, and fabrica- 55; of drug development marketplace, 21;
tion of, 120, 121, 129–35, 304 n.16; Fou- GeneEd and, 240, 248; genomics and, 23–
cault and, 295–97 n.35; hype and, 251, 24; genomics industry and, 44, 54, 293
264–65; popular conception of the lie vs., n.5; pharmaceutical industry and, 44–45;
133; promise and, 134–35; temporality upstream companies and, 23–24, 47. See
and, 134; venture science and, 133, 305 also drug development marketplace
n.29
Turaga, Uday, 214 value: access to information and, 239; bio-
capital and, 57, 76; dialectic of material-
Unger, Brooke, 100 ity to abstraction, and act of valuation,
United Kingdom, 305 n.2 18–19; as double-jointed word, 43, 292
United Nations Development Program n.2; hype, and commercial, 116, 303
(undp), 300 n.17 n.12; market contradictions and, 39;
United States: biopiracy vs. free market Scott, and moral value, 56–57; sites for
competition, 291 n.33; capital-intensive study of, 44; vision, and commercial, 116,
process, and drug development market- 303 n.12

342 Index
Venter, Craig, 2, 29, 48, 49, 293 nn.9 and 12, 110; as set of guiding principles, 266; ven-
310 n.25 ture science and, 133, 305 n.29
venture capital (vc): angel investments vs., Vision 2020: The Right to Sight, 107, 128
245–46, 312 n.8; biotech industry and, 6; Vogel, Friedrich, 154
ceos and, 271–72; entrepreneurship and,
242, 245–46, 271–72; GeneEd company W. R. Grace company, 74, 299 n.60
and, 242, 268, 270–71, 272–73, 313 n.36; Watson, James, 48
India and, 88–89, 300 n.17; Maulik and, Weber, Max: coproduction of Christianity
242, 245–46, 272–73; Naidu and, 88–89; and capitalism, 180, 199; dichotomy be-
nonresident Indians and, 88–89; Rekhi tween asceticism and mysticism, 199; Econ-
and, 224–26; returns on investment and, omy and Society, 199; element of calling in
312 n.8; United States and, 112; Vishwa biotech industry and, 200; multiple causal-
Hindu Parishad and, 193, 225 ities and, 181; Protestant Ethic, The, 199;
venture science, 133–34, 142, 195, 199, Protestant ethic and, 113, 199, 303 n.11
305 n.29 Wellcome Trust, 51
Vertex Pharmaceuticals company, 123, 265 Wellspring Hospital, 83–84, 93–94, 96, 301
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu n.26
Forum, or vhp), 193, 222, 223, 225, Werth, Barry, 123–24, 186, 241, 265, 312 n.6
228 Western and non-Western issues. See First
vision: commercial value and, 116, 303 World–Third World asymmetry
n.12; of Council for Scientific and Indus- Whitehead Institute, 138–39, 142, 305 n.3
trial Research, 214, 219; Doubletwist Williamson, Alan, 54
company (Pangea), 108–10, 244–45; Williamson, Rob, 109
evangelism and, 266, 313 n.27; of Geno- Wired, 303 n.5
mic Health, 194, 309 n.12; hype vs., 266– World Bank, 82, 300 n.18
67; ideology and, 266; Indian context of, World Health Assembly, 75
111–12, 303 n.7; interdisciplinary issues, World Health Organization, 107
265, 313 n.254; Maulik and, 249–51, 275; World Trade Organization (wto), 25, 73,
original research and, 265–66; persona 189
and performative space and, 119, 121–25,
303–4 n.15; as productive mechanism, Žižek, Slavoj, 6, 59, 282–83

Index 343
Sections of this book have previously appeared in article form. Parts of chapter 1 appeared in
Science as Culture 12, no. 1 (2003): 87–121, and in the Sarai Reader 2 (2002): 277–89. Many
thanks to Les Levidow, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta for helping me move my
thoughts along through and in the process of writing these articles. Parts of chapters 2 and 5
appeared in American Anthropologist 107, no. 1 (2005): 19–30. Many thanks to Bill Maurer for
helping to put this special issue together.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan is an assistant professor of anthropology
at the University of California, Irvine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 1974–
Biocapital : the constitution of postgenomic life /
Kaushik Sunder Rajan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8223-3708-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-8223-3720-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Biotechnology industries. I. Title.
hd9999.b442s86 2006
338.4%76151—dc22 2005030718