New spaces of biological commodification:

the dynamics of trade in genetic resources

and ‘bioinformation’
BRONWYN PARRY
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, UK

The genetic revolution is transforming agriculture and medicine, creating markets for
genetic materials of both human and non-human origin that might form the basis of new
proprietary products. In this paper I outline how these biological materials are combined
with specialised scientific knowledge to create engineered artefacts – cell lines, tissue
samples, sequenced DNA – that are now commodified and traded internationally as part of
the new global resource economy in ‘bioinformation’. In so doing I place particular empha-
sis on the role that spatial relations have played in shaping the organisation and operation
of this new scientific and industrial enterprise.

For those whose last engagement with ‘geography’ was a long past, tedious and now
thankfully almost forgotten school fieldtrip, the word probably remains synonymous
with, indeed reducible to, ‘location’. ‘Location’, or place, has an important role in shaping
scientific practice and outcomes. We are now much more cognisant of the fact that
where science is produced inevitably affects what science is produced, and how.1 But how
is this influence exerted? We would be succumbing to an attack of ‘spatial fetishism’ if
we were to imagine (as famous locational analysis theorists such as Christaller and Haggett
did2) that location of itself exerts an influence over human behaviour. Clearly, it is not
location alone, but rather the complex ‘spatial relations’ – relationships between individu-
als, organisations, technologies and objects that are set up within and between locations –
that shape scientific and other practices.
Geographers are primarily interested in investigating how these spatial relations, or
more specifically the dynamics of these relationships, are altered by distance; by the vari-
able natures of the sites, places and spaces in which the interactions occur; by the cultural,
economic, political and moral convictions of the protagonists, which are themselves con-
text dependent; by differential access to specialised knowledge, technologies, finance and
power; by flows of trade and exchange. It is not simply individual institutions that deter-
mine how scientific knowledge is produced and consumed. Rather, it is the relationships
established and maintained within and between such institutions and a host of ancillary
sites (laboratories, learned societies, field stations) that configure the production, reception
and progressive reinvention of forms of scientific knowledge.
The significance of these spatial relations was particularly evident in the Enlightenment
project of generating scientific knowledge about the botanical world. Botanical gardens

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20 Bronwyn Parry

located in the metropolitan centres of the ‘Old World’ were to become important focal
points for accumulations of plants, specimens and botanical information, and thus also, in
time, privileged sites for the production of new ‘scientific’ systems of botanical classifica-
tion and categorisation. As Miller, Mackay and Brockway have shown,3 it was however
the relations that were established between institutions such as the Royal Botanic Gardens
at Kew and its dependent outposts – the satellite botanical gardens in the colonies – that
made them so. ‘Minions’ in far flung corners of the Empire simply could not be trusted to
classify plants in situ (due, it seems, to their inadequate knowledge of plant species, their
tendency to claim all plants as new variants, and their ‘predilection’ for naming them after
local geographic features or personages). As a consequence, botanical materials were
sent back to Kew and other centres of expertise, to be amassed, redefined as specimens,
concentrated within collections, and ultimately disciplined within knowledge systems that
prove, in retrospect, to be simultaneously scientific and parochial.
It may appear that that golden age of plant hunting, as the great seventeenth and eigh-
teenth century colonial enterprise came to be known, is now a remnant of a long forgotten
past. But in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The practice of biological
collecting did indeed decline during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but
in recent years it has undergone a major resurgence. The reasons for this are clear. In the
late 1970s and early 1980s an extraordinary revolution began to take place in biology.
The introduction of advanced biotechnologies and the concomitant development of novel
techniques such as genetic engineering were to provide entirely new and highly sophisti-
cated means of modifying biological material, fundamentally altering the ways in which
collected specimens could be used, both industrially and commercially.
The life sciences industry, as it has since become known (and this includes the phar-
maceutical, agribusiness, cosmetics and health sectors), began to create new proprietary
products from existing samples of human, plant, animal, fungal and microbial material,
by extracting and recombining their genetic components in unprecedented ways. These
tissue samples, and the genetic material and information that can be extracted from them,
have also been used to create sophisticated research ‘tools’ that have become central to the
practice of molecular science. To meet this need a host of new engineered ‘artefacts’ – cell
lines, cryogenically stored tissues samples and sequenced DNA to name but a few – have
been created from collected biological materials, and they too are now also traded interna-
tionally as part of the new global resource economy in genetic resources and information.4
The life sciences industry may be revolutionising the ways in which biological materials
are used, both scientifically and industrially, however this is not a revolution without a
geography. There are very considerable geographical variations in the locations in which
biological resources are collected, the sites at which they are transformed into economi-
cally valuable commodities, and the direction and volume of the flow of compensation
that arises from their commercial use. By concentrating on exposing the dynamics of this
trade I hope to reveal something of the effects that geography and spatial relations more
generally are having in creating new and highly differentiated ‘spaces of commodification’
for biological materials and derivatives in the twenty-first century.
This paper has three short sections. In the first, I outline why and how the phenomenon
of contemporary bioprospecting has occurred, while simultaneously mapping the geogra-
phy of this scientific practice. In the second, I detail how the biological materials collected
through such endeavours have since been transformed into tradeable biocommodities.

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Here I focus on revealing why specific contemporary institutions have become focal
points for accumulating genetic material and information and what the implications of this
are for ‘donor’ countries. Third, I briefly discuss the new kinds of regulation that have
been introduced, at different scales, to control the collection and use of genetic resources.
In conclusion I assess how well these regulations meet their stated aim of ensuring the
equitable distribution of monies generated from the commercialisation of the collected
resources. In so doing I hope to illustrate the role played by particular sites and locations,
or more specifically by the relationships established within and between them, in shaping
the dynamics of this emergent scientific trade in genetic material and information.

‘AN HISTORIC REVIVAL IN BIOLOGICAL COLLECTING’

The year 1985 marked the start of what has been described as ‘an historic revival in
biological collecting’.5 It has been estimated that in the years 1985–95 over two hundred
primarily US based companies and organisations instituted new collecting programmes.
A number of obvious questions arise. Why, after many decades of declining interest in the
collection of biological materials, did this revival occur – what prompted this new interest?
Who was doing the collecting? What were they collecting and where? The first of these
questions is relatively easy to answer. The resurgence of interest in biological collecting
occurred because of demand from a vibrant new industry, one that would become the
fastest growing and most lucrative of the twenty-first century, the biotechnology or life
sciences industry.
Nothing perhaps more clearly conveys just how phenomenally profitable the life
sciences industry has since become than Fig. 1, which illustrates the exponential growth
in combined revenues of the five largest of the US biotech corporations (Genentech,
Amgen, Biogen, Chiron and Genzyme) that occurred in the two decades from 1980 to
2000. Figure 2 reveals that growth in the sales and revenue of publicly traded biotechnol-
ogy companies in the US continues to be sustained at a high level. These biotechnology
companies, including major pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations, employ samples
of both human and non-human biological materials as the basis of a host of new commer-
cial products ranging from genetically engineered organisms, to pharmaceuticals, to gene
therapies. This has created a tremendous demand for the raw biological materials upon
which such products are based.

1 Combined revenues of selected US biotech companies 1980–2000 (source: Biotechnology

Industry Organization statistics)

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2 Combined revenues of publicly traded US biotech companies 2001–04 (source: Ernst & Young
LLP annual biotechnology industry reports, 1993–2005)

These industries consequently began, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to initiate a
series of bioprospecting programmes in tropical developing countries through which
they could secure access to samples of plant, animal, fungal and microbial organisms for
commercial use. However, even the largest corporations such as pharmaceutical giants
Bristol-Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline lacked the expertise necessary to undertake
the collecting themselves. Consequently, they contracted this work out to publicly funded
organisations such as America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its subsidiary
the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI, in turn, called upon the services of the
institutions that had the longest experience of collecting in the ‘New World’ – botanical
gardens. Biological collecting contracts were subsequently let to three organisations, the
Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden and the Arnold Arboretum.
The scope and scale of this new collecting enterprise was considerable, and has certainly
not been rivalled since colonial times. Collecting was instituted in over forty different
countries. But which countries? Where were the collected materials coming from and
going to? The flow of these resources has a particular geography, one that has its genesis
in historical preoccupations with the search for the origins of genetic diversity.

GEOGRAPHIES OF GENETIC DIVERSITY

Nikolai Vavilov, the eminent Russian botanist and plant geographer, began in the early
years of the twentieth century to undertake groundbreaking work on evolutionary genetics.
Vavilov himself mounted expeditions to over sixty different countries during his lifetime,
while also coordinating a team of collectors that included Russian émigrés, all of whom
acquired specimens on his behalf. Together they amassed a quarter of a million seed
samples, representing several thousands of distinct species of crop germplasm. These were
returned to Russia, where they were collated to form one of the world’s first systematically
ordered seed accession banks at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in St Petersburg.
Vavilov discerned from his study of these specimens that genetic diversity was not evenly
distributed around the globe, but rather concentrated in a number of specific regions.
Speculating on why this should be, he reasoned that genetic diversity must be a product of
continuous cultivation and cross-cultivation, and that these centres of diversity were also
therefore in all probability the places in which plants or crops had first originated. Vavilov

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located eight such ‘centres of origin’ for the world’s principle crops. Later plant geneticists
such as Jack Harlan revised Vavilov’s theory, postulating the existence of three large
centres of genetic diversity containing centres of origin, but also extensive areas of
surrounding land in which crops and plants were diversified through domestication and
cross-breeding with wild landraces. One of these areas is central Africa, which Vavilov had
neglected to include as a centre of genetic diversity because of his own lack of experience
there.
It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that the majority of the collecting that has been
undertaken by contemporary bioprospectors has also been focused on these same centres
of genetic diversity. During the late 1980s and early 1990s over sixty different organisa-
tions and institutions in developing countries were enrolled in the project of collecting for
the NIH. They have since extracted literally hundreds of thousands of samples of tissue
from plant, animal, fungal and microbial organisms from countries within Harlan’s centres
of genetic diversity (Fig. 3).6 The majority of these are in tropical developing countries
whose economies are still particularly dependent on natural resource exploitation. If these
countries are to successfully capitalise on the collection and commercialisation of their
genetic resources, it is first necessary to trace where the resources go and how they are
subsequently used.

PRODUCING TECHNOSCIENTIFIC ARTEFACTS

In order to understand the significance of the changes that the biotechnological revolution
has brought in the ways biological materials may be employed commercially, it is impor-
tant to begin by historicising these contemporary collecting projects within a much longer
history of collecting within natural history. As history attests, the practice of collecting and
transferring biological materials from periphery to core began centuries ago, reaching
its apogee during the colonial period. In fact, it is precisely because these new collection
projects so closely mirror those undertaken during the height of Empire that critics came
to suggest that these bioprospecting programmes might actually constitute a new form of
‘biocolonialism’ or ‘bioimperialism’. So what then, if anything, is ‘new’ about this emerging
trade in samples of biological material? In thinking through this question it seems impor-
tant first to establish the ontological status of the commodity in question. What exactly
is the nature of the resource that is now being acquired and transacted – what is it that
contemporary bioprospectors are really collecting?
It is often said that the biotechnological revolution has radically altered the ways in
which biological materials may be employed industrially, but what exactly is the nature
of this change and what impact is it likely to have on the social and spatial dynamics of
biological resource exploitation? New biotechnologies enable the component parts of
organisms to be engineered on a genetic or molecular level. This, in turn, has radically
transformed approaches to the study of disease, to pharmaceutical and crop development.
Whilst scientists are still interested in examining specimens morphologically, these
examinations are now almost always conducted in concert with analyses of the genetic
and biochemical composition of the organisms in question. These analyses produce
invaluable biological information, or ‘bioinformation’. This genetic or biochemical infor-
mation, which has many applied scientific and commercial uses, may now be employed
independently of the organisms from which it was derived. Scientists are aware of this,

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3 Harlan’s centres of genetic diversity (above), with NCI collection sites 1985–95 (below)

and are consequently less interested in obtaining what Donna Haraway calls ‘thick,
messy, whole organisms’7 than they are in acquiring the genetic or biochemical information
embodied within them. It is this genetic and biochemical information, I would argue, that
is the commodity that collectors now primarily seek and value.
How and where is this genetic information extracted – and what role does geography
play in this process? In the past, genetic material and information remained firmly embed-
ded within biological organisms, and could not be reproduced or conveyed in isolation
from those organisms. This is no longer the case. As a consequence of increasingly sophis-
ticated biotechnological advances, it has become possible to extract genetic material and/
or information and to ‘render’ it in a series of new artefactual forms. Some of these

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technological artefacts – cryogenically stored tissue samples and cell lines – retain a degree
of corporeality; others such as DNA sequences stored in databases exist in a more purely
informational form.
These artefacts can be thought of as acting as ‘proxies’ for whole organisms, in that they
can, in some instances, effectively stand in for the organism in its absence. They do not act
as effective substitutes for whole organisms in all circumstances: if you are after wood to
burn in your fireplace a tissue sample from a tree won’t get you far. However in many
areas of biotechnological research their worth as proxies for whole organisms has been
very well established. Cell lines are routinely used as substitutes for whole organisms,
including human beings, when conducting tests of drug efficacy, for example.
As biological scientists have become aware of the tremendous functional utility of these
new proxies – tissue samples, cell lines, extracted DNA and the like – so demand for them
has grown. This has provided the impetus for the creation of important new commodity
markets in these bioinformational proxies. This raises the question of who benefits or
profits from this trade. In order to answer it, it is necessary to know something of the
spaces in which these new commodities are generated, as they prove to play a very signifi-
cant role. Here we need to ask who has the capacity to create these valuable new
bioinformational artefacts and proxies, and who does not.

CONTEMPORARY ‘CENTRES OF CALCULATION’

Once again, some answers may lie in history. Bruno Latour has argued that the great
European voyages of discovery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were under-
takings dedicated to both investigation and accumulation. What was being accumulateed
with each successive voyage, he suggests, was not just an undisciplined array of trophies or
souvenirs, but a systematically organised body of information about the coastlines, flora,
fauna, languages and cultures of distant peoples. This information could be employed to
recreate within particular dedicated spaces in Europe – such as museums and laboratories
– a scaled down version of the world that could be surveyed panoptically. By these
‘extraordinary means’ it became possible for collectors to ‘see’ distant places, events and
experiences without actually experiencing them firsthand.
By concentrating information and specimens in one location, it became possible
for collectors to gain an overview of relationships between collected materials that would
otherwise have been all but impossible for a single person in a single location to obtain.
As Latour suggests, it was at this point that something akin to a Copernican revolution
took place: ‘those who were the weakest because they remained at the center and saw
nothing started becoming the strongest, familiar with more places not only than any
native, but than any traveling captain as well.’ To use Latour’s term, as a consequence a
‘cycle of accumulation’ was established.8
These ‘cycles of accumulation’ were, as Latour notes, concentrated on particular
privileged sites in the imperial centres – museums, botanical gardens, laboratories – which
became focal points for concentrations of collected specimens, data, technologies and the
expertise necessary to convert them through study, manipulation, selective breeding and
classification into commodities that might be re-employed abroad in the service of empire.
Latour dubs these particular sites ‘centres of calculation’, as they enjoyed an exclusive
ability to calculate and capitalise on the inherent value of the resources there accumulated.

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The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, for example, became constituted as a master reposi-
tory, as a privileged site for the production of scientific knowledge about the natural world.
Although specimens could theoretically be classified in the field, they were not; rather, they
began to be drawn, vortex-like, towards Latour’s ‘centres of calculation’.
Latour’s conceptualisation invites consideration of a further question: where are the
focal points for the contemporary ‘cycle of accumulation’, where are today’s new centres
of calculation? The resurgence of interest in biological collecting that began in the 1980s
and which resulted in the introduction of so many new bioprospecting programmes, set in
train a new ‘cycle of accumulation’. Biological materials are, once again, being collected in
many parts of the world and concentrated in dedicated repositories, located now, as they
have been historically, in the principal scientific research establishments of the developed
world. Many of the largest of these repositories are to be found not in Europe, but in the
United States, in what might be termed ‘new (world) centres of calculation’.
Institutions such of these are not characterised as centres of calculation simply because
they are centres of accumulation. If this were the case the institutional laboratories and
repositories that act as storehouses for collections of biological materials in the developing
world would warrant inclusion as such, when in fact very few do. Simply holding a col-
lection of biological material affords the collector no particular scientific or commercial
advantage, unless that material can be acted upon in novel ways. What makes institutions
such as the NCI or the corporate laboratories of the pharmaceutical giant Merck deserving
of the title ‘new centres of calculation’ is the fact that they have the technological capacity
to explore and exploit the collected materials in ways that other collectors cannot.
Only a relatively small number of institutions in the USA have the combination of
specialised knowledge and advanced technologies (such as high throughput screening
instruments and large cryogenic storage facilities) necessary to convert these newly
collected materials into the biotechnological artefacts that are central to the production of
new, highly engineered pharmaceutical drugs and gene therapies. One of these contem-
porary centres of calculation is the NCI’s Natural Products Repository in Maryland. As
Fig. 4 suggests, unlike its considerably more elegant historical counterpart at Kew, this
new technoscientific site of investigation is an unashamedly industrial space – a nonde-
script brown warehouse. The inauspicious facade is, however, deceptive, for inside
stands some sophisticated technology, including the twenty-eight double-decker walk-in
cryogenic storage facilities (Fig. 5) used to house some of the literally hundreds of thou-
sands of collected biological samples that are being archived there for future use. Nearby
in associated laboratories are located the extremely advanced high throughput screening
and genetic technologies that will provide the genetic and biochemical information that the
NCI’s industrial partners will employ commercially using techniques such as combinatorial
chemistry and proteomics.
This extracted genetic and biochemical information may also be stored with great effi-
ciency, and made available to researchers in a highly accessible manner, by presenting it in
a more purely informational form, sequencing it and then notating the sequences onto
genetic databases. These are the kinds of sophisticated renderings of biological materials
that only a select few institutions in the world – those that have accumulated the appropri-
ate and rare mix of sophisticated technology, expertise and capital – are able to produce.
It is only those institutions, therefore, that find themselves in a position to capitalise on the
commodification.

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4 Natural Products Repository of the US National Cancer Institute, in Frederick, MD, USA

5 Industrial cryogenic storage facilities at the NCI’s Natural Products Repository

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TRADE IN BIOINFORMATION
The amounts of money that can be secured from trading in this kind of bioinformation
are very substantial indeed. In December 2001, Nature Biotechnology reported that Incyte
Genomics was to concentrate exclusively on marketing access to their highly profitable
genomic sequence databases. Subscriptions to the database provided sixty per cent of
Incyte’s revenue in 2000, and this revenue rose to 45.2 million US dollars for the third
quarter of 2001 alone.9 The pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG paid Millennium Pharmaceu-
ticals a record 465 million US dollars in 1999 for access to Millennium’s sequence data-
base. It has also been reported that Celera Genomics, the bioinformatics industry leader,
charges individual pharmaceutical company subscribers in excess of eight million dollars
each per year for unlimited access to their proprietary sequence database.10 Beyond the
USA, the industry magazine Drug Discovery News reported recently that the value of the
European bioinformatics market is projected to rise to 720 million US dollars per year
by 2011, as competition to accelerate the drug discovery process increases.11 Genetic
sequence databases and other forms of genetic and protein data are clearly producing very
substantial monetary returns for their creators.
The desire to translate commodities into more transmissible forms is not, of course,
confined to the biotechnological realm. Similar processes are at work in other domains –
in the financial sector, in publishing, in the music and film industries – and this reflects
a much wider trend towards the emergence of a post-industrial informational economy.
Printed information, music and money can now be presented in new artefactual forms, as
digital MP3 files, as electronic cash, as e-journals, for example, and new markets have been
created for these commodities as well. Whilst this improved transmissibility can make
certain commodities much easier to circulate, it also makes it considerably more difficult
to trace where these commodities go and how they are subsequently used. This may lead
to a considerable loss of revenue, as producers of computer software and recorded music
have discovered.
There has been a recognition in these domains that technology has changed the way in
which we value commodities or ‘works’ – that what is of most value in a work, and in most
need of protection, is not its physical form, but rather its transmissible content. I have
argued elsewhere that as far as the life sciences industry goes, the same is now true of bio-
logical material – what is most valuable and most in need of protection is not the biological
material per se, but rather the transmissible content of that biological material, the genetic
information embodied in it.12
With that thought in mind, it is appropriate to return to my earlier analysis and to look
upon it as an economic equation. Figures 1 and 2 graphically illustrate the large amounts of
profit that are being generated by the largest life sciences companies. We also know that a
lot of this profit is derived from products – drugs or databases – that are created from
biological materials collected in the range of developing countries mapped in Fig. 3. If
we place one over the other like a simple fraction we arrive at a straightforward question
of redistributive justice: what proportion of these profits will revert to suppliers of genetic
resources? This in turn begs a further question: what impact is the creation of this new
resource economy in bioinformational proxies having on this equation? The answers lie
in the very pertinent subject of how the use of genetic resources and extracted sequence
information is being regulated, as this inevitably determines who will benefit from this

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technoscientific trade and in what proportion. Here, again, geography is everywhere in

evidence.

GEOGRAPHIES OF COMPENSATORY FLOW

In the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was signed by a hundred and fifty state
leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, regulations were introduced with the intention of
ensuring that contemporary biological collection projects were undertaken in a much more
equitable way than their colonial counterparts. Several clauses contained new protocols
governing how genetic resources might be collected and used by signatory states and their
nationals. The Convention establishes in Article 15.1, for example, that genetic resources
form part of the patrimony of nation states, and that they have a sovereign right to utilise
them, subject to certain conditions. The most significant of these, articulated in Article
15.7, is that the benefits (profits) arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources should
be shared ‘fairly and equitably’ with the suppliers of those resources. These suppliers are
elsewhere stipulated as including those indigenous communities which may have provided
genetic resources or information pertaining to their use.
How are these benefits to be returned to these constituencies? Over the fifteen years
since the introduction of these new protocols, new benefit-sharing agreements have been
devised, primarily by collectors working in, or for, the new centres of calculation. Under
the terms of such agreements, compensation is usually disbursed in three phases. Some
monies are paid to communities at the time of collection, however these sums are usually
quite small. Further, mid-term compensation has also been granted to fund infrastructural
works in the collection countries, however in many instances this has gone towards fund-
ing the infrastructure necessary to facilitate the collection process itself. The sums paid
in these short and medium term forms of compensation have deliberately been kept at a
low level, in anticipation of the fact that the majority of the benefit/profit that countries
are due will be returned to them in the form of a royalty. These royalties are negotiated on
a case by case basis but typically consist of one or two per cent of all net profit generated
from products derived from the collected genetic resources. They are to be paid to donor
countries and communities if and when such products are successfully marketed.
While benefit-sharing agreements are well intentioned, they have not always been
successful, for a variety of complex reasons. The first relates to traceability over space. In
order for it to be possible to pay a royalty, it is first necessary to be able to determine to
whom that royalty is due. This means that it must be possible to effectively and accurately
trace all the uses that are made of collected materials as they circulate across the world and
through a succession of laboratories and indeed molecular scale transformations. This,
unsurprisingly, has proved to be a very difficult task. It is further complicated by the fact
that some organisms are endemic to many different countries, and establishing provenance
is thus extremely problematic. So problematic, in fact, that no royalties have yet been paid
to any developing countries, despite the fact that these compensation agreements have
now been in place for a decade or more.
The situation worsens further when we examine the circumstances surrounding the
commercial exploitation of bioinformational resources. While some small sums of mon-
etary compensation have been paid for the use of collected genetic resources (though no
ongoing royalties), they are only paid when the resources have remained in corporeal, that

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is to say wholly biological, form, as a tissue sample, for instance. Once they are rendered
in more informational or artefactual forms the compensatory paradigm collapses. As
I have noted elsewhere,13 donor countries and communities do not at present receive any
proportion of the very considerable profits that have been generated from licensed use of
genetic sequences or bioinformational databases created from materials collected within
their borders.
If the commitments that were introduced under the Convention on Biological Diversity
are to be met, in other words if suppliers of genetic and biochemical resources are to
receive a ‘just and equitable’ share of the benefits that arise from their utilisation, then it
will be necessary to trace all uses that are made of their resources – be they material or
informational. A failure to successfully monitor and compensate for these uses will have
potentially disastrous consequences for such suppliers, many of whom are groups in
economically vulnerable developing countries. If this outcome is to be avoided, some new
and possibly quite radical approaches to the governance of the new resource economy
in bioinformation will have to be implemented.14

CONCLUSION
In this paper I have set out to illustrate the impact that geographical factors are having on
the organisation and operation of one aspect of the contemporary life sciences industry:
bioprospecting. It has, I hope, illustrated that the new resource economies and markets
in genetic materials and information that are now emerging are highly differentiated geo-
graphically. As the evidence presented here suggests, despite efforts to redress the imbal-
ances that have historically characterised the dynamics of biological resource exploitation,
the power to fully capitalise on the scientific and commercial value of these collected
genetic resources continues to be located primarily within certain privileged sites – what
I have termed the ‘new centres of calculation’ of the metropolitan world. As even the brief
analysis of the operation of existing compensatory agreements offered here demonstrates,
the flow and circulation of these new bioinformational commodities creates, finally, its
own geography of justice and injustice. These are issues that illustrate just how centrally
geography and spatial relations are implicated in shaping and influencing the way in which
science – in this case contemporary technoscience – is created and conducted, even in this
very globalised twenty-first century.

NOTES
1. D. N. Livingstone: Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge; 2003,Chicago, IL, University
of Chicago Press.
2. W. Christaller: Central Places in Southern Germany, (trans. C. W. Baskin); 1966, Englewood Cliffs, NJ,
Prentice-Hall (first published 1933, as Die zentralen Orte in Suddeutschland); P. Haggett: Locational Analysis in
Human Geography; 1967, London, Methuen.
3. See D. Miller: ‘Joseph Banks, Empire, and the centres of calculation in late Hanoverian London’ and
D. Mackay: ‘Agents of Empire: the Banksian collectors and evaluation of new lands’, in Visions of Empire:
Voyages, Botany and Representations of Empire, (ed. D. Miller and P. Reill); 1996, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press; also L. Brockway: Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanical
Gardens; 1979, New York, NY, Academic Press.
4. For more detailed information on this new global trade in genetic materials and information see B. Parry:
Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-Information; 2004, New York, NY, Columbia
University Press.

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 New spaces of biological commodification 31

5. M. R. Boyd and K. D. Paull: ‘Some practical considerations and applications of the National Cancer
Institute in vitro anti-cancer drug discovery screen’, Drug Development Research, 1995, 34, 91–109, 92.
6. J. R. Harlan: ‘Agricultural origins: centers and noncenters’, Science, 1971, 174, 468–474.
7. D. Haraway: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Techno-
science, 246; 1997, London, Routledge.
8. B. Latour: Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, 215–257; 1987, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press.
9. L. Fletcher: ‘Sleeker Incyte flirts with drug discovery’, Nature Biotechnology, 2001, 19, 1092–1093.
10. B. Goodman: ‘Can Celera map money into genomics?’, Red Herring Business Magazine, 15 February 2001.
11. See [Link]/[Link]?newsarticle=365.
12. B. C. Parry: ‘From the corporeal to the informational: exploring the scope of benefit sharing agreements
and their applicability to sequence databases’, in Bioethics in a Small World, (ed. F. Theile and R. E.
Ashcroft); 2005, Berlin/Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag.
13. B. C. Parry: ‘From the corporeal to the informational’ (see Note 12).
14. Some initial thoughts on what form these approaches might take are outlined in the concluding chapter of
my recent book, Trading the Genome; 2004, New York, NY, Columbia University Press.

Bronwyn Parry ([Link]@[Link]) is an economic and cultural geographer whose primary interests lie
in investigating the ways in which human–environment relations are being recast by technological, economic
and regulatory changes. Her special interests include the rise and operation of the life sciences industry,
informationalism, the commodification of life forms, bioethics, and the emergence of intellectual property
rights, indigenous rights and other regulatory knowledge systems. She recently published Trading the
Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-Information (2004, Columbia University Press).

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2006, VOL. 31, NO. 1