The Politics Of Life In TheTwenty First Century:
Nikolas RoseBIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine,
Biotechnology and SocietyLondon School of Economics and Political Science
Viden, Politic og SundhedAarhus
4 December 2008
From politics of health to politics of life
No linear history of our contemporarybiomedical complex
Clinical gaze emerged in C19… So too does novelty today
Extension of territory of medicine Technologies of the healthy self Challenges to medical expertise
Empowering active citizens The shadow of the law The constraints of insurance The diagnostic bible
Medicine becomes technomedicine Biomedicine – links of clinic, bench and
market Capitalization of medical truth and rise of
the bioeconomy
Biopolitics in C21
The Politics of Life Itself
Molecularization
Optimization (governing the future)
Subjectification
Expertise
Bioeconomics
The Somatic Ethic and the Spirit ofBiocapital
Molecular biopolitics From ‘molar’ to ‘molecular’ image of life:
Genomics: functional properties of coding sequences ofbases (CAGT), transcription and expression
Proteomics: functional properties of proteins linked totheir molecular topography
Molecular neuroscience: disorders visualized in terms ofion channels, enzyme activities, transporter genes,membrane potentials
A molecular style of thought (Fleck)
A new molecular ontology of life – tied to amolecular gaze
Vitality – embodied and embrained - nowbecomes available as a technical resourcewhich can be instrumentalized, engineered,capitalised etc.
Protemic image from National Cancer Research Insitute: http://ccr.nci.nih.gov/tech_initiatives/bpp/;3D image of ions in a calcium channel from http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/exhibits/iotw/1999-11-11/
Optimization – governing vital futures
Governing the future Bringing the vital future into the vital present
and making it calculable and manageable
The age of biological control? A new medical telos - from cure to control The re-engineering of life – from the inside The body as parts – organs, genes,
reproductive components, tissues…
Cartesian bodies and brains? Two dimensions for governing vital
futures Susceptibility Optimization
Susceptibility Rewriting human difference (individual and
population) at the molecular level
From mutations – “the gene for” to SNPs forsusceptibilities to common complexdisorders, e.g. depression.
From genetics- single genes/determinism
To genomics -multiple protective anddisposing sites/probabilism)
Genome Wide Association Studies
Predisposition, risk, susceptibility
Presymptomatic and asymptomatic illness
Screen and intervene
Optimisation: Mental Capital and Wellbeing
Mental Capital, “encompasses both cognitive and emotionalresources. It includes people’s cognitive ability; theirflexibility and efficiency at learning; and their ‘emotionalintelligence’, or social skills and resilience in the face ofstress. The term therefore captures a key dimension of theelements that establish how well an individual is able tocontribute to society and to experience a high quality of life…how a nation develops and uses its mental capital not onlyhas a significant effect on economic competitiveness andprosperity, it is also important for mental health and well-being and social cohesion and inclusion”.
Subjectification
Citizenship since C18 in Europe linked to‘biological’ notion of subjects actual, potential, impossible citizens.
‘Biosociality’ citizens who define themselves, their affiliations, their
obligations and their rights in terms of their biology.
Making up biological citizens Biological responsibility: ‘Biological prudence’: obligations to take responsibility
for health, illness, reproduction Active citizens as ‘ethical pioneers’
Somatic individuality Our bodies, ourselves - BUT Do I possess my body (brain) or am I my body (brain)?
Biology NOT destiny Political economy of hope (Novas) Hope as psychological, biosocial, commercial and
cultural
PXE (pseudoxanthomaelasticum) ‘Virtual Patient’
Experts of life itself
New relations between medical expertise and itssubjects
Medics as experts of life Medics as experts of the future, governing the future But now surrounded by regulators, auditors and
Bioethics: Ethics once inscribed in the medical personage
him/herself Now medic surrounded by regulatory apparatus of
distrust Ethics as value: corporate ethics:: “Life is our life’s
work…” Why (how) bioethics today?
Capitalizing vitality A path dependent theory of biomedical truth –
though the imagined future seldom arrives asexpected (c.f. the human genome)
The laboratory and the corporation Biovalue: capturing latent value inherent in life itself The birth of ‘the bioeconomy
OECD (2006) ‘the bioeconomy’ is:“that part of economic activities “which captures thelatent value in biological processes and renewablebioresources to produce improved health andsustainable growth and development”
“The Knowledge Based Bioeconomy (KBBE)”
Biotechnology is the next wave of the knowledgeeconomy and I want Britain to become its Europeanhub” (T. Blair)
Biocapital …..
Bioeconomies without borders?
National Genes, Inc.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Going once, going twice, gone! Estonia's gene poolhas been sold to the bidder in the front row….The newest resources "discovered" in Estonia arethe genes of its 1.4 million citizens. The country'sgovernment and a Silicon Valley start-up calledEGeen International are treating the Estonian genepool as a commodity to be exploited for medicalresearch and profit. EGeen owns the exclusivecommercial rights to data from the Estonian GeneBank Project.
The Bioeconomy:Circuits of Vitality in a Flattened World?
A new mobility on the elements of life , in the service of bioeconomicobjectives – circuits of vitality / tissue economies
Tissues, proteins, molecules stripped of specific affinities They become manipulable, mobile, transferable, de-localized Vitality decomposed, stabilized, frozen, banked, stored,
commoditized, accumulated, exchanged, traded across time, acrossspace, across organs and species, across diverse contexts andenterprises
Flattening of circuits to construct ‘level playing fields’ intellectual property regimes forms of ethical governance standards and regulations and information
“Un-flattening” circuits to create local advantages or to stress localspecificities
Ethics and Economics
Max Weber
An elective affinitybetween early Calvinismand early accumulativecapitalism
Between a form ofextraction: capitalisation
And a way of conductingones life: Lebensfűhring
Somatic Ethics
Kant’s questions: what can I know?
What must I do?
What may I hope?
Now posed in ‘somatic’ terms: ‘Soma’ – our genome, our neurotransmitters: our
‘biology’ - given salience
Somatic experts articulate rules for living
We understand ourselves partly in ‘biological’ terms
Expectations, hopes shaped in terms of maintenance ofhealth and prolongation of earthly existence.
Somatic Ethics and the Spirit of Biocapital
Does this ‘somatic’ ethical economy haveelective affinity with biocapital? Only where life itself has achieved such ethical
importance
Only where the technologies for maintaining andimproving it can place themselves in the service ofhealth and life
Can biocapital achieve this hold on economies ofhope, of imagination and of profit.
In this sense somatic ethics is intrinsically linkedto the ‘spirit of biocapital’.