Third plenary session
Saturday, 10.1.2009 (16.30 - 18.30, SSS1 auditorium)
Chair: Brenna Bhandar
Panelists
Ownership and Regulation of Transformative Technologies
Suman Sahai [bio]
The new biologies are giving rise to a range of transformative technologies like genetic transformation, nanobiotechnology, synthetic biology, genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, among others. Transformative technologies change the way people have lived their lives. The sources of food, health care, toiletries and personal hygiene, almost all aspects of life are being radically altered by the new technologies. People have a right to full disclosure about these technologies but that is increasingly not happening, as the generation of these technologies moves from the public to the private sector. Intellectual Property Rights shift knowledge into private hands so that it is removed from the public domain and public control. This causes disquiet. Not surprisingly, the progress of transformative technologies is marred by protests and resistance from a public that feels excluded from having any say in its development. Developing countries have an interest in technologies that are oriented to the creation of public goods that serve the public interest and are pro-poor. Social and economic mechanisms need to be developed that will allow technological development within a framework of equity, justice and safety.
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About the Speaker
Dr. Suman Sahai, who has had a distinguished scientific career in the field of genetics, was honored with the 2004 Borlaug Award for her outstanding contribution to agriculture and the environment. Dr. Sahai received her Ph.D. degree in genetics from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi. From 1981 to 1989, she served as a faculty member at the University of Alberta in Canada, University of Chicago in the U.S., and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Dr. Sahai returned to India in 1989 and organized Gene Campaign, a non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting farmers’ rights and food and livelihood security. Gene Campaign which has played a key role in formulating India’s Farmers’ Rights law and fostering genetic and trade literacy among farmers and the general public, has been at the forefront of generating awareness on issues relating to trade, intellectual property rights, genetic resources conservation and sustainable use, as well as genetic engineering and agriculture biotechnology. She was appointed Knight of the Golden Ark (Netherlands) in 2001 for establishing Gene Campaign and generating awareness about issues related to genetic resources and trade.
Dr. Sahai, who has published extensively on science and policy issues related to food security, has been working both at the grassroots and policy levels, with great dedication and considerable impact. She is a member of several national policy forums on international trade, biodiversity and environment, biotechnology and bioethics, intellectual property rights and research and education. Dr Sahai chaired the Planning Commission Task Force on ‘Agro biodiversity and Genetically Engineered Organisms’, for the Eleventh Plan. She is a member of the National Biodiversity Board and serves on the Research Advisory Committees of national scientific institutions, the Expert Committee on Biotechnology Policy and the Bioethics Committee of the Indian Council of Medical Research.
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Intellectual Property and its Cultures: Informational Capital and Cultural Resources in a Neoliberal Era
Rosemary Coombe [bio]
As requirements to implement “minimal standards” of intellectual property protection were imposed by international trade regimes in the late twentieth century, other forms of ‘culture’ and cultural diversity were asserted in resistance to or in uneasy accomodation with these neoliberal dictates. Law’s global technologies of subject formation are diverse (conventions, treaties, hard and soft law declarations, NGO policies, and transnational rights networks) but they have put new forms of emphasis upon communities and encouraged them to bear cultural distinction as new kind of resource which may then be posited as the basis for asserting new rights. Cultural rights claims have thus ironically proliferated alongside the consolidation of informational capital. Drawing contrasting examples from Latin America and Southeast Asia, the dynamics of this relationship will be explored and the contextual bases for evaluating these claims considered.
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About the Speaker
Rosemary J. Coombe is Senior Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Culture at York University where she is affiliated with the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, Osgoode Law School and the new Graduate Program in Sociolegal Studies as well as the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought. She received her doctorate from Stanford University and taught as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor of Law at the University of Toronto for twelve years before assuming the CRC. She is trained as an anthropologist and writes in the fields of political and legal anthropology as well as in cultural and sociolegal studies. In 2008 she gave a plenary address at the Commonwealth Anthropology meetings in Auckland, NZ. She has been appointed to numerous Visiting Chairs and Fellowships, including the Stellenbosch Institute Inaugural Fellowship in South Africa (2008), the Wiarda Chair at Utrecht University (2006) the Mackenzie King Chair of Canadian Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University (2003-4), the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Chair at the University of Iowa (2005), the Hoosier Distinguished Chair at De Paul University (2002) and was chosen as Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California-Irvine (1997). She has been a Visiting Scholar at MIT (2002-3), the University of Connecticut (1998), the University of Chicago (1995-6) and the American Bar Foundation (1995). Her work explores issues emerging at the intersection of expanding intellectual property rights, informational capital, new forms of neoliberal governmentality and the human and indigenous rights frameworks, with particular interest in the proliferation of cultural claims. She teaches Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Development, Legal and Political Anthropology, and courses in social theory. Her publications may be found on her website at www.yorku.ca/rcoombe.
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Intellectual Property, Pharmaceutical Logics, and Ideologies of Innovation
Kaushik Sunder Rajan [bio]
In this paper, I draw upon research that traces the interconnections between:
I do so in order to look at the articulations between clinical research, biomedical epistemology, pharmaceutical development and property regimes, in a historical conjuncture in India that is marked simultaneously by attempts at global commensuration on the one hand, and the emergence of particular national legal and political trajectories on the other.
I explore the ways in which developments in global biomedicine, as it touches down in an Indian context, are justified and underwritten by ideologies of innovation. Innovation, I argue, is a shifting referent, and the reason I call it “ideological” is precisely because the deployment of this notion, and the value-systems it implies, masks the ways in which it allows the logics of the multinational pharmaceutical economy to play out. These logics, I suggest, are not simply free market logics, but are logics that are about the establishment and expansion of monopoly capitalism. Hence, the paper traces how emergent forms of biomedicine are being established and contested in the Indian context, and what law, capital, ideology and epistemology have to do with these forms.
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About the Speaker
Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine. Kaushik Sunder Rajan was initially trained as a biologist, obtained his Ph.D. in the History and Social Studies of Science and Technology, and works on the anthropology of science and technology. Professor Sunder Rajan initially started following the Human Genome Project in 1999. The project had by this time resolved into a race to sequence the human genome between the public-funded five-nation Human Genome Consortium and the private sector genome company, Celera Genomics. Integral to these conflicts was the fact that genomic information was recognized as a potential commodity, thanks to the ability to take out patents on gene sequences. In other words, the genome sequencing race was not just a race for credit, but was a race for ownership as well, and the legal, institutional and market contexts within which this research was being performed was evidently crucial to understanding the larger technoscientific event that was unfolding.
This led to Professor Sunder Rajan’s broader interest in corporate genomics, and the business practices and strategies of genome companies in the United States. These practices and strategies could not themselves be adequately conceptualized without situating them in the larger context of the drug development marketplaces that they were inserted into. This involved understanding the specificities of the drug development industry (marked, in the United States especially, by the immense time, risk, uncertainty and capital investment required to bring a therapeutic molecule to market), but also involved understanding and theorizing the market, and contemporary capitalism, more generally. Clearly, genomics was a constantly shifting referent, especially once the working draft sequence of the human genome was generated in mid-2000 by both the public genome project and by Celera, and attention shifted to “post”-genomics, which involved making biological sense of the huge amount of information that had been generated by the sequencing efforts. But equally clearly, “the market” was also a shifting referent. What constituted sound market logic was constantly contested, negotiated and at stake, especially through the period of incredible speculative ferment of the “dot com” boom that many genomic developments were situated in the midst of, and the subsequent bust that saw the dramatic collapse of this seemingly infallible speculative bubble. In other words, capitalism as a conceptual construct was (is) itself very much at stake and demanding theorization - it is not an eternal and essential systemic construct, but is rather completely historically specific and mutable. Further, neither the life sciences nor market systems completely determined the other, though the relationships between the two were tangible, significant and required resolution.
The contemporary historical conjuncture that Sunder Rajan studied, then, was marked by a number of interrelated events and emergences: firstly, the increased corporatization of life science research; secondly, the emergence of new technologies and epistemologies within the life sciences, such as, significantly, genomics; and thirdly, the fact that these technoscientific and market emergences were not simply occurring in the United States, but rather globally. His book, titled Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life, tries to capture a flavor of these emergences. On the one hand, it is a multi-sited ethnography of emergent genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. On the other hand, it traces the historical emergence of what he calls biocapital in the late 20th century, which asks questions of the nature and manner of the co-production of economic and epistemic value in the life sciences today. In the former register, Sunder Rajan’s work has followed a number of actors - scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and policymakers - involved in genomics research and market development in a range of sites in the US and India (in the US, primarily in the Bay Area; in India, primarily in Delhi, Bombay and Hyderabad). In the latter register, his work engages social theories of epistemology, political economy, ethics, subjectivity, language and value (most directly the analyses of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida), in order to provide ways to think about a current moment in world history that is significantly shaped by technoscientific capitalism.
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Natural or Naturalizing? – Law and Knowledge in a Constitutional Moment
Sheila Jassanoff [bio]
What does the law know and how does it know it? In the past twenty or so years, this question has been posed most often in connection with scientific evidence and expert testimony. Courts and expert bodies throughout the western world have asked how the law knows the truth and have taken steps, as the US Supreme Court famously did in its 1993 decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, to shore up the law’s truth-seeking capacities. This preoccupation with facts and truth tilts the law’s knowledge toward those aspects of institutional epistemology that have to do with the uptake of claims about nature. We can see in this bias toward scientific knowledge a persistence of the ancient idea of natural law: that nature is the law’s ultimate, most secure, and most persuasive source of legitimation.
Against this tendency, I will argue that the law today is a powerful force for naturalizing, that is, for rendering natural the legal dispensations that we wish to live by. Ideas of what is just, in other words, drive ideas of what is natural, rather than the reverse. Naturalness, moreover, pervades the law’s notions of social relations as well as of the ordering of nature. Recognizing this dynamic forces us to pose a second, more insistent question about the law’s knowledge. How does the law know what should be done, what in effect is just? And how does the law’s knowledge of the right facts relate to its understanding of the right norms?
Drawing on two cases that arose in different times and under very different circumstances, I will show how this inquiry has taken on new urgency in the current era of globalization, when disputes over both facts and justice must be settled in cross-border settings. The cases are the Bhopal compensation litigation in the late 1980s and the debate on the safety of GMOs between the United States and Europe in the early years of this century. It is through the resolution of such cases, I argue, that we are shaping the tacit constitutional foundations of a new world order. Apart from showing how the law constructed the “natural” and the “just” in each case, I will reflect on what these rulings mean for emerging notions of epistemic citizenship and cognitive justice.
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About the Speaker
Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She has held academic positions at Cornell, Yale, Oxford, and Kyoto. At Cornell, she founded and chaired the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She has also been a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge, Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio study center. Her research concerns the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and public policy of modern democracies, with a particular focus on the challenges of globalization. She has written and lectured widely on problems of environmental regulation, risk management, and biotechnology in the United States, Europe, and India. Her books include Controlling Chemicals (1985), The Fifth Branch (1990), Science at the Bar (1995), and Designs on Nature (2005). Jasanoff has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science.
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