ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the creation of novel medical devices, or “medtech,” in contemporary South Asia. As elite Indian professionals trained in medicine and engineering leave traditional career paths and establish themselves as entrepreneurs and inventors, this chapter features an ethnographic tracking of early-stage experimentation of their emergent biomedical technologies to argue that bioinformation is produced through human-object relations throughout the invention processes. Instead of solely focusing on data that already marketed biomedical technologies might glean from patient bodies, this chapter demonstrates how cultures of biomedical innovation require this co-production of bioinformation between data and bodies far before formal clinical trials. The “prototype,” a device in progress in one of its many iterations, features centrally in this chapter, juxtaposed with analyses of the types of people, and types of clinical sites, who are often called upon to serve as informal test subjects for emergent Indian biocapital. At the heart of this chapter is an ethnographic study of a particular instantiation of Indian medtech—a hearing device—being repeatedly tested on infants in a public Bangalore hospital. This case illustrates how emerging processes of bio-innovation and biocapital rooted in the Global South are contributing to changing global landscapes of bioinformation.
