ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the practices through which compensation-oriented relationships and histories are actively written into biological resources and right back out of them again. It deals with a brief discussion of some theoretical and regulatory domains which must guide our understanding of publicness. The position of the nation-state as the guardian of and claimant to “the public” is reinforced significantly in the Convention on Biological Diversity; as such, it powerfully marks the politics of benefit-sharing. Bioprospecting contracts are pointed sites for the negotiation of competing sovereignties in the midst of these refigurings of the nature of property, and of properties in nature. From controversies over patenting “indigenous DNA” to the development of biotechnologically engineered seeds and genetically modified foods, the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first have seen a stunning intensification in transformations of life forms and life processes into property.
