ABSTRACT
This research explores the rapidly dis-locating landscape of biotechnological research around the globe. It is a landscape characterized by the spread of (bio)science and technology research to global sites that were, until now, not thought of as locations of ‘biotechnological autoproduction’ (Rabinow, 1996). Such dis-locations are rapidly problematizing long-established oppositions between the global North/South, First/Third Worlds, developed/developing economies and Western/Eastern cultures. Taking the rise of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research in India as its ethnographic focus, the book shows that what is to count as local and global is rapidly dis-locating. The twentiethcentury development discourse that privileged the unidirectional flow of knowledge from the ‘global’ North/developed to the ‘local’ South/developing is now both an untenable orthodoxy and an unsustainable project. In the new century, the taken-for-granted, static locality of the ‘South’ and the inevitable global domination of the ‘North’ bleed into each other. In these emerging and dispersed biotechnological assemblages (Rabinow, 1999; Ong and Collier, 2005), ethical ideologies, governance protocols, free markets, venture capital, and geo-political cultures of scientific research, strategically frame global and local spatial configurations in unprecedented ways. These changes exemplify what Appadurai (1996) has described as the technoscape: that is, a fluid global configuration of technologies that moves at high speed across previously impervious boundaries (cf. Inhorn, 2003). A biotechnological technoscape continually reassembles the global biological
phenomena (Franklin, 2005). Discussing stem cell research in the UK, Sarah Franklin shows how, as a distinctive, emergent life form, stem cell production has become a global biological enterprise. She argues:
Stem cells ‘in culture’ at the moment are being ‘fed’ by the production of norms, principles, values, and laws, as they are also being ‘nurtured’ by venture capital investments, media coverage, and public-sector funding. Certainly stem cells are being carefully tended by highly trained scientists, who are trying to teach them basic obedience lessons in state-of-the-art
laboratories from Singapore to Silicon Valley. They are being watched over carefully by presidents, prime ministers, and innumerable professional organisations concerned with their welfare, their rate of population growth, and their international travel arrangements. Few offspring have their provenance, ancestry, reproductive behavior, or genetic composition more carefully scrutinised by highly trained custodians.
