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

n.rose@lse.ac.uk

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’.

Thank you for your attention!