Encoding Capital

The Political Economy of the Human Genome Project

Rodney Loeppky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135471156
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book deals with the rapid changes in contemporary molecular biology, particularly genome sciences, and the manner in which they can be understood through the lens of political economy. Specifically, the work investigates the case of the United States-led Genome Project (HGP), in order to show that even large-scale basic science is closely bound up in the progression of capitalist social relations. The work has, in part, been motivated by the lack of rigorous analysis of the HGP. Most the existing literature tends to present either a chronological review of events surrounding the HGP or describe it thematically. In contrast, this book contributes to a needed discussion concerning the 'why and how' of the HGP emergence. It elucidates the features within capitalist social relations which have simultaneously enable the HGP and ensure its amenability to systemic demands. The work's most compelling elements are both historical and analytical. Historically, it places the HGP within the context of wider political, economic and social issues. Related to this, it puts forward an analytical, explanatory understanding of the project's emergence, making it a valuable tool for both political economists, science & society theorists, and even bioethicists.

Chapter One
Introduction

It is unlikely that any scientific undertaking has ever been invested with so much public hope and expectation as the Human Genome Project (HGP).¹ Since its official inauguration in 1990, the project's aim has been to map and decode the full complement of human genetic material. Viewed by some as the ‘holy grail’ of biology and medicine, the HGP has garnered a formidable degree of political and scientific support, securing a project budget of over $3 billion. To its proponents, the reasoning for such support was obvious, given the substantial benefits that would ostensibly result from the project. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), compared the project with NASA's moon landing, except that,

the implications of the [HGP] for human life are likely to be far greater. A more important set of instruction books will never be found by human beings. When finally interpreted, the genetic messages encoded within our DNA molecules will provide the ultimate answers to the chemical underpinnings of human existence. They will not only help us to understand how we function as healthy human beings, but will also explain, at the chemical level, the role of genetic factors in a multitude of diseases, such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and schizophrenia, that diminish the individual lives of so many millions of people.²

This was, indeed, a tall order. Nonetheless, Watson's general tone was repeated across a range of public spaces. The attention of eminent scientists, political figures, the media, leading universities and an overflow of corporations pointed decisively to the socially perceived importance of the HGP. Yet, before 1990, who, besides molecular biologists, knew anything about the inherent value of physical maps and DNA sequencing methods? Near the end of the 1980s, in the wake of the Challenger disaster, the emerging controversy surrounding the costs of the Superconducting Supercollider, and the failed viability of nuclear energy, the HGP seems to have bucked the trend of prevailing pessimism over the benefits of large-scale science-based projects.³ This gives rise to an important question: why, in particular, was this project able to successfully emerge and thrive?

There have largely been two answers to this question. The first, in keeping with the logic resident in Watson's claims, asserts that the HGP was given the go-ahead, because it was both scientifically compelling and would, potentially, bring countless medical and other benefits to society. While such arguments are valuable in many respects, they tend to over-emphasize the altruistic intentions of science and its agents. In such accounts, there is an explicit or implicit portrayal of scientific progress as the result of leading scientists overcoming technical barriers, the misconceptions of public debate or the obstructions of bureaucratic administrators and short-sighted politicians.⁴ They tended to construct a teleological history of genome science, in which the political and social ‘payoff is estimated and evaluated mainly through a calculation of potential technical improvements, occasionally weighed against the prospective hazards. However, in the aftermath of a century that witnessed scientific involvement in the hydrogen bomb, as well as the scientific complicities of the Second World War and the Vietnam War, such Mertonian invocations of science and its virtuous intentions seem increasingly hard to sustain, if they ever really existed.⁵

A related, but separate, answer to this question invokes, in one form or another, the technological imperative. In such accounts, one finds varying invocations of technological necessity, the scientific ‘idea,’ or the ‘inevitability’ of scientific and technological change used as an explanatory prop. Rather than utilizing a medical or otherwise beneficial ‘telos’ to explain progress, this approach often volunteers a long explication of the manner in which fundamentally technological ideas are advanced through the sinews of political or economic structures, relying, along the way, on the advocacy of specific individuals or organizations. At one end of this category are popularly aimed critical works that tend to portray genome sciences as a dangerous set of developments in which a technological ‘can of worms’ has been left unattended.⁶ Putting aside their polemical tone, a critical analytical problem with (but not restricted to) these perspectives is their penchant for positioning genome science as a ‘revolutionary’ event. Jeremy Rifkin, for instance, incessantly makes reference to a ‘biotech century’ in which “... convergent forces [come] together to create [a] powerful new social current. At the epicenter is a technology revolution unmatched in all history in its power to remake ourselves, our institutions, and our world.”⁷ Despite Rifkin's clear awareness of powerful social elements, such as capital or the state, in the unfolding of biotechnology, he systematically depicts this process as one in which detrimental social effects follow—or are determined by—an already-burgeoning scientific and technological development. Although such reverent perspectives towards technology effectively expose some of the latter's more pernicious elements, nowhere is the unexplored ‘black box’ of technology better left intact.

A subtler version of this thinking is found in the most widely cited source on politics and the HGP, Robert Cook-Deegan's The Gene Wars.⁸ Cook-Deegan's account considers the project in terms of an institutional process, given a scientific necessity. As such, the author describes his own work as,

an account of the origins of the Human Genome Project. The scientific ideas took hold only after they were publicly aired, provoked a vigorous debate, and were then repackaged to make them politically palatable. The main story line is the creation of a bureaucratic structure to carry those ideas to fruition. The ideas derive from science and technology; the genome project as a sociological phenomenon, however, came from the actions of many people, often working without knowledge of others treading on convergent paths.⁹

This approach, while supplying a valuable detailed reconstruction of the political and scientific events leading up to the HGP's actual promulgation, offers a not-so-compelling analysis of the project's origins. Historical analysis aimed at origins should, ostensibly, lead to some explanation of why a given process has developed in a particular way. This means that the possible social factors that prioritize scientific ideas are precisely what need to be explained. To be sure, such an explanation requires more than a saturated description of the actors and events, which precede and embody a given phenomenon.¹⁰ Cook-Deegan's chronological recounting of the interaction between major policy-makers and scientific elite represents a considerable archival accomplishment, but it does not adequately explain why Congressional actors and the scientific community were able to arrive at profound consensus which he describes.¹¹ Such an explanation would require us to identify the critical social, political and economic forces that historically condition the trajectory of science policy, and how this policy, in turn, has been able to interact with science itself.

While a limited amount of critical literature has also grown up around the theme of biotechnology, none has examined the HGP explicitly, and precious little has provided analytical frameworks with which to understand such scientific practice. The work of Sheldon Krimsky and Martin Kenney are demonstrative of a more analytical approach.¹² Both authors are impressive in their capacities to relate biotechnology thematically to political, economic and institutional practices. Krimsky has, across multiple works, effectively elaborated the distinct political and economic flavor of developments, including the 1970s recombinant DNA (rDNA) debate and the 1980s maturation of the biotechnology industry.¹³ Kenney lays out, in a more specific manner, the critical elements that make up an emerging nexus between government, industry and academia. But neither author connects any well-elaborated explanatory framework to their otherwise well-documented empirical research, and each tends, in his own way, to rely on a technologically-driven picture. In particular, Krimsky's later work presents molecular genetics as “... a case where a scientific and technological revolution has helped to recast industrial boundaries, fostering entirely new pathways through which economic sectors interact.”¹⁴ Although this later research is both meticulous and sensitive to a wide range of important issues, it retains an uncomfortably pure image of scientific research, a somewhat benign view of capital, and an optimistic view of the state (which he feels can regulate any potential problems), weakening its utility as comprehensive social criticism.¹⁵

Comparatively, Kenney's work positions biotechnology within the upward swing of a long economic wave, led by the rise of certain core technologies. According to Kenney, “[these] technologies or productive forces cannot have such tremendous impact without severely affecting the social relations of a society. In periods of crisis not only are new technologies adopted, but old institutions are transformed or entirely swept away.”¹⁶ His argument depends on short references to Joseph Schumpeter and Ernst Mandel, positing ‘long waves’ as the explanatory mechanism for surges in scientific and technological activity.¹⁷ Kenney's clear attempt to position biotechnology in the wider historical picture is important, but the manner in which science and technology emerges, and exactly how its emergence is connected with social relations, is not especially clear. Ultimately, the status of scientific innovation in Kenney's work is difficult to isolate. On one side, it is represented as a process reflective of the continuing drive of capitalist social relations while, on the other, it is awarded a disconcerting transformative autonomy in the rise and fall of long-term economic waves.¹⁸

Given the paucity of theoretical development in this area of study, this work undertakes an analytically framed historical exploration of the rise of the HGP in the United States. It does this by utilizing an approach that situates the understanding of contemporary science and technology in the specificities of capitalism as a form of society, with an eye toward locating the project's social and historical significance. Moving away from accounts based on natural ‘scientific progress’ or ‘technological necessity,’ which tend to obscure the social origins of change, the work argues that the emergence of the HGP can be properly understood as a function of the social relations of capitalism. In this regard, at political, corporate and scientific-institutional levels, the HGP emerged through processes that reflect the ‘logic of motion’ of capitalist development. In stark contrast to Watson's views, then, the genome project is interpreted in light of the historical dynamic peculiar to capitalism: the pressing systemic need to enhance the possibilities for value accumulation through innovation. The strategy by which U.S. (and other) corporations thrive in the contemporary era has involved, in part, the reassertion of value accumulation through increasingly high-tech, monopoly protected, production processes. In the case of the HGP, the state entered this arena, in order to accommodate the needs of—particularly U.S. based— corporate actors, by providing a research infrastructure valuable to capital in general, but one that would not otherwise have been constructed. This process of ‘risk socialization’ finds its roots in the increasing historical and systemic pressure on individual corporate actors to perform within a structure that more and more limits their possibilities to do so. Responding to this systemic contradiction, the state politicized a critical part of scientific research on behalf of capital's needs, and research institutions effectively took up the task presented to them by state and corporate actors. Ultimately, the goals of this state-capital imposition were diligently absorbed by lower order institutions in the United States, allowing—indeed, necessitating—the increasingly visible circulation of capitalist social relations at the research level. If genome science is the future staple of capitalist growth that it is purported to be, then it is likely no coincidence that its greatest stimulus (that from the HGP) emerged overwhelmingly in a society with the most extensive reach of capitalist social relations.

To pursue this argument, the work is divided into five parts. Chapter 2 outlines a very brief historical sketch of molecular biology in the United States, as well as a rough explanation of the HGP itself. Intended both as background and as a basis for historical contrast, the chapter contains three purposes. First, it provides the reader with some understanding of the HGP as a scientific project, as well as an initial sense of its potential biomedical effects. Second, it demonstrates that while the science of the HGP can be traced to a trajectory of scientific events, this trajectory has never been entirely detached from the social relations of U.S. capitalism. Finally, the chapter offers a basis for historical comparison in relation to questions of contemporary scientific practice, an issue taken up in chapter 6. On this point, throughout the development of molecular biology, scientists exhibited a complicated relationship to external authority, but also demonstrated a semblance of communal autonomy. Particularly during the 1970s debates concerning rDNA research, the scientific community's internal tensions, brought about by the prospect of Congressional oversight, undoubtedly suggested a notion of collective autonomy and ‘self-regulation’ still largely administered by open and free exchange. Overall, then, the chapter presents both a baseline to think about molecular biology across time, as well as a sketch of the one undertaking that, from its inception, came to symbolize the ‘new biology.’

Having elaborated the scientific ‘event’ with which this work is concerned, chapter 3 sets out the principal aspects of its theoretical framework. It notes the necessity of understanding science and technology in relation to prevailing social forces, and proceeds to examine this connection systematically in terms of political economy. As such, it draws on historical materialist insights with respect to the role of scientific innovation as a particular social tendency, rooted in the ‘logic of motion’ of capitalism. Insisting on historical process as basic to its theoretical framework, the chapter stresses the increasing importance of information commodities in the contemporary expression of capitalist social relations, as well as the critical role of the state in ensuring their development.

Chapters 4 and 5 are oriented around a historical and empirical elaboration of how the HGP came to be in the United States, specifically in relation to the expectations of capital and the state. Chapter 4 elucidates the connection between the project's emergence and intra-capital relations, emphasizing the historical trajectories of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. It points explicitly to the special motivation and support of capital for the creation and maintenance of the HGP. In direct relation to this, chapter 5 points to the state as the political terrain in which the necessary conditions of capitalist production needs are secured. Linking the HGP directly to such a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Contextualizing and Understanding Human Genome Sciences
• Chapter Three: Understanding Science and Technology: A Political Economy Framework
• Chapter Four: U.S. Capital, Innovation and the HGP
• Chapter Five: The State, the HGP and Capitalist Development
• Chapter Six: Science and Labor: Norms, Discipline and the HGP
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index