Mutant Ecologies

Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital

Erica Borg, Amedeo Policante

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780745344522
• eBook ISBN: 9780745344546
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Genética y genómica

Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry.

CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.

While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Fragments of Tomorrow
• Introduction
• 1 Life’s Inner Workings: Cracking Codes, Mutant Flies and Recombinant Lives
• 2 Manufacturing Lives: Corporate Genes, Genomic Rents and Living Assets
• 3 Genomic Infrastructures: Banking the Biosphere and Genomic Big Data
• 4 CRISPR Assembly Lines: Speeding up the Molecular Factory
• 5 Molecular Factory Farms: Engineering Living Means of Production
• 6 Engineering Extinction Ecologies: Resurrection, Annihilation and Genetic Biocontrol
• 7 Pharmaceutical Lives: Humanised Mice, Pharma-Pigs, and the Molecularisation of Production
• 8 Bioengineering the Human: Human Genetic Capital in a Neoliberal Environment
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index