BiblioVault - Books about Biotechnology industries

Biocapital

The Constitution of Postgenomic Life

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Duke University Press, 2006

Biocapital is a major theoretical contribution to science studies and political economy. Grounding his analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge. Sunder Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period spanning 1999 to 2004. He draws on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug development in the two countries, examining the practices and goals of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the process, he illuminates the global flow of ideas, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives.

Sunder Rajan’s ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls technoscientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

[more]

French DNA

Trouble in Purgatory

Paul Rabinow

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as a commodity unto itself: French DNA.

[more]

Genentech

The Beginnings of Biotech

Sally Smith Hughes

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc., a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. Lacking marketed products or substantial profit, the firm nonetheless saw its share price escalate from $35 to $89 in the first few minutes of trading, at that point the largest gain in stock market history. Coming at a time of economic recession and declining technological competitiveness in the United States, the event provoked banner headlines and ignited a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology as a revolutionary means for creating new and better kinds of pharmaceuticals, untold profit, and a possible solution to national economic malaise.

Drawing from an unparalleled collection of interviews with early biotech players, Sally Smith Hughes offers the first book-length history of this pioneering company, depicting Genentech’s improbable creation, precarious youth, and ascent to immense prosperity. Hughes provides intimate portraits of the people significant to Genentech’s science and business, including cofounders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and in doing so sheds new light on how personality affects the growth of science. By placing Genentech’s founders, followers, opponents, victims, and beneficiaries in context, Hughes also demonstrates how science interacts with commercial and legal interests and university research, and with government regulation, venture capital, and commercial profits.

Integrating the scientific, the corporate, the contextual, and the personal, Genentech tells the story of biotechnology as it is not often told, as a risky and improbable entrepreneurial venture that had to overcome a number of powerful forces working against it.

[more]

Genetically Modified Food

A Short Guide For the Confused

Andy Rees

Pluto Press, 2006

Genetically modified food has been headline news for years, but it's difficult to know how far the genetic revolution has affected our lives. Is the food on our shelves free of genetically engineered ingredients? How much power to food corporations wield? Andy Rees provides the answers. He shows that, while corporations that produce genetically modified food have met with resistance in Europe, their hold on the U.S. market is strong. They're also expanding operations in less-regulated countries in Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc. The United States has launched a legal suit to attempt to force the European market open to genetically modified food. What does the future hold? Written by a leading campaigner for GM Watch, one of the world's leading lobbying groups, this brilliantly readable book tells us all we need to know.

[more]

Kellogg on Biotechnology

Thriving through Integration

Alicia Loffler

Northwestern University Press, 2005

Biotechnology is the new capital. The stakeholders in this revolution are many: the scientists who generate the knowledge in fields where the pace is maddeningly fast; the technologists who make ideas a reality; the managers who struggle to deal with an industry where the old rules of thinking do not always apply; the venture capitalists who provide funds based on market moods rather than science; the health care, agricultural, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries whose once cozy enclaves have been revolutionized and are now barely recognizable; the law professionals and ethicists who have to grapple with issues unimaginable just a few years ago; the public policy makers who struggle with the complex issues and have to make decisions quickly, or risk being left behind; and, finally, the society and individuals who are in the midst of all that is taking place. This book addresses this diverse constituency and offers an integrated view of exciting new biotechnologies, both from a science and business perspective.

The book walks the reader through the "what"--what are some of the newest biotechnologies that will revolutionize the way we think about health?; the "how"--how to transform those technologies into profitable products and companies; and the "who"--who will benefit from these technologies?

Kellogg on Biotech is the outgrowth of a collaborative student-faculty effort called TechVentures at the Kellogg School of Management. Their research forms the raw material for Kellogg on Biotech.

[more]

Lively Capital

Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets

Kaushik Sunder Rajan, ed.

Duke University Press, 2012

Lively Capital is an urgent and important collection of essays addressing the reconfigured relations between the life sciences and the market. Exploring the ground where social and cultural anthropology intersect with science and technology studies, prominent scholars investigate the relationship of biotechnology to ethics, governance, and markets, as well as the new legal, social, cultural, and institutional mechanisms emerging to regulate biotechnology. The contributors examine genomics, pharmaceutical marketing, intellectual property, environmental science, clinical trials, patient advocacy, and other such matters as they are playing out in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Lively Capital is not only about the commercialization of the life sciences, but their institutional histories, epistemic formations, and systems of valuation. It is also about the lively affects—the emotions and desires—involved when technologies and research impinge on experiences of embodiment, kinship, identity, disability, citizenship, accumulation, and dispossession. At stake in the commodification of the life sciences are opportunities to intervene in and adjudicate matters of health, life, and death.

Contributors. Timothy Choy, Joseph Dumit, Michael M. J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Donna Haraway, Sheila Jasanoff, Wen-Hua Kuo, Andrew Lakoff, Kristin Peterson, Chloe Silverman, Elta Smith, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Travis J. Tanner

[more]

Mutant Ecologies

Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital

Erica Borg

Pluto Press, 2022

How capitalism is reconfiguring the very texture of life

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, humanized 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 by simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs its 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.

[more]

Shaping the Industrial Century

The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries

Alfred D. Chandler Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2009

The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century begun in Inventing the Electronic Century.

Alfred Chandler argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed.

By the end of World War II, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries were transformed by the commercializing of new learning, the petrochemical and the antibiotic revolutions. But by the 1970s, chemical science was no longer providing the new learning necessary to commercialize more products, although new directions flourished in the pharmaceutical industries. In the 1980s, major drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Schering Plough, commercialized the first biotechnology products, and as the twenty-first century began, the infrastructure of this biotechnology revolution was comparable to that of the second industrial revolution just before World War I and the information revolution of the 1960s. Shaping the Industrial Century is a major contribution to our understanding of the most dynamic industries of the modern era.

[more]