LIFESCIENCE: Re: LIFESCIENCE contexts

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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One of the things which Birgit has brought up in dialog w/ Trevor, Phil,
myself, and others, is the contexts within which science activity takes
place. This is evident but maybe we need to spell some of this out
explicity. It is absolutely valuable for us, on the one hand, to discuss
developments, theories, practices, etc., internal to the sciences (as
well as their trans-discipinary intersections), but on the other hand it
is also important for us to find interesting ways of talking about those
contexts within which science is possible at all.

A couple of suggestions here:

-One of the big themes of biotech has been the sudden shift from
government-supported research to corporate frames. Add to this the
emergence of either independent research-based (EBI, EMBL) or non-profit
research-based (TIGR) organizations. Add to this also the negotiations
and alliances between different types of organizational bodies: between
biotech corporations and pharmaceutical companies; between
government-supported genome mapping organizations and corporate genomics
organizations; between online databases and the selling of subscriptions
to those database. The triangulation between
university-corporation-government is definitely a messy one, especially
when dealing with the Human Genome Project & the ownership of bio-data.

-One of the comments Manuel Castells makes in the opening of his book
_The Rise of the Network Society_ is on the influence of state and
national politics in directing or radically enframing developments in
science and technology. This, again, goes without saying, but maybe we
need to look more specifically at how, say, the NIH organizes its
various research programmes so that a significant portion of its budget
goes to genomic mapping and related endeavors.

-The economics of all this also seems to make a great deal of
difference. The rise of corporate biotech (most of which are becoming
trans-national corporations, and which also includes "big pharma"
corporations like Pfizer) has meant that there is a greater tension
between an economically-driven, product-driven business, and the
convoluted mechanisms of national and state policy-making (e.g., the
recent debates in the U.S. over the cloning of human embryos for stem
cell research).


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