The next new thing? Biotechnology and its discontents

Geoforum 34 (2003) 165–174 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Guest Editorial

The next new thing? Biotechnology and its discontents

Strange as it may seem to the unscientific reader, there can be no denying that. . . the manufacture of monsters––and perhaps even of quasi-human monsters––is within the possibilities of vivisection. Wells (1896/1996, p. 104) The Island of Dr. Moreau Geographers will not be involved in developing these technologies, nor is it necessary that they should engross themselves with the underpinning science. They will, however, need to appreciate the implications and the environmental impacts, including the potential adverse impacts, of these developments which will undoubtedly intensify in the ensuing decades. The many ramifications of biotechnology that are directly relevant to several branches of geography mean that it deserves appropriate recognition. . . Mannion (1993, p. 353) The human predilection to tinker with the genetic composition of plants and animals is long-standing. Open a book about biotechnology and you are likely to find discussion of Sumerian and Babylonian practices of brewing beer, ancient Egyptians making unleavened bread or Roman copper mining in Rio Tinto, Spain over 2000 years ago (El-Gewely, 1995; Smith, 1996; Commonwealth of Australia, 2000). Yet if genetic modification is a recurrent thread within the well-worn tapestry of human history, what are we to make of its recent emergence as leading edge science and ÔengineÕ of a putative fifth Kondratieff wave? More significantly, what are we to make of the quiet insinuation of biotech products into daily life, the regulation of biotech in ways that reproduce structural inequalities between (and within) North and South, or the mounting voices of disquiet as bioutopias promised by ‘‘miracle science’’ appear to mutate (once again) into the dystopias of Drs. Moreau and Frankenstein (Hindmarsh and Lawrence, 2001; Best, 2002)? If gene tinkering is not new, but an enduring nexus through which science, nature, capital and the state are intertwined, how is geography approaching its current configuration? As the quotation from Mannion (1993) suggests, and as several editorials have recently noted (Castree, 1999;

Whatmore, 1999a,b,c), contemporary applications of biotechnology are distinctive when judged by either scientific or sociological criteria and they do raise critical questions for geography. We do not intend to revisit here these arguments regarding the relevance or importance of biotechnology for geographical inquiry. Rather than urge geographyÕs adoption of biotechnology as a field of study, we want instead to ask what Ôdoing biotechnologyÕ might mean for geography. Might genetic modification simply be the disciplineÕs Ônext new thingÕ––a novel yet ultimately ephemeral frontier of inquiry on which to rearticulate well-worn theories? Alternatively, could Ôdoing biotechnologyÕ raise new questions and analytical opportunities for geography that require the creation of new modes of inquiry, development of alternative theoretical frameworks, or experimentation with creative practice? In introducing a set of four papers, we make no claims towards a comprehensive representation of the breadth of geographical approaches to biotechnology. Rather, the papers that follow share an emphasis on the political–economic and cultural contexts of biotechnology: all, for example, are suspicious of universal, ahistorical claims that genomic technology and transgenic crops represent Ôprogress for humanity,Õ and draw attention to the social institutions which mediate the ways in which, by whom and for whom biotechnologies are developed and deployed. In each case, the authors’ concern is to embed the specific cluster of innovations labeled biotech within a social and historical context, and to illustrate the institutional dynamics through which particular technological forms are developed, transferred and regulated. Their focus, in other words, is on the socio-political governance of biotechnologyÕs applications and represents, we argue, one of several emergent clusters of research by geographers on biotechnology. The papers were initially presented as part of a special session on Biotechnology, Nature and the State at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New York City in 2001, where they formed part of a larger grouping of sessions on political economies of the environment (Marsden et al., 2002). The aim of these sessions was to move beyond accounts of natureÕs social construction to examine the material and discursive practices through which nature has been historically

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produced, consumed, and regulated. Our introduction to this theme issue has three parts. The first contextualizes the recent interest among geographers in biotechnology and illustrates recent applications of biotechnology. The second reviews recent work on geographies of biotechnology and identifies four emergent research clusters. In the light of this categorization, the third and final part comments on the themes addressed in the four papers and draws a number of conclusions about the significance of biotechnology for geography.

1. Adventures in technology: geographers take on biotech Genetic modification in the last few years has burst from its relatively obscure confines within Ôthe labÕ to occupy the ubiquitous and familiar spaces of talk shows, shop shelves, farms/pharms, and health clinics. The first transgenic plants, for example, were introduced experimentally as far back as the early 1980s, but it was not until 1996 that they became commercially available (UNHDP, 2001, p. 34). It is now estimated that around 60% of all processed foods sold in the United States contain genetically modified (GM) products, although an FDA ruling in 1992 means GM content does not have to be identified via labeling (Deutsche Bank, 1999, p. 4). With biotechnology aggressively entering daily life as both material artifact and zeitgeist narrative, so human geographers have begun to adopt it as an entry point for examining a number of distinct problematics within geography. This is because the practices of contemporary biotech re-work and, in some cases, actively question concepts and relationships that lie at the heart of geographical inquiry. These range from the utility of conventional dualisms like Ônature and societyÕ to concrete concerns about ethics, the politics of the body, the distributional and health implications of new biotech products, and the effects of these on the restructuring of socio-spatial relations. As a result, biotechnology also raises challenging questions about geography, about the role that the discipline and its practitioners can––or should––play in addressing the issues it raises (see Castree, 1999). However, concerns expressed in previous years that we might Ôhave nothing to sayÕ on biotechnology are––it would seem––being heeded: increasingly geography does have something to say about the ‘‘corporate-state-science networks that shape the metabolisms of social life’’ (Whatmore, 1999a,b,c, p. 259; see also Whatmore, 2000; Castree, 2002; Goodman, 2001; Hinchliffe, 2001). Yet if one is to judge by the available geographical literature, this interest in all-things biotech is a very recent phenomenon: open The Dictionary of Human Geography (4th Edition) and one will find only a passing reference to biotechnology, under a listing for ‘‘biodiversity’’. Similarly, current review volumes for Eco-

nomic Geography tend to discuss biotechnology either as empirical backdrop (e.g., as an indicator of broad macro-economic shifts within industrial economies) or as a case-in-point to illustrate broader processes (e.g. privatization and commodification of nature) rather than as an object of analysis in its own right or as emerging ÔproblematicÕ within geography (Sheppard and Barnes, 2000; Clark et al., 2000). Given that biotechnology within human geography is emergent rather than established, we have chosen to contextualize the four papers in this issue by first providing a brief survey of the ways in which human geography is currently approaching biotech. But first a definition: for the purposes of this introduction, biotechnology may be defined using the terms of the Convention on Biological Diversity as ‘‘any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use’’ (FAO, 2002). Interpreted broadly, this definition covers many of the common tools and techniques used in agriculture, food production, and health care. These include animal husbandry, selective plant breeding for the development of commercially valued traits, vegetative propagation (i.e., cloning) of plants, and the production of antibiotics––like penicillin, begun in the 1940s––from living organisms (Buttel, 2000). A narrower and more conventional understanding of the term, however, limits biotechnology to the manipulation––or use––of genetic material from living organisms. Typically the focus of this narrower definition is recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology. Building on discoveries made in the 1950s (e.g., identification of the structure of DNA) and 1960s (e.g., synthesis of DNA in a test tube, and the identification of the proteins responsible for cutting DNA), rDNA has provided techniques for cutting and splicing DNA since the 1970s, making possible the manipulation and transfer of genetic material between species. As Kloppenburg (1988) points out, it is this technological capacity for intervening with much greater specificity at the genetic level by selecting, cutting and splicing genetic material that makes the contemporary period distinctive. The degree of specificity and the capacity for transferring selected genetic material across species boundaries––the creation of ÔtransgenicÕ species––represents a marked intensification of millennial processes of genetic modification that previously involved whole organisms: ‘‘the walls of speciation, heretofore breached only infrequently and with great difficulty, are now crumbling’’ (Kloppenburg, 1988, p. 3). The current focus on genetic engineering may soon by supplemented by the emergence of nanotechnology, in which engineering shifts from the scale of DNA sequences to the molecular level. A defining characteristic of contemporary biotechnology is that its applications are widespread and

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ubiquitous. This represents a significant challenge for geographical thinking in that these innovations insinuate themselves in and through spatial relations and structures. Popular concern over genetic modification often centers on the way in which genetically modified products, particularly foods, have made their way into daily life to the point that they are inseparable and indistinguishable from non-modified products. This diversity of applications, however, may be simplified by identifying three main economic arenas in which biotechnology is becoming increasingly significant. These are plant/crop breeding, animal husbandry, and medical research. In many instances these categories overlap: ‘‘pharming’’ (the genetic modification and subsequent harvesting of animal physiology to produce organs and solutions of use to humans) illustrates how these categories are blurred in practice. Applications of biotechnology to plants and crops typically include the genetic manipulation of seeds, tissues or plant cells to make them more desirable by changing traits such as its size, growth rate, resistance to herbicides and pests or ––for plants destined for human consumption––color, texture and taste. The oft-cited ÔFlavr SavrÕ tomato exemplifies genetic modification in search of a premium in consumer markets. Developed in California by Calgene Inc and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1994, the tomato became the first genetically modified food in the world to be approved by a government food regulator. The most extensive application of biotechnology to agriculture, however, is the genetic-modification of crops to be pest or herbicide resistant. It is around such crops that some of most sustained public opposition to biotechnology has coalesced, including consumer and retailer boycotts of ÔGMÕ foods and direct action in Europe to uproot known and experimental plots of GM crops. Also in Europe considerable controversy amongst member states surrounds the question of effective traceablity of both GM grains and animal feedstuffs. Among the most significant GM crops in terms of harvested volume are soya, canola and cotton, which have seen the rapid adoption of herbicide-tolerant varieties. Herbicide-tolerant soybeans, for example, were first introduced in the US in 1996 and by 2000 had expanded to around 50% of harvested acreage. Herbicide-tolerant cotton expanded equally rapidly, representing 46% of total acreage in the US in 2000 (USDA, 2002). Dolly the sheep may have captured the headlines as the first successful cloning of a mammal (Wilmut et al., 1997), but the primary application of biotechnology to animals is their use as human analogues or test platforms for research, and as production units for human pharmaceuticals and organs for transplantation (Breekveldt and Jongerden, 1998). For example, the development in the early 1990s of OncoMouse––genetically modified mice that develop cancerous tumors under

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certain conditions––provided a test bed for researchers working on human disease development and drug reactions. More recently it is the transgenic reconfiguration of the ‘‘interior geographies’’ (Ufkes, 1998, p. 241) of animals so as to render them Ôpharmaceutical production unitsÕ that galvanizes public reaction to biotechnology. Genetically engineered bacterial organisms have been used to generate human proteins like insulin and human growth hormone since the 1980s. The scaling up from cell cultures to mammals is, however, a more recent phenomenon and was first demonstrated by the use of mice to produce human tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) to treat blood clots in the late 1980s. Human proteins for the treatment of diseases such as cystic fibrosis, thrombosis, and hemophilia have been produced transgenically in the milk and urine of sheep, pigs, mice, and goats since the early 1990s (Breekveldt and Jongerden, 1998). While the ‘‘success’’ of high profile examples of mammalian cloning is increasingly questioned––as McAfee (this issue) points out, not only did Dolly follow 270 unsuccessful attempts at cloning but also she has been diagnosed with premature arthritis (Smith, 2002)––the range of species and the motivations for cloning continue to grow. In the last few years, for example, a transgenic sheep that is capable of producing human protein in her milk has been cloned, while in 2001 the cloning of a Gaur, a South Asian species of ox, marked the first successful effort to clone an endangered species. The use of biotechnology for medical research is often cited as an example of the social benefits of biotechnology (see Tzotzos, 2000 for an overview). Common diseases or therapies being addressed in biotechnology research include AIDS/HIV, various forms of cancer, infectious diseases and the creation of vaccines (in Tzotzos, 2000). The ‘‘enhancement’’ of human health raises ethical issues, especially in light of the potential risks of biotechnology (Adam, 2000). While very important, the increasing number of medical applications of biotechnology, the ethical issues and the assessment of risks are outside the scope of this introduction (see Levidow, 2001).

2. Remaking nature, remaking geography? What does an analytical interest in biotechnology mean for geography? One response to this question is to suggest that biotechnology constitutes a mirror for contemporary geography, a new topic within which one sees reflected whatever ideas and approaches are already extant within the field. An alternative response, however, is that biotechnology does not simply reflect existing geographical approaches but requires geography to forge significantly new tools or to ask different questions. In this scenario, biotechnology is less a mirror and more a creative crucible, a set of issues that require

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disciplinary development if they are to be addressed in meaningful ways. In the spirit of sorting through the ways in which geographers have begun to approach biotechnology, we outline below four emergent clusters within contemporary geographical research that illustrate the range of ways in which human geographers (and researchers in other, related fields) Ôdo biotechnologyÕ. Our objective is to survey existing research rather than rehearse (and in the process perhaps justify) recurrent anxieties about disciplinary relevance by identifying what geography might contribute to the social understanding and democratic control of biotechnology. We aim, in other words, to provide a context for the four papers in this theme issue by identifying the breadth of issues and approaches that have begun to emerge as geography takes on biotechnology. 2.1. Frontiers of commodification: biotechnology and enclosure of the commons OncoMouseâ; Round-Up Readyâ; Starlinkâ; Posilacâ: in each case the diminutive superscript belies the radical nature of the process through which private rights have been assigned over time to increasingly complex form of life: ‘‘life itself’’, as Haraway (1998) has put it, is now ‘‘life enterprised up’’. While popular interest in biotechnology focuses on the scientific and technical capacities for customizing organisms by restructuring their genetic composition, a number of geographers have focused instead on the political economy of enclosure that underpins biotechnology. From an historical perspective, the patenting of life forms and the carving of the ‘‘vast interior commons’’ of different species through the assignment of rights to sections of genetic code represent only the most recent––but no less radical––attempt to enclose the common weal for the purposes of enabling market exchange and the production of surplus value. Like the earlier commodification of land––a process that Polanyi described as ‘‘perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors’’ (1944, 2001, p. 187)––this involves not only the privatization and fragmentation of a commons into a series of dissociable parts, but also their enmeshment within the logic of exchange value rather than use value (Rifkin, 1992). The empirical focus for this work is primarily the strategies adopted by agro-industrial corporations as they seek to generate new areas of profit. Drawing strength from KloppenburgÕs (1988) remarkable social history of the scientific and commercial aspects of crop improvement, there is increasing interest in the strategies through which agro-industrial corporations attempt to enclose and commodify the reproductive cycle of crops, effectively severing one of the most basic of agroecological cycles (e.g. Pistorius and van Wijk, 1999). Levidow (2001) highlights the centralisation of biotechnology capital, the inadequate regulation of large

corporations and the self-serving nature of arguments such as the ability of biotechnology to adequately feed the worldÕs rapidly growing population of under-nourished people. While some authors have focused on the technological (e.g. terminator genes), institutional (e.g. patenting) and strategic (e.g. corporate mergers and acquisitions within the agro-industrial complex) mechanisms through which enclosure takes place, others are interested in the implications of this process of enclosure for agrarian societies, particularly those in the global South. In her work on ÔbiopiracyÕ, for example, Shiva (1997) points to the ways in which the prospecting and patenting of plant life from the tropics involves a displacement––and devalorization––of indigenous knowledge structures. The institutions for regulating the international trade in genetic material systematically devalue the role of indigenous knowledge by arguing that the material inputs for biotechnology are the stuff of nature and constitute a global, open-access resource. The patenting by US scientists in the early 1990s of a variety of quinoa, a high-protein Andean cereal, provide a case in point (after much controversy the patent was dropped in 1998). In the case of cultivated crops like quinoa ––which has been grown in the high Andes for millennia––indigenous knowledge has played an active role in producing now-valued strains through generations of selective breeding (Parrott and Marsden, 2001, Christie, 2001). By drawing attention to the co-evolution of seed and indigenous farming practices, Shiva (1997) shows how patenting processes which separate seed from the knowledge surrounding its cultivation––by, for example, arguing that the attributes of seed are intrinsic rather than produced––enclose the commons. Others have addressed the impacts on agrarian communities of introducing patented seeds, pointing to the ways in which the commodification of seed can drive the commodification of labor and increase exposure to external market forces (see Guivant, 2002). With the agro-ecological cycle of seed production broken by patenting, seed is no longer the product of last yearÕs harvest but something to be purchased from suppliers. Wage labor becomes, therefore, a necessary livelihood strategy in order to purchase inputs that formerly were self-produced. The commodification of seeds with commercially valuable traits (e.g. rapid growth, high yields, or pest resistant) therefore not only drives a technological and economic change within farming communities, but can also drive a social transition. There are under-explored links here to earlier work on the ecological and social costs of the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Farmer, 1977; Lipton, 1989; Shiva, 1997; see also Yapa, 1996): not only do the Green RevolutionÕs high yielding varieties and the transgenic crops of contemporary ÔbiotechÕ share a physical-limits notion of scarcity to which improved productivity

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through genetic manipulation (rather than resource access or distribution) is the answer but, as a consequence, the introduction of both can drive processes of social stratification that erode established farming systems. As McAfee (this issue) suggests, underneath the biotech industryÕs rhetoric of agronomic and nutritional improvement in the Third World via such miracle grains as ‘‘golden rice’’ lie processes of economic concentration and class consolidation: while those farmers with access to capital may be able to cultivate new varieties, smallscale farmers are unlikely to be able to afford ÔpremiumÕ seeds or the agrochemical inputs such seeds require. 2.2. Hybridity A number of observers have called attention to ways in which the artifacts of biotechnology transgress the conventional categories through which we understand the world (Haraway, 1998). For example, popular concern surrounding the applications of biotechnology to plants and animals is frequently expressed via Ônarratives of disgust, pollution or contaminationÕ (Brown, 1999). Associated with the production of such ÔmonstersÕ as sheep that produce human proteins in their milk or the visceral horrors of xenotransplantation (the exchange of tissue between humans and transgenic non-humans), these narratives revolve around biotechnologyÕs affront to conventional boundaries of human/non-human or nature/society. Indeed, the ease with which biotechnology simultaneously dismantles and exposes such apparently foundational binaries provides an opportunity to investigate the disciplinary role such boundary markers play (and have played historically) as sociopolitical constructions. Thus, on topics from pollution to sexuality, geography has increasingly sought to understand how constructions of Ôthe naturalÕ can serve as socio-spatial disciplinary mechanisms. In refusing the modernist urge to purify categories and spaces, several authors have turned to the notion of the hybrid as a means for insisting on the pervasive admixture of socio-natures in daily life. While the notion of the hybrid is neither confined to discussions of biotechnology nor originates from work on genetic manipulation (for significant examples outside this area, see Swyngedouw, 1999; Robbins, 2001; Whatmore, 1999a,b,c), the chimeras and cyborgs of biotechnology provide concrete instances of how the social and natural are churned together in ways that belie their categorical clarity. In biotechnology, some see the emergence of a ‘‘third nature’’ as two realms are historically fused (Wark, 1994). Others, however, reject such epic interpretations and regard biotechnology as a window on the long-standing, pervasive and considerably more mundane processes that produce the everyday spaces lying between the ideal categorizations of ÔhumanÕ and ÔnonhumanÕ (Whatmore, 1999a,b,c; Whatmore, 2002).

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2.3. New economic spaces? Industrial geography and biotechnology Biotechnology has emerged since the mid-1970s as a leading growth sector within many industrial economies. Bio-science research and development (both in universities and increasingly through private firms) is now seen by many governments as a major investment which maintains global competitiveness. For example, by the mid-1990s over 60% of all federally funded biological and biomedical research in the US utilized techniques of molecular biology or molecular genetics (Haraway, 1998, p. 57). Increasingly regions vie with each other to recruit and grow bio-investment by creating ‘‘life-science corridors’’ (Michigan, for example, is reported to be spending $1 billion over 20 years to develop a biotech corridor from Detroit to Grand Rapids) or touting existing concentrations of biotech expertise such as the ‘‘Holland Bio-Delta’’ (Netherlands) or Singapore as ‘‘the Biopolis of Asia’’ (Pollack, 2002). Recognizing the emergence of new economic spaces around this sector, a number of industrial geographers have begun to focus on the regional dynamics of the biotech industry examining, among other things, the importance of agglomeration economies, cluster developments and private–public partnerships in shaping the industryÕs potential for growth and its implications for communities (Gray and Parker, 1998; Kenney, 1998; Kenney and Florida, 1994). 2.4. The cultural politics of biotechnology One of the most striking aspects of biotechnology is its growing ubiquity as a social discourse. Within industrial societies at least, applications of biotechnology have emerged as nuclei upon which broader discontents can condense and crystallize, key fora within which critical socio-political relationships are worked out. The ambivalence many people feel towards biotechnology–– the lure of a science that promises to cure disease simply by turning genes ‘‘on and off’’ yet the revulsion of a science that severely compromises notions of the body (and the bodies of non-human ‘‘others’’) as inviolate, integral spaces, and which cedes authority on Ôlife issuesÕ to a cadre of experts who are increasingly enmeshed in webs of corporate and state interests––reflects deeper, less tangible anxieties about the interests that bind together citizens, corporations, government, science and nature see, for example, Best and Kellner (2001). Applications of biotechnology to health, food, and medicine, for example, raise not only technical questions about costs and benefits or the possibility of unintended effects, but fundamental questions about the relationship between state and citizen, about the role of civil society in the regulation of science, and about the extent to which private interests can deliver the public good.

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Biotechnology therefore assumes an increasingly central place within what Giddens (1994) and others have termed Ôlife politicsÕ––the emergence within post-industrial societies of issues to do with identity, health, and environment as central problematics. As a result, a spectacularly rich discursive field has grown up around biotechnology. Indeed, so replete are the life-sciences with interlocking and often contradictory imaginaries of nature, science, information and identity that geography (and other disciplines) have shown considerably more interest in charting and deconstructing these constructions as cultural history than in understanding the political-economy of biotechnology (Ross, 1994; Hayles, 1994; Kay, 2000; Flitner and Heins, 2002). In her remarkable history of the genetic code, for example, Kay (2000) places the emergence of genetic science during the Cold War at the heart of a Ôgestalt switchÕ or Ôepistemic ruptureÕ whereby nature–– traditionally understood via narratives of material and energy flows––increasingly became interpreted through ideas and metaphors drawn from information theory. She points to the ways in which the pairing of information and writing analogies (genetic ÔcodeÕ is but one example) with such textual tropes as the ‘‘Book of Life’’, conflated analogy with ontology. Thus the trafficking of metaphors from information and communication theory to molecular biology not only endowed the objects of this science with universal properties as records of creation, but also gave to those who interpreted Ôthe wordÕ or Ôbroke the codeÕ the capacities of a creator. Thus, she argues, does genomic science provide a contemporary mechanism for the exercise of what Foucault (1978) terms biopower, the expression of power through the capacity for monitoring and regulating the processes of reproduction, health and disease in living organisms. Biotechnology, then, encapsulates the paradoxes of BeckÕs risk society: born of the modernist impulse to modify and control nature, the processes of control over nature developed by biotechnology nonetheless create new risks and challenges that prove increasingly difficult to regulate, mitigate or legitimate within conventional institutions: thus, ‘‘once highly praised sources of wealth (the atom, chemistry, genetic technology and so on) are transformed into unpredictable sources of danger’’ (Beck, 1994, pp. 51–52). Social movements protesting applications of biotechnology represent some of the most significant challenges to the state in recent times: the success of these movements in highlighting perceived risks of genetically modified organisms, for example, led analysts at DeutscheBank to report that ‘‘GMOs are Dead’’ and were ‘‘going the way of the nuclear industry’’ (Deutsche Bank, 1999). Thus the competency and legitimacy of government institutions set up to monitor food and health have been increasingly challenged by a series of issues relating to the management of biotechnology and food supply. Government policies to pro-

mote growth in these sectors increasingly seem to be out of step with popular concern (see Economic and Social Research Council, 1999), raising questions about whose interests are being regulated and who has a right to determine the attributes of products that enter the food chain. With biotechnologies now ubiquitous and widespread, geographers are increasingly challenged to understand the uneven processes by which such technologies are communicated, applied and regulated.

3. The four papers: governing biotech and its discontents While the papers which follow touch in different ways on each of the preceding issues, they develop a distinctive fifth cluster: the socio-political processes surrounding the introduction, commercialization, and legitimation of biotechnologies and the ways in which Ôinstitutions of governanceÕ––particularly, but not exclusively, those of the state––emerge out of these processes to codify and regulate the underlying political–economic relationships through which biotechnologies are constituted. All papers share, then, a common conviction that the issues currently surrounding biotechnology present a forum in which established relationships between states, and between states and their citizens, are being re-worked. In different ways, each paper points to how the state has increasingly sought, in ScottÕs (1998) terms, to make ÔlegibleÕ the Ôvast interior commonsÕ opened up by biotechnology as a prelude to monitoring and regulating both the interior and exterior spaces of nature. Flitner provides an historical context for the contemporary concerns over biotechnology in a study of state-led plant breeding strategies in Germany, Soviet Union and the US in the 1920s and 1930s. While todayÕs popular concern over biotechnology tends to focus on the role of corporate Ôgene giantsÕ, Flitner shows how in an earlier era biotechnology was a state endeavor: genetics were embraced by the state––sometimes in criminal ways––as a means for driving forward the modernization of nature and society. He suggests that a ‘‘new kind of biopolitical connection between states and seeds’’ emerged in the early 20th century as the state sought to increase agricultural productivity by creating a new material base for plant breeding and by establishing new rules for the use of seed. He contrasts the central role of the state in this earlier period of Ôgenetic modernizationÕ with the contemporary period, and examines how in each case the state came to be involved in sponsoring expeditions to collect plant genetic material, fostering plant-breeding research, and establishing rules for the use and re-use of seed. He points to the ideological and techno-scientific connections between plant breeding programs and the emergence of eugenics, indicating how geographical assessments of the distribution of difference (in crop hardiness or protein content,

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for example) became harnessed to notions of racial hierarchy and genetic improvement. In Germany, for example, state-sponsored expeditions to map and acquire new seed varieties from Central Asia and South America were paralleled by domestic programs of Ôvarietal cleansingÕ which removed around 90% of existing seed varieties from the market. Flitner shows how similar state-led programs for improving and standardizing seed stock were adopted in the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, where the genetic modernization of agriculture was encouraged through regulatory acts such as the Plant Patent Act (1930) and the Bankhead–Jones Act (1935). In examining the evolution in the early 20th century of national regulatory systems for improving agriculture, FlitnerÕs analysis focuses on a scale of regulation that is firmly within the Westphalian mold. Yet as he points out, contemporary struggles over biotechnology appear to challenge the parameters of this classical Westphalian politics. The Ôbiotechnology battlesÕ that provide a backdrop to the papers by McAfee and MacMillan may be considered to constitute a new Ôlife politicsÕ which challenge the stateÕs capacity for regulation. That is, the transnational networks through which biotechnology is increasingly constituted are in marked contrast to the geographical scale of the institutions which conventionally regulate agriculture, resource access, pharmaceuticals and food. Biotechnology raises issues of regulation because the institutional forms that enable biotechnology are often locally or nationally constructed (e.g. national laws protecting property rights or national prohibitions on tissue culture). Several of the authors point, therefore, to the regulatory aspects of biotechnology and the struggles to produce new regimes at national and international scales. MacMillan addresses the linkages between science and state regulation directly. Starting from the position that state regulation is integral to the commercial success of biotech, he focuses on the European UnionÕs (EU) ban on bovine somatotrophin (BST) as an opportunity to develop a set of theoretical tools for understanding how science and state policy become articulated in ways that tend to favor business. As he points out, critics of permissive (i.e. pro-business) biotech regulation typically mobilize the notion of ÔinterestsÕ––that scientists, bureaucrats or government agents stand to gain in some way from decisions favoring industry––as a way of explaining regulatory outcomes. He argues, however, that such explanations are functionalist and insufficiently specific regarding the mechanisms that link interests to regulatory outcomes. Claiming that science is the standard reference point for regulatory decisions involving biotechnology, MacMillan then examines how the notion of Ôvalue-freeÕ regulatory science is constructed and legitimated. He finds the evolution of BST regulation in the EU to be accompanied by per-

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vasive scientism, which he defines as a suite of claims about regulatory science which mischaracterize uncertainties as calculable risks, preclude assessment of ethical, social and political-economic implications of GM products, and curtail opportunities for public participation in the regulatory process. He suggests, therefore, that such a method may provide an alternative to conventional ÔinterestÕ models for understanding the production of bias in biotechnology regulation. Like MacMillan, McAfee is also interested in how issues surrounding biotechnology are framed in debates over the industryÕs regulation and how such framing narratives are then mobilized to achieve particular policy outcomes. Rather than focus on a specific case, however, McAfee points to the ways in which broadly neoliberal regulatory approaches are underpinned by reductionist narratives. She argues that regulatory frameworks proposed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are predicated on a double, mutually reinforcing reductionism: genetically reductive arguments that genes are discrete, functional units of information that can be precisely characterized and switched on and off reinforce economically reductive arguments that treat genetic material as tradeable, patentable factors of production subject to the rules of neoclassical economics. Regulation underpinned by notions of the unitary ‘‘gene’’, she argues, is misguided: such notions are contradicted by both emergent theories of molecular biology and the experiences of scientists and farmers who work with genetically modified organisms. McAfee uses the example of so-called ‘‘terminator technologies’’ to illustrate how economic and genetic reductionism can reinforce each other in ways that increase––rather than decrease––insecurity among farmers. ‘‘Genetic use restriction technologies’’, as they are known among their advocates, are genetically modified crops that produce seeds that will not germinate or, alternatively, that will germinate only if treated with a chemical inducer purchased from the seed supplier. As McAfee puts it, such technologies effectively ‘‘hard wire property rights into plant genomes’’. This approach may reduce the risk to the biotechnology company of selling seeds in countries where international property rights are either not recognized or not enforced, but it also strongly suggests––contra the public message of the biotech industry––that the development of transgenic crops has much more to do with expanding the market for seed and other agricultural inputs than aiding the hungry and improving food supply in the developing world. A secondary theme in McAfeeÕs paper concerns the significant differences––and incompatibilities––between the regulation of transgenic organisms under the WTO and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Whereas the former assumes a universal regime predicated on globally applicable categories (such as patent

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rights and the laws of international commerce) the latter reaffirms national control over genetic resources: Article 15 of the CBD, for example, assigns control over biodiversity to individual countries and several countries have begun the process of designing legal regimes to regulate access to genetic resources. Brand and G€ org take up the theme of the CBD in their study of Mexico which hosts around 10% of the worldÕs known plant species, of which 40% are considered endemic. Whereas McAfee sees in the CBD a regulatory approach that, unlike the regulatory model of the WTO, has the capacity to acknowledge differences in the social and environmental impacts of biotechnology in different settings, Brand and G€ org provide an interesting account of how the CBD has played out in the context of a country undergoing the profound effects of neoliberal adjustment. Adopting a broadly regulationist perspective, they reframe discussion of biodiversity conservation (and the Mexican response to the CBD in particular) in terms of a political–economic, as opposed to solely environmental, project. Brand and G€ org suggest that the valorization of genetic resources represents a significant shift in the relationship between core urban areas and the rural periphery within developing countries. Once considered an obstacle to modernization and a persistent reminder of the modernizing stateÕs failure to eliminate traditional, pre-modern society, rural––and particularly indigenous––areas are now regarded as harboring an underutilized resource. Significant interests within the state, they argue, now regard these genetic resources as a means by which to reposition the country within the global economy. Rather than interpret this story through the conventional optimistic narrative––that valorization and exchange of genetic resources provides opportunities for development––Brand and G€ org point to the ways in which the institutional mechanisms embraced for regulating these resources can reproduce relations of domination between core and periphery. Sketching out the alliances between different interest groups in Mexico, they demonstrate how the politics associated with access to genetic resources, the distribution of benefits from the use of genetic resources, and the definition of intellectual property rights have solidified in the form of a relatively stable institutional regime that enables the commercialization of biotechnology.

4. Conclusion The papers in this theme issue contribute to an emerging body of work by human geographers on the social and political ramifications of biotechnologies. While they address a relatively limited sub-set of issues relating to the governance of genetic modification and its applications, they are illustrative nonetheless of a

broader enthusiasm within geography for Ôtaking onÕ biotechnology. Recent editorial interventions have examined the significance of geography for biotechnology, arguing, for example, that a geographical perspective has much to contribute to the collective understanding of contemporary biotechnology and that geographers should articulate their distinctive approach to wider audiences. We concur with such arguments, but have opted in this introduction to reverse the question, and ask what the significance of biotechnology––as a novel set of issues and questions––might be for geography. Geographical scholarship on biotechnology is emergent rather than established and it is, therefore, too soon to make judgments about what the impact of this topic will be on the discipline. We can distinguish, however, between two possible scenarios in which the significance of biotechnology is alternatively ÔweakÕ and ÔstrongÕ. In the weak scenario, biotechnology emerges as a timely topic for study, one that finds support from funding bodies and which articulates popular concerns, but which does not significantly impact on the nature of geographical inquiry. Rather than call geography to figure out new models, theoretical frameworks, or networks of professional association, biotechnology instead becomes just a novel terrain on which to drape existing approaches. In the strong scenario, alternatively, biotechnology drives geographical inquiry in new directions, pushes the limits of existing modes of inquiry and requires the development of alternative approaches. There is, we argue, some evidence to support the ÔstrongÕ thesis: work on hybridity and the development of relational modes of inquiry, for example, draws strongly on the epistemological and ontological issues raised by biotech applications (although these perspectives are certainly not confined to analyses of biotechnology). Moreover, as the papers in this issue begin to suggest, biotech can act to question existing analyses of uneven regulation, production and consumption. As such it may stimulate––as well as drive the further recombination of––traditional sub-disciplines of human geography to critically question current models of socio-spatial relations and uneven development. To take just one example, biotechnology provides an opportunity to question the sustainability over time and space of different socionatural configurations and suggests the need for more critical ÔvisioningÕ to develop alternative possibilities. For instance, are agro-ecological/organic movements viable alternatives, and how will they spatially configure in relation to biotech? How will different geographies of consumption react and shape biotech development? What are the limits of publicly sponsored state activity in different regions (e.g. the EU vis a vis the US), and how will these different assemblages of state–corporate– science networks construct legitimising platforms for continued biotech development? It is our contention that the issues associated with biotechnology not only

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provide an opportunity for––but in some cases also require––the development of innovative analytical approaches that may take geography in new, even challenging directions. We hope that the contributions to this theme issue of Geoforum may serve as one small step in this process.

Acknowledgements We thank those who participated in the sessions at the 2001 AAG Meetings in New York where these papers were first aired, and the Economic Geography, Political Geography and Cultural Ecology Specialty Groups of the AAG for sponsoring the sessions. Thanks to Helen Robertson for continuing discussions on biotech and agriculture. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Gavin Bridge Department of Geography University of Oklahoma Norman OK 73019 3032, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Phil McManus University of Sydney Australia Terry Marsden University of Cardiff UK