Mutant Ecologies

Amedeo Policante, Erica Borg

Description

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.

Introduction

1. Life's Inner Workings
2. Manufacturing Lives
3. Genomic Infrastructures
4. Crispr Assembly Lines
5. Molecular Factory Farms
6. Engineering Extinction Ecologies
7. Pharmaceutical Lives
8. Bioengineering the Human

Conclusion

Sujets

• Life Sciences
• Public Policy
• Industries
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sciences et techniques
• Biology
• CRISPR
• Genomics
• Biodiversity
• Genetic engineering
• Genetically modified organism
• Capitalism
• 454 Life Sciences
• Genetics
• Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
• Science
• Industrie

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745344546
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Mutant Ecologies
Money is making biology mutate. Capital nowadays reaches ever deeper into organisms to reformat their genes, metabolisms and more. This book is a lucid and provocative guide to this brave new world.
-Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
An ambitious and timely critique of biopolitical economy that traces the long history of genetics through to the high-tech biofoundries that serve as capital s hidden abode of genomic production. The battle against capital requires a struggle over the means of genomic production, and Mutant Ecologies provides an essential, historically and theoretically rigorous assessment of the terrain.
-Jesse Goldstein, Associate Professor of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University
Mutant Ecologies is an incandescent illumination of capital s own molecular revolution. With deep research and smart theory, Borg and Policante take us into the planet factory s latest abodes of production, where genomic tools manufacture life-forms tailor-made for accumulation on a scorching planet; a must-read.
-Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx and Cyber-Proletariat
Capitalism is becoming genomic, Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante contend. Reinventing the critique of political economy in this new conjuncture of capital accumulation is the task they successfully pursue in this book. Mutant Ecologies is a major work, a must-read both for scholars of capitalism and for anybody interested in the history and present of genomics.
-Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Bologna

First published 2022 by Pluto Press New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press Inc. 1930 Village Center Circle, Ste. 3-384, Las Vegas, NV 89134
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante 2022
The right of Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4453 9 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 4452 2 Paperback ISBN 978 0 7453 4456 0 PDF ISBN 978 0 7453 4454 6 EPUB
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
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
Fragments of Tomorrow
In the biotech Utopia conjured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurial scientists and techno-plutocrats, monoculture plantations populated by genetically modified crops cover most of the Earth. Row after row of perfectly identical corn-stalks, producing pesticide in their cellular machinery. Fast-growing sugarcane, shooting to full height in half the time of its unmodified kin. Herbicide-resistant vegetables, prospering in the midst of ever-increasing amounts of poison in the air and soil. Spring is silent; no insects dwell in the fields - a cocktail of bio-engineered pesticide-producing plants and genetic extinction technologies have wiped them out. A few lonely genetically modified honeybees, engineered to withstand the pesticides dumped on never-ending fields, buzz among the rows of identical plants .
In a nearby factory farm, genetically engineered cattle grow bodybuilder-type, hyper-muscled bodies. They no longer have pesky horns that might damage workers or profits - these have been genetically removed. The space is overcrowded, but the veterinary doctors are confident that the last round of genetic modification may contain the next epidemic. Up in the hills, where salmon used to swim in rivers before they were all dammed, sit massive tanks in which the fish grow to maturity in half the natural time .
In the rapidly shrinking forests, bioprospectors are busy mining a disappearing biodiversity, hoping to sequence their genomes for the latest proprietary pharmaceutical commodity. Using DNA barcode scanners, they create a digital copy of the forest in server farms located thousands of kilometres away. Timber companies are busy chopping down poplar trees disposed in neat geometric patterns. The gene-edited trees grow fast, their accelerated life cycle boosting the expected rate of profit. Yet, no animal will munch their bark. The grey squirrels who used to eat into loggers profits have been genetically sterilised and wiped out .
At sea, genetic life-support keeps corals breathing in a warming ocean. Further beyond, the global dead zone spreads. There, floating farms grow genetically modified algae in water that is too oxygen-poor to host marine wildlife. Oil rigs in the distance keep pumping, but ships are already releasing gene-edited microbes to lap up the oil spills. Beneath the waves, in the deep time of the Hadal Zone, unmanned vehicles hunt extremophilic microbes by hydrothermal vents, sequencing their genomes in search of potentially valuable genetic traits to patent .
In crowded cities around the world, conscious urbanites have a choice between a variety of bio-engineered foods. Become the envy of your friends and followers with this highly sought-after delicacy! Pinkglow will look phenomenal on whatever social media platform is en vogue by the time you read this. Biofortified foods produced by billionaire philanthropies are offered to the many who have been forcefully removed from the land. In tiny rental studios, miniaturised pigs keep company to the housebound workforce .
Capital s internal contradictions appear temporarily suspended; no need for radical social and ecological change .
Introduction
Fast-growing salmon, herbicide-resistant plants, hyper-muscled cattle, synthetic bacteria, Trojan mosquitoes, humanised mice, autocidal rats, 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. Each of these living organisms is a metabolic being, which systematically transforms raw materials into energy, molecules and waste by-products. Each is both a destructive agent (breaking down molecular compounds in processes of digestion and respiration) and a productive agent (building up new molecular compounds by synthesising the proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and nucleic acids they need in order to persist, grow, act and reproduce). Each is both a catabolic and anabolic force. Through their metabolic processes of reproduction, all living organisms participate in the shaping of the global environment. Indeed, we could say that the biosphere is the ever-changing result of the multiple metabolic exchanges set in play by living organisms as they go about their existence.
Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. Genetic engineering seizes the living vectors that make and unmake the world. It is a set of techniques, elaborated in the last half a century, which offers new ways of manufacturing commodities by taking possession of living bodies, redesigning metabolic pathways and thereby affecting global ecological processes at ever-larger scales. The emergence of new genomic tools has opened up new horizons of industrial production, enabling the manufacture of life-forms adapted to the peculiar requirements of capital accumulation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully engineers their internal metabolism, thereby reshaping the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. Genomic science and genome editing are increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors - including agriculture, aquaculture, livestock breeding, pharmaceutical production, the chemical industry, the textile industry, and many more. In all of these branches of production, the deliberate induction of genetic mutations enables a multiplicity of metabolic shifts, whose impact on the socio-ecological (re)construction of the biosphere remains uncertain. Capital is driving a biological revolution, which ripples through the ecosphere.
The introduction of genome editing technologies has rapidly transformed the ways in which life is imagined, manipulated and exploited for profit. It has stimulated the elaboration of novel technological solutions to many of the most pressing economic, social and ecological problems; a new understanding of the relation between nature and culture, ontology and technology, society and the self; and a new vision of the future that negates the necessity for radical political change. CRISPR/Cas9, in particular, has been variously celebrated as a breakthrough technology that may control evolution , improve lives , protect the Earth s biodiversity , change society , edit the human race and even save the world . 1 According to the Royal Swedish Academy, which awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, these genetic scissors have already taken the life sci