The Global Circulation of Genomics as an Empowerment Idiom
In 2001 at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, a heated dispute ensued between representatives of the Indian government and the Dalit movement (formerly “untouchables”) over whether caste discrimination should be included on the international agenda as a form of oppression akin to racism. This was the latest iteration of a longstanding debate that pits the view that caste is an ancient, naturalized hierarchy against the idea that it is a colonial fabrication built upon existing social fault lines. Some Dalit activists have made appeals to ancient genetic divisions, emphasizing the outsiderness of the upper caste, in order to legitimize their grievances, undermine the authority of powerful actors and build solidarity with other racialized groups. Representatives of the Indian government, in turn, have resisted the latter appeals and were largely successful in eliminating any mention of caste discrimination in the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance proceedings and outcomes document (Egorova 2009). Although the inherited position of caste is tied to one’s work, it is also an embodied status such that lower castes are often considered “impure” and “untouchable” with numerous implications for social life. But until very recently there was little scientific evidence to support the notion that caste groupings were biologically distinct in the way that US racial groupings have historically been construed. In 2009, when the Durban Review Committee convened in Geneva to evaluate progress towards the conference goals, a sizable delegation of Dalit representatives traveled to Geneva to “raise their voices against the wall of silence they [were] met with at the Durban Review Conference” (Human Rights Watch 2009). In this case, advancing the idea that group differences are biologically real is a way to assert social divisions as consequential, and therefore requiring redress. To the extent that socially subordinate groups find it necessary to claim recognition and assert rights in genomic terms, it is both a form of co-optation of and capitulation to science as the authority on group boundaries.
In this chapter, I explore how genomics is both powerful and problematic due to its epistemic agility (making competing knowledge claims) and normative dexterity (asserting conflicting political claims), rather than due to the field’s strict enforcement of hierarchically stable categories. While those at the bottom of the Indian social hierarchy have seized upon genomic findings to bolster their oppressed group identity (Egorova 2009), those who monopolize power and status in India have also used population genomics to support their claims to indigeneity when that was called in to question. Genomic claims are used at both ends of the lines of power, where the meaning of biological difference and the rights sought by different groups are negotiated and contested. But despite the seeming short-term empowerment that genomics claims seem to hold for marginalized social groups, the long-term political implications of describing centuries-old social divisions as “genetic diversity” are unclear. In what follows I discuss national genomic initiatives in Mexico and India, which marshal already existing national discourses about biological and cultural affinity in their quest to genetically map variation in the population. I compare their different conceptions of heterogeneity, one focusing on diversity and the other on mixture, to show how political and scientific actors in both contexts must contend with the ways in which linking genetic and social groupings become politically controversial.
proof of the idea that “upper castes” were alien to the subcontinent. At the same time, the Hindu right favoured the studies which suggest that the “European” contribution to the South Asian gene pool was minimal, and hence could be construed as supporting the Aryan indigenousness hypothesis. (Egorova 2010:34)
Population genomics in this context has become an unlikely ally on both sides of a very heated and at times deadly struggle over the legitimate parameters of citizenship. On the one side, there are Hindu nationalists of purportedly Aryan ancestry, and on the other, Dalit activists of purportedly Dravidian ancestry. The dexterity of genomics, supporting as it does two competing accounts of Indian peoplehood, suggests it is important to examine the wider context in which population genomics is taking shape.
Making the Biopolity
It is tempting to embark upon an investigation of the biopolitics of race in the post-genomics era as if the “polity” at the heart of biopolitics were self-evident and stable. But one of the features that sets it apart from other political fields is that it involves a simultaneous struggle over the parameters of both rights and bodies (Benjamin 2013). So that claims about what governments, for example, owe particular groups or conversely what citizens are responsible for as members of a society are intimately connected to the question of what constitute groups in the first place. Whether on the basis of genes, geographical proximity or census results – to name but a few – how groups are imagined and produced is at the heart of biopolitical struggles. The possible forms of group-making, in turn, are negotiated and contested by a host of social agents – scientists, activists and politicians among them – who vie for legitimacy and authority with and against one another. While advocates of population genomics in postcolonial settings typically appeal to progress, profit and public health as the desired aims of the field, there are unintended social and political consequences that do not fit neatly in to a development narrative of science.
Strictly speaking, population genomicists seek to understand how “evolutionary processes … influence variation across genomes and populations” (Kumar 2012) by sampling and genotyping individuals in the hope of finding patterns that may eventually relate to disease susceptibility and drug response. As a first step in understanding population genomics, it is important to recognize that it is not simply a new discipline, but part of a broader social field with political implications that exceed the intentions of researchers. The growth of the field is tied to the crises faced by the global pharmaceutical industry, wherein an estimated US$140 billion worth of drugs will lose their patents between 2012 and 2017 (Kulkarni 2012). Companies are under pressure to reconfigure their business models and find new markets as blockbuster drugs fall over the “patent cliff.”1 The one-size-fits-all model of drug development is giving way to a niche marketing strategy in which companies are turning to “growth potential in specialty markets and in emerging nations” (Wilson 2011). This approach is often undertaken in the name of helping “the underserved,” as exemplified by prominent Canadian health policy officials Daar and Singer:
Developing countries are not only potentially huge markets for drug therapeutics but are also depositories of important human genetic diversity. Understanding this diversity is valuable because it better defines those population subgroups that will benefit more from a particular drug than others, and allows the detection of side-effects that might not be seen in populations that are mainly Caucasian. (2005:245)
Such appeals to marginalized racial groups as the purported beneficiaries of genomic medicine avert critical attention from the broader political economy of pharmaceuticals in which “the public health paradigm shifted from prevention to treatment access, [and] political rights have moved towards biologically-based rights” (Biehl and Eskerod 2009:10).
A focus on the political economy of drug development reveals that, in resuscitating intellectual property and establishing niche markets, racialized understandings of biological difference become the value added, as a justification for extending patent life. In “How a Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’” (2004), Kahn describes how the role of law and commerce in creating race-based medicine becomes “masked both by well-meaning concerns about perceived health disparities and by an imprudent reliance on erroneous or incomplete statistical data” (2004:3). His in-depth case study of the first race-based prescription in the USA, BiDil, illuminates how legal and marketing imperatives incentivize racial packaging even, or especially, when the scientific grounds for doing so are shaky. As Rajan explains, “the more things get reduced to their molecular components … the more one needs to reply on statistical, population-based data to ‘individualize’ therapy. This means that one can individualize therapy only on the basis of population classifications” (2006:163). So although “personalized medicine” is the umbrella under which many of these practices fall, many analysts caution that race serves as a permanent “detour” to individualized treatments (Collier 2012). Kahn points out that as companies attempt to “tailor therapies ever more closely to the genetic profile of individuals or groups of consumers, identifying racial or ethnic correlations with disease are becoming big business” (2006:118). In terms of “tailoring” drugs to consumers, groups not individuals comprise the necessary markets.
In response, a number of postcolonial nations seek to control the terms in which researchers and pharmaceutical companies approach their populations as resources for genetic samples and as markets for new drugs by asserting “genomic sovereignty” over their population’s genome. In addition to the economic implications, proponents of genomic sovereignty in India and Mexico expressed a sense of exclusion from the US-based International Haplotype Mapping project, “a partnership of scientists and funding agencies from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States to develop a public resource that w[ould] help researchers find genes associated with human disease and response to pharmaceuticals.”2 As I have described elsewhere, scientists from a number of countries, including Mexico and India, questioned the generalizability of this initiative because it did not include samples from their populations (Benjamin 2009). In Mexico, where a Genomic Sovereignty amendment to the national constitution was passed, foreign researchers are subject to fines and prison time for collecting genetic samples without the necessary permission. Spokesmen for the new policy have made claims about the uniqueness of the “Mexican Genome” as a justification for protecting Mexican genetic samples (Schwartz-Marin and Restrepo 2013). Governments are approaching the genomic data produced from their citizens’ bodies as a national resource vulnerable to capitalist piracy, in the same way that plants and minerals have been regarded for some time (Hayden 2003; Foster 2014). In response, one US-based investor lamented that the expansion of Big Pharma in to foreign markets has “hit a roadblock: Nationalism” (D’Altorio 2011).
Some of the countries with genomic sovereignty policies are part of the “emerging seven” – China, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, India and Mexico – that global capital regards as its new “Promised Land” (Pharmaceutical Technology 2009). US business journals discuss this in terms of companies needing to develop strategies to capitalize on the “new” illnesses resulting from the higher standards of living in these societies. The financial consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates that by 2020 the “emerging seven” may account for as much as one-fifth of global sales. PwC says “the number of diabetes suffers in India is projected to reach 73.5 million people by 2025, with the direct cost of treating each individual at about $420 per person per year, and that if these costs remain the same, India’s total bill for diabetes alone would be about $30 billion by 2025” (Pharmaceutical Technology 2009).
The need to protect intellectual property by regulating the flow of genomic data is also motivated by the promise of health interventions that may save countries’ healthcare expenditures and generate profits from “tailored” drug development in the long term. Genomic sovereignty policies, in turn, implicitly brand nations as biologically distinct from other nations, even as the science itself seeks to discern clinically meaningful subgroup differences within each country. In these “bioethnic” markets (Montoya 2007) human bodies are classified as neither part of a universal nor as individuals, but as biologically meaningful social groups (Epstein 2007). In the process, new biopolitical entities are being imagined. “Mexican DNA” and “Indian DNA,” among others, are part of a biopolitical imaginary that is strategically calibrating existing social differences such as race-ethnicity with genetic groupings. On the surface, genomic sovereignty asserts a deeply nationalist sentiment of self-determination in a time of increasing globalization. It implicitly “brands” national populations as biologically distinct from other populations, naturalizing nation-state boundaries to ensure that countries receive the economic and medical benefits that may result from this new science. But as Aoki urges, “invocations of nations’ sovereignty vis-à-vis an international order are always, foundationally, wrapped up in the question of nations’ sovereignty over the subjects contained within their jurisdiction” (Aoki 1996; cf. Ghosh 2005:15). So instead of celebrating genomic sovereignty as postcolonial empowerment, such claims are better examined for the kinds of power relations that they at once hide, rather than combat.
Bioconstitutional Moments
By examining the emergence of genomic sovereignty claims as a form of what Jasanoff and colleagues term bioconstitutionalism, novel life sciences and new rights claims that are “redefining the obligations of the state in relation to lives in its care” are drawn into the same analytic frame (2011:3). In doing so, it is important to extend beyond the realm of official policy and legislative enactment, to include bioconstitutional moments in scholarly analysis, where struggles over who “we” are, what we are owed and what we are responsible for, as both objects and subjects of scientific initiatives, take place all around us. In the more mundane work of developing sampling protocols, reporting scientific findings in the mass media or lobbying the state for social and political redress as the Dalit movement in India has attempted to do, the meaning of life and the entitlements owed to the living are negotiated and contested.
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