Bioprospecting: governance, science, and the politics of plant collecting
Cori Hayden
University of Cambridge and UC Berkeley
This paper charts the controversial trajectory of 'bioprospecting', or benefit-sharing
agreements between pharmaceutical companies, public sector universities, and
rural and indigenous communities, and it explores the implications of these
agreements for the analytical project of science studies.
I will discuss the
pharmacological and political/regulatory dimensions of the advent of benefitsharing, with a particular emphasis on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity
and contravening trade accords such as NAFTA/TLC. I will then discuss a few
particular agreements in Mexico to show how scientific collecting practices
themselves are transformed by the new and contested mandate of benefit-sharing,
just as particular investigators' research practices prove to be crucial political sites
for shaping these transnational collaborations. In this context, routine decisions
about which plants to collect, or what kingdom to scan for potential value, become
laced with the explosive question of who shall ‘come with’ these plants (ie, be
considered a beneficiary), and on what basis. The paper argues that the rise and
fall of such arrangements in Mexico and internationally marks out a distinctive
challenge for the social studies of science, in particular for our understandings of
how political and social relations are literally being written into bio-artifacts, and
back out of them again, with enormous consequence for questions of rights,
sovereignty, and the conduct of Mexican science.