Experiments

Experiments and speculation infuse the health sciences. Funders seek assurances, the public seeks cures, experimenters seek novelty, and governments seek innovation. Ong’s book, Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life, grounds these concerns by examining the Singapore research institute of Biopolis and contrasting it with the ‘assembly line’ science at Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) in China. Fungible life exemplifies ‘situated cosmopolitan technoscience’ (Ong, 2016: 16) and provides a narrative of how notions of race, health, and population are emerging in Asia that reconfigure scientific models based in America and Europe. Ong argues that the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic sparked a growth in Asian science based out of Singapore. Even though the epidemic missed Europe and the United States, SARS shocked the institutions of global health. Different cosmopolitan entanglements emerged among Guangdong, Singapore, Hong Kong, and my hometown of Toronto. SARS—more than any other recent outbreak other than Ebola—rekindled fears over newly emerging diseases in geography, causing a reevaluation of the relations of global health, public health, urban health, and health workers (Ali and Keil, 2008; Braun, 2007). Ong’s examination of Biopolis succeeds because she sticks with the scientists and institutions in Singapore for almost 10 years after the outbreak and explores how the regional bioeconomy sustained engagement in order to tackle both the epidemic and the endemic fears, even though a SARS-level crisis has not been repeated. Yet speculation requires the acknowledgment that these goals of the health sciences may never be realized.

How experiments fail has always interested me. Many times predictions don’t come to fruition. Ong delves into uncertainty and preparation around health and science, tied to Foucault’s Security, Territory and Population, and presents Singapore’s ‘fear of losing out’ (or kiasu) as a very particular iteration of predicting the future. This fear of failure is lived through everyday anxieties, recreated in regional tensions, and infuses both the architecture and science. However, failure is not specific to Biopolis. Since the 1970s, proponents of biotech have heralded that this sector will transform capitalism and everyday life, and yet failed experiments abound (Birch and Tyfield, 2012). While new ways of thinking and new knowledge regimes have emerged, the venture funding model hasn’t transformed the economy, except the growth in pharmaceutical sector. One of Ong’s main sources, Dr Liu, acknowledges and rejects biotech as a ‘driver of the economy’ (Ong, 2016: 162).

The American model of bioeconomic experiments doubles down on the bluster and promotion, rather than acknowledging the limitations of this sector of the economy. A big-man history of technoscience comes from a Rockefeller model of development that underpins entrepreneurial science: what Ong calls ‘Venter-esque’. Ong’s take on the Biopolis’ bioeconomy is refreshing for the lack of a single charismatic CEO. This speaks to the difference of Asian technoscience as a nation building exercise, with a metric of success or failure not tied to a CEO or stock prices. While promises are rarely fulfilled in biotech, over the long periods of time, Ong shows how careers are made, new technologies are slowly innovated, regional economies expand, buildings go up, and bridges are built. Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and medical anthropologists could pay more attention to the failures in these experimental anthropologies of the future. Previous studies in bioeconomy might gain by returning to the field to see how the concepts and formulations of the bioeconomy are hold over time.

Ong’s book contributes to the ongoing discussions around biocapital and bioeconomy (much of these debates being hashed out in Duke Press series on Experimental Futures). Ong adds to conversation around the intersection of life and the economy with the modifier fungible and reasserts Cooper and Waldby’s (2014) contribution of the pluripotent—the generative capacity of stem cells to produce difference. The title of Ong’s book comes from one of Ong’s interviewees who says that the information from genetic sequencing has made DNA fungible. Ong acknowledges that the term fungible has an economic and legal history, saying ‘By analogy, making DNA fungible suggests transposing (in data and abstract forms) qualities into equitable values…shifting around data points’. Ong contrasts transferable value with the ‘chameleon entity’ of biovalue, which is ‘biologically engineered vital qualities in the production of capital value’ (Ong, 2016: 14–15). She combines the concepts of fungible and pluripotent to understand how the strategies of both Biopolis and BGI Genomics unleash value through ‘variegated types of potentiality from a mixture of ethnic, economic, and scientific dreams’ (Ong, 2016: 17). Later, Ong jumps scale to say that ‘at the regional scale, fungiblity is about aligning cosmopolitan science with regional modernity’ (Ong, 2016: 161). Ong helps to visualize these processes through the metaphor of origami by ‘making DNA fungible through strategic mapping, mobilization, and folding of diverse points and sites is productive of value-producing systems’ (Ong, 2016: 18). Fluid spaces and objects become connected through these Deleuzian ‘folds’ and this produces new value. But what happens when we fold together a cultural way of thinking about life and the practices that produce and reproduce our everyday life under capitalism? Can DNA and modernity be folded in the same way? In this Deleuzian formulation, how these folding power relations work in parallel or in tandem among these plateaux (spatial or otherwise) would have been more illuminating.

Much of the bioeconomy literature lacks clarity into the difference of variations within biotech and the biomedical/pharmaceutical industries. What do value and life refer to exactly? In terms of fungible, what is being exchanged and replaced: information, locations, or dreams? Trained as a political ecologist, I’m always worried about taking biology for granted. I’m wary of ‘logics that naturalize biotech’, as Helmreich says, as if there is value in the biomatter (like pluripotent cells), just as some think gold is merely value just sitting in the earth. Ong seems to be focused on the question of meaning in terms of value rather than in terms of details over biomatter or the divisions between production and reproduction (for a useful guide, see Helmreich, 2008: 471). Ong’s account gives more attention to meaning and metaphor than practices, matter, and labor. Yet I’m always yearning for more attention to how, as Helmreich (2008: 474) succinctly phrases it, ‘biotech geese cannot lay golden eggs without daily tending’. This tending means paying attention to the labor that structures these cosmopolitan connections and the relationships that sustain those who live and work in this ‘city of life’ assemblage.

Ong brings in ‘geo-bio-sociality’ from a book review of Bonta and Protevi’s Deleuze and Geophilosphy (2004) to elaborate regional collaborations and cosmopolitan science. Geographers have long been tackling the notions of Deleuzian assemblages and there is a rich tradition that could contribute to Ong’s perspective. More than 10 years ago, geographers sought to examine human assemblages without the restrictions of scale (Marston et al., 2005). This could help to think about active geographies of Biopolis across static geopolitical borders. Marston et al.’s notion of a flat ontology is another version of this geo-bio-sociality but gives greater attention to materiality of sites. Ong suggests that there is potential in the Deleuzian notion of the fold and invokes origami, collapse, and fluid connections between objects and spaces. ‘This genomic origami thus transmits various affects—genetic pride, public support—that Singaporean researchers hope to leverage for market competitiveness and science solidarity in the Asian region’ (Ong, 2016: 16). But is this hope speculation, emotion, or DNA? Is the fold merely a metaphor of understanding these relations of cultural ‘codes’ (DNA, life, language, disease) or is there a material folding of labor and life?

To get away from the speculation, more attention could have been given to the materiality of these Biopolis ecologies: more biomatter than biomeaning. My training in urban political ecology makes me curious about circulation and metabolism. What materials are brought into this city and how are they transformed? How is the food prepared for the scientists? Where do the lab supplies come from? How is the waste managed in Biopolis? How is the labor divided? Who does the cleaning of the facilities? While this was beyond the scope and methods of Ong, the life and capital that Ong traces are undergirded by multiple processes of social reproduction. Innovations cannot be made unless people get fed and their messes get cleaned up. In Ong’s account, the labor regimes fade into the background of speculative practices, except in the BGI example where she discusses discourses of industry and assembly line genetic sequencing (Ong, 2016: 201). Cheap labor at the ‘gene factory’ was a useful comparison to Biopolis’ elite scientists. But if we are talking about genetic ‘resources’, who does the work and who are they paid to extract those resources?

The aim of this regional Asian science assemblage is to move away from the pole of epidemic toward tackling chronic conditions. Experiments and fears seemed to be leaving the fast outbreaks of regional biosecurity threats behind and engaging with the slower eugenic worries around race. Ong notes ‘Like any best-conceived biopolitical plan—to improve health and wealth—the innovative ethnogenomic experiments in Singapore can go awry’ (Ong, 2016: 226). That much of this ‘familial eugenics’ is taken for granted is worrisome. Ong restricts this discussion to BGI’s drive for ‘curating human life’ (Ong, 2016: 216) but this danger is always present in biomedical systems that seek technological fixes for health problems. While the anti-eugenic discussion was raised around BGI, this analysis was missing at Biopolis. Where do these notions of race and Asianness lead? There was no sense of danger in these politics that allows eugenics to come in ‘through the back door’ via health-giving scientific innovations (Duster, 2003). Other perspectives that might add to this analysis of life and value are crip and queer theory (Chen, 2014; McRuer, 2006; Puar, 2009) that can reconfigure how some cosmopolitan assemblages are enabled while others are disabled. Back to the geography of Biopolis, Ong states: ‘The new skyline is a hybrid symbol of taking and making bets: on money, on genes, and on a future’ (Ong, 2016: 224). There are dangers of both a winning and a failing bet on these experiments of life and capital.