Cori Hayden

When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico

List of Figures and Tables ix List of Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xiii Authors Note xvii Introduction 1 PART ONE: NEOLIBERAL NATURES Chapter 1: Interests and Publics: On (Ethno)science and Its Accountabilities 19 Chapter 2: Neoliberalisms Nature 48 Chapter 3: Prospecting in Mexico: Rights, Risk, and Regulation 85 PART TWO: PUBLIC PROSPECTING Chapter 4: Market Research: When Local Knowledge Is Public Knowledge 125 Chapter 5: By the Side of the Road: The Contours of a Field Site 158 PART THREE: PROSPECTINGs PUBLICS Chapter 6: The Brine Shrimp Assay: Signs of Life, Sites of Value 191 Chapter 7: Presumptions of Interest 213 Chapter 8: Remaking Prospectings Publics 230 Notes 237 Bibliography 255 Index 275

Indigenous people incorporated? Culture as politics, culture as property in pharmaceutical bioprospecting. Commentaries. Author's reply

The ongoing debate over indigenous claims to intellectual and cultural property reveals a series of indigenous strategies of mobilization that both appropriate from and work against the logic of the market. Of particular significance in this regard are the various indigenous strategies used in contemporary pharmaceutical bioprospecting activities to address claims to traditional medical knowledge as cultural property. This article presents field data on a controversial ethnopharmaceutical project among the Aguaruna of Perus high forest and offers a comparative analysis of the outcomes with attention to several other cases in and beyond South America. In particular, questions are raised about the forms of legitimating authority in the burgeoning international indigenous movement, the role of NGOs, researchers, bureaucracies, and corporations in this process, and the dilemmas that emerge from the politicization and privatization of indigenous culture and identity.The ongoing debate over indigenous claims to intellectual and cultural property reveals a series of indigenous strategies of mobilization that both appropriate from and work against the logic of the market. Of particular significance in this regard are the various indigenous strategies used in contemporary pharmaceutical bioprospecting activities to address claims to traditional medical knowledge as cultural property. This article presents field data on a controversial ethnopharmaceutical project among the Aguaruna of Perus high forest and offers a comparative analysis of the outcomes with attention to several other cases in and beyond South America. In particular, questions are raised about the forms of legitimating authority in the burgeoning international indigenous movement, the role of NGOs, researchers, bureaucracies, and corporations in this process, and the dilemmas that emerge from the politicization and privatization of indigenous culture and identity.

THE PROPER COPY

Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domains normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy.

Bioprospecting's representational dilemma

This article is about the politically and epistemologically charged endeavor of turning medicinal plants and ‘traditional knowledge’ into pharmaceutical products. In Mexico, where I conducted ethnographic research on one such endeavor in the late 1990s, the project of eliciting pharmaceuticals from traditional or popular remedies has belonged as much to vaunted national(ist) scientific traditions (Lozoya, 1984) as to processes we might diagnose as an extractive colonialism or the ‘needs’ of transnational capital, foreign drug companies, and researchers from abroad. Here, as elsewhere, efforts to tease out the ‘efficacy’ of traditional knowledge have not been framed as a particularly symmetrical project. Plantand ethnobotanically-guided drug discovery—whether conducted by, for example, the researchers in Mexico’s National Medical Institute in the late nineteenth century, by the US National Cancer Institute in the 1950s, or by the San Francisco-based bioprospecting company Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the 1990s—has been an effort to render ‘traditional’ or popular medicine actionable in terms established by the exigencies of industrial drug discovery, biochemistry, and intellectual property. As such, it has focused on the form of the isolated, bioactive chemical compound. Certainly, many researchers I know in Mexico and in the US take an equitable view if these wrenching efforts at transformation or corroboration ‘fail’, often pointing to the narrowness or inadequacy of biochemical models rather than simply concluding that traditional remedies or particular plants simply ‘don’t work’ in the ways people say they do. But the ideological charge of the overall project does not thereby evaporate: plantand ethnobotanically-guided drug discovery is, by definition, an effort that relies on biomedical models and ‘strong’ patent provisions as its ultimate source of legitimation and value. The uneven epistemological weight that is built-in to this ‘corroborative’ project significantly complicates the well-intentioned efforts of many activist ethnobotanists and chemists to ‘prove’ the veracity of traditional knowledge by demonstrating that it really works—in pharmacological terms (Adams, 2002). Such questions about belief, knowledge, and efficacy are well-worn in anthropology and in the sociology of knowledge. But, in recent years—more specifically, since the early Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 2, 185–200, June 2005

A Generic Solution

In 1997 and 1998 the Mexican government encouraged the introduction of generic drugs into Mexico, Latin America’s biggest and fastest‐growing pharmaceutical market. In contrast to the situation in Brazil, where anti‐retrovirals and HIV/AIDS treatment have been the centerpiece of a powerful state‐led generics “revolution,” in Mexico the move to cheaper, copied medicines has made its strongest mark in the private sector. The rapidly growing pharmaceutical chain Farmacias Similares, whose populist nationalism (“Mexican Products to Help Those Who Have the Least”), affiliated laboratories, political movements, health clinics, and motto—“The Same But Cheaper”—have begun to transform the face of health care provision in that country, raises important questions about whether the emergence of a market for generic medicines does in fact signal the reassertion of “the public” in and for Mexican public health. How does the copied pharmaceutical configure a particular set of political practices and discourses launched in the name of the (Mexican) public interest?

Rethinking Reductionism, or, the Transformative Work of Making the Same

Plant-based drug discovery has long served as an iconic instance of both the power and the folly of scientific reductionism: this is a project, after all, that seeks to turn complex indigenous therapeutic practices into isolated molecules, to be scaled-up, and set into mass circulation. This arena has, for good reason, served as an example of the economic and epistemological violences enacted in forms of ‘recognition’ or ‘translation’ that treat scientific idioms and industrial value as the arbiters of truth and value. But here, I ask whether we are giving too much away, in analytic terms, when we take reductionism for granted. In this essay, I draw on my ethnographic research in Mexico, as well as broader philosophical debates, to suggest critical resources that might allow us to do something other than restage the familiar, infelicitous encounter between ‘embedded’, relational indigenous knowledges and isolating, abstracting, reductionist science. Here, I consider pharmaceutical research and development as a process that works less by reducing than by proliferating materials: in particular, by producing and recontextualising chemical compounds as simultaneously the same, and not the same. This formula has a strong place in pharmaceutical chemistry, and it resonates somewhat surprisingly in domains ranging from transnational drug regulation, to marketing strategies for generic drugs in Mexico, to debates within the philosophy of chemistry about the nature of chemical entities themselves. These conversations offer conceptual resources for rethinking reduction(ism), itself one of the key operators in charged projects of recognising and translating knowledge.

Bioprospecting: The “Promise” and Threat of the Market

for a well-established practice. The term was coined by sustainable development advocates in the late 1980s to refer to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries’ renewed interest in the use of plants, microbes and “traditional knowledge” as leads for developing new products. The drug industry’s much-hyped “return to nature,” after roughly 50 years of emphasis on synthetic chemistry, took visible form in a number of high-profile bioprospecting arrangements. The more well known of these included the U.S. government’s ongoing International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) initiative, which has funded drug discovery partnerships between U.S. researchers and collaborators in countries including Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru; and a 1991 agreement between the drug company Merck and Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute (INBio). The novelty of these partnerships extended beyond corporations’ renewed interest in nature. In accordance with the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and a growing body of supporting legislation in signatory nations, as well as demands from indigenous organizations and changes in academic research protocols, efforts to collect biological material for pharmaceutical research and development came with new sets of provisions attached. Bioprospecting initiatives began incorporating contractual promises to return some form of benefits to the providers of plants, microbes, insects and knowledge. Such benefit-sharing arrangements were the outcome of a number of different demands. Significant among them were powerful critiques on the part of Southern activists, indigenous movements and multilateral organizations of what many call “biopiracy”: the histories of resource appropriation in which Northern states and corporations have built fortunes, empires and nations out of material taken freely from the global South. Claims for social justice that demanded new forms of reciprocity, community consent and recognition of national sovereignty over these resources played a strong role in establishing some of the CBD’s innovative requirements. Most notably, the CBD held that research institutions and corporations provide some form of “equitable returns” to source nations and source communities in exchange for continued access to biodiversity and cultural knowledge. But social justice and biopiracy critiques were only one aspect of the shift toward benefit-sharing as a new multilateral principle. The CBD also promotes and endorses an explicitly marketmediated vision of biodiversity conservation. The Convention literally banks on the life sciences industries and the increasingly broad scope of patents on forms of life as key engines for “granting value” to biodiversity. Conservation thus becomes indispensable in this vision of sustainable development in which biodiversity is conceived of as a productive resource that “pays for itself.” As the argument has it, the CBD provides “incentives” for the nations of the South to save their forests rather than cut them down. In NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS

The Entailments of Exchange

For several years now, Warwick Anderson has been my guide to thinking about the “unequal and disordered” reciprocities that lie at the very foundation of biomedical research, colonial and otherwise. The phrase “collected” me when I read some of Anderson’s earlier work on kuru (2000: 715), and it proves a perfect key to the brilliantly rendered, often jarring, dynamics of taking and giving that await readers in The Collectors of Lost Souls. In this provocative book, Anderson refuses the temptation to simply cry “thief” where biomedical extraction is concerned. Instead, he walks readers through what has to be one of the more complex narrative threads in twentieth-century biomedical history, which might properly be called the story of a colonial twentieth century and of a postcolonial twentieth century. In fact, we use such temporal markers at our own peril here, as the story of kuru research enacts a kind of looping temporality (Murphy 2010); it is a story that constantly cannibalizes and renews itself. In Anderson’s hands—and one could imagine what it might look like in a different pair of hands—the story of kuru is complicated both because of the (post) colonial twentieth century it presents to us, and because of the way it thwarts any temptation to take a high-handed ethical stance on matters of biomedical takings. The risk Anderson takes here works in large part because of his writerly virtuosity,