Associate Professor of Anthropology (PhD: MIT, 2002)
office: Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway (SBSG) 3304 | phone: (949) 824-3188
email: ksunderr at uci dot edu

Kaushik Sunder Rajan was initially trained as a biologist, obtained his Ph.D. in the History and Social Studies of Science and Technology, and works on the anthropology of science and technology.

Professor Sunder Rajan initially started following the Human Genome Project in 1999. The project had by this time resolved into a race to sequence the human genome between the public-funded five-nation Human Genome Consortium and the private sector genome company, Celera Genomics. Integral to these conflicts was the fact that genomic information was recognized as a potential commodity, thanks to the ability to take out patents on gene sequences. In other words, the genome sequencing race was not just a race for credit, but was a race for ownership as well, and the legal, institutional and market contexts within which this research was being performed was evidently crucial to understanding the larger technoscientific event that was unfolding.

This led to Professor Sunder Rajan's broader interest in corporate genomics, and the business practices and strategies of genome companies in the United States. These practices and strategies could not themselves be adequately conceptualized without situating them in the larger context of the drug development marketplaces that they were inserted into. This involved understanding the specificities of the drug development industry (marked, in the United States especially, by the immense time, risk, uncertainty and capital investment required to bring a therapeutic molecule to market), but also involved understanding and theorizing the market, and contemporary capitalism, more generally. Clearly, genomics was a constantly shifting referent, especially once the working draft sequence of the human genome was generated in mid-2000 by both the public genome project and by Celera, and attention shifted to "post"-genomics, which involved making biological sense of the huge amount of information that had been generated by the sequencing efforts. But equally clearly, "the market" was also a shifting referent. What constituted sound market logic was constantly contested, negotiated and at stake, especially through the period of incredible speculative ferment of the "dot com" boom that many genomic developments were situated in the midst of, and the subsequent bust that saw the dramatic collapse of this seemingly infallible speculative bubble. In other words, capitalism as a conceptual construct was (is) itself very much at stake and demanding theorization - it is not an eternal and essential systemic construct, but is rather completely historically specific and mutable. Further, neither the life sciences nor market systems completely determined the other, though the relationships between the two were tangible, significant and required resolution.

The contemporary historical conjuncture that Sunder Rajan studied, then, was marked by a number of interrelated events and emergences: firstly, the increased corporatization of life science research; secondly, the emergence of new technologies and epistemologies within the life sciences, such as, significantly, genomics; and thirdly, the fact that these technoscientific and market emergences were not simply occurring in the United States, but rather globally. His book manuscript, titled Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life, tries to capture a flavor of these emergences. On the one hand, it is a multi-sited ethnography of emergent genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. On the other hand, it traces the historical emergence of what he calls biocapital in the late 20th century, which asks questions of the nature and manner of the co-production of economic and epistemic value in the life sciences today. In the former register, Sunder Rajan's work has followed a number of actors - scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and policymakers - involved in genomics research and market development in a range of sites in the US and India (in the US, primarily in the Bay Area; in India, primarily in Delhi, Bombay and Hyderabad). In the latter register, his work engages social theories of epistemology, political economy, ethics, subjectivity, language and value (most directly the analyses of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida), in order to provide ways to think about a current moment in world history that is significantly shaped by technoscientific capitalism. The book is forthcoming from Duke University Press.