Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  From the “Biotech Century” to “Biology Is Technology”

  The phrase “biotech century” can be readily traced to Jeremy Rifkin’s 1999 bestselling cautionary book by the same name. As Rifkin points out, his book was part of an ongoing conversation, “on the eve of what many in the scientific and business community [were] calling the ‘Biotech Century’” (xv). Much of that conversation began two years earlier when a cloned Finnish Dorset named “Dolly” was suddenly thrust onto the global stage, a “trigger event” that “put the whole world into synchrony over biotechnology for the first time” (Bauer et al. 2002: 15). And while a sympathetic image of Dolly’s sheepish face regularly accompanied media coverage of her birth, the Dorset quickly became a symbol for an unwelcome biotechnological future driven by human cloning.

  In response to Dolly’s birth, Bill Clinton spoke from the White House Rose Garden to propose a legislative ban on all forms of human cloning, arguing that “nothing makes … [our] moral obligation more clear than the troubling possibility that these new animal-cloning techniques could be used to create a child.” At stake, for Clinton, was nothing less than “our most cherished belief about the miracle of human life and the God-given individuality each person possesses” (1997). Despite his affirmation of human exceptionalism, Clinton conceded that Dolly’s birth reconfirmed the underlying shared biomateriality of human and animal life or, in other words, the applicability of “animal-cloning techniques” to the creation of a human “child.” Seen as a threat to both liberal humanism’s conception of “individuality” and religious beliefs about the “miracle of human life,” somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) initially provoked reactionary responses. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, legislatures around the globe hotly debated human cloning. The United Nations, for example, took up the issue between 2001 and 2005. Ultimately, however, widespread dissension about what counted as “the human” doomed most of these legal prohibitions, even as some informal agreements were reached.

  At the heart of the debate was the question of whether or not therapeutic cloning of human stem cells was the same as the reproductive cloning of human beings. Most scientists and investors believed these were two very different procedures; however, the religious right, especially in the United States, whose rhetoric of “family values” dominated public discourse at the time,1 insisted on lumping together therapeutic and reproductive cloning. Thus, in this early twenty-first-century context, stem cell research became locked in the “culture wars” along with Christian conservatives’ opposition to abortion, birth control, feminism, evolution, multiculturalism, and homosexuality. Indeed, in George W. Bush’s first primetime address to the nation, he appealed to his conservative base by announcing an executive order that stopped funding for the use of new human embryonic stem cells in public research, professing that “human life is a sacred gift from our Creator” (2001). On this front, then, the biotech century was off to a slow start.

  In stark contrast, during this same period, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was greeted with celebratory images of human exploration, national triumph, and entrepreneurial success. During their joint press conference to announce the near-completion of the project, both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair evoked Francis Crick and Jim Watson’s discovery of DNA as an example of an ongoing “Anglo-American partnership” in bioscience (2000). Clinton’s opening remarks likened the HGP to Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the “American Frontier … a map that … forever expanded … our continent,” thereby perpetuating the settler colonial ideology of Manifest Destiny. While repeatedly claiming the HGP would serve “the common good of all humankind,” both leaders emphasized that American and British “biotechnology companies are absolutely essential in this endeavor.” After all, they argued, the HGP was the product of “healthy competition” and “enhanced public-private cooperation” between “academia and their colleagues in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.” In other words, unlike stem cell research, which uncomfortably challenged both Christian and liberal humanist views of man’s sovereignty and superiority above other animals, the gene-centred research of the HGP easily upheld narratives of national expansion, Euro-centric humanism, and capitalist growth.

  But then, in 2003, the HGP released its results, and, to the shock of many, it turned out that humans possess a relatively small genome. Totalling just about 21,000 genes, the human genome was “half the size of the rice plant,” and only two-thirds the size of a “humble water flea” (Collen 2015: 8).2 This was not the encyclopaedic “book of life” scientists and investors had promised. True, the project made sequencing techniques faster and cheaper, and yes, the ability to translate sequences into risk profiles has provided some degree of preventative health benefits. Nevertheless, the overhyped idea that the HGP would uncover genetic cures for cancer or diabetes suddenly seemed “irrationally exuberant,” to borrow Alan Greenspan’s characterization of the 1990s. DNA, the “master molecule,” had failed to cosign man’s anthropocentric view of himself as the most evolved or “complex” animal on earth. And so, ten years after the sequencing, The New York Times reported that “geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease” (Wade 2010, June 12). Buried deeply in this same article, though, are the stirrings of a new speculative direction for the biotech century: “The slowly emerging explanation is that humans and other animals have much the same set of protein-coding genes, but the human set is regulated in a much more complicated way” (emphasis added). In the following years, this “slowly emerging explanation” transformed into a giant component of postgenomic research, unleashing a new wave of biotechnological speculation.

  While postgenomics simply refers to the period after the sequencing of the human genome, this new era is also characterized by a growing interest in gene regulation and the numerous interactions that occur within cellular environments.3 The postgenomic study of regenerative medicine, epigenetics, embryology, bacteriology, and stem cells all point to a conceptual shift away from DNA as a dictatorial molecule or sovereign power within an otherwise docile cell; instead, these fields envision an interactive relationship between DNA and their bacteria-rich cellular environments, which can cut, insert, deactivate, reactivate, and reprogram the DNA code directly.4 Still, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the technique used to clone Dolly the sheep way back in 1996,5 remains by far the most stunning example of a cellular environment radically transforming gene expression. As Sara Franklin puts it, “post-genomic biology is defined by a return to the cell—the first and primary unit of the life sciences, overtaken mid-century by the gene, but back in ascendancy in part because of Dolly (and vice versa, for she was, in a sense, an offspring of the cellular turn)” (2007: 33). In other words, postgenomics is haunted by Dolly, the pregenomic symbol of the biotech century.

  In response to this “cellular-turn,” Barack Obama, in 2009, lifted the limitations George W. Bush had placed on the use of embryological stem cells, but unlike his predecessors, Obama’s announcement was much shorter and quieter. In contrast to Clinton’s exuberance, Obama lowered expectations, warning that the “promise of stem-cell research … should not be overstated” (2009). But just as importantly, in contrast to Bush’s primetime address, Obama’s brief announcement was seemingly calculated to mitigate the prospect of stem cell research once again becoming ensnared in a thicket of political, ethical, and philosophical challenges.6 In this way, the biotech century proceeds, but now with more caution, managing within itself a central contradiction: on the one hand, only by selling visions of a biotech future can scientists and pharmaceutical companies attract the attention of much-needed investors, but, on the other hand, this attention always risks enflaming cultural and political disputes about the definition of human life, the status of patented life, the growth of medical inequality, and the overall desirability of these biotechnological futures.

  As the scientific and legal underpinnings of bioscience have changed ove
r the last couple of decades, the biotech century has also matured as a cultural signifier for naming the technological transformation of human belonging. From the outset, the idea of a biotech century signalled both the next chapter of human progress and a radical threat to traditional notions of human dignity and individuality. For example, Time magazine’s first issue of 1999 was dedicated to “The Future of Medicine: How Genetic Engineering Will Change Us in the Next Century.” On its cover Time displayed a bright green serpent twisted into the shape of a double-helix and wrapped around a tree branch. The visual reference to the ancient symbol for medicine, the Rod of Asclepius, is complicated by the snake itself, which curls off the branch to position its eye directly towards the reader. Unlike the iconographic serpents that appear in logos for the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association, and the World Health Organization, this snake has a personality and a presence of its own. It knows it is being watched and, therefore, appears both threatening and seductive. By animating the classical icon for medicine with a sinister allusion to the Christian story of Man’s seduction by a satanic snake, Time associates biotechnological knowledge with the genesis of Man’s mortality, forced labour, permanent exile, sexual humiliation, and gender assignment. If the cover wonders “how genetic engineering will change us in the next century,” then this evocation of Man’s fall suggests a perilous and widespread shift in the human condition (Fig. 1.1).

  Fig. 1.1Magazine covers that evoke Christian imagery to imagine the power of biotechnology, Time magazine (January 11, 1999) and The Economist (June 14, 2007)

  Eight years later, The Economist published a similar issue on what they called “Biology’s Big Bang” (2007). On its cover, The Economist reproduced a portion of Michelangelo’s painting “Adam’s Creation” from the Sistine Chapel, which depicts the hand of God reaching down from heaven to touch the out-stretched hand of Man. Here, the two hands are front-and-centre and a rainbow-coloured strand of DNA fills the gap between Adam and God’s fingers: a spark of life or squiggle of electricity. Like Time, The Economist deploys Christian imagery to visualize biotechnology, hinting that the crackling power of biotechnology might jump the ontological gap and bestow onto Man the godlike power to design life by hand. Significantly, whether depicting a benevolent deity or an evil snake, both newsmagazines imagine the coming century as an encounter with a transcendent technology that promises to permanently alter traditional western and Christian conceptions of the human.

  One interpretation of this repetition can be gathered from The Economist article, “Biology’s Big Bang,” which asserts the historical analogy, “what physics was to the 20th century, biology will be to the 21st” (2007: 13). In relation to twentieth-century physics, the idea of a techno-scientific “big bang” recalls the image of a mushroom cloud and the weaponization of physics through the creation of the atom bomb. After all, “what physics [became] to the 20th century” was a nuclear arms race that, after 1989, established the United States as the sole global hegemon. In other words, one way to interpret the repeated Christian vision of Man’s fall or ascension due to biotechnology is as an anxious analogue for a hegemonic world order that is rooted in the cultural traditions of Euro-North American humanism.

  This suspicion that biotechnology could challenge the cultural authority of western humanism is best captured by the historian Francis Fukuyama in his cautionary book Our Posthuman Future. Here Fukuyama revisits his well-known argument that “after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, older, more familiar patterns of [human] behavior reasserted themselves,” leading to a “worldwide convergence on liberal democracy” (2002: 12). According to Fukuyama, this proved the “tenacity of human nature” to reject socialist “utopian political movements that sought to create an earthly heaven by radically rearranging the most basic institutions of society” (2002: 14). Controversially, in the late 1990s, Fukuyama characterized this supposed alignment of liberal democracy, global capitalism, and human nature as “the end of history.” However, in a stunning reversal, Fukuyama now believes “that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will … move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history” (2002: 7). Under the heading “Biotechnology and the Recommencement of History,” Fukuyama echoes a sentiment shared by many prognosticators: “we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history,” and at least for Fukuyama, this means that “social engineers and utopian planners” might yet utilize biotechnology to upset the hypothetical alignment of capitalist democracy and human nature (2002: 15). Therefore, according to Fukuyama, the biotech century is best understood as a return to historical struggle, which he predicts will take the form of a contest over who or what counts as human.

  Expanding on these concerns, E.O. Wilson, the renowned biologist, offers a vision of the biotech future that illustrates many of the common underlying assumptions about human nature and civilizational progress that inform other popular prognostications. Wilson too contrasts the biotech century to twentieth-century physics: “This is a century of Biology. Physics has had its good time, but now, it’s going to be Biology. This is the century of synthesis” (2008). But Wilson struggles, at times, to square this prediction with his underlying humanism. Indeed, for Wilson, the conflict triggers a vociferous defence of the humanities, where he argues that biotechnological “change in the human condition” poses a “problem best solved within the humanities” (2015: 60). In part, this is because the humanities, for Wilson, are “addicted to anthropocentricity” and so analyse “the same old (human) story, with the same themes, the same archetypes, the same [human] emotions” (2015: 42). For Wilson, this is a useful narcissism not only because the “function of anthropocentricity … is the sharpening of our social intelligence,” but more importantly because the humanities’ supposed insularity also preserves a basic “existential conservatism” (2015: 43, 60). That is, for Wilson, the humanities should become a bioethical enterprise charged with policing and promoting a conservative notion of human nature.7

  To better grasp Wilson’s conservative vision of the humanities, we must first recognize its sociobiological premises. Wilson’s appraisal of the humanities rests heavily on a narrative that locates humanity’s origins in their prehistoric domestic and labour practices. Specifically, the development of “eusociality” or “true sociality” is achieved when groups “cooperatively rear the young across multiple generations” and “divide labor through the surrender by some members of at least part of their personal reproduction in a way that increases the ‘reproductive success’ of other members” (2015: 61).8 For Wilson, the “campsite” functions as the prehistoric image of human eusociality. According to this “hunter-gatherer” model, the construction of a campsite allowed hunters to leave their young offspring in the care of others, while, in exchange, they hunted for “high-energy” meat to bring back to the domestic sphere. To be clear, for sociobiologists, this is not just one historical example of many possible alternative social arrangements; this is the origin story of human sociality as such. Moreover, by locating this scene of domestic cooperation in a prehistorical period, the “hunter-gatherer” prototype not only advances a proto-patriarchal division of labour, but it also obscures any experience of social conflict, political struggle, protest, oppression, resistance, or dissatisfaction that surely accompanied this historically contingent arrangement of campfire-life.

  Nevertheless, the campfire prehistory shapes Wilson’s thinking, and it clearly informs his characterization of science as engaged in a “hunter-gatherer” relationship with the humanities. Accordingly, the masculinized sciences go off to hunt for meaty knowledge in unfamiliar territories far from the domestic campfire, while the feminized humanities stay at home to reproduce the cultural norms that maintain group cohesion. Wilson writes, “the social intelligence of the campsite-anchored prehumans … are best expressed in … [what] we have come to call the humanities” (2015: 22).
Even though “humanities scholars by and large have little grasp of the otherwise immense continuum of space-time on Earth,” they are experts about “tiny segments of continua” that constitute their “small box of awareness” around the campfire (2015: 186, 51). In contrast, Wilson often describes science as exploring the wilderness beyond the campfire, “measur[ing] the dimensions of the real cosmos” (2015: 50). And this is not just a metaphor for Wilson. It is an expression of an entirely naturalized division of labour, knowledge, and gender that cannot be contested—especially not by the humanities—without collapsing the sociobiological basis of human nature.

  But Wilson’s theory is merely preamble to his vision of a biotechnological future whose basic contours are shared by many futurologists. When Wilson finally jumps from his prehistorical narrative to the biotech century, his eusocial balance-of-power is thrown dramatically out of whack. First Wilson predicts that in the coming decades new biotechnologies will inundate humans with existential dilemmas arising from “volitional evolution,” automation, and intelligent robotics. He writes:With more and more decision making and work done by robots, what will be left for humans to do? Do we really want to compete biologically with robot technology by using brain implants and genetically improved intelligence and social behavior? This choice would mean a sharp departure away from the human nature we have inherited, and a fundamental change in the human condition. (2015: 59)

  The issue of labour is critical here. To compete with robots requires “fundamentally” changing human nature, which Wilson is loath to do. So instead, Wilson turns to the humanities not only to defend human nature but also to answer the question, “what will be left for humans to do?” In a key passage Wilson explains:In time, after reaching an immense size and unimaginable complexity, [scientific discovery and technological advances] will certainly slow and stabilize at a much lower level of growth. Not to worry. By the time the process has set in, likely in this century, the role of science and high technology will, as expected, be beneficent and far more pervasive than now. But—and this is the most important part—science and technology will also be the same everywhere, for every civilized culture, subculture, and person. Sweden, the United States, Bhutan, and Zimbabwe will share the same information. What will continue to evolve and diversify almost infinitely are the humanities. (2015: 57)