helmreich - trees and seas

8/9/2019 Helmreich - Trees and Seas

1/19

S T E F A N H E L M R E I C HMassachusetts Institute of Technology

T rees an d seas of information:Alien kinship and the biopolitics of gene transfer in marinebiology and biotechnology

A B S T R A C TExamining discussions of "lateral gene transfer" inmarine biology and biotechnology, I maintain that"natural" bonds between genealogy and classifica-tion in biology may be dissolving. I argue that ma-rine microbial biology is good to think about withthe rise of new kinships and biopolitics organizedless around practices of "sex" than politics of"transfer." I draw on fieldwork among academicand industry marine b iologists to explore implica-tions of rhizomatic, informatic, watery articulationsof "bare life." [biopolitics, kinship, gene transfer,anthropology of science, maritime anthropology,biotechnology]

I n Western scientific culture, at least since Charles Darwin, the familytree h as been an a lgorithm for thinking ab out evolutionary genealogy,origins, and identity. The object that trees have been asked to tracehas been heredity, famously figured in the sym bol of blood or blood-lines, though mo re lately rend ered in the idiom of genetics. But geneshave been enlisted to do som ething blood was never asked to do, and that isprovide the substance that gathers together al l living organisms on earth,throu gh the ramifying lineages of animals, p lants, fungi, p rotists, and bacte-ria, and across prokaryotes and eukaryotes. As this list illustrates, the fivefolddivision of life into kingdoms has coexisted with a twofold distinction basedon the abse nce or presence of a nuclear m embrane; the partitions have notbee n strictly com me nsu rate, bu t they have been com patible. And both havefound their an cho rs in genealogy, which D arwin named the ideal principlefrom which to generate "natural classification" (1859:411-434). Such genea-logical classification, as Marilyn Strathern (1992a) has argued, derived forDarwin from Victorian social practices of family record keeping.1 Readingsuch kinship customs onto the organic world, Darwin effectively naturalizedand universalized them, suggesting through a now commonplace epistemo-logical reversal that such practices were themselves em anation s of a naturallogic organizing all relatednes s.

Such a tale prov ides on e origin story for David Schne ider's famous claimthat "in American cu ltural con ception , kinship is defined as biogenetic. Thisdefinition says that k inship is whatever the bioge netic relationship is. If sci-ence discovers new facts about biog enetic relationsh ip, then this is what kin-ship is and was all along" (1968:23). One expectation of Schneider's pro-nou nce me nt was that as the disciplines of biology got a firmer fix on genes,Euro-American folk n otions of genealogy might find tighter confirmation. Asanthropologists studying reproductive and genetic technologies in the con-text of kinship studies have found, h owever, "new facts abou t biogenetic re-lationship " do not always have such straightforward or consolidating mean-ings for kinship imaginaries (see Franklin 2001; Franklin and McKinnon 2000 ).2In her introduction to Cultures of Relatedness, Janet Carsten argues that, in theage of in vitro fertilization, cloning, and the labo ratory transfer of genes acrossspecieswhen cultural practice must be mobilized to guide "biology" to-ward social goalsthe notion that nature grounds social relations "appears

American Ethnologist 30(31:340-358. Copyright 2003, American Anthropological Association.


2/19

Trees and seas of information A m e r i c a n E t h n o l o g i s t

to have been destabilized" (2000:3). In this article, I point toan unexpected arena in which "new facts about biogeneticrelationship" may disturb one facet of biogenetics' foundingfunction for cultural classification, and indeed, for Darwin's"natural classification." It is an ex treme case, the case of lat-eral gene transfer in microbes, and it may uproot the verybase of what biologists call the "tree of life," that structurelinking together all life on earth in a great biogenetic genea-logical branching (Doolittle 2000; Pennisi 1999; Woese2000 ). The new facts of gene transfer may unfas ten links be-tween genealogy and classification, between trees and theorganisms they purport to organize. I argue that there areimplications extending beyond the concerns of microbialmolecular taxonomy; new kinship and biopolitical imagi-naries may be in the making.

My story begins in the deep sea, in the microbial ecolo-gies around hydrothermal vents, undersea locations wheretectonic plates meet and molten rock emerges from theearth's crust, dosing the ambient water with superheatedminerals. These are sites where dwell microbes capable ofliving without light, creatures that engage in c hem osynthe-sis, the production of organic compounds using energyfrom chemical reactions, like the oxidation of hydrogen sul-fide, endemic to vents. Hydrothermal vents cap tured my at-tention when I discovered marine biological accounts ofhow these ecologies m ight stretch scientific unde rstanding sof the cond itions that could sup port life. Having previouslystudied amp lifications of the definition of life in the field of"Artificial Life," a hybrid of comp uter science and theo reti-cal biology devoted to mo deling organisms as information-processing systems (Helmreich 200 0), I found my attentionriveted by the strange hab its and materialities of these d eep-sea chemosynthetic creatures. I found out, through readingpopular a nd scholarly texts, that vent m icrobes were consid-ered potential links to the earliest earthly life, having traits incommon with both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and thatsome biologists had wondered whether such creaturesmight suggest the outlines of life on lightless alien worlds(Bock and Goode 1996). I learned that accomm odating suchcreatures into existing taxonomy was pressing for a de eperrooting of the tree of life. As I began to interview scientistsworking with these creatures, however, the picture turnedout to be considerably less clear. It had b ecom e evident thatthese microbes shuffled genetic information back and forthwith their contemporaries, moving genes laterally (withingenerations), not just vertically ("down" generations), anactivity mixing up their own and othe rs' genealogies, mak-ing it difficult to arrive at a roo t for the tree of life.

In this article, I argue that the taxonomic untidinesssuch microbes have introduced through their lateral genetransfer rea ches beyond issues in phylogeny and molecularsystematics into arenas adjacent to kinship concerns andbiopolitics. The scrambling of the biogenetic phylogeneticsignal that these cre atures enact has implications for the in-

tegrity of Darwin's link between genealogy and taxonomyas well as, perhaps, for the biogenetic kinship imaginaryoutlined by Schneider. More interesting, however, may bethe entailme nts of gene transfer for biopolitics those rela-tions of power organized around the management of bio-logical systems, including those of which h um an s are a part(Foucault 1978). In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and BareLife, philosopher Giorgio Agamben (following HannahArendt and rephrasing Foucault) argues that biological lifeas suchwhat he calls "bare life"has c ome "to occupy thevery center of the political scene of modernity" (1998:3). Henotes that tracking changes in what counts as bare lifeonce, functional anatom y; later, with Darwin, the pr incipleof heredity; today, genetic codes requires scrutinizing thescientific practices that make this sub stance available to thecalculations of biopolitics. I maintain here that we are see-ing the rise of an inform atically inflected bare life that is in-creasingly agenealogical, and I argue that tracking the rami-fications of this bare life in the circuits of marine microbialbiology and biotechnology can provide an instructive viewinto the limits and possibilities of this fluid substance. As Ihope to demonstrate, marine microbes are good to thinkwith about kinship and changing relations between "soci-ety" and "biology"that is, biopolitics.3Foucault argued that in the 19th century new concep-tualizations of the relation of individuals to populationsarticulated in part by nasce nt evolutionary theoryfocusedstate attention on the sexual behavior and reproductivehealth of national citizenries, something that changed howgovernmen tality worked and, in its extreme expression, ledto eugenics. The biopolitics of our contemporary world,however, are different; genomics and transgenics are noteugenics, and they enable different biopolitical constella-tions, ones not so neatly organized around genealogy andbirth. When genes become information and are made leg-ible through gene sequen cing and bioinformatics (the use ofcom puters to organize and analyze biological data), the bio-politics that result may well be new; they may be transspeci-fic and translocal.4 When the genes in question belong towaterborne creatures like marine microbesvariouslyscripted as cre atures that can offer views into the origin oflife (Corliss et al. 1980), resources for pharmaceutically andindustrially useful biotechnological products (Robb 2000),and tokens for rethinking the nature of property in fluid,often ambiguously territorialized zones like the so-calledhigh seas or ocean commonssuch biopolitics may fastentogether g enes, ecologies, global biogeochemical process es,and legal and political economies at national and trans-national scales.In French DNA, Paul Rabinow writes,

we now have a more problematized understanding ofthe bios in biopower. That the new genom ic knowledgeswill form assemb lages with social and political networks

341


3/19

A m e r i c a n E t h n o l o g i s t Volume 30 Number 3 August 2003

is clear; precisely how chang es in bios will interact withold and new forms of power relations is open to ques-tion, and the evolution must be observed and analyzed.[1999:15]In this article, I seek to contribute to the analysis of suchevolution, asking how a genomically shuffled bios might beinserted into new biopolitics. I argue that if "sex" was thepivot po int of classical biopolitics, tying together both indi-viduals and populations as well as subjects and states,"transfer" will be the logic and practice through whichgen om ic assem blages will be netwo rked to social and politi-cal formations. Exactly what kinds of assemblages will bewebb ed together by transfer is of course very much underconstruction. 1 consid er here a few possibilities, elaboratingon fieldwork 1 have done amon g m arine microbiologists andbiotechnologists.

Detailed connections are drawn from ethnography Iconducted at the following locations: the Monterey BayAq uarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, insummer 2000; at a symposium on microbial biotechnologyat the Center of Marine Biotechnology in Baltimore, Mary-land, in July 200 1; and at the F ourth Asia-Pacific M arineBiotechno logy C onferen ce, held at the University of Hawai'iin Honolulu in April 2002. This fieldwork included inter-views and participation in scientific lectures and symposia; Ialso read extensively on rece nt m arine m icrobiology. I wasinspired to do this work by earlier attendance at a PublicOcean Fair held in Monterey, in coordination with theUnited States' First National Ocean Conference in June1998, where I happe ned upon persistent enunciations of thema xim that th e "sea is life" (see the California?! 1998). Whilefinishing up my project about Artificial Life scientists, whooften claimed that information processing was life, I wasstruck by the resuscitation of the maxim that "water is life." Icam e to wo nde r if a new bare life might be in the making or,indeed, whether "information as life" and "water as life"might not be recombining in the age of marine genomicsand biotechnology. Certainly, microbial gene transfer andgenetic engineering are not unique to marine biology;however, I think this context brings into special relief thebiopolitical networks within which new bare life mightmaterialize. Let me begin with a story about category-confounding m icrobes.Trees of information: Lateral gene transfer andthe ret iculat ions of al ien kinshipThis is a story of scientificand ethnograp hic inquiry, be -ginning for m e with a July 2000 discu ssion w ith m icrobial bi-ologist Ed DeLong at the M onterey Bay Aquarium ResearchInstitute (MBARI), the resear ch-o riented sibling of the Mon-terey Bay Aquarium. DeLong has been a pioneer in usinggenom ic technique s to investigate the doings of marine mi-

crobes. After hearing DeLong speak at MBARl's summeropen house, where he discussed the role of microbes insearching for the origin of life, in shaping the chemistry ofthe sea and atmosphere (DeLong called these creatures"stewards of our planet"), and in biotechnological enter-prise, I approached him to ask about the vent creatures Ihad read so much about. We set up an interview. I walkedinto DeLong's office prepared to ask about vent microbesand their evolutionary and ecological relationships. I hadread of the discovery of these microbes on the underseaGalapagos Ridge in 1977 and 1979, by scientists diving in theresearch submersible Alvin. I had also read th at in 1990, mi-crobiologist Carl Woese, along with a couple of colleagues,had argued that microbes at the se vents were "members of aclass that seemed to have undergone less evolutionarychange th an any other living species on the planet, implyingthat their a ncestors were pe rhap s the original forms of life"(Broad 1997:112; see Woese et al. 1990, also Woese and Fox1977). I had learned too that these hyperthermophilicvery-hot-temperature-lovingmicrobes, along with theirrecently discovered cold- and salt-loving, methane-meta-bolizing similars (all called "extremophiles," or "loving ex-trem es"; see DeLong 1998), had b een gathered into a newlycreated taxonomic category above the kingdom level: thedom ain. In an article en titled "Towards a Natural System ofOrganisms"an explicit nod to Darwin, who wrote in Origin," I believe [the] elemen t of descent is the h idden bond of con-nexion w hich na turalists have sought u nder the term of theNatural System" (1859:433, emphasis added)Woese etal.(1990) argued that genealogies guided by molecular genet-ics led the way tow ard a view of life on earth as divided intothree domains: Bacteria, Eucarya, and the new microbialgroup Archaea, meaning "ancient ones."5 This nomenclaturalmove, widely tho ugh not universally accepted by the mid-1990s, amplified the framework of Linnaean taxonomy bycreating a new level, a step taken in part because of Archaea'sapparent genetic uniqueness, a property that in turn ren-dered them cand idates for the most conserved life on earth,a direct line to the planet's vital history. Woese, along withcommon biological wisdom (see Zuckerkandl and Pauling1965), held that following this linefilling in family trees, or

phylogenies, along the waycould be done by chasinggenes back to a ncestral origins. Molecular phylogeny wouldconfirm and extend large-scale o rganismic phylogeny. Stu-den ts of descent theory in kinship studies will not find thisview surprising.As DeLong told me , finding g enes that lead cleanly backto ancestral destinations requires looking for particularkinds of genes, genes that accumu late rando m mutations ata constant rate, that are sheltered from the vicissitudes ofnatural selection, and that can therefore act as molecularclocks. Woese had argued that small-subunit ribosomal

RNAgenetic material from ribosomes (cellular organelleswhere protein is synthesized)was a good candidate for

342


4/19

Trees and seas of information Amer ican E thnologist

such a chronometer because it is present in all genomesand, since its function is so fundam ental (see Doolittle 1996:8797), it is not likely to change much over time. More impor-tantly, Woese considered ribosomal RNA the cen ter of whathe termed the cell's "information processing systems" (2000:8393)a complex of genes coding for replication, transcrip -tion, and translation; in other words, the part coding forcoding itself. As one researcher has ventriloquized this view,"Transcription and translation genes are central to the 'es-sence of the organism.' They encode the hardware thatreads the exchangeable genes for the cellular software"(Doolittle 1999:2127). Family trees planted in the g round ofthis "essence" produced Archaea as quite distinct from Bac-teria and Eukaryotes. The traits Archaea shared with pro-karyotes and eukaryo tes looked very early on to be exp lainedby the possibility that Archaea could be ancestral to both .6Such an idea was reinforced by descriptions of hyper-thermophilic Archaea as inhabiting the kinds of extreme en-vironments tha t may have ch aracterized early earth. Somescientists argued that amino acids could only have origi-nated in chemically rich water where tem peratures soaredabove boiling and where high pressure prevented thesetemperatures from denaturing such complex configura-tions (Corliss et al. 1980). It looked like the family tree for lifeon earth would turn out to be rooted, as many had sus-pected, underwater. As 1 spoke with DeLong, I mused thatthe information provided by genes looked to be leading theway to the origin of life. Genetic inform ation, a s a sort of kin-

ship substance, looked to be constitutionally thicker thanthe watery worlds inside and outside the organism throughwhich it had to be transmitted.At this juncture in our discussion, DeLong paused tosay that in the late 1990s, a number of microbial biologistsbegan to point out that assu mptions about linear genealogymight be all wrong for these organisms. W hen research erstried to corrobo rate ribosomal RNA phylogen ies of Archaea,Bacteria, and Eucarya by choosing genes other than thoserelated to "information processing systems," the trees thatresulted were quite contradictory. Crafting phylogenies, as 1had learned from talking with DeLong's colleagues atMBARI, depends on a complex set of bioinformatic tools:DNA sequence databases, techniques for comparing se-quences or whole genomes, and computer software for us-ing these comparisons to generate possible relationshipsbetween genomes or organisms, including tree relation-ships (see M ackenzie 20 01; Thacker 200 0).' Similarities insequencesknown as homologiescan be exam ined to as-certain whether they are the result of common ancestry.Software packages like PHYL1P and MacCladepopularamong my interlocutorsaid in the making of family treesand do so by allowing researche rs to play arou nd w ith differ-ent assumptions about parsimony, generation lengths, ormolecu lar clock rates, to take a few examp les.8

In 1996, molecular biologist Kim Borges. signaling theprospect of classificatory systems that might embrace poly-glot categoriesm uch like that othe r Borges, whose hetero-geneous "Chinese Encyclopedia" was memorialized in thepreface to Foucault's The Order of Things (1970)w rote, "Itis possible to support four possible rooted universal tree to-pologies, depen ding on the protein encoding genes ch osen "(Borges et al. 1996). A variety of theory-d riven decisionsmust be m ade on the bioinformatic path to a tree, and thesechoices take on a life of their own, once plugged into pro-grammed procedures.9 Rooting a tree requires groundingone's logic in better or worse assumptions, as one team ofmolecular biologists concerned with Archaea noted in anarticle I discovered after my conversation with DeLong:

There is in fact in principle no way ... to root ... auniversal tree based only on a collection of homo logoussequenc es. We can root any sequence-b ased tree relat-ing a restricted group of organ isms (all anim als, say) bydetermining which point on it is closest to an "o utgro up"(plants, for examp le). But there can be n o such organis-mal outgroup for a tree relating all organisms, and thedesignation of an outgro up for any less-embrac ing treeinvolves an a ssum ption, justifiable only by other u nre-lated data or argum ent. [Doolittle and Brown 1994:6724]

As Geoffrey Bowker (2000) p uts it in a discus sion of biodiver-sity database s, the problem here is that the data are radically"singular"; that is, they cannot be co mpa red with anythingelse until that som ething else is specified, which tu rns ou t toinvolve specifying the initial object of inquiry, in this case"all organisms" an d their relationships.Given the logical tangles endemic to building familytrees, it may be no surprise that conse nsus phylogen ies havebeen elusive. After all, as Adrian Mackenzie has argued,"Bioinformatics, when it works on comparing sequences,cuts across genealogical descent and historical unidirec-tionality" (2001:11). However, DeLong continued, some re-searchers were beginning to believe that there may besomething other than methodological heterogeneity atwork. They believe that the genetic "information" containedin microbes like the Archaeaand the Bacteria, too, by thewaymay itself not be behaving in a predictable genera-tion-to -gen eration way. It may be difficult to build trees notonly because of the tools we use but also becau se the "infor-mation" genes carry may he smeared laterally across gen-erations, in addition to cascading vertically "down" genera-tions.10Discerning that I was unusually interested in thisscrambling of the genealogical logic underwriting evolu-tionary notions of relatednes s. DeLong han ded me a photo-copy of a 1999 article from Science bya man he called an "ex-Carl Woese kind of guy." microbiologist W. lord Doolittle.

entitled "Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree."As 1 sat in a Mexican restaurant-bar outside Monterey just

343


5/19

A m e r i ca n E t h n o lo g i s t Volume 30 Number 3 August 2003

after th e interview, 1 read throu gh the article, in whichDoolittle argued that molecular phylogenetics may, in fact,reveal that on e cann ot do phylogeny for very early microbes,for the first e arthly life. The relation ships of early organism smay not be treelike in character or nature. As Doolittlephrased it, the tree of life would turn out to be a net:

If .. . different genes give different tre es, and ther e is nofair way to suppress this disagreement, then a species(or phylum ) can " belong" to man y genera (or kingdoms)at the same time: There really can be no universal phylo-genetic tree of organisms based on such a reduction togenes. [1999:2128, em pha sis a dded ]11A later article I found on the web, written by John Paul, aprofessor in the De partm ent of Marine Sciences at the Uni-versity of South Florida, put it this way:

The sequ encing of complete genomes of archaea, bac-teria, and eukaryo tes has clearly "shaken the tree of life";[it] has shown that microbes are mosaics of acquiredgene s. In fact, th e ro oting of the universal tree is highlyproblematic because of multiple transfer events be-tween the king dom s. [Paul 1999; and see Pennisi 1998]12(See Figures 1 and 2, rep rod uce d from Doo little 1999, for arepre sen tation of what th e tree of life looks like before and aftertaking lateral gene transfer into account.) Deleuzian discus-sions a bo ut rh izom es as alternatives to trees find a scientificanalo g he re. So much for the genealogical origin of species.

Doolittle was challenging the logic at the he art of ribo-somal RNA reasoning, the idea that transcription and trans-lation genes were central to the "essence of the organism."Doolittle pointe d out that "cells do not actually know what isfundam ental to them, which of their genes encode hardwarerather than software" (1999:2127). The language of compu-tation that formats this discussionand that is indicted by

Domain BacteriaKingdom

Bacteria Eukarya Archaea

Figure 1. "The current consensus or standard model" of the "universal treeof life" (Doolittle 1999:2125, figure 2).

Figure 2. "A reticulated tree, or net, which might more appropriatelyrepresent life's history" (Doolittle 1999:2127, figure 3).Doolittlepoints us toward many molecular geneticists'commitments to an abstract understanding of "informa-tion"as a formal, quantifiable property of a message orprogramthat turns out not always to be consistent withthe p articula r m aterialities of so-called genetic information.That is, the me anin g of information as an instruction set orprogram only partially overlaps with biochemical specificitiesinstantiated in DNA (and see Kay 2000).It occurred to me that what was happening here wasthat a biogenetic understan ding of relatedness had pressedresearchers into phylogenies based on genes, had grafted agenetic logic onto the arborescent image of the family tree(see Malkki 1992). On this view, relations of species could bediscerned by following genes through the naturalized biopoli-tical objectsindividuals and populationsof Darwiniantheory. Rather than pointing toward a common ancestor,however, this focus fragmented the very object of inquiry."Natural classification"translated into the informationprocessing systems of genealogyturned back on itself totake apart its own constitution as naturally classiflcatory.Readers might not find this surprising, since the paniculate,discrete, inform atic logic that has inflected biology since therise of genetic codes has long been at work disaggregatingthe genealogical ontologies of such items as races and spe-ciesas Stephen Jay Gould (1977), Sarah Franklin (2001),Paul Gilroy (2000), Donna Haraway (1997), Lily Kay (2000),Paul Rabinow (1992), and many others have argued. As Har-riet Ritvo maintains in The Platypus and the Mermaid (1997),taxonomic systems have long embedded philosophicalcommitments containing the seeds of their own decon-struction (and see Bowker and Star 2000). After all, as JohnPauland this time I mean the Second; that is, I do meanthe Pope writes in his introduction to a Vatican volume onevolution, although evolutionary theory "com plies with theneed for consistency with observed data," it also "borrows

certain notions from natural philosophy" (1998:4). Suchnotions can bend back to take apart their own p remises

344


6/19


As Doolittle was urging, scientists' traditional adher-ence to the tree image was in part the result of treating ge-netic information as an abstract entity: As he maintained,there is no part of the genomeno self-evident informa-tion-processing backbone sitting outside the material cir-cumstanc es of organisms. In m any w ays, this is a very con-temporary anthropological observation. As Strathern (1992b)has argued, when biotechnological practice seeks to makeexplicit exactly what kind of "nature" is meant to groundculture, this reveals that n ature to be culturally c onstituted.In this case, commitments to the notion that genes are in-formation explicitly dissolve when they run up against thematerial circumstances of lateral gene transferwhich inmany hyperthermophilic Archaea takes place in super-heated, high-pressure water.

It seemed to m e that understand ing the movement ofgenes across organisms entailed considering the physicalconditions und er which this could h app en. I was curious ifattention to lateral gene transfer would swing emphasisback to gene tic material, an d 1 wondered whether it mightturn out that for m any of the organisms that trade geneslike marine m icrobesthe p articular properties of the waterthey inhabit will turn o ut to be imp ortant for such transfer. Ihad read in an article by Paul that "terrestrially-derivedmodels of gene transfer may have no validity in m arine orother en vironm ents" (1999). But given that w ater is presentin all organisms, there seems nothing necessarily uniqueabou t marine environ men ts. And given that gene transfer isan outcome, not a mechanism, Paul's contention might beoverdrawn. But might it be that information is no t alwaysthicker than water? Might water some times act as a solventto break "information" down and facilitate its flow acrossboundaries? Was there something particular about waterthat impinged on this lateral gene transfer? At the risk ofputting the qu estion too poetically, was water as life dissolv-ing information as life? I decided I had to ask Dr. Doolittle.In summer 2001,1 contacted Doolittle by email and af-ter an exchange or two, I sent him an early version of this ar-gumen t, which he kindly read. Afterward we set up a p hon einterview. He argued that Archaea (and Bacteria) were u n-doing the tree metaphor for microbial life and complainedthat "people have deep paradigmatic com mitments to trees;they are wedd ed to genes and trees." Dr. Doolittlelike hisfictional near-nam esake, draw ing our attention to m enager-ies of creatures that confound species boundariesreiter-ated his argument that genes could not stabilize trees forthese creatures beca use "as few as five perce nt of the genesmay be faithful to one anothe r," a phrasing that bo th retainsand refuses the link between relatedness and heredity. (Inone article, Doolittle suggests that lateral gene transfer m aylead to dynamics "akin to adoption in their confusing ef-fects" [1997:12751].) But D oolittle was suspicious of my cu-riosity abo ut water "What are you, a Pisces?" he asked.He did not see that w ater as such had show n "gen etic infor-

mation" to be a metaphysical conceit, directing attention tothe material circumstances in which genes actually exist,and he said, "It's not so much that recent work on extremo-philic microbes and lateral gene transfer has materializedthe genome. We [microbial biologists] knew genes w ere m a-terial all along," but that "bioinformatics has dematerializedthe genome." I later recalled a passage from Adrian Macken-zie, who has written, "bioinformatics software systems cur-rently coming to bear on biotechnical research and innova-tion materially fortify the metaphor of life as informationsystem" (2001:2), and I saw Doolittle's point. It seemed tome, too, that another dynamic was in place here, one thatmight contradict Mackenzie's contention; bioinformaticsseemed to be allowing lateral gene transfer to become vis-ible. It was not w ater, but, ironically, information comp u-tationally rendered and instantiatedthat was being usedto den ature abstrac t notions of genetic information.Not in every instance, of course. "Information" contin-ues to b e used in ways solidifying traditional asso ciations ofgenetic information with genealogy. A marine biologist atPenn State, who works on hydrothermal vents put the phy-logenetic issue to me in terms directly borrowed from infor-mation theory: The "signal" of origin may n ot b e easily aud i-ble through the "noise" of gene transfer.13Although the image of a scrambled communicationfrom a remote so urce m ay destabilize any originary charac-ter of Archaea, it does not entirely displace an early figureused in connection with Archaea: the alien.14 Early storiesabout hyperthermophilic Archaea as the Earth's mostautochthonous residents often featured descriptions ofthese creatures as nearly extraterrestrial. Researchers haveviewed hydro thermal ecosystems as "mod els for sites wherelife might have originated on this planet and where extrater-restrial life is speculated to exist on Mars and Europa" (VanDover 1996:back cover). Science journalists have often de-scribed populations of hydrothermal life forms with colo-nial science fiction tropes: "an alien horde that thrivels] intotal darkness" (Broad 1997:109). As archaeal origins havebeen obscured, the alien rhetoric has attenuated these days.No longer do researchers consider these microbes alien in-vaders that may have seede d the p lanet in its infancy (once afavorite speculation of people in the field of astrobiology).Now, along with their bacterial and viral cohorts, the Ar-chaea have beco me agents of lateral gene transfer, installingalienness at m any sites around the root of the tree of life.It seemed that Doolittle and I were in agreem ent thatgenetic information must be understood as materially in-stantiated. W hat N. Katherine H ayles (1999) has called "themateriality of informatics" takes shape w ith respect to genetic-information in the context of particular cellular, organism ic,and evolutionary circumstances. Bioinformaticians whotake genetic data and build phylogenies based on treatinginformation as an abstract entity risk floating free of the

345


7/19


contingencies of the physical world (Doyle 1997; Kay 2000;Oyama2000).There has been intriguing fallout of this sort of forget-ting where the A rchaea have been concerned, too. Accord-ing to the life science editor for Science, Elizabeth Pennisi,some microbiologists have

suspected that the placement of the hyperthermo-philes, microbes that live at extremely high tempera-tures, toward th e bottom of the tree might be an artifactresulting from assumptions about how fast these mi-crobes evolve and on their initial discovery in extremeenv ironm ents remin iscent of what early life might haveexperienced. [1999]Archa ea's plac em ent near the b ottom of the tree of life

was based in part on the finding that the DNA in theribosomal genes of the organisms has lots of guanineand cytosine bases, an indication that their genomeshad b een a round long enough for certain bases to be-come over-represented. [Pennisi 1999]

But it turns out that these bases tend to dominate in thegenomes of organisms living in extreme environments, asthey help stabilize DNA (Penn isi 1999; see also Galtier et al.1999; Vogel 1999). Creatures with higher gu anine and cyto-sine conten t might be erroneously brou ght closer to the rootof the tree of life bec ause the therm al stresses to which theirgenomes are subject may slow down their molecular clock;assuming their clock to tick at the same rate as other crea-tures' would then place them too far back in time. In otherwords, comm itment to the idea that Archaea were "ancientones" living at the bottom of the sea came together with atreatm ent of "genetic information" as abstracted from its lo-cal substantiation in particular organisms in particular cir-cum stanc es, such as variously hot or cold, differently p res-sured, and diversely salty water. Such idealized geneticinformation was conflated withbut, to use Andrew Picker-ing's (1993) languag e, finally man gled, un don e by the ab-stractions of bioinformatics.13 The systematic conflation ofmetaphysical "information" with genetic "information"looks to have been de natu red by the gene-shuffling proper-ties of microb es.So, whe re do es this leave bare life? What em erges fromthis tale of lateral gene transfer is the possibility that ge neticinformation, ironically enough through bioinformatics,might be reacq uiring the materiality that was muted w hen itwas first theorized as "information." When speaking aboutthe transfer of genetic information demands talking abouttemperatures, the chemical properties of water, and soforth, it becomes difficult to treat information as a meta-physical principle (see Oyama 2000). When I spoke with

Doolittle about this, he pointed to colleagues who had be-come too attached to the computers on which they gener-

ated trees; he did not see that genetic material had becomenewly visible because of fissures in the information meta-phor, though he graciously added, "I supp ose you could ar-gue that I'm a part of some Hegelian dialectic that I don'tunderstandwhich might be fair enough, but I don't seethe shift in quite this way." The difficulty, he said, was meth-odological, even disciplinary; proper biologists never lostsight of materiality, were never blinded by analogies be-tween genes and information.Whichever is the case, the "bare life" at the root of thetree of life looks to be becoming agenealogical. Links be-tween life, genealogy, and classification have been desta-bilized. It would be easy to say this upends one of Darwin'sdearest premises, if one imagines he wanted the "hiddenbond of connexion" of descen t to lead to a unitary ancestor.But, even if Darwin was probably answering polygenistswho believed in multiple origins (especially for humans) inthe final sentenc e of Origin, his statement still reads as opento the m ultiplicity of bare life: "There is grandeur in this viewof life, with its several powers, having been originallybreathed into a. few forms or into one" (1859:490, emphasisadded). The frame of "a few forms" offers a path into imag-ining mu ltiple org anismic relationships, patterns of bioge-netic relatedness at once unitary and multiple, at once fa-miliar and alien.S e a s o f i n f o r m a t i o n : M a r in e b io t e c hn o l o g y an dt r a n ssp e ci f i c b i o p o l i t i csWhat might this resub stantialization, recorporealization ofgenetic information mean for biopolitics? What kinds of net-works, new socialities, might this n ew ba re life, this genomi-cally scrambled biosof heterogeneously materialized andrhizomatically dispersed genetic informationbe writteninto? I suggested in my introduction that "transfer" wouldbe the logic and practice conjoining new genomic assem-blages. I look now at the po litics of gene transfer in the prac-tice of marine biotechnology.Even if Doolittle had disabused me of the idea thatthere w as anything particular abou t water or seawater at is-sue in m icrobial gene transfer, I was struck by how much ofthe tree of life discussion seemed sited in the sea. More, Iwas impressed by the fact that, even though microbes them-selves make no hard distinction between land and seaecologies, scientists working in biotechnology were begin-ning to organize their endeavo rs a roun d a specifically ma-rine microbial biotechnologylooking to marine creaturesfor genetic materials useful in Pharmaceuticals and indus-trial products. Several institutions dedicated to marinebiotechnology have been launched in the past few years.The Center of Marine Biotechnology at the University ofMaryland and the Marine Byproducts Engineering Centerat the University of Hawai'i are just a couple. I decided totake a closer look.

346


8/19


Thinking back to DeLong's open house talk at MBARI,in which he m entioned biotechnological app lications of Ar-chaea, I began to learn more about the biotechnologies towhich archaeal hyperthermophiles might be useful. I wascurious, too, to know w hether lateral gene transfer had anyimplications for biotech and for the biopolitical frames intowhich such technologies might be inserted. And what didthe sea have to do with all of this, either as an em pirical orrhetorical site for biotechnology?I did some reading. I learned that the extreme tempe ra-tures at which vent microbes thrive are of interest in theprocess of gene amplification, because enzymes from thesecreaturesextremozymescan be used to make biochemi-cal reactions run hotter and faster. DNA polymerase derivedfrom hyperthermophiles well withstands the temperaturefluctuations required in the polymerase chain reaction, theprocess used to m ake copies of DNA (see Rabinow 1999). InWilliam Broad's Th e Universe Below, I read that

from a hot spring m ore than a mile deep in the Gulf ofCalifornia, amid dense thickets of tube worms thrivingin otherworldly darknes s, Holger W. Jannasch, a micro-biologist at Woods Hole, in 1988 isolated an Archaealhyperthermophile of the Pyrococcus genus. The mi-crobe was obviously special. It grew at temperatures ofup to 104 degrees Celsius and could withstand muchhigher heats for short periods of time. New EnglandBiolabs, Inc., of Beverly, Massachusetts, took the mi-crobe, isolated its DNA polymerase, cloned it, and thensold the enzyme, beginning in December 1991. It wasthe first time a deep-sea microbe had been brought tomarket. Appropriately enough, the trade name of theDNA polymerase was Deep Vent. "Thermostability, Fi-delity & Versatility from the Ocean Dep ths" read on e ofthe company's ads. [1997:280]

The transfer events herea microbe from the Gulf of Cali-fornia transported to Beverly, Massachusetts; a gene froman archaeon copied into another creatu re's genome (in thiscase E. coli);a polymerase moved from lab to marketplacethe bare life of Archaea a t the c enter of assem blages of deep-sea submersibles, biotech labs, and c orporations. These Ar-chaea were hyperlinked not just to other organisms throughgene transfer but also to new kinds of biotechnological sci-ence and capital. Many marine biotechnology centers, I dis-covered, worked in partnership with industrial con cerns.To learn m ore, I signed up for a workshop on extremo-philes at the Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB) inMaryland. Arriving in waterfront Baltimore one morning inJuly 2001,1 walked through a scattering of whimsical sculp-tures offish (a public art project called "Fish Out of Water"),past the city's Hard Rock Cafebrashly announcing itselfwith "Save the Planet" emblazoned across its logoandcame upon COMB, housed in a glass-windowed officebuilding covered by an undulating roof suggesting the mantle

of a mollusk. I arrived early, before the doors to the confer-ence were open, and wandered around a public area onthe ground floor. I read on one colorful poster aimed at chil-drennearby small furniture suggested day care andfieldtripsthatscientists work to improve the future using cutting-edgebiotech tools to investigate the oceansearth's lastfrontier. They strive to develop p roduc ts to improve ourlivesnew food sources; cures for cancer, AIDS, Alzhe-imer's; and clean up the plane t, from the bay outside tomarine ecosystems worldwide.

I walked up a flight of stairs and saw pain ted on th e wall thelegend "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man tofish and he eats for a lifetimeancient Chinese proverb."The biotechnological sea, it seemed, was to be a space ofbountyfitting, perhaps, in an age when fish populationsare famously dwindling. COMB scientists do work onbiotech for aquac ulture, and the quotation b rought to mindthe biblical miracle of loaves and fishes, finally realizedthrough the high-tech prom ise offish cloning.Or gene cloning. I'd com e here to learn about the prom -ises of multiplying, through genetic engineering, the usefuladaptation s of cloned Archaea. In the wo rkshop's first pres-entation, microbiologist Michael Madigan announced that"extremophiles represent valuable genetic resou rces for so-lutions to u nique biological pro blems" (2001). Shortly there-after, in a talk entitled "Archaeal Molecular Biology," an-other scientist opined that "the hyperthe rmop hiles are goldmines for biotechnologically important products that dem-onstrate enhanced biological activity and stability at hightemperatures." Extremophiles like Archaea had man y appli-cations aside from their use in gene am plification. M any Ar-chaea thrive on hydrogen sulfide, a toxic waste of the minin gand power industries. Several talks discussed Archaea'sability to break down this poisonou s co mp ound , a capacitythat made them of interest in bioremediation, in cleaningup the biosphere. I recalled that th e COMB website had an-noun ced work on biotech "tools with which to process an ddegrade a wide variety of natural and man-made sub-stances."16 This is a technological fix to a social problem andgathers force from its phrasing as a "natural" solution.Ecologically minded scientists, with the aid of industry, aregiving Archaea the opportunity to bend their adaptationstoward remediating deleterious effects of human activity.We might see this as a kind of m icrobiological ins tantiationof imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo 1989), where humans turnto a form of life imagined as primitive and in tune with na-ture to renounce and redeem their own depreda tions. Thebiological resources of the planet are called on to help theplanet heal itself. The transfer events here added anotherelement to the assemblage linking genes to capital: the"environment." Punning on Rabinow's "biosociality" -thatbiopolitics that cons titutes individuals not so nin th in relation

347


9/19


to populations but in relation to nongenealogical networksorganized around shared genetic polymorphisms, trans-genes, and th e like (and see Heath 1997; Rapp 1999; Taussiget al. in press)it seemed as though here I was looking at"gaiasociality": Genes would tie together not just people butalso microorganisms, metabolisms, people, and the planet.In gaiasociality, the globe, und ersto od as a cybernetic whole(see Haraway 1995), is enlisted as an important node in andcontext for relations among hum ans and nonhum ans.If such earth-healing secrets were locked up in extre-mophiles, how did scientists go about finding them? Bioin-formatics. Identifying interesting properties of Archaea de-pended on comparing gene sequences across creatures forsigns of useful prot eins . Using data from A rchaea, scientistsat COMB were looking to rationally design macromolecules,using comparative genomic analysis to infer, reconstruct,and modulate such properties as protein thermostability(see Robb 200 0). I learned from a talk at the symposium thatresearchers often go online to acquire sequences for crea-tures, using c om putatio nal tools like Cross BLAST (Basic Lo-cal Alignment Search Tool; version for Archaea available atht tp : / /comb5-156.umbi.umd.edu/genemate/) to comparegenomes point by point. In this technique one genome se-que nce is put along a horizontal axis, and a second is placedalong the vertical axis; similarities are noted by markingspo ts of coin cide nce. The m ore exactly diagonal the line, thebetter match. A schematic example:

GCTT

XX

XXT

Where genom es m atch up, scientists call these homologies.Searching for hom ologies, of course, m ight be aided by hav-ing a sense of which creatures are most closely related, onhaving to ha nd a family tree. Given that family trees lookedto be in trouble, however, I wondered how much this couldhelp. Homologies could be due to gene transfer. Did thatmatter? When I asked one researcher during a coffee breakhow he located organisms with promising properties, hesaid, "W ell, I wo uldn't want to be relying on phylogeny thesedays!" and suggested that finding genes proceeded muchmore opportunistically.What other implications did lateral gene transfer havefor b iotechnology? Shortly after this brief exchan ge, I hearda talk that posited lateral gene transfer as holding a lessonfor scien tists. A speaker interpreted it as akin to hu ma nbiotechnological enterprise, arguing that "natural geneticengineering is very comm on." The na ture at the heart of thisbiotechnology does not seem to bo one of biological con-

straints. I thought back to an argument of Rabinow'sthat,in the culture of late mod ernity, "nature will be m odeled onculture understood as practice. Nature will be known andremade through technique and ... become artificial, just asculture becomes natural" (1992:241). The "natural geneticengineering" of Archaea gives an organic heritage to a futurein which biology becom es technology. Bare life becomes aninformational vector of relentless connectivity, which inturn co mes to be seen as the nature of nature itself. As scien-tists know from experience, however, genetic engineering,even if it has "n atural" instan tiations, is more often than notmediated by constellations of institutional, market, andother forces. The social ecologies in which the lateral genetransfer of genetic engineering takes place are shot throughwith politics and econom ics.How? Almost a ye ar later, at a m eeting o n th e tree of lifeat the American Museum of Natural History in New YorkCity, I ran into W. Ford D oolittle, and w e had a conversationabout how microbial gene trading might lead to a prolifera-tion of phylogenies and of taxonom ies. He remarked that hehad overheard som eone at the meeting say, "If you own apate nt on an organism 's genom e and a taxonomist changesits nam e, you can lose your patent!" He said he had no ideawhether this was true but mused that if it was, scientistscould threaten other people's intellectual property by say-ing, "Look outI'm a licensed taxonomist!"

The remark resonated. I had just come back a fewweeks earlier from the Fourth Asia-Pacific Marine Biotech-nology Conference, held in Honolulu at the Marine Biopro-ducts Engineering Center. One of the plenary talks perfectlyembodied the anxieties condensed in Doolittle's joke abouttaxonomy. In a talk entitled "Tapping into Nature's Diver-sity for N ovel Biom olecules Discovery," delivered by a sci-entist at Diversa, a private biotech concern in San Diego, thespeakerafter offering th at "th e tree of life contains abro adarray of me tabolism s" and that his compa ny was "cultivat-ing organisms from all over the tree" for recombin ant natu-ral productsshowed us a microbial species the companyhad patented, Stryptomyces diversa, which perfectly em-bodies in its nam e w hat Don na Haraway (1997) has called ashift in biological nomenclature from "kind" to "brand." It ispossible, owing to lateral gene transfer, th at som eone mightfind ano ther n am e for this creature, emb edding it in a differ-ent set of relations. Indeed, on e perso n asked, at the end ofthe talk, "How do you define a species in microbes whenthey're shifting their genes all around? If you have some-thing that differs by one base from anoth er creature? Is thata different species?" The spea ker said n o, "a similarity of 70percent or mo re at the DNA level makes a m icrobial species,but th at's artificial an d convention al." Artifice and conven-tion, of course, are precisely what hold in place pate nt rights .

Some people in the audience at this meeting were dis-turbed. I spoke with a scientist from Chulalongkorn Universityin Thailand who complained that the Diversa scientist was

348


10/19

Trees and seas of information Amer ican E thnologist

"changing evolution." She saw the proper use of marinebiotechnology in the domain of aquaculture (for example,in biocontrol, trying to keep shrimp from being infected inaquacu lture pond s). She felt that engineering new creatureswould lead to runaway competition between microorgan-isms and people that could have deleterious effects. As sheput it, "If wefill he w orld with all these aliens, they will at-tack us and we will all die in 50 years." She saw keen differ-ences in how U.S. biotech and Southeast Asia biotech oper-ated. She said that U.S. scientists seemed to take for grantedthat they could chan ge natu re.

Even if the Diversa speaker might brush off the com-plaint that he was transforming nature, he was at pains tospeak carefully about the political dimensions of how Di-versa obtained rights to genes and metabolisms. He detailedthe benefit-sharing plans Diversa had with concerns in for-eign n ation-states. As he put it, "Gone are the days when youcan just send your scientists on vacation to collect samples.Now, you must have rights from governments to look forand commercialize biodiversity." He said that listenerscould rest assured that Diversa had 100 percent legal rightsto all genes and pathways, bu t that they kept firmly in viewthe need for sustainable use and equitable benefit-sharing(and that some revenue should go for conservation ["explo-ration of biodiversity should be contrasted with biopiracy;we should protect, not pillage"]). The speaker was talkinghere of course of bioprospecting the activity of looking forbiological resources useful in biotechnological enterpriseand of securing access and rights to these resources throughcontacts drawn up between host nation-states (or NGOs)and corporations or university research groups. There is agrowing literature in anthropology investigating the politi-cal economy of genetic material; much examines what h ap-pens when local knowledge abo ut plants or anim als is trans-formed into intellectual property that can be patented(Brush 1999; Hayden 2000; Moran et al. 2001; Orlove andBrush 1996). Here the re exist transfer events of many kinds.To date, there is relatively little social analysis of marinebioprospecting (though see Aalbersberg et al. n.d. andQanungo 2002 for short takes), particularly in areas of juris-dictional ambiguity, like the so-called high seas. As the Di-versa speaker said, the open oc ean is "fair gam e."

As it turns out, many interesting vent Archaea reside injust such legally ambigu ous a reas, being "primarily found inthe deep sea in areas beyon d national jurisdiction, typicallyoccurring in conjunction with volcanically active underseamo untains in water 3,00 0-4,000m dee p" (Glowka 1996:158).During an interview I condu cted at Penn State, a biologistshowed me a map of these mountainous ridges, pointingout that m any fall outside exclusive econom ic zone sthoseareas extending 200 nautical miles off the shores of terres-trial natio ns. Once " alien" in a fanciful sense, such Archaeaare "alien" as citizen creatures , which m akes accessing theirbiodiversity a complex prospect. Their extraterritoriality has

been particularly potent for a Lockean liberal bioprospecl-ing imagination, which sees spaces outside national juris-diction as ripe for first-come, first-served appropr iation (seeBrush 1999). According to legal officer Lyle Glowka of theEnvironmental Law Center, "The potential market for in-dustrial uses of hyperthermophilic bacteria has been esti-mated at $3 billion per year" (1996:160). But if plans for ac-cessing extraterritorial biodiversity have, until recently,depe nded on a Lockean gold rush attitudew ith U .S. gov-ernmental agencies, universities, and companies leadingthe way toward "m ining" new unclaimed biotic wealth (withthe aid of declassified military technology [see Mukerji1989])this approach has started to come un der scrutiny.

As I listened to the D iversa speaker, I recalled meeting ascientist at Monterey who pointed me to the InterRidgegroup, an international conso rtium of marine scientists whoinformally convened a few years ago to figure out th e eth icsof using genetic resources collected outside national juris-diction, in what they term "the Area." In a piece of gray lit-erature entitled "Management and Conservation of Hydro-thermal Vent Ecosystems," the InterRidge group expressesconcern about ecological effects of bioprosp ecting in thesejurisdictional gray areas, charging that nations that are con-tracting parties to the United Nations Convention on theLaw of the Sea and the Convention on Biological Diversity(CBD) should be obliged to protect and preserve marinebiodiversity and ecological sustainability (Dando and Juni-per 200 1:1). A key issue at these sites rem ains "resolving andavoiding conflict between different types of field investiga-tions. .. . As vent sites become the focus of intensive, long-term investigation, oversight organization will need to in-troduce mitigative measures to avoid significant loss ofhabitat or over sampling of populations" (Dando and Juni-per 2001:2). Noting that "vent organisms may prove to havea large biotechnological potential, in terms of both enzym esand specialised compounds," and reporting on a case inwhich "an Australian-led expedition to the Bismarck Seanorth of Papua New Guinea dredged seafloor vents, pros-pecting for minerals and micro-organisms of potential eco-nomic value," the InterRidge scientists argue that the biodi-versity that supplies this potential must be protected "forevolution a nd for m aintaining life-sustaining systems in thebiosphere" (Dando and Juniper 2001:3-4). lr Realizing thatkey players such as the United States do not recognize theconvention, they also argue for more informal me chan ismsamong scientists themselves.18 Their report suggests zoninghydrothe rmal ve nts for different uses, including m ining andbiological sampling; in their formulation, mining wouldhappen on the periphery of vents and bioprospecting some-what closer to the center, leaving the absolute center un-toucheda literalization of a Lakotosian view of sciencethat keeps pure nature-science at the core.1-' Noting tha t "atthis time, there is no agency with a man date to oversee m.irine scientific research activities of biological resources on

348


11/19


the seabed," InterRidge proposes that it act as a "researchreserve system regulated entirely by consensus" (Glowka2001:17). In a kind of Mertonian revivalist spirit, the Inter-Ridge report argues for informal m echan isms a mon g scien-tists themselvesa "code of conduct" (Dando and Juniper2001:25) that my Monterey contact, himself a former par-ticipant in InterRidge, described to me as a "gentleman'sagreement." Given the heterogeneity of the scientists in-volved and the corporate partnerships in which many mayparticipate, this appears ambitious. There are various otherplans in formulation to deal with this oceanic commons,coming from the UN and from indigenous groups in theSouth Pacific.20 The transfers entailed here summon alter-native assemblages that might link vent organisms to pro-jects of rethinking property, equity, and the commons in acontested seascape.These are assemblages that might be seen profitablythrough the lens of maritime anthropology. Drawing onearly work in the traditions of economic anthropology andcognitive anthropology (Barth 1966; Frake 1985), maritimeanthropology has explored how fishers think about the na-ture of property in ocean resources. Contrary to liberaleconom ists who hold that the seas are a common resourceinviting overexploitation owing to an assumed "natural"selfishness driving human action (see Hardin 1968 on the"tragedy of the commons"), maritime anthropologists haveargued, using case studies, that people understand owner-ship in relation to ocean resources in ways more to do withlocal systems of cultural meaning and with such globalpro ces ses as colon ialism a nd c apitalism (Befu 1980; Box-burger 1989; Durrenberger and Palsson 1987; McCay 1992;McC ay and Ache son 1987; Olson 1997; Palsson 1991; Walley1999). Scholars in this tradition have demonstrated that theidea of the oc eans as a comm ons is a recent, and European,one: "The idea of freedom of the seas was a precursor to thesocial relations of both colonialism an d capitalism in an erain which transformations and communication still occurredprimarily across water" (Walley 1999:282). Western con-structio ns of the "natu re" of the sea as "fluid" and "protean"(Raban 1993) or as " another world . . . without hum an cul-ture" (Davis 1997:100) in contrast to the grounded "culture"of the land are hardly universal. What we see in debatesabout the status of extraterritorial biodiversity is a contestover how the transfer of biowealth will be accomplished andwhat sorts of property imaginaries will be deployed.

So, what are the biopolitics of the new gene-swapping"bare life" made legible by bioinformatics? And is the equa-tion of the sea w ith life at all relevant? Why is there a field ofmarine biotechnology? Is this simply a rhetorical frame totrade on associations of the sea with health? During a coffeebreak at the Hawaii meeting, I picked up the 1999 inauguralissue of the journal Marine Biotechnology, which editorial-ized that "In the next millennium, the world's aquatic sys-tem s will be the new frontier for intensive biological investi-

gation, resource development and man agem ent, and indus-trial application."21 Was this just hype? Most scientists Ispoke with said yes. One researcher opined that while thebig selling point of the ocean is that it contains vast, un-tapped biodiversity, creatures like Archaea exist in a widerange of environments, including not only vents, but alsogeysers and cow's stomachs. More may be picked up atvents by deep-diving submersibles like Alvin simply be-cause this approach is romantic. If marine biotechnologyinitially attrac ts m oney, this often backfires because it is tooexpensive to do for long. Universities and research institutesin wealthy cou ntries have an adv antage becau se many ofthem are able to capitalize on technology initially developedby the military to get access to new seabed resources. Forscientists with whom I spoke, these were the realities behindwhat they read as cynical attempts to use the sea's associa-tion with health to sell this brand of biotech. And this intro-duces a formu lation in tension with the alienness of Ar-chaea; the sea is scripted in many venues as familiar, evenfamilial, motherly. W hen I summ arized my research projectto a doctor during a check-up, he was able to rattle off animitation of the rh etoric instantly: "Since time immemorial,man kind has know n the healing power of the sea. Now, ourbiotech company brings it to you in a pill." This link be-tween the symbolics of the sea a nd th e political economy ofthe w ealthy exactly points o ut th e ideology at work. It is richcountries that will look for unique boutique compounds inthe deep, not poorer nations, for which marine biotechnol-ogy is often associated with more low-tech aquaculture.

Because vent microorganisms are so cosmopolitan,some of the discussion of the political status of genetic re-sources on the seabed grasps at a problem of territorialitythat m ay not exist. A more imm ediate site where gene trans-fer may have mea ning s for transspecific biopolitics is in newwork about marine microbes that shows them to be every-where in the water column and, moreover, hyperlinked tothe earth's biogeochemical processes, like the carbon cycle(DeLong 1992). Consortiums of gene-trading microbes con-stitute communities whose metabolic processes may havelarge-scale effects on climate (see Beja et al. 2000:1905). EdDeLong is at the center of this work. During my interviewwith him, he said to me,

It's difficult for peo ple to get a visceral sense of microbes.You start teaching th em with stories abou t E. coli at Jackin the Box, but then tell them that that is a very smallpiece of the p uzzle. Microbes are by far the m ost numer-ous and biodiverse organisms on the plane t. We're onlybeginning to understand how they mediate biogeo-chemical processes.At Monterey, DeLong has been at the forefront of marine"environmental genomics," and his research has receivedattention in the mainstream press:

350


12/19


At his lab in Monterey, Calif., DeLong runs mud from3,000 feet below sea level through centrifuges, then fil-ters, and treats it with chemicals that dissolve the mi-crobes embed ded within. Their DNA floats free, a cock-tail of genetic essences. Using the latest tools ofbiotechnology, he and his co-workers separate thegenes and compare their DNA sequences to genes ofknown microbial classes. Later, they put fluorescenttags on the more distinct DNA and put it back in themud, where it sticks to mem bers of parent species andmakes them light up. "It's the reverse of traditiona l biol-ogy, where we spot a new creature and then analyze itsDNA," says DeLong. "Now we get the DNA first, thenfind what m ade it." Every time, he adds, "wefindsome-thing new." [Petit and Tangley 2001]

Identifying microbial communities by sequencing largequantities of seawaterto "see who's there," as DeLong putit to meand assessing how these communities might belinked to human practice is a political question. They arealien and kin at the same time. As a PBS series on microbeshas it, such creatures are "intimate strangers" (Oregon P ub-lic Broadcasting and PBS Online 1999). The sea and its cur-rents stand for the transfers they allow.22

Gene transfer, hyperactive kinship, and biopoliticsIn meditating on the changed notion of bios at stake in con-temporary biopower, Rabinow argues that the ancientGreek distinction between zo e and bios may be useful: Zoerefers "to the simple fact of being alive," whe reas bios "indi-cate [s] the ap propria te form given to a way of life of an indi-vidual or group" (1999:15). Rabinow mainta ins tha t

the biopolitical ar ticulation of zoe and bios that emergedafter World War IIwhich ce ntered on the "dignity" of"the human person" in response to programs tostrengthen the race (or population)is today being dis-aggregated . .. "Life" is problematic today because newunderstand ings an d new technologies that are involvedin giving it a form are producing results that escape thephilosophical self-understanding provided by both theclassical world and the C hristian tradition. [1999:16]

What is "life"? Or, to be m ore precise w hat is bios in the ageof a zoe mad e of marine m angles of heterogeneously mate-rialized genetic information?Declarations from 1998's Year of the Ocean offer oneway into the question. Carl Safina, director of the LivingOceans Program at the National Audubon Society offers thefollowing: "It is said that w here th ere 's life there's h ope , andso no place can inspire us with more hopefulness than thegreat life-making sea" (1997:440). In an age in which geneshave been touted as the essence of life, the maxim that wateris life is being resu rrected. And this water is often depictedas a salty substance mooring humans to their planetary

home. Safina: "We are, in a sense, soft vessels of seawater.Seventy percent of our bodies is water, the same percen tagethat covers Earth's surface. We are wrapped around anocean within" (1997:435).23 The bios here leans on an ethicof stewardship based on a kinship of reflection-resem-blance that links individual humans to the planet in waysthat both call on and bypass evolutionary historyofferinga kind of one-step program of communion with the planet.Bios, "the appropriate form given to a way of life," is chan-neled throu gh a rhetoric not of biosociality but of gaiasocial-ity. But "genes" are no t absent in this revival of the "water islife" narrative; they appear as an infotechnique linking mi-crobes to peop le to politics to planet. This is not just abou tthe return of "water as life" in the age of inform ation. Waterhas been informaticized because information as biology, asgenetic, has been materialized.In previous work on theoretical biology, computermodeling, and transgenics, 1 explored the possibility that wemay be witnessing an ascendant formation of "kinship inhypertext," as genes become "information" and begin toconjoin organisms and objects usually kept far apart by therhetoric of genealogy (Helmreich 2001; see also Franklin2001; Haraway 1997). Hints of this mode of hypertext kin-ship were apparent in the Human Genome Project's short-cuts to the human genome through sequencing relatedgenes in mice, yeast, and other creatures (see Rabinow1992), though this has often b een seen as a sign of bound arycrossing and category confusion rather tha n as a practice at-

tentive to the shared b ut not neatly nested characteristics ofdifferent species in the first place. Transgenics has beenpopularly figured as enabled by artifice rather th an by "na-ture." Now, however, microbial marine geneticists a re locat-ing in lateral gene transfer a hypertextual logic tethered ex-plicitly to "nature," to how these thing s really work. The treeof life was always a net. Nature was always a genetic engi-neer. Such declarations find further support in recent dis-cussions of mobile elements in the human genome, liketransposons, retrotransposons, and human endogenousretroviruses that have likely origins in retroviral m aterial in-corporated into early eukaryotic and mammalian lines(Prak and Kazazian 2000), suggesting that lateral gene trans -fer might have shaped nonmicrobial life forms as well.'4Lynn Margulis (Margulis and Sagan 2002) suggests thatmany animal traits might owe their origin to acquiredgenomes.

Following Schneider, one might say that this natural-izes transgenics as an operative logic of kinship. Hut onecould also ask why this rhizomatic genetic connectivityshould be called "kinship" at all!25 Why be so literal minde das to insist on following genes into all the network s they con-nect? One reason: Because the stories that conjoin zoe andbioslike COMB's rhetorics a bou t using genetic engineer-ing to do the good work of saving the en vironm ent- linkgenes and appropriate social forms, what Schneider called

351


13/19


"substance" and "code for conduct," inways tha t still situneasily and deconstructively, to be sureat the boundarybetween nature and culture. Kinship, as Marilyn Strathernreminds us, "connects the two domains" (1992b: 17). Kin-ship is, as Donn a Haraway notes, "a technology for produc-ing the material and semiotic effect of natural relationship,of shared kind" (1997:53).26 The "nature" that can producethese special effects is changing. Another reason to call it"kinship" is that the term draw s attention to social, political,and economic inequalities that operate through substanceoften considered to speak for itself. I join Haraway here inpartially advocating that the "new facts of biogenetic rela-t ionship" be seen as kinship factsbecause seeing them inthis way allows us to deploy other kinship tropes of sharedrisk.2'But let me be clear. I do not want to claim that bare lifehas m eaning in itself. It does not essentially entail particularconjunctures between zoe and bios. Claming this would beto fall into the sam e trap Franz B oas (1940) did, seeing "biol-ogy" as speaking for itself to demolish "race," or, indeed,Paul Gilroy (2000), who similarly claims that the latest barelife, genom ics, cannot supp ort racism. Biology canno t meananything in itself, and so particular biopolitics do not followfrom given articulations of bare life. Indeed, my use of theword transfer to name a new biopolitical mech anism mightproperly be placed alongside words like translation, trans-position, and transformation to highlight the densely socialwebs within which new kinds of bare life come to matter.More, it remains to be seen whether and how the bare life Ihave identified issuing from bioinformatically enabled mi-crobial marine biology andbiotechnology will materialize inother dom ains of biological practice andpolitics.

What I am describing as a new, agenealogical, waterybare life is impressionistically conden sed in Carl Safina's"70 p ercent of our bodies is water" kinship. But the notionthat the ocean is within us is also gathering a scientific war-rant. Ingeobiologists Mark and Dianna McMenamin's the-ory of "hypersea," life on land is sustained through a rhi-zom atic, interior ocean: "In a way, the land biota has had tofind ways to carry the sea within it and, moreover, to con-struct watery conduits from 'nod e' to 'nod e' " (McMenaminand McM enam in 1994:5). This redefinition of "life" as a net-work of salty fluid provides a trope for connecting local or-gan isms to global systems a trope th at may be increasinglyprevalent in discussions of what kinds of "biology" texturecontem pora ry shape-shifting, gene-sw apping biopolitics. Italso suggests that we think of the metaphorics of "fluid"alongside those of "networks"something that Mariannede Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000) have suggested can ac-cent the mutability of objectslike genesthat movethrough what are only in retrospect legible as networks."Genes," after all, are not quite the same thing whereverthey are transitedand especially when they gethot, wet,or patented. If, as Foucault suggested at the conclusion of

The Order of Things, "man" may someday "beerased, like aface draw n insand at the edge of the sea" (1970:387)if the"human" is a fleeting construc tion of science and pol i t ics-it might be worth asking whether the ocean, as it becomes asite inwhich links betwee n genealogy andevolution are de-natured, could become a solvent aiding a near-future gaia-social liquefaction of the huma n, anthropos. An anthropol-ogy of science that follows th e sa turatio n of "bare life" by thehyperactive politics and unexpected kinships of seawatershould be attuned to this possibility and attentive to thespecificity of the networks of property, law, governmental-ity, andcapital that will connect genes to Gaia through somechannels and not others. Thinking about the alien kin net-works scrambling up the domain of Archaea may help ustrack the re com binations of the do mains of Nature and Cul-ture in the transspecific biopolitics of gaiasociality.N o t e s

Acknowledgments. Thanks to Jose de la Torre, EdDeLong, W.Ford Doolittle, Catherine Lutz, Bill Maurer, Karen Nelson, MarcNeumann, Susan Oyama, Gi'sli Palsson, Heather Paxson, and PaulRabinow for com men ts on previous iterations of this article. Specialthanks to Deborah Heath and Michael Silverstein for asking me towrite the earliest inca rnation of this article for their "TransspecificBiopolitics: Animals as Models and as Collaborators" panel at the2001 meeting of the Society for Cultural A nthropology in Montreal,Canada, May 3-6. My gratitude goes as well to audiences that com-mented onportions of this argument inanthropology at UC Irvine;history at the University of Michigan; science andtechnology stud-ies atRensselaer Polytechnic Institu te; history of science at HarvardUniversity; anthropology at Berkeley; anthropology and scienceand technology studies at Cornell; and anthropology at MIT.Thanks also to Virginia Dominguez and to the anonymous review-ers fo r American Ethnologist for helping m e cultivate the hyperlinksbetween microbial marine biology and anthropology.

1. For deeper history of family trees, see Klapisch-Zuber 1991and Palsson 2002.2. Indeed, Schneider himself wroteit does not follow that every fact of nature as establishedby science will automatically andunquestioningly be ac-cepted or assimilated as part of the natu re of nature. Peo-ple may simply deny that a finding of science is true andtherefore not accept it as a part of what kinship "is." By thesame token, some items insome people's inventories ofthe real, true, objective facts of nature may be those whichscientific authority has long ago shown to be false or untruebut which these Americans nevertheless insist are true.11968:24, no te 3]

Franklin writes, however, that Schneider "ignored the extent towhich biology, even its traditional form, is about change. Biotech-nology today is the matrix of unprecedented life-forms that haveas little to do with the nature biology once depicted as they dowith the biology portrayed by Schneider" (2001:320).3. For another recent anthropological use of marine creaturesto rethink history and time, see Maurer 2000.4. The term transspecific is taken from the title of the panel forwhich the p aper givingrise o this article was developed: "Transspe-cific Biopolitics: Animals asModels and as Collaborators," organized

352


14/19


by Deborah Heath and Michael Silverstein and held at the 2001meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.5.Molecular structures and sequences are generally morerevealing of evolutionary relationships than are classicalphenotypes (particularly so among microorganisms).Consequ ently, the basis for the definition of taxa has pro-gressively shifted from the organismal to the cellular to themolecular level. Molecular comparisons show that life onthis planet divides into three primary groupings, com-monly known as the eubacteria, the archaebacteria, andthe eukaryotes. The three are very dissimilar, the differ-ences that separate them being of a more profound na turethan the differences that separate typical kingdoms, suchas animals and plants. Unfortunately, neither of the con-ventionally accepted views of the natural relationshipsamong living systemsi.e., the five-kingdom taxonomyor the eukaryote-prokaryote dichotomyreflects this pri-mary tripartite division of the living world. To remedy thissituation we propose that a formal system of organism s beestablished in which above the level of kingdom thereexists a new taxon called a "domain." Life on this planetwould then be seen as comprising three domains, theBacteria, the Archaea, and the Eucarya, each containingtwo or more kingd oms. [Woese et al. 1990:4576-4579]

6. Though, according to Doolittle and Brown (1994:6724), therewere three ways of reading the tree, including the possibility thatbacteria branched off first, the possibility that researchers havecome to favor.7. Doing phylogeny requires gene sequences that can be com-pared. Gene sequences are the much-celebrated products of thevarious genome projects. These genom es m ight be accessed froma variety of databases, and, as Donna Haraway notes, databasesare not always or only digital or computer based. Genome data-bases can also have a carbon-based instantiation, as with "yeastartificial chromosomes or bacterial plasmids, which can hold andtransfer cloned genes" (Haraway 1994:351). Here "the entiregenome of an organism might be held in a library of such artifactualbiochemical information structures" (Haraway 1994:351).Organisms' genomes can also be held in DNA microarrays, alsoknown as genome chips, gene chips, or DNA chips or probes. DNAmicroarrays are arrangem ents of DNA samples (on microplates orstandard blotting membranes) that allow for matching known tounknown DNA sequences based on the principles of nucleotidebase pairing. A DNA microarray or gene chip can be constructedfor a set of characteristics of interest and then used to investigatewhether a particular individual organism has those characteristics;probe will match target if sequences match. There are issues ofcategorization and slippage (false positives and negatives) toodense to go into here.8. An excerpt from a footnote in a marine biology article illus-trates the extent to which such tweaking is important to report:

The 16Sribosomalneighbor-joining tree w as constructedon the basis of 1256 homologous positions by the 'neigh-bor' program of the PHYL1P pac kag e... . The numbers atforks indicate the percent of bootstrap replications inwhich the branching was observed. The least-squareme thod (the Kitch program of PHYL1P) and the m aximumlikelihood method (the Puzzle program) produced treeswith essentially identical topologies, whereas the proteinparsimony method (the Protpars program of PHYL1P)placed proteorhodopsin within the sensory rhodopsincluster. [Be"ja et al. 2000 :1905, n. 16]

9. As Geoffrey Bowker writes in "Biodiversity Datadiversity,""The world that is explored scientifically becom es m ore and moreclosely tied to the world that can be re presented by one's theo riesand in one's databases: and this world is ever more readily recog-nized as 'the real world' " (2000:659). A similar view is forwardedby Michael N. l.iebman, a bioinformatics researcher quoted in Sci-entific American: "How we store data becom es critical in the typesof questions we can ask" (Howard 2000).10. Moreover, such "information" can be lost as it procee ds for-ward in historical time. As Bowker points out, "When producingcomputer models, it is assumed that time is unidirectionalspe-cies cannot lose characteristics once acquired. And yet we knowsome species do just that" (2002).11. See also Doolittle's "Uprooting the Tree of Life" (2000). Inan earlier article, Doolittle asked, "To what extent is our desire tolook at early evolution in terms of cellular lineages preventing usfrom seeing that it is about genes and their promiscuous spreadacross taxonomic boundaries, which then have no permanent sig-nificance?" (1997:12753).An interesting critique of this position is that it must assume thevery vertical model it seeks to explode. This Derridian reading isoffered in Gupta and Soltys's (1999) response to Doolittle in thesame issue of Science.12. Also:

Archaea are now recognized as having mixed heritage. Thegenes for replication, transcription, and translation are alleukaryote-like in complexity (Doolittle and Logsdon. 1998).However, the genes of intermediary metabolism arepurely bacterial. The Archaeal genome sequ encing pa persindicate that the genes for replication, transcription, an dtransduction form an end uring cellular hardware , where-as the other genes for biochemical functions are a type ofsoftware, a nd prone to chang e. [Paul 19991And:A major mec hanism for acquisition of genes by eukaryotesmay have been grazing on prokaryotes an d/ or eukaryotes("you arewhaty ou eat"; Doolittle, 1998). Th at is, overtime,there has been a tendency to replace true eukaryotic orarchaeal genes in eukaryotes with those com ing in fromthe food source. Although such transfer may be infre-quent, there is a constant influx of genes, and once aeukaryotic gene is lost, it is lost for good. The replacementof archaeal genes in eukaryotes was thought to occur quiteearly in the evolution of eukaryotes, and that archaealgenes are found at all is surprising. (Paul 19991

In other words, appeals to the fact that groups of organisms havemany genes in common can no longer unequivocally ground anargument that these creatures are related. Woese writes: "This as-sertion is based on numerology, not phylogenetic analysis"(2000:8393). And Doolittle, writing against the argument from num-bers as well as the centrality of ribosomal RNA (rRNA):

the "majority-rule" and "core function" approa ches bothseem arbitrary, and tinged by the sam e sort of essentialismthat colors our thinking about "eukaryotes" and "pro-karyotes." We want to believe that organismal and specieslineages do have discrete and definable histories that wecan discover and not that we are choosing, arbitrarily,genes whose phylogeny we will equa te w ith that history.[1996:8799]13. Note that gene transfer is only "noise," however, if it is seen

as undesirable. If it is constitutive in the pro duction of organisms,then figure and ground shift and gene transfer becomes the signal.

353


15/19


14. We might note that Lovecraft's "ancient ones," the hideousArctic progenitors of humanity in his "At the M ountains of Madness"(1971), were extraterrestrials!15. From the vantage point of my previous work on ArtificialLife (the attempt to simulate and synthesize living things in thevirtual universe of the comp uter), in which I documented how cod-ing metaphors from computer science were mapped onto biologyand then folded back into computational theories of biology, thisdenaturing of computational and biological information is refresh-ing. Also notewo rthy is that bioinformatics is beginning to be called"biology in silico" (see Howard 2000), a phrase I often heard inconnection with Artificial Life. In Artificial Life, however, it wasmeant to suggest creation of "biological" objects in cyberspace.For bioinformatics, the "biology" at stake is disciplinary practice.16. Electronic document, www.umbi.umd.edu/~comb/programs/biorem/bioreme.html, accessed March 4, 2003.17.

Adaptations to high temperature are a continuing focusfor research, as are adaptations to other extreme condi-tions. In an exam ple of the latter, some vent organisms areknown to survive under highly radioactive conditions, re-sulting from the pres ence of radionuclides in polymetallicsulphide deposits. The study of such organisms may leadto the discovery of new DNA repair mechanisms thatcould be of use in medicine. Similarly, the tolerance ofvent organisms to high heavy metal concentrations mayfind beneficial applications in bio-remediation, allowingthe recovery of badly polluted sites. [Dando and Juniper2001:4]

18. They argue thatbeyond the limits of national jurisdiction, the CBD's pro-visions on genetic resources access and benefit sharingare no t ap plicable. N evertheless, the CBD Conference ofthe Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity(COP) has called upon the CBD Secretariat to study theconservation and sustainable use of deep seabed geneticresources in relation to biopro specting. [Dando and Juni-per 2001:201

19.The true extent of marine b ioprospecting at hydrothermalvent sites within and beyond areas of national jurisdictionis unknown. However, these activities probably do notpose an immediate threat to biological communities as-sociated with hydrothermal vents, with the possible ex-ception of the risk of redistribution of endemic micro-organisms between vent sites. At present, there is noscientific basis to suggest that end emic m icrobial pop ula-tions exist at any hydrothermal vent site. Sustainabilitymay need to be considered where bioprospectors needlarge quantities of a macro-organism to obtain usefuJquantities of a secondary metabolite produced by, forexample, a mutualistic micro-organism. If the secondarymetabolite is not readily synthesizable and the micro-organism is not culturable, then harvesting the macro-organism at unsustainable levels could threaten both themicro-organism, as well as the particular ecosystem.[Dando and Juniper 2001:19]

20 . More reading directed me to the UN's response to extrater-ritorial marine biodiversity, which has asked whether deep-seacreaturesmicrobes includedmight not need international rep-resentation. International debates over access to deep-sea bio-diversity extend from early contests over rights to mine the oce an's

minerals. In 1967, the Maltese ambassador Arvid Pardo famouslyaddressed mem bers of the UN General Assembly, urging them "todeclare the deep ocean floor the 'common heritage of mankind'and to see that its mineral wealth was distributed preferentially tothe poorer countries of the global community" (Jacobson and Ri-eser 1998:103). Adherents of free-market ideology did not muchtake to this notion, most notably the delegation from the UnitedStates, which continued to mine the deep seabed, a project thateventually turned out to be so cost-intensive as to be unprofitable.But the deep sea became newly interesting in the age of biodiver-sity. New York Times science w riter William Broad sum marizes: "Itis no small irony that the greatest excitement to date in underseamining centers not on deep minerals" but on "the mining of life.... By weight, ... single cell organisms are worth far more thangold. The mining of deep life was never anticipated in all the in-ternational hubbub over the divvying up of the sea's mineralwealth" (1997:276).In 1995, the UN comm issioned an independent study of the stateof the oceans. Following Pardo, the Independent World Commis-sion on the Ocean contested the notion that the ecologies of thedeep seabed were up for grabs for the first nation or company ableto exploit them. C ommission mem bers took ocean space as a blankslate on which to rethink the distribution of resources, writing intheir report, "Contrary to what occurs with terrestrial resources,which can be individually possessed and appropriated in formsdeveloped and consecrated over the centuries, marine resourcesare by their own nature common, and are generally considered assuc h" (Soares et al. 1998:10, em phas is added). For the commission,marine resources had a watery life of their own resistant to incor-poration by national politics, state territorial claims, and the freemarket. The commission turned to deep-sea vents as sites fromwhich to revive Pardo's vision of the ocean floor as "the commonheritage of mankind," proposing a project for the redistribution ofgenetic wealth to poor nations, which they called "HydrothermalOcean Processes and Ecosystems," or HOPE.

In anothe r, contem pora neou s formulation, however, critical Pa-cific studies scholar Epeli Hau'ofa (1994) of the University of theSouth Pacific in Fiji argued that treating the sea as a kind of blankspace between nations (a place by its "nature" common) ignoresindigenous sovereignty in what Europeans have called "the PacificIslands" and local people are coming to call "the sea of islands."Questions of how to acce ss the archaea l diversity of the m id-Pacificrise must engage with these politics. Transspecific biopolitics musttake place in the "trading zone" (to borrow a term from Peter Gal-ison (19971) of trans-Pacific bioprospecting. And genes, as hetero-geneously realized inform ation (materialized in labs, patent offices,the UN, etc.), are the biopolitical sub stance that will be the currencyin these unequal trading zones.21. Electronic document, http://link.springer.de/link/s

helmreich - trees and seas

Documents