Global Politics of Science, Technology and Innovation

This article discusses historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA) as a novel approach in policy studies, and the ways in which it draws on elements of interpretive policy analysis (IPA). In our reply to Ulrich Brand’s recent proposal of such an approach in the Austrian Journal of Political Science, we particularly discuss two aspects from a poststructuralist interpretive perspective: First, we propose that HMPA and IPA feature divergent ontologies and epistemologies that are ultimately incommensurable. Second, addressing Brand's concern with what he perceives to be a theoretical deficit in IPA, we clarify the concept of the state and its conceptual relationship to policy and policy knowledge. We conclude that, to further develop a non-functionalist policy analysis, HMPA scholarship may benefit from a more engaged reading of poststructuralist IPA.

Drawing on work conducted for my phd thesis, I explore the field of stem cell therapy as a contentious and emergent site of advanced biomedicine.  Drawing on two case studies in the US context I am able to show how the meaning and concrete direction of emerging biomedical technologies involve divergent visions not only of the science, technology and business of stem cell medicine, but also radically opposed meanings of the "social good", of rights and obligations of/in biomedicine, and of the desireable relationships between science, medicine, the state, and "society". 
Analytically and conceptually, I draw on a biopolitical perspective on innovation that helps analyzing the struggles and conflicts inherent in the ways biomedical innovation is thought and enacted against the backdrop of broader socio-economic and socio-technial configurations. I particularly draw on S. Jasanoff's notion of "sociotechnial imaginary" and S. Hilgartner's concept of "sociotechnial vanguard" to make sense of competing visons and enactments in an emergent field of advanced biotechnology.

This review article discusses Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s recent book, "Clinical Labor. Tissue donors and research subjects in the global bio-economy" (Duke, 2014), as a topical contribution to the literatures on the bio-economy, and to studies of life sciences, society, and policy more generally. The article contextualizes the book within existing literatures (1) and thoroughly considers its conceptual approach as well as its findings (2). Further, it discusses its value as a contribution, arguing that clinical labor also presents an intriguing framework for further research, thereby suggesting some possible directions (3).

The present thesis explores struggles and conflicts concerning practices of biomedical research and innovation, as the development of medical treatments involves intricate political and ethical issues, particularly pertaining to experiments conducted with human beings. To that effect, the thesis develops a biopolitics perspective on innovation sensitive to the ways in which discourses, practices and imaginations of sound research and regulation, as well as notions of health, value, and subjectivity are being mutually performed and (re-)articulated in advanced biomedical research and innovation.
Empirically, the thesis explores two cases of pioneering US-based companies that have struggled to realize the promise of regenerative medicine and to bring stem cell-based therapies to clinic and market. As a frontier of contemporary biomedicine, stem cell therapies have become topical objects of collective demands and aspirations, as well as of concerns and contestations. Contrasting the two cases within the trajectories of biomedicine and innovation policy in the United States reveals striking divergence regarding the companies’ respective sociotechnical visions of stem cell therapy, and of biomedical innovation more generally. In the first case, Geron Corp. articulates a post-pharmaceutical vision that configures stem cell therapies as advanced drug products, thereby inscribing stem cell therapies into the regimes of pharmaceutical innovation, regulation and commercialization. In the second case, Celltex Corp. articulates a vision of stem cell therapies as innovative medical procedures to be gradually developed in experimental treatment settings, authorized by medical practitioners and commercialized directly to patient-consumers.
The thesis draws on interpretive methodologies grounded in post-positivist research approaches found at the intersections of interpretive policy analysis (IPA) and science and technology studies (STS). Fieldwork was conducted in a European research project (REMEDiE), following a multi-site situational analysis strategy for data collection, analysis and interpretation.
Regenerative medicine presents a salient site of broader biopolitical struggles and challenges confronting contemporary “innovation societies”, as stem cell therapies have given rise to fierce struggles over the very meanings of “good” research and innovation. The thesis suggests that there are significant tensions between competing values of/in biomedical research and innovation, such as accelerating research and commercialization on the one hand, and regulating emerging technologies in a sound and responsible way on the other.
The comparative perspective further helped to explore how different visions of innovation perform and articulate different values, thereby setting distinct, even partially competing coordinates for emerging sociotechnical futures. The biopolitics of innovation in stem cell therapy thus confronts us with the topical challenge to reimagine how, in the face of the nascent global bioeconomy, sound practices of biomedical innovation should look like, and what kinds of research, policy, and ethics need to be (re-)invented to bring about modes and practices of innovation that set the course for desirable sociotechnical futures.

The paper explores the politics of innovation stem cell therapy as an emerging field of advanced biomedicine. The concept of "biopolitics of innovation" helps to analyze the struggles over desirable modes of innovation, and to critically examine the relationships between innovation and politics.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has arisen as a grand challenge and global problem confronting the world in the 21st century. AMR is truly global not only in the geographical-political sense, but also in that it runs across and proliferates through the complex interactions of human medicine and patterns of health care on the one hand, and veterinary medicine and the livestock industries on the other hand. Even though the ‘science-question’ seems rather subordinate at this point in the politics of AMR, STS has a vital role to play in researching and contributing to engaging this matter of pressing concern. Yet, it confronts STS with the need and the opportunity to engage more eagerly with other fields and communities of social science research, particularly the field of critical policy studies.

Als Beitrag zu einer Bestandsaufnahme von Foucaults Werk für die politische Theorie der Gegenwart erwägt die vorliegende Arbeit die Aktualität (des Konzepts) von Biopolitik anhand eines aktuellen Feldes.
Die These des Beitrages ist, dass die regenerative Stammzellmedizin ein Artikulations- und Experimentierfeld für eine „Biopolitik der Innovation“ im Kontext einer entstehenden globalen Bio-Ökonomie der Lebenswissenschaften bildet. Das „revolutionäre“ Innovationsversprechen der Stammzellmedizin besteht mitunter in ihrer post-pharmazeutischen Vision neuartiger Behandlungsmöglichkeiten, die auf tatsächliche Regeneration an Stelle von bloßer Symptombehandlung zielen. Was dabei jenseits technischer Innovationen auf dem Spiel steht sind die spezifischen Wissens- und Wertgefüge, die „Gesundheit“ als Praxis einer spezifischen Biopolitik hervorbringen. Eine biopolitische Perspektive ermöglicht über die Fallstudie hinaus, das Politische an Innovationsprozessen angemessen zu konzeptualisieren, und somit den Begriff der Innovation in den Fokus einer politischen Theorie der Gegenwart zu nehmen.

This paper analyzes an emerging form of post-pharmaceutical health and its underlying regime of value in the global bioeconomy of regenerative stem cell-based medicine (RSCM). Animated by a vision to overcome drug-based therapies and their underlying political economies, RSCM pursues a form of regenerative health that is strikingly at odds with pharmaceutical regimes of drug research, regulation and therapy. To offer a theoretical account of these competing forms of health, the paper provides an analysis of the regimes of values that underpin pharmaceutical and regenerative health respectively. This analysis is done alongside three dimensions: the interlinkage between knowledge, technology and economic value creation; its relation to normative values and ethics; and conceptions and valuations of the biomedical subject and his/her body in biomedical research, intervention and innovation. Contrasting these two diverging regimes of health and value suggests that in RSCM the pharmaceutical logic of accumulating “surplus health” is not entirely dismissed but re-articulated in a regime based on the (re-)generation of regenerative biovalue through the extraction and ex vivo accumulation of “surplus vitality”. Finally, the article discusses “post-pharmaceutical health” as a sensitizing concept that offers new research avenues into emergent forms of health, value, and subjectivity beyond RSCM.