Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today.
About the Author: Melinda Cooper is a research fellow with the Centre for Biomedicine and Society, Kings College London..
Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary Life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.
At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological Life into surplus value.
In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the Life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-Life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy.
Taking as her point of departure the assumption that Life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices.
The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level.
From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration\'s policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market Capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized Life sciences.
Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of Biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy.
Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today
