Abstract
How are ‘conflicts in time’ in technoscientific practices effectively theorised from a social scientific perspective? What are the ramifications for critique of the complex relations between ‘public’ and ‘private’ sectors in the global bioeconomy? This article furnishes a case study drawn from frontier research in agricultural biotechnology development, as this field is confronted with the challenges of global food security and climate change. ‘Apomixis’, the capacity of certain plants to ‘self-clone’, would arguably comprise a revolutionary tool for agriculture. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are a leading template for innovation, yet their hybrid character poses special challenges to stakeholders for the resource-poor. Through historical anthropological study of a PPP incorporating key players from the public sector and seed industry, I analyse the conflictive temporal politics of project planning and management, co-innovation, and frontier research; their impacts on technology development; and highlight implications for production of public goods. The article illustrates how such conflicts are illuminated by a temporal analysis informed by the anthropology of time, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of Deleuze. It presents a theoretical model for wider critique of how significant research and development trajectories go undeveloped or are impeded, which it terms ‘sideshadows’.
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Notes
Hybrid seed is produced by cross-pollination between two plants. F1 (Filial 1) hybrid seed is the product of selective breeding of two distinct plants with desirable characteristics. These are combined in improved form in the first (F1) generation of seed, but dissipate in subsequent generations. F1 hybrids are the mainstay of intensive agriculture. I discuss apomixis and hybrids in detail below.
For Adam (1998, p. 11, p. 56), ‘[a] timescape perspective conceives of the conflictual interpenetration of temporalities as an interactive and mutually constituting whole …. Where other scapes such as landscapes mark the spatial features of past and present activities and interactions … timescapes emphasise their rhythmicities, their timings and tempos, their changes and contingencies’.
Deterritorialisation can be defined as ‘the movement by which something escapes or departs from a given territory … [It] is always bound up with correlative processes of reterritorialisation, which does not mean returning to the original territory but rather the ways in which deterritorialised elements recombine and enter into new relations’ (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, pp. 508–510; Parr, 2005, p. 70). In the protophase, incidents of reterritorialisation are thus short-lived and unstable.
The other was based at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (Bashaw and Hanna, 1990). Since the 1970s, Wayne Hanna has worked to transfer apomixis from Pennisetum squamulatum, a wild grass, to pearl millet.
Through analysis of why certain trajectories were followed, and others were not, the production of scientific ignorance or ‘nescience’ (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008) comes into focus as a social practice (see Proctor, 1995, on the tobacco industry). This article also assesses, therefore, the extent to which certain research sideshadows were deliberately obviated given their challenge to corporate interests.
CHR stipulates: ‘When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed’ (http://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/chathamhouserule, accessed 24 June 2011). Where evidence is referenced to a personal communication, it should be noted that this is often a post-factual reconstruction of events from the viewpoint of a particular individual and should be treated as such.
A cultivar is a plant selected for its desirable characteristics. Such a plant is usually fashioned through cultivation.
Savings have been estimated at US$2.5 billion per annum for hybrid rice (McMeniman and Lubulwa, 1997).
Monsanto and other corporations sue farmers for seed saving, yet farmers are also discouraged from seed saving because of the uncertain quality of hybrid seed which results (Pollock, 2000).
A detailed account of the implications of an apomixis technology is beyond the scope of this article. See Jefferson (1994), GRAIN (2001), Curtis et al (2004), Spillane et al (2004).
CIMMYT stands for the ‘International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre’ (http://www.cimmyt.org, accessed 26 June 2011). Based in Mexico, it is a member of CGIAR, the ‘Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research’, a leading global stakeholder for resource-poor farmers. The CGIAR (http://www.cgiar.org/, accessed 24 June 2011), founded in 1971, is a global, not-for-profit group of 15 scientific and agronomic research centres funded by governments, philanthropists and bodies such as the UN and World Bank, which is committed to translation of scientific research into ‘public goods’ for agriculture. ORSTOM was the ‘Overseas Scientific and Technical Research Institute’, funded by the French state, which converted agronomic knowledge into international development products. In 1999, ORSTOM became ‘IRD’, the ‘Research Institute for Development’, with a greater focus on technological innovation (http://www.ird.fr, accessed 24 June 2011).
Savidan and the Frenchmen were employed by ORSTOM; the Italian was partly funded by the Leverhulme Foundation.
The technical term for ‘wide crossing’ (or wide ‘hybridisation’) is ‘interspecific hybridisation’. This breeding technique mimics a naturally occurring phenomenon, whereby plants from related genera ‘accidentally’ reproduce to create ‘wide hybrids’. Wide crossing involves inserting, or ‘introgressing’ a trait, usually from a wild relative to a domesticated plant, via specialist techniques. The targeted trait in this case is apomixis. ‘Introgression’ refers to the specific process of transferring the gene or gene cluster from one gene pool to another, through creating a wide hybrid that is then bred or ‘backcrossed’ over many generations with a parent plant to exclude undesirable characteristics. In this case, after hybridising maize with gamagrass, the wide hybrid would be backcrossed with the maize parent to remove other gamagrass features, leaving apomictic maize.
A ‘facultative’ apomict can produce both sexual and apomictic offspring (Savidan, 2000). The percentage figure refers to the number of plants in a given population that can reproduce sexually.
In 1999, the goal was described as follows: ‘It will yield a final product that should be unconstrained by intellectual property rights, thereby guaranteeing its free access to developing world clients’ (http://www.cimmyt.org/english/docs/brochure/Apomixis/htm/apomixisbroch-engl.htm, accessed 20 May 2010; cf. Adams and Henson-Apollonio, 2002).
This could work through a farmer selecting a sexually reproducing apomictic maize plant and crossing it with a different maize variety. The offspring of this cross would theoretically comprise a range of apomictic and non-apomictic maize plants, which could then be selected for apomictic plants with the desired qualities. In this way, resource-poor farmers could breed and fix cultivars for niche microclimates, and farmers could clone F1 hybrid maize seed (Savidan, personal communication, 2009).
One should add that ‘public’ and ‘private’ partners were not wholly distinct entities, imbued with positivist identities, but became economically linked, relationally constituted and symbolically differentiated in complex ways, not least via the PPP.
‘Pre-breeding’ refers to that period of plant cultivation that entails identification of desired traits and their incorporation into a cultivar, before its production for distribution.
See footnote 13.
A promoter is a stretch of genetic material that acts as a switch for ‘turning genes on’.
Medium Term Plans, CIMMYT, 2000–2002, 2001–2003 (http://apps.cimmyt.org/english/wps/publs/catalogdb/catalog.cfm?data=19&monitor=3, accessed 24 June 2011). Gene tagging is the process of identifying and tagging selected genes with molecular markers, thereby facilitating screening for them in cultivars and, potentially, cloning them.
Helmreich proposes a ‘formula to describe the making of biology into capital: B–C–B’, where B stands for biomaterial, C for its fashioning into a commodity through laboratory and legal instruments, and B’ for the biocapital produced at the end of this process, with ‘the value added through the instrumentalisation of the initial biomaterial’ (Helmreich, 2008, p. 472). This model informs the analytical frame adopted here.
Analysis omits the Australian National University, whose involvement began in phase two.
Triticum aestivum (common bread wheat) emerged from wide hybridisation events over extended timescales.
In the case of V-GURT, use of GM plants is controlled by rendering second-generation seeds sterile; T-GURT permits seed saving, but genetic enhancements must be activated by a spray. Both are known as ‘terminator’ technology, and currently subject to a de facto UN moratorium.
For Gurvitch, ‘enduring time’ is where ‘the past is projected in the present and in the future. This is the most continuous of the social times despite its retention of some proportion of the qualitative and the contingent penetrated with multiple meanings ….’ (1964, p. 31). This temporal quality is extended here to conceptualise the materiality of biomatter that exists in a stable state.
Charles (2003, p. 41) comments: ‘[T]he corporate friends of apomixis are also its worst enemies. The reason is simple: seed companies have a financial incentive to keep self-cloning corn out of farmers’ hands because apomixis breaks a natural sort of copy protection …. CIMMYT's corporate sponsors might see topnotch apomictic hybrids from CIMMYT as competition’.
It is important to note that this nomadism could also have a negative impact on existing maize varieties and land races, biodiversity, and the environment (see GRAIN, 2001).
‘Promissory capital’ is ‘capital raised for speculative ventures on the strength of promised future returns’, and is a key driving force in biotechological modes of production (Franklin and Lock, 2003, pp. 6–7; cf. Sunder Rajan, 2006, pp. 107–137).
New research on endosperm development would be of value to corporations whether or not an apomixis technology emerged.
For Giddens (2002, p. 26), manufactured risk is ‘risk created by the very impact of our developing knowledge upon the world’, that is, it is the product, to a significant degree, of human agency.
By ‘temporal fabric’, I refer to cultural media used for evocation of temporal phenomena, and co-ordination of activities, for example calendars, clocks or symbolic media such as language with its temporal markers (cf. Gell, 1992, pp. 118–126). Data on the temporal fabric of the Consortium are restricted by confidentiality agreements.
Allochronism is ‘a systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of [a discourse] in a Time other than the present of the producer of … discourse’ (Fabian, 1983, p. 31). It is sometimes used as a discursive strategy in establishing power hierarchies.
This refers to the ‘donor’ of the apomictic trait, that is, the plant that scientists chose to cross with maize. The plant was Tripsacum dactyloides ref. 65–1234, from CIMMYT Plant Genetic Resources Center (Leblanc et al, 2009, p. 594).
This account is based on published sources, and interviews with Savidan. The OC was contacted with questions in 2009, but responses were unavailable.
‘Deleuze and Guattari distinguish four types of deterritorialisation along the twin axes of absolute and relative, positive and negative. Deterritorialisation is relative in so far as it concerns only movements within the actual order of things … [and] negative when immediately subjected to forms of reterritorialisation which enclose or obstruct [transformation]’ (Parr, 2005, p. 71).
See footnote 25.
Anthony Cavalieri, Vice President of trait and technology development at Pioneer Hi-Bred, put it bluntly: ‘The thinking in the seed business is that apomixis would be more useful if you could turn it off’ (Charles, 2003, p. 41).
No inference should be drawn that Apomixis Consortium partners were implicated.
‘If you’re not in control of everything, you’re not in control of anything’, Savidan commented on leaving the Apomixis Consortium (Charles, 2003, p. 41). Where the sideshadows of technology development threaten the interests of corporate partners, this may be true; however, see Banziger (n.d.) on CIMMYT's current policy on PPPs.
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Acknowledgements
CIMMYT kindly provided data and the use of its library in Mexico. My thanks to CGIAR Secretariat for funding my participation in the CGIAR Alliance Deputy Executive and Private Sector Committee Workshop on Public–Private Partnerships in 2009, at which I presented this study in abbreviated form. I am very grateful to Yves Savidan and Stephen Hughes. Finally, my sincere thanks to three anonymous BioSocieties reviewers. Research was funded by ESRC grant RES-145-28-0001.
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Hodges, M. The politics of emergence: Public–private partnerships and the conflictive timescapes of apomixis technology development. BioSocieties 7, 23–49 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2011.30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2011.30