Biotechnology and global biocapitalism

Abstract

This article situates the rise of biotechnology in the context of the reorganization of technological and economic life and the globalization of markets in the 1980s. It goes on to discuss how biotechnology has developed in the ideological framework of a change in the scientific ethos and in a research environment increasingly dominated by global corporations. The article concludes by looking at the role of biotechnology in the formation of a bioeconomy whose purpose is the commercial appropriation of life. This process is examined in the light of political economy and the many aspects of the phenomenon of charisma.