Neoliberal reform and biomedical research in India: A story of globalization, industrial change, and science.

摘要

This dissertation examines how political and economic reforms in India associated with the onset of neoliberalism since the early 1990s have affected biomedical research in that country, with an emphasis on health biotechnology. The term "biomedical research" is understood broadly to include three main institutional settings --- government, university research hospitals, and industry --- and a range of research types --- subclinical, clinical, and epidemiological.;The main argument of the dissertation is that place matters to the ways neoliberal globalization unfolds on the ground. Historically, India is a predominantly socialist society that has embraced not just New Deal and Keynesian-style governance over five decades of postcolonial rule, but also an ethos of public ownership. Thus it has tended to evince a strong legacy of state-involvement in economic development. The infrastructure for basic research has always been stronger in the country's public sector labs as opposed to industry. While drug development in India, as elsewhere, has always been a commercial activity, the key difference in the Indian case is that this form of research enterprise has tended to be approached, culturally, as a way of meeting the country's public health goals, as opposed to targeting individual sovereign consumers and social groups, as often happens in the United States. On account of its socialist welfare objectives, the Indian state has historically supported protectionist patent regimes that encouraged industry to manufacture low-cost generic drugs in bulk for local populations. As a result, the Indian academic and industrial sectors of the life sciences have had very diverse objectives, with the former largely engaged in fundamental research missing an explicit applications focus and the latter largely invested in revenue-based commercial projects having limited use for fundamental research. For strategic reasons, a semantic separation between basic research and applied priorities, and likewise between "science" and "technology," also featured prominently in the original policy documents that drove post-independence scientific and technological growth in the country in the 1950s. This led to an ossification of the division of responsibilities between institutions on the ground, causing them to evolve historically distinct missions that contributed to a rift between academic and industrial research and a consequent formation of institutional research silos, thereby rendering partnerships on the ground a veritable challenge.;With the onset of neoliberal reforms corresponding to globalization in the early 1990s, the enforcement of a new global standardized patent regime has rendered fundamental research in the life sciences a strong imperative for most countries. India, being one such signatory to the WTO-mandated GATT, and a rapidly developing representative of the global South, has had to assert its original research capacities amidst a global pharmaceutical empire. The main channel by which this was accomplished was through aggressive participation by the country's infrastructure-rich government labs in globally oriented research enterprises. Many such public labs, spearheaded by the federal government ministry of Science and Technology, seek projects catering to the big capital markets, with the potential for original ownership of IP, while also engaging in lower-end contract-based research for Western pharmaceutical concerns. In contrast, the Indian pharmaceutical industry continues to function largely on a safe and lucrative commercial model based on reverse-engineered off-patent drugs. Thus neoliberal growth in India gets inflected upon former statist socialism in a particular way - it plays out much more in the domain of state-funded governmental labs as opposed to a fledgling bio-pharmaceutical industry, thereby rendering the Indian state a primary locus of innovation, entrepreneurship and commercial activity within the current global financial empire. In other words, neoliberal approaches to health research in India defy any simplistic assumptions about the uniform and unidirectional transportation of the American free market imaginary to regions of the global South. The role of the state in spurring scientific and technological development is key to the differences observed in the Indian case.;One of the main theoretical implications of this case study is to argue for a disaggregation of neoliberalism/social liberalism from hegemonic accumulation/redistribution. Along with other scholars who have studied the case of Euro-America, I argue against a tendency in social science scholarship to periodize political ideologies like neoliberalism as totalitarian regime shifts having a purely elitist focus that presumably contrasts with the purely ameliorative focus of former social liberalism. Instead, based on my findings in a region of the global South, I suggest that newer political-economic philosophies tend to get superimposed on older ones through layered spatial and temporal pathways incorporating diverse, and often competing, objectives relevant to local social systems. India is a case in point. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)