The Financialization of the Economy

“By ventures, I mean privately held entrepreneurial firms with significant external equity investment from professional investors,” Garg (2013: 90) writes. This is an operative definition that will be used in this volume. Today, the life sciences are not only capable of producing new drugs and therapies that benefit patients and their relatives by increasing the quality of life and prolonging the lives of millions; they can also produce various forms of what Mitchell and Waldby refer to as biovalue, a composite term that refers to “the yield of both vitality and profitability produced by the biotechnical reformulation of living processes” (2010: 336). When technically manipulating biological materials in a variety of ways, for example, “transformed into cell lines, genetic sequences, or genetically modified organisms” (ibid.), biovalue is produced and thereafter translated into economic capital. This connection between biovalue and economic value constitutes what has been called the bioeconomy, the wider institutional field wherein life science research acquires its economic and financial worth (Birch and Tyfield, 2013). The term biovalue is useful because it captures how the biological, material substratum being worked on — a genome sequence, a cell line, a biological pathway, or an organ — can be translated into economic worth and become subject to the calculative practices that lie at the very heart of the capitalist regime of accumulation.