The following is a transcript of a keynote presentation that Professor Catherine Waldby delivered at the workshop "Embodiments of Science," held on November 6, 2009 at Barnard College in New York City. The "Embodiments of Science" workshop brought together scholars of science and science practitioners to critically discuss the history of present scientific approaches to bodies, identities, and destinies including neurological, genetic, and epigenetic interventions.

Listen to a podcast of Professor Waldby's talk.

I've been working on the question of tissue economies for more than ten years now, coming at it in different ways. When I say "tissue economies" I mean the question of how the exchange, circulation, and recalibration of biological materials—which have their origins in human, animal, and plant bodies—but I focus mainly on human bodies. How do human bodies constitute various types of social relationships? How do they create different kinds of value? How do they link populations to each other, or indeed, repel them from each other? Tissue economies have been central to the 20th century concept of the nation state and to the concept of citizenship. We only need to think about the discourse of blood banking, particularly in Western Europe, where the giving of blood is the primary act of citizenship. The gift to the other, the gift to the unknown fellow citizen.

One of the things I will be looking at today is how, increasingly, tissue economies circulate between populations and across national boundaries, creating relationships between the more and the less privileged—the north and the south.

I will also be looking at the ways in which tissue economies suture populations into broader forms of economic productivity; how human bodies are mobilized into bioeconomic development, more broadly. How do they contribute to and participate in the creation of bioeconomic value or 'biovalue'?

Much of what I will be talking about is drawn from a new book I am working on with Melinda Cooper (author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology in the Neoliberal Era) provisionally titled Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Bioeconomy. In this book we are exploring the proposition that human medical subjects—those who give tissues to medical research and those who participate in clinical trial research—are increasingly mobilized not through the tradition of citizenship and voluntary participation, but through transactional and formal labor relationships. In some circles this is a fairly startling proposition. However, in the U.S., I find that people tend to get what I'm saying because the business models underpinning these informal transactional relations, in many cases, have their origins in the United States and have been exported around the world. Whereas in Europe, the discourse of voluntarism and citizenship is still more hegemonic, even if it's not as explanatory as they might think it is.

Since World War II, biomedical researchers relied on the idea of a freely-consenting volunteer who gives to the public good, donating blood or other types of tissue either to a fellow citizen for therapeutic reasons or to medical research. But a number of dynamics within the commercialization of biomedicine have made this a less persuasive form of mobilization. In particular, the expansion of biomedical research has led to a very large scaling up of tissue banking. National biobanks all around the world aim to enroll very large percentages of the national population. The U.K. biobank is aiming for half a million participants. The Icelandic biobank aimed for the entirety of its national population to be enrolled in its biobank, although it didn't succeed. This scaling up of biomedical research activity, in many cases, has simply reached the limits of the voluntary system. It is very difficult within the voluntary system to mobilize enough experimental subjects to proceed.

There are also many historical precedents to the kind of thing we're talking about: for example, blood vending and plasma vending, particularly in the United States, as well as the use of prisoners for clinical trials. The strategy here is either to recruit through fee for service, or to turn to an incarcerated population and use institutional leverage.

This type of transactional procurement is expanding rapidly, however it tends to be found as kind of an exception. It is not conceptualized in the regulatory agencies that control and regulate clinical trial work, and it is certainly not conceptualized as labor. Rather, it is thought of as a type of voluntary participation for which the volunteers are compensated, where the language of volunteerism, citizenship, participation, and public good is still very much in place in regulatory and bioethical circles.

Turning to the reproductive aspect of this kind of clinical labor there are two different categories: one is clinical trial experimentation, and the other is reproductive labor. Central to this idea is that since the beginning of the so-called 'life sciences revolution' in the 1970s, a great deal of the achievements of biomedical research are actually a disaggregation and a redistribution of reproductive processes generally—genetic processes, cellular replication and tissue cultures, embryogenesis, etc. So if we think about biological reproduction in its many manifestations, much of the biotech revolution is precisely about instrumentalizing biological reproduction and being able to redirect it, recalibrate it, change its direction to be able to do nifty things in vitro and sometimes in vivo.

This disaggregation and redistribution of reproduction has particular and very complex implications for women because women's bodies necessarily have an asymmetrical capacity for biological reproduction compared to male bodies. So it raises a series of complicated questions about how to understand the biopolitics of the relationship between, particularly, young women when we're talking about stem-cell research and reproductive labor, and biomedical research and biomedical industries, more generally.

Fertility outsourcing is one such area where these questions come into sharp focus.

Fertility outsourcing is a set of practices that redistribute fertility and reproduction of children across a number of different bodies: for example, in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, superovulation, and other similar kinds of processes that have been developed within reproductive medicine and applied to human beings since the 1970s.

Now, in the 1980s and early 1990s, we see the development of a business model that arose in the United States, which revolves around commercial gestational surrogacy and oöcyte vending. This business model, through a contractual process, secures the reproductive capacity of surrogates, and oöcyte vendors for the use of 'intending parents,' in exchange for fees.

It took quite awhile for the contractual form to be elaborated and to be embedded in a commercially secure way; and certainly it differs from state to state in the United States. California has been the state that has provided the most secure legal and commercial environment for fertility outsourcing, in the sense that it treats surrogacy contracts as enforceable, and it has effectively become the state that has the most elaborated fertility outsourcing industry in the world.

But this business model is being exported. Primarily driven by price competition, of course in California and in the United States more generally, the cost of this kind of purchasing, this kind of gestational and fertility services, has gone up; we are now seeing the development of competition sites elsewhere in the world, such as India. The Indian state is very busily marketing its female population as reproductive laborers and their surplus reproductive capacities as national assets. Since the Indian government became a signatory to the World Trade Organization, to treaties that create intellectual property agreements and the general agreement on tariff and services, it has created a safe commercial environment for medical tourism, which includes reproductive tourism. The External Affairs Ministry has also created a category of medical visa to facilitate medical tourism.

Clinical trials also, are being increasingly conducted off-shore in less expensive sites, rather than in the United States or in Western Europe. Essentially, you can conduct your clinical trial in a much more low-cost environment, where you have much better access to experimental populations who will come forward for a much lower fee, and will make themselves available for clinical trial research to simply get temporary access to health care.

But also, now there have been a number of clinics that have sprung up, which focus particularly on gestational surrogacy. Surrogacy is interesting because it's a very potentially global industry, in the sense that the surrogate does not make a genetic contribution to the child.

Now, it seems to me that a great deal of what fertility outsourcing is about is the reproduction of whiteness—of course that is not the only thing as there are other groups that will seek surrogacy services, like, for example the Japan/Korea circuit (since closed down after the Hwang scandal). It is the reproduction of whiteness because that is where the money is. So, it's quite possible to locate your clinic in India, where the government treats commercial surrogacy as enforceable, and have your primary market, for example, in the United States or Australia, where surrogacy is often financially or legally prohibitive.

On a website for a fertility clinic in Mumbai, the thing which is most alarming is that the site is full of photographs of lovely blonde, blue-eyed mothers with lovely blonde, blue-eyed babies. There is not a single photograph of anyone that looks like they live anywhere other than the richest, whitest suburbs of Southern California. You would never in a million years know, looking at the people who are represented on the site, that there was any relationship whatsoever to anyone in India. What strikes me about this is that you have this contractual and genetic arrangement whereby you can travel to India, you can make a baby that looks like you, and you can take the baby home, and there is no trace of the relation to the actual surrogate herself. There is no genetic trace, and there is no contractual trace because the surrogate has no recourse in law. She has no recourse in law because the contracts are treated as enforceable.

If we're looking at oöcyte vending—again, we really need to move outside the United States—the way in which oöcyte vending has been globalized has been through the development of these transnational fertility clinics that recruit vendors from populations that are phenotypically similar to purchasers, but are divided by regulatory boundaries. For example, in Spain (I think the only country in Western Europe that has commercial oöcyte vending), oöcytes are drawn from the local student populations; but also, from Eastern European women. Eastern Europe has developed a circuit whereby one of the ways you can improve your probably fairly low income is to travel, for example, from the Ukraine to Spain, and spend a month or two undergoing superovulation, being paid about 1,000 Euro or 1,500 Euro, before going back to the Ukraine. There are women who do this maybe three times a year. It may be their primary source of income and in any case is a very substantial source of income for them. There are anecdotally some crossovers with the sex industry as well, where women will go and work in the fertility clinics, and then also work in the local sex industry, and then go home.

So this is what I mean when I say a phenotypically similar population divided by regulatory boundaries: Northern Europeans travelling to Spain because they can purchase eggs from women who have appropriately Northern European features—blue eyes and fair skin. Again, we can see the logics of the reproduction of whiteness working here, because this is where the money is, and I don't think it takes a huge leap of imagination to see that this is a kind of informal labor.

I also want to talk about the stem-cell industries, more broadly, because there again, women constitute the primary tissue donors in the stem-cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, fetal tissue, and umbilical cord blood. But in this case, their participation is often given for free even though the nature of the donation is quite onerous in that it requires a lot of reproductive labor in order to produce the actual material that you give away.

A stem cell is basically an undifferentiated cell that can both renew itself and give rise to one or more specialized cell types with specific function in the body. The ones we hear most about are the pluripotent stem cells—the type of stem cell that you get in the embryo—and it has the capacity to develop into almost all of the body's tissue types. Recent research suggests it may be possible to produce large numbers of pluripotent stem cells that differentiate on demand, providing an unlimited supply of transplantable tissue.

The whole stem-cell area is the hope (and hype) that the process of organ transplant will be able to be replaced by stem-cell tissue transplanting. So if you have a faulty heart, instead of having to wait on some wretched waiting list for years and years and hope that someone dies so that you can get their heart, you'll be able to have an infusion of cardio myocytes that will then go about repairing your heart. Your heart will be regenerated, and so we reach the whole logic of regenerative medicine that presides over stem-cell research. The stem-cell sciences, with the use of embryos, cord blood, fetal material and oöcytes, work to transform the generative capacity of female reproductive biology into regenerative capacity—to divert productivity away from the generation of new babies, towards the regeneration of existing populations. Essentially, it is a kind of redistribution of vitality where you take a kind of surplus vitality from the site of reproductive biology and you redistribute it to the aging population and their lack of vitality, and you hopefully regenerate people who have things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart defects, kidney disease, Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and so forth.

But to secure this regenerative potential involves negotiating with different groups of women in various kinds of ways. I'll just very quickly talk about the ways in which women are mobilized through these different kinds of tissue donation. From 2000 and on, a number of the OECD countries have developed regulatory systems which permit IVF clinics to solicit surplus embryos for stem-cell research. How an embryo is designated a spare embryo is quite a complex process, and there's been a lot of ethnographic work into this. But this whole idea of the surplus is crucial to the logic of the field. Surplus is constantly appealed to, in that these are spare; they'll just go to waste, we'll just kill them unless you give them to us. But if you use this surplus, they can be transformed into life-saving research. So, embryos are now fairly well-regulated. Embryo donations are a fairly well-regulated phenomenon in most places in the world.

Now, fetal material, which is harvested from pregnancy terminations, is somewhat different. In the U.K., if you have a termination, you may be approached to donate the fetus to medical research. The thing that is striking about the difference between fetal donation and embryo donation is that unlike embryo donation, which has this kind of amazingly ceremonious and complex consent process around it and a great deal of respect is shown to the embryo in the procedures, in the U.K. at least, fetal donation is much less ceremonious. It tends to be something that the woman signs over and there is not a huge amount of discussion about it.

Cord blood. There is a whole arm of the stem-cell industry which is organized around private cord blood banking. Companies like Pluristem solicit pregnant women to open a private cord blood account for their child. The logic of this is that if you keep the cord blood and your child develops leukemia or a severe blood disorder, instead of trying to find a bone marrow match, in theory, you can go back to the private cord blood account that you have kept and paid for. Despite this being clinically counter-indicated in many cases, it is still a thriving industry. But here we see the waste of the cord blood transformed into a kind of biological investment where you invest in the future of your child. You also invest in the promise of stem-cell science, because more and more, the cord blood companies are appealing to the promissory value of the stem cell industries and saying, "here, this will be your private stem cell account, and when stem cells can do all the kinds of nifty things we think they might be able to do, then you'll have this autologous tissue there at your disposal."

Finally, oöcytes, or eggs. Now, I've been doing a lot of work about oöcytes because they are the most unstable type of tissue in the stem cell industry, and they've proved the most difficult to recruit. This is in part because there is already a worldwide shortage, a huge amount of demand in the IVF clinics for reproductive use of eggs, plus fertile oöcytes are needed for somatic cell nuclear transfer research. You can't freeze them because the freezing technology is not very good. The fact that you can't freeze a tissue has enormous implications for the ways in which it circulates and the kinds of values you can produce from them. Plus we now have this discourse about declining fertility so that oöcytes have developed an enormous scarcity value and the scarcity value is increasing more and more. Because of their scarcity value, it's very hard to designate them as a surplus and there has thus been very little success in securing sufficient numbers of oöcytes for somatic cell nuclear transfer (therapeutic cloning) research to go ahead. In fact, many clinics have had to give away that side of their research program because they just cannot get the material that they need.

It is interesting that even in Britain, which has a very highly developed bioethical discourse about the gift relation, they have developed a system called 'egg sharing,' whereby, if you go to IVF and you promise to give a certain number of oöcytes to stem cell research, you get discounted IVF treatment. So it's not a fee transaction but it's nevertheless a type of transaction. In the United States too, there is a lot of debate about fees—if they should pay fees, what kind of fees they should pay. I saw an article just recently where New York State has legislated so that stem cell scientists can pay women up to $10,000 to sell eggs for stem cell research. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough.

So, having described these different forms of procurement, it seems to me that one of the things we're looking at in the clinical labor book is that, with the globalization of biomedical research, we have this process where different populations are scanned for different types of value. And different types of biomedical industries, different types of biomedical disciplines, scan different populations for particular kinds of biological or socioeconomic or regulatory affordances. That is, points where you can get traction on that population. You can then mobilize in different kinds of ways. You might be able to mobilize them simply through fees because they need the money or you might need to mobilize them through more complex kinds of discourse around surplus and around the idea that you can contribute to the good that the medical research might do—an appeal to citizenship and the good of future generations. Another affordance is this kind of regulatory boundary that divides a phenotypically-similar population.

So that is the kind of model I'm working on at the moment: we see different female populations integrated into the lower echelons of the stem cell industries and the fertility outsourcing industries as essential productive agents through various contractual mechanisms, institutional arrangements, and regulatory systems that are designed to secure a surplus of biological potential in different ways.

Now, as I said at the beginning, these practices range from, frankly, transactional, i.e. surrogacy is a transaction where there is no doubt what is going on, to the most sanctified and ceremonious kind of gift relation. At the surrogacy facility outsourcing end, the relationship to the type of labor seems fairly self-evident, but it is a much harder argument to make at the gift relation end. But nevertheless, we are trying to make the argument, and one of the ways we have done this is by going back to an old debate in feminism known as the reproductive labor debates. You may recall this was a debate generated primarily by Marxist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Michele Barrett, Christine Delphy, and Nancy Hartsock are some of the names associated with this debate about how to understand the relationship between reproduction and production. This is the reason that we have returned to that debate—it seems to me that that relationship is absolutely central to what we are interrogating in this process.

How can we understand reproduction as a form of production? Because of course, in liberal theory and in Marxist theory they are considered to be diametrically opposed to each other.

In the reproductive labor debate they were not talking about biological reproduction in quite the same way. The arguments were more about domesticity and the space of domestic reproduction. That is, the space where child bearing, child care, housework, and nurturing—the space in which children are raised and brought up—takes place. These Marxist/feminists argued that this space was not merely a private space of natural gift relations, where it was part of women's nature to give for nothing. Instead these apparently selfless gift relations were rather a kind of economic activity. They argued for the recognition of reproductive labor as labor, rather than simply a natural aspect of femininity, and in turn, some argued for wages and benefits to be provided on that basis.

These arguments need to be put in historical context. They are critiquing the social relations often described as the Fordist Social Contract or the Keynesian Social Contract, which developed at the end of the Depression particularly in Western Europe, and reached its strongest expression in the European welfare state after World War II. The key features here are the regulation of the male wage to include a family support element, and the statutory delivery of a large share of social protections through the male wage. Hence, the full-time housewife has access to income and social security only through her husband. Again, this idea was not quite as well-established in the United States because it never had a completely inclusive welfare state, although the New Deal involved many of these elements.

In their critiques, the Marxist/feminists were pointing to the foundational economic role of reproduction within the Fordist Social Contract, and demanding a direct form of market recognition for this economic role, rather than its transaction through the male wage and the nuclear family. They were appealing directly to the state to say that the subsidization of this type of reproduction should not be through the male wages; it should be directly to the woman, as a type of recognition of her economic role.

We are not the only commentators on the bioeconomy who have gone back and looked at this debate as a way to think about these relations through reproduction and production. Charis Thompson, in her book Making Parents, makes an argument about what she calls the "biotech node of production." Donna Dickenson, a feminist bioethicist, has also looked at these reproductive labor debates and how they appear to have quite a strong and interesting relationship to the kinds of phenomena that we are commenting on here. That is the symmetry of the arrangements between the women in the family in the 1970s and the women involved in gift relations that underlie sectors of the stem cell industries today, where both groups create an economic value that is not recognized as such. Instead, it is simply treated as a naturally-occurring gift, a naturally-occurring maternal surplus which is really, already in a sense, available to be procured.

But what we have done with the reproductive labor debates is try and go back and look at the extent to which both the idea of labor and the idea of reproduction evoked in these accounts are embedded in a 1970s formulation and need critical reconsideration.

So at the level of political economy, those accounts rely on the Fordist industrial model of labor and a nation-state model of reproduction, both of which have been significantly displaced; and at the level of biology, they of course naturally fail to take into account the significant technical and contractual reworking of the potentials of reproductive biology.

The rest of my paper is going to be an unpacking of those two claims. At the level of political economy, we can see that the post-war Fordist domestic reproduction was organized as a gift exchange through the social state's decommodifying action. That is, the regulatory exclusion of particular social relations from markets, as a way to promote social stability. The aspects of life that were decommodified were health, national education, social security, and the mandating of a family wage—these were all state-initiated actions to keep the relations of the family outside of the market. This is not something that is suddenly simply occurring. It's actually a very actively-constituted set of protections and exclusions which have also, of course, been dismantled by the feminist movement because it gave women a very particular position in this reproductive life.

It is interesting then to look at, if we go back again to the post-war period, in a parallel move to the post-war human tissue economy that was also organized as a state-subsidized gift economy. If we look at blood banking as the very first human tissue economy, an enormous amount of social institutional work—and now, still today, organ donation—is put into keeping those transactions outside of, frankly, market relations. And that's still true, although again, less so in the United States.

So we have this situation where we have two gift economies: we have the gift economy of the tissue economy; we have the gift economy of the family, and this describes a particular kind of historical moment. But this situation begins to come apart in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Particularly with the oil shocks and the changes in the global economy that begin in 1973 and inaugurate the age of neoliberalism, we get the decline in the notion of a family wage and the disaggregation of employment from social protections—an increase in casualised, temporary, and outsourced labor that lacks the former securities of the male fulltime job in the vertically integrated Fordist firm.

We get the development of Third Wave Feminism. We see women flooding into the workforce and contesting the idea of the male wage, and one of the effects is that the labor of domestic reproduction ceases to be just a gift economy and becomes more and more a service economy. What I mean by this is that we increasingly see domestic labor organized, contracted out, and sold in the market where middle- and upper-class working women increasingly employ other women to carry out aspects of domestic care. (Saskia Sassen has done brilliant work on global women and the use of particularly female migrant labor to contract out work once performed by housewives). Nannying, cleaning, food service workers, and sex workers are all part of this new service economy to support these relations that were formally produced within the space of domesticity.

So reproductive labor becomes, frankly, labor, becomes transactional, market-driven, sometimes or often informal, but nevertheless, clearly a form of labor. We can say that a major difference between Fordist uncompensated reproductive labor, and the contemporary relations of reproduction is a de-nationalization of the reproductive sphere and its exposure to global precarious labor markets. This is a key part in what we are arguing: instead of reproduction being primarily something located within the space of a nuclear family, within the space of the nation and outside of labor relations; it is increasingly reproduced through the global circulation of migrant labor; and it's increasingly reproduced through various kinds of market relations.

This is a very easily seen when we talk about the human surrogacy market—a clear de-nationalization of reproduction, where the site of reproduction moves offshore—you go outside of your country, specifically so that you can purchase reproductive services.

It is interesting that these circuits are often closely aligned with the geographies of labor migration, more generally. So, again going back to my Eastern European women example, they are a major part of the oöcyte vending population, but of course, they are also a major part of the migrant population throughout Europe, particularly as nannies, cleaners, or sex workers.

There are interesting and significant crossovers happening between these different two populations.

I'm going to now just talk about the actual biology itself, and ways in which biology has to be rethought to understand how we can think about it as a kind of clinical reproductive labor. I'll first talk about fertility outsourcing and the biology of assisted reproduction.

For the greater part of the 20th century, assisted reproduction technologies and IVF have been devoted precisely to the mass reproduction of animal life for industrial agriculture. That is where IVF technologies emerged. They emerged from the management of large industrial animal herds. IVF technology has also inherited concerns with standardization, rationalization, and a kind of factory-production model of scientific management. If we think about IVF as a process that intervenes at different points in the trajectory of in vivo reproduction, it breaks it down into its components, it scales some of the components up, or scales them down, and it renders them ex vivo. Therefore, instead of reproduction being something that takes place inside the body through the self-regulating biology that goes to work to make the baby, you actually identify the different points in the reproductive process as if you're breaking it down into a production line, if you like. You disaggregate insemination from conception. You can disaggregate the egg from the body and with gestational surrogacy, you can disaggregate the uterus from the actual contracting parent. So we see this way in which the process of reproduction gets redistributed in a much more, in a sense, industrial production line.

By doing this, it gets around certain kinds of clinical bottlenecks in the process. So typically, people who go to have fertility treatments have some kind of problem with one of these processes, and by rendering it ex vivo, you can then address the particular problems. There might be a problem with sperm, there might be a problem with eggs, there might be a problem with gestation itself, and if you can just isolate and externalize these different aspects, then you can get around the bottleneck and you can get your baby in the end. Well, you may not, of course—the success rates are not that high. It is a kind of industrialization of the process of reproduction, and it is precisely this industrialization which lends it to the new kinds of spatial ordering, so you can use Indian populations, you can use East European populations as reproductive sites, precisely because of this disaggregation.

It seems to me that it is very, very similar to the off-shoring and subcontracting and manufacture which happened in the 1990s, where in response to the falling rates of profit for industrial manufacture in the United States and Western Europe, that manufacturing goes off shore. It goes to southern China, in particular. But of course, the head office stays in Europe or the United States and you subcontract your production out to this other site. This is really effectively what is happening with this off-shoring and fertility outsourcing. You identify low-cost populations, if you can facilitate different stages of your reproductive process, more cheaply than you could if you were to stay in the relative wealth of the global North.

The process is nevertheless different from the stem cell process because it's concerned with preserving the developmental pathways that will eventually produce a child, even if these pathways have to travel through several different bodies. You keep the pathways more or less the same, you just divert them outside the body, and eventually you will send them back. Stem cell research is quite different from this, because it is precisely concerned with disrupting the teleology of the production of an organism, a child. It's precisely about experimenting with cellular potential and diverting cellular potential in all kinds of novel ways that have nothing to do with the reproduction of an organism. You define the potential of the cell in a radically-different way from how it's defined in reproductive medicine.

So in the case of embryonic stem cells, the pluripotency of the embryo is diverted away from the production of the blastocyst and eventually, the fetus, and towards the production of a cell line. The cell line immortalizes the tissue and facilitates the self-perpetuating potential in vitro. They are called immortalized cell lines because theoretically, the cell line will live indefinitely and just reproduce the same kind of tissues over and over and over again in the laboratory. Theoretically then, the embryonic stem cell line can produce any of the specialized, fully-differentiated cells that constitute a developing organism, while continuing to divide and produce more of themselves in an uncommitted ex-organism state.

This is a technology concerned with the potential of the cell. It's concerned with the future possibilities of differentiation that are always surplus to the finite possibilities of differentiation within the organism itself. If our bodies start to proliferate cells in an immortalized fashion, we call it cancer, and of course, it's an extremely serious clinical condition. But precisely the same kind of open-ended proliferation, in vitro, is an extremely bio-valuable capacity and it is highly sought-after. The biology of the cell is being reorganized around the promissory value form, which animates the stock market-driven, post-Fordist mode of accumulation—or at least it did until about a year ago.

So we have been very much acculturated to an economy which works on the promise of value, which is what stock market value is. It is always about value that takes place in the future. Suddenly, though, with the global financial crisis, the future seems to have stopped and it is intriguing to think about how the promissory value of biomedicine might relate to this failure of promissory value in the broader economy.

I will just make a couple of concluding comments. As I said, a key feature of life sciences research and bioeconomic development since the 1970s is about the recalibration of reproductive processes of biology, and more and more of these processes have been turned into a new material base for production. The whole regenerative medicine paradigm is precisely about securing the reproductive process of biology and transforming it into a new material base for the production of clinically-useful material. I think it would be fair to say that if we combine that development with the development I was talking about before—the ways in which the reproductive sphere of Fordism has been put on the market—reproduction in general has been put to work, so the whole reproduction is now involved in a kind of labor.

Both the domestic life of the Fordist economy and the biological reproduction of the body have been put on the post-Fordist labor market, if you like, and really, what we are trying to do in the book is to think about the implications of that development for women and for the populations in developing and transitional economies who are most caught up in the process.

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Catherine Waldby - Podcast Description
Catherine Waldby is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this lecture, delivered on November 6, 2009 at Barnard College, Professor Waldby explores the emerging tensions between women's voluntary (public good) donation of reproductive tissues for stem cell research and the increasing resort to transactional forms of tissue procurement, for example egg sharing and egg vending. She locates this tension in both a feminist biopolitical analysis and in the broader dynamics of the global bioeconomy.