Globalization, Stem Cell Markets and National Interests

Abstract

Throughout the developed and developing world, states are investing public funds in basic ESC science and devising regulatory frameworks to facilitate research. In the neoliberal climate that has dominated, or at least influenced, most national administrations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since the 1980s, the provision of large-scale public funding for biomedical research is startling when set against stagnant or declining health budgets, the steady marketization of health services and the growing pressures on universities to find corporate research funding. Moreover, it suggests that, contrary to much of the globalization literature that emphasizes an overall decline of state power in the face of transnational communications and global markets (Ohmae, 1995; Bauman, 1998; Starnge, 2000), nation states are in fact significant actors in the biotechnology sector, particularly in the stem cell sector. This involvement, however, does not imply the existence of a nationally or locally based bioeconomy. Stem cell research and development (R&D), regenerative medicine and the bioeconomy in general are intensively globalized, through multiple levels of transnational commercial, policy and research networks. McMeekin and Green, in their introduction to a special issue of New Genetics and Society, which focused on the UK biotechnology industries, observe: ‘The [contemporary] biotechnology sector is the first science-intensive set of industrial activities which has been truly globalized “from birth”’ (2002, p. 101).