This article analyses the role of the pharmaceutical and medical device industries (‘pharma’) in the construction of scientific and medical knowledge. Pharma's activities are part of the broader dispositif of institutions, enterprises, regulations and constituencies within which medical-scientific knowledge is generated, but pharma's contributions exhibit a specific character reflecting commercial pressures. As drug development proceeds, research and marketing activities coalesce around ‘product canons’ that integrate scientific truth-claims and commercial positioning, generating knowledge with implicit commercial functionality. From this platform, pharma stamps consensus-building ‘narratives’ into medical-scientific discourse, in which ‘problems’ arise and are ‘solved’ by drugs. Concurrently, pharma modulates the structure of discourse and the social networks through which discourse proceeds. Implicit within these activities is a meta-science whose goal is to understand and technologize the operation of science to an external end. This mode of knowledge production can be viewed as a normative transformation of Kuhnian normal science, characterized by the attachment (and at times subordination) of paradigmatic tenets to extrinsic goals; exaggerated control of belief, research and consensus formation; and a capacity for infringement of traditional norms of scientific truthfulness. An International Standard of Integrity in Science would strengthen pharma's contributions to medical and scientific knowledge.

In this article I address the interactions between biological knowledge and ideas about the kinds of entity that are suited to appropriation. I start by arguing that commodification and reductionism are closely linked, and that patenting suits entities that are discrete and isolable, such as those that are the focus of molecular biology. I then turn to the new field of systems biology, which recognizes that traditional reductionist approaches to biology are no longer adequate and attempts to provide a more integrative understanding of biological systems. In doing this, systems biology has to deal with emergent phenomena. But patenting does not suit the dynamic and interactive complexity that is the object of study in systems biology. If systems biology rejects reductionism where does that leave commodification? I examine attempts to commodify predictive computational models in systems biology. I then turn to systems biology's sister discipline, synthetic biology, which deals with emergence by reducing the complexity of biological systems. By factoring out messy contingencies, synthetic biology is, in theory, well suited to commodification. Drawing on both these examples I explore how ideas about appropriation, including open source, are influencing the nature and course of research in biology.

Post-genomic research relies on blood samples and health information from great numbers of individuals as well as on access to medical records. Studies of collecting and banking bio-resources have increasingly focused on the policy and commodification issues that arise when human DNA enters the information economy. Yet, what has been given much less attention is the process through which citizens are recruited to contribute to post-genomic research. This article analyses practices of recruiting psychiatric patients to a pharmacogenomic research centre in Denmark. It argues that recruitment activities may be conceived as interpellation practices that ‘hail’ individual patients and ask them to place themselves in relationships to other citizens and state institutions by giving researchers access to blood samples, medical records and sensitive life-and-illness information. The interpellation practices studied demonstrate a tension between techniques that operate through distance (sending out letters with information and consent forms) and techniques that operate through presence (making phone calls to patients). These techniques are not simply seen as contrasting ethical conducts, but as complementary and coexisting ways of constituting spatial and social state–citizen relationships.

The intertwined genealogies of racialization and medicalization are mutating once more, with the much heralded arrival of personal genomics. A proliferation of commercial organizations now offer web-based services that, on the basis of an analysis of a DNA sample from a cheek swab and at the cost of a few hundred dollars, promise to scan millions of variations in ‘my genome’ and to tell me where my ancestors came from, to compare my genome with others, and to enable me to calculate my risk for dozens of diseases and conditions from age-related macular degeneration, through Alzheimer's disease and prostate cancer, to restless legs. These new forms of genetic information arise in part from a crisis in genomic medicine, combined with a radical reduction in the costs of gene sequencing. They are linked to a new form of thinking about the genomic bases of disease that link ancestry and medicine in new ways. These cannot be understood simply by deploying the familiar tropes of sociological and anthropological critique—by repeating that ‘race has no biological meaning’. In this article I try to characterize the new ways of thinking about individuals and populations, about risk and responsibility, and about race and population differentiation that are taking shape, and explore their personal and social implications.