Starting up Biology in China: Performances of Life at BGI

Abstract

BGI (hua da ji ying; 华大基因; “China Great Gene”) counts among the world’s largest and wealthiest institutions for biomedical research. Located in Shenzhen, the new megacity in southern China, BGI is now a critical site for understanding the relationship between biomedicine and the economic development of China. This essay uses performance studies and the notion of shanzhai (“copycatting”) to understanding how this laboratory poses a challenge to traditional modes of understanding technoscience. This marks an attempt to understand BGI, its work, and its workers on their own terms, or at least on local terms. Just as shanzhai challenges our notions of originality, BGI’s hybridity challenges our notions of where and how scientific knowledge is produced. Performing not merely as a “laboratory,” but also, and at the same time, as a “factory,” and a “company,” BGI is an unfamiliar kind of hybrid scientific-industrial-commercial-governmental-philanthropic space that draws its repertoire from its very particular regional, national, and local-urban circumstances.