Microbiology and the Imperatives of Capital in International Agro-Biodiversity Preservation

This essay considers the political economy of transnational scientific research based on global collection of biota for laboratory manipulation, focusing on a program to develop pest-resistant wheat using fungal endophytes common in a range of wild but closely related grasses. This effort extends long-standing efforts to commoditize living substances of increasing scope and complexity, and it is supported by efforts to collect and preserve biological diversity. The essay explores how imperatives of capital shape biodiversity as a policy category and determine which forms of life are saved, materially altering our records of life on earth. These newly legible and malleable organisms become more perfect commodities, suitable for standardization and transmutation into finance capital. Yet endophytes are also of interest in part because of their resistance to such control, throwing into sharp relief the reductive imperatives of commoditization while also provoking new ways of justifying capital accumulation and flow. This essay questions the extent to which histories of capitalism and science as conjoined projects rooted in the biological species concept can explain contemporary practices of biodiversity preservation and the microbiological research they support. Microbiological research provides new renderings of life on earth that may challenge or reconfigure metaphors and practices common to capitalism and science.