Biobanking in Singapore: Post-developmental state, experimental population

Abstract

Like other wealthy states in East Asia, Singapore is busy building a bioeconomy. The government has allocated billions of dollars to life sciences research, under the aegis of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative (BMSI). This paper focuses on one important life sciences research project to consider some of the biopolitical implications of bioeconomic development, in Singapore, but also more generally. This project is the Singapore Consortium for Cohort Studies (SCCS), a large prospective population cohort, designed to track gene environment interactions in metabolic disease, specifically type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. I use the Singapore Consortium for Cohort Studies as a site to examine the question: how are populations figured in bioeconomic development? To put it another way, what are the biopolitics of the bioeconomy? The Singapore example is telling, both because the rate of bioeconomic development is so startling and because it forms an explicit element in the state's attempt to reposition the national population in the global economy.