Globalizing Technologies: Geopolitical Innovation in the U.S. Bioeconomy

Abstract

This chapter examines how U.S.-based visions of biotechnological potential, undergirded by narratives of biological and economic progress, contribute to shaping technological innovation, policy, and politics at the international level. The invocation of “science-based” markets and policies is put to work in diverse instances to create conditions of potentiality for a particular vision of future good—the bioeconomy. The chapter discusses techniques for the creation of international markets for biotechnologies, as well as the modes of measurement and obfuscation leveraged in their validation and discursive construction as universally beneficial, placeless, and disembodied technologies.