"Biocapital" is a major theoretical contribution to science studies and political economy. Grounding his analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge. Sunder Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period from 1999 through 2004. He draws on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug development in the two countries, examining the practices and goals of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the process, he illuminates the global flow of ideas, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives. Sunder Rajan's ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls techno-scientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and Co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. His work engages social theories of capitalism, science, technology studies, and postcolonial studies, holding a special interest in the global political economy of biomedicine, with a comparative focus on the United States and India. He has lectured and published widely in the United States and beyond. In his first major study, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (2006), he examines genomics and post-genomic drug development marketplaces in the US and India. His most recent book, Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine (2017), elucidates the political economy of global pharmaceuticals as seen from contemporary India.