The inscription of life in law: genes, patents, and bio-politics.
In 1989, Carol Jenkins, an American medical anthropologist attached to the Institute of Medical Research in Papua New Guinea, extracted a set of blood samples from some members of the Hagahai, a small group of hunter-gatherers living in an inaccessible mountain range: 'I told them we wanted to see a 'binitang' an insect in their blood'.' The suspicion that this peculiar 'insect' existed had arisen from research carried out by scientists from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), who were conducting a survey of the distribution of variants of the HTLV-I virus in Melanesia." In her own (retrospective) accounts of the transaction that was taking shape, Jenkins identified herself as a disinterested intermediary, whose primary concern was to ensure that the Hagahai received the proper commercial or therapeutic return for their participation. Her original research interests had little to do with the genetic properties of their blood. In a paper describing the methods and objectives of her medical-anthropological survey, written before these particular blood samples had been extracted, Jenkins heralded 'a rare opportunity to document the effects of contact on a previously isolated population in Papua New Guinea'.3 Apparently, the Hagahai had avoided direct contact with 'globalised' society until 1983, when the effects of various illnesses became so severe that they came to a missionary outpost in search of assistance. The missionaries had their own ambitions for the Hagahai, which were not necessarily in the best interests of the health of the group,4 and the first effective measures of medical assistance arrived only when Jenkins and her colleagues began their study. Indeed, Jenkins' published account states that 'the ethical obligation to intervene with medical aid was immediately obvious to the researchers'.5 However, although the protocols of research and publication did not exclude an active concern for the health of the Hagahai,6 it remains the case that the governing objective of Jenkins' programme was 'to investigate the causes