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In the early 2000s, global development policy promoted a model of public health genomics as a pathway to both health improvement and economic growth in ‘developing countries’. Governments were encouraged to invest in national genome sequencing initiatives and translate genomic knowledge into biotech innovation addressing domestic health needs. Two decades later, this paper examines the Indian genome program as a case study to ask why this policy model has failed to deliver on its core promises – medical benefits, health equity, economic prosperity, and ‘genomic sovereignty’.

Tayyaba argues that the model mobilised a decolonial rhetoric of scientific and economic independence for developing nations, yet its prescriptions failed to challenge the structural conditions of dependence in the global economy. Instead, it advocated the wholesale adoption of a neoliberal ‘innovation economy’, centred on large-scale public investment in genomics infrastructure, alongside policies that relaxed intellectual property laws and promoted the commercialisation and financialisation of biotech innovation.

Far from realising its prophesies, this model of national genomics has in fact entrenched existing health inequalities and patterns of value extraction along both local and global axes. This paper underscores the limits of technoscientific development projects that selectively mobilise decolonial discourse while failing to transform the underlying material relations in the national and global economy.

The readings for this session include:

• Jiwani T (2023). “The Muslim genome: postcolonial nation-building through genomics in Pakistan”. New Genetics & Society

https://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2023.2254919

• Optional: Kent M at al. (2015). “Building the genomic nation: ‘Homo Brasilis’ and the ‘Genoma Mexicano’ in comparative cultural perspective”. Social Studies of Science

Dr Tayyaba Jiwani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ERC-funded HUGERA (Human Genomics Without Racism) project, based at Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences at the University of Exeter. She received her PhD in cancer biology and genetics from the University of Toronto. Her current research is in science and technology studies, focusing on the sociology of genomics at the intersection of race and nationalism, with an emphasis on South Asia.

Existing sociological research on global health pay attention to how medical scientific knowledge and practices become diffused, and in some cases interact with national – local institutional arrangements to engender distinct biopolitical formations and health morality. However, scant consideration has been given to how the very science underlying these ideas change as they travel. Borrowing perspectives from the sociology of scientific knowledge and postcolonial sociology, this presentation builds on the literature on global health by elucidating how medical scientific ideas such as the thrifty gene hypothesis, posited by American geneticist James Neel in 1962 to explain the high prevalence of type 2 diabetes among certain ethnoracial groups, was transformed as it encountered the postcolonial politics in the Asia Pacific region.

Following research on diabetes causality and public facing diabetes messaging in Singapore and island Oceania between 1960-2000, a period which also saw efforts to internationalise and standardise diabetes by multilateral health institutions such as the World Health Organization, Bin Khidzer first presents how the thrifty gene hypothesis converged with local and regional ethnoracial classification systems to reproduce moralized public health messaging that sought to discipline the genetics and behavior of ‘at risk’ minorities.

Secondly, Bin Khidzer shows how the hypothesis was mobilized by postcolonial scientific and political actors who exploited the interpretive flexibility of the ‘environment’ in the hypothesis to recreate an understanding of diabetes causality that emphasized postcolonial progress but more importantly, that pushed for the recognition and reckoning of colonial history in understanding population health.

Readings will be posted here, and registered attendees notified, closer to the reading group.

Dr Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer is Lecturer in Medicine, Health and Society in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London. He currently working on a book project on the globalization of Asian Diabetes from Singapore, which traces how diabetes transformed from a relatively obscure condition in the colonial tropics, to a biovaluable and racialized disease in postgenomic Singapore. He has published research on the social and historical studies of science and medicine in journals such as Biosocieties and EASTS,  as well as public facing outlets such as academia.sg and Positions Politics. More recently,  Mohammad has started exploring the diabetes issue comparatively, looking at health movements in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia that engage with healing and care practices through the lens of Nusantara.