Youdiil Ophinni (Medicine, Area Genomics)
What is a scientist to do upon realizing their life’s work—their research, thought, and passion—has become complicit in a system they no longer recognize, or never intended to serve? Shock and regret, perhaps, but more deeply, a sobering disillusionment.
A sense of disillusionment accompanied my arrival at CSEAS last year. Having spent much of my life moving between hectic hospital wards and hushed biomedical labs (both equally monotonous), I found refuge in the Center’s open-minded culture of Area Studies. Yet since then, I have been struck by an even greater doubt: not merely about the labor of the life sciences, but about the myth of neutrality in the life sciences, shaped by the very architectures of knowledge and power within which the life sciences operate.
One such moment came when the American anthropologist Celia Lowe visited our Center earlier this year. Her book, Wild Profusion,[1] documents conservation research in Indonesia’s Togean Islands that was meant to protect biodiversity. Instead, it helped create a marine park that restricted the everyday fishing practices of the indigenous Sama people, while benefiting bureaucratic and tourism interests. In her later work, Viral Sovereignty,[2] Lowe recounts Indonesia’s refusal during the 2006 bird flu outbreak to share virus samples with the World Health Organization, arguing that they should not be used primarily to benefit wealthy nations’ vaccine development—a concern later proved accurate.[3] In such cases, when science becomes entangled with political and ethical questions, what are life scientists to do?
For empiricists (or, more aptly, positivists) who trust data more than anything, such dilemmas reveal a terrifying blind spot in how we think about our work and gain our knowledge. When we relentlessly pursue measurable “facts” without stopping to contemplate values, ethics, and their impact on people’s lives, we may perpetuate systemic harm, even as we convince ourselves we are serving the “greater good.” We claim to be “objective,” “unbiased,” and “evidence-based,” yet from the perspective of those marginalized, we are merely standing on the shoulders of giants oppressors.
My epiphany then came through my rapport with another Visiting Fellow at the Center. An MD–PhD and a renowned professor in Europe, he has published extensively in Nature and Cell journals, and discovered a family of proteins crucial to cellular function—achievements any life scientist would take pride in. Yet he confided in me a profound disillusionment. He was troubled by the perverse trajectory of biomedical research: discoveries generated through publicly funded science were routinely converted into proprietary assets of pharmaceutical companies, producing vast private wealth while leaving the resulting drugs, vaccines, and technologies largely inaccessible to the Global South.
Given another life, he told me, he would choose to work on socio-economic development in developing countries, where his efforts might genuinely improve the lives of vulnerable populations. What I admire most is that he did not wait for any reincarnation; instead, he radically reshaped his career by earning a second PhD in the social sciences to work on the political economy of Southeast Asia.
The British sociologist Nikolas Rose anticipated many of these tensions in The Politics of Life Itself.[4] He describes the rise of “vital politics,” in which human life itself becomes a site of control and intervention, and biology is “no longer destiny.” While echoing Foucault’s la clinique[5] and Fukuyama’s posthuman anxieties,[6] these ideas have been intensified by 21st-century modernization and biotechnological advancement. Rose identifies five key “mutations”: the growing focus on life at the molecular level, efforts to optimize biological processes, the subjectification of people through bodily conditions (resulting in biological citizenship[7]), the emergence of somatic experts who manage bodily health in precise ways, and economies of vitality that turn life itself into profit (biocapitalism[8]).
Rose suggests that such mutations unfold not through dramatic rupture, but through small, everyday practices that become routine and taken for granted. Writing before CRISPR, next-generation sequencing, and artificial intelligence, he likely underestimated the speed of these changes, and the consequences later laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Rose’s aim was never to judge, but to help readers think about the kinds of futures these mutations might produce—perhaps an “emergent form of life” that is deeply biological, yet still human.
Rose extends these concerns in his collaboration with the Irish sociologist Des Fitzgerald, The Urban Brain,[9] which examines the relationship between urban living and mental health—a topic studied separately by sociologists and biologists, leading to unresolved paradoxes. For example, cities, seen as spaces of opportunity[10] and migrant acculturation,[11] show higher rates of mental health conditions than rural areas,[12] while people with schizophrenia in some developing regions tend to recover better than those in wealthier countries.[13] The book also critiques the global expansion of Western psychiatric models and the urban pressures that encourage antidepressant use. To address these, Rose and Fitzgerald propose vitalism, an approach that understands life through the material, social, and spatial surroundings or inhabitation. They engage with contemporary neuroscience findings (such as neuroplasticity and epigenetics), while inviting life scientists to integrate sociological concepts (such as vital politics) into their work.
So, to return: what am I to do? I cannot afford a second PhD, nor do I presume the ability to synthesize knowledge comprehensively as sociologists do. Instead, I chose to dwell here within the Center, hoping to pick up crumbs of expertise from across disciplinary aisles. And when I confided my unease about the myth of neutrality to a colleague in the social sciences (whose office is quite literally across the aisle), he reminded me of an anti-apartheid adage by Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
As life scientists, we indeed study life. Inevitably, we are studying—and shaping—the politics of it.
References
[1] Lowe, C. Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago. Princeton University Press, 2006.
[2] Lowe, C. Viral Sovereignty: Security and Mistrust as Measures of Future Health in the Indonesian H5N1 Influenza Outbreak. Medicine Anthropology Theory 6, (2019).
[3] Deplazes-Zemp, A. et al. The Nagoya Protocol Could Backfire on the Global South. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, 917–919 (2018).
[4] Rose, N. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2007.
[5] Foucault, M. Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical. Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
[6] Fukuyama, F. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Macmillan, 2003.
[7] Rose, N. & Novas, C. Biological Citizenship. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. by Ong, A. & Collier, S. J., 439–463. (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2007). doi:10.1002/9780470696569.ch23.
[8] Peters, M. A. & Venkatesan, P. Biocapitalism and the Politics of Life. Geopolitics, History, and International Relations 2, 100–122 (2010).
[9] Rose, N. & Fitzgerald, D. The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City. Princeton University Press, 2022.
[10] Lipton, M. Why Poor People Stay Poor. A Study of Urban Bias in World Development. 1977.
[11] Bhugra, D. Migration and Mental Health. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 109, 243–258 (2004).
[12] Lederbogen, F. et al. City Living and Urban Upbringing Affect Neural Social Stress Processing in Humans. Nature 474, 498–501 (2011).
[13] Padma, T. V. Developing Countries: The Outcomes Paradox. Nature 508, S14–S15 (2014).
This article is also available in Japanese. >>
「ある生命科学者の幻滅」
（オフィンニ ユディル）
