Patents are biopolitical and neoliberal tools.

In the previous chapter, I argue that patent law functions as a technology of power, utilizing the molecularization of life described by Rose as its means: advances in biotechnology enabling human societies to alter the cellular and subcellular processes of life allow living material to enter the marketplace and be governed by legal policy. More profoundly, molecularization enables policy to influence how we view our relationship to those processes of life—that is, the power of our public policy to influence our moral sentiments arises not merely from the incremental introduction of new laws and regulations, but rather from a new view of biology produced by molecularization. In closing by revisiting this point, I consider Foucault's ​The Birth of the Clinic​ , particularly as it relates historically to the development of a political biomedical consciousness from the advancement of biotechnology and the sciences. In detailing his notion of biopower, Foucault historically traces the state's conditional provision of legal status to the medical profession as it began operating at the level of the home and family. Initially serving state interests by providing its own form of surveillance, the field of biomedicine soon intensified its connection to the state: the epidemic as a phenomenon soon became a threat to the essential economic interests of the state, meriting its consideration as a national medical issue. This in turn allowed for "the definition of a political status for medicine and the constitution, at state level, of a medical consciousness whose constant task would be to provide information, supervision, and constraint, all of which 'relate as much to the police as to the field of medicine proper'" (26).173 This state interest in medicine as a means to preserve control over production occurred simultaneously with the technological advancements necessary for the development of a systematic, scientific field of inquiry. Stated differently, advancements in medical technology and the discipline's maturation as a knowledge-generating apparatus began to allow for human bodies to become the targets of power as the raw materials from which that knowledge is manufactured. According to Foucault, the establishment of the clinic permits this phenomenon, enabled by the epistemic shift previously discussed. That power is secured, reified, and reinforced through legal policy, inexorably linking the goals of science with those of the state. In turn, the content of our policy influences moral discourse subtly and incrementally, a point worth noting in the context of Rose’s proposal that modern political power takes the form of governing a genetic body: modern policy is no longer limited by a grossly anatomic or physiologic view of the body as biotechnology’s advancement permits life science institutions to envision life at a cellular or molecular level. This epistemic shift functions within a broader framework of power relations that are capable of influencing and even determining our ethical evaluations. In this section, I propose that reframing moral discourse by acknowledging a reciprocal power relationship (in which the interests and beliefs of a state’s citizens have the power to determine policy) is valuable in approaching resolution of the issues discussed to this point. My intention in providing this brief overview of Foucault's political biomedical consciousness is twofold: first, to close this project by alluding to Foucault's claim that the "medical gaze" as a product of and instrument in the knowledge-generating apparatus of biomedicine provides a foundational power asymmetry—one that takes its more modern form in Rose's molecularization; and second to propose that the very development of biomedicine as a field even prior to its industrialization occurred via the powers of the state. In these ways, our current economic frameworks, ideologies, and practices afford distinctive forms of public control. More specifically, emphasizing "privatization and free trade as privileged modes of governance" allows for "the control and management of knowledge through patent law," thereby situating "patent law as a juridical tool and mechanism of neoliberalism where biological and genetic material are privatized for the development of capitalist production"