2025/08/11 by A. Gregory Murray · 1 voice
Medicine · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Biotechnology and Related Fields #Bioeconomy and Sustainability Development #Biomedical Ethics and Regulation
paper · doi:10.1080/09505431.2025.2532769
openalex publication_date 2025/08/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
The Open Insulin Project is a community lab-based effort to make affordable insulin using bioengineering. The growth of financialised biotechnology and biomedicine yielded both a crisis of access to motivate and surplus resources to enable Open Insulin. Project volunteers attempted turn spillover expertise and materials against the status quo to produce a ‘biologic of resistance.’ However, adopting the production of a biologic pharmaceutical as the project’s core ultimately constrained their resistance effort. The focus on the available resources and expertise limited project members’ ability to manage important dimensions of producing usable insulin, including the imposing prospects of purification, scaling, and regulatory approval and the legal nuances of intellectual property. Paradoxically, Open Insulin members found themselves reproducing key features of the financialised biomedical model they aimed to resist, including the embrace of hype and speculation, the depoliticisation of intellectual property, and pressure for accelerated regulatory approval. This case demonstrates how the commonsense logics of contemporary biocapitalism can carry over into resistance movements and limit their capacity. The emergence of community biology and biotechnology initiatives like Open Insulin calls attention to biomedical inequities and provides a vision of biomedicine operating on more altruistic motives. However, it also raises questions about the limits of technological interventions to address inequities in financialised biocapitalism. The embrace of a narrow strategy that privileges technological intervention ultimately resulted in a similarly narrow, incremental form of resistance that shied away from broader systemic critiques.