ISIS Recoding Life Project

At any rate, it's clear that deCODe held out the bait of a uniquely homogenous population, and journalists and investors in Iceland and the U.S. took it hook, line, and sinker, as they say in the fishihg industry that still accounts for a good 70% of Iceland's foreign earnings. In multiple media stories, on investment web sites, in deCODE's own registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the "unmuddied" quality of the gene pool was the big selling point that distinguished this otherwise undistinguished company from the genomics pack.

And like every other genomics company, deCODE issued a continual stream of press releases detailing its latest achievements and discoveries: the mapping or isolation of markers or candidate genes "for" - in the familiar and inaccurate shorthand - for conditions including pre-eclampsia, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, and most recently schizophrenia. But the later publication of some article in the scientific literature substantiating these claims appears with far less frequency in the case of deCODE than with companies like Celera, Millennium, Human Genome Sciences, and other genomics companies. With deCODE, one gets a press release, and little else.

Like the homogeneity line, that too has worked quite well thus far - especially in Iceland itself, where many people were happy to combine their well-intentioned desire to contribute to biomedical research and to support what they saw as an Icelandic company, with a newfound enthusiasm for the stock market. The Icelandic Stock Exchange has really only operated since 1998, and a key official there described to me the operations of what was called "the gray market" and how it allowed deCODE to spread its financial risk among the supposedly homogenous Icelandic population.

In the two years before deCODE's July 2000 IPO on the NASDAQ exchange, the state banks of Iceland bought shares of preferred stock in the company. The banks encouraged Icelandic journalists and others to spread the good news about deCODE and its reported discoveries, and then re-sold the preferred stock they had bought, ever more valuable with each news story, to the genome-enthusiast Icelanders. A total of 11.1 million shares of deCODE were traded on the gray market, pre-IPO. Some 6,000 Icelanders bought stock on the "gray market" like this at prices between $30 and $65 per share; by contrast, deCODE opened on NASDAQ in July 2000 at $18, bubbled up briefly to around $30, and now trades around $9. Many of the Icelanders took out second mortgages or other forms of bank loans to buy into the national enterprise. The securities laws have now been changed in Iceland to preclude exactly the kind of activitiy that went on in the case of deCODE and the state banks.

The Iceland story is a particularly intense and volatile example of the kinds of media-enhanced volatilities that characterize the genomics scene more generally. It's a story that indexes the importance of stories in today's genomics economy. Biotech and genomics stocks are some of the best exemplars of what are called "story stocks" on Wall Street: stocks whose value, even more so than "regular" stocks, is contingent upon the kind of narrative that can be spun around them. (The name "story stocks" dates to around 1994, when "certain stocks for which an intriguing argument could be made - called story stocks - began responding largely to chat-room comment and newsletter hype." [Browning (2000)]

The genomics companies, like their dot-com cousins, depend on intriguing narratives of open-ended futures for their value. They depend on speculation. In his book "irrational exuberance," the economist Robert Shiller has described how speculative bubbles since the tulip-mania of the seventeenth century have been blown up by narrative-dependent anticipations, and how that process has always required the media for its production. In Schiller's analysis, one of the most important features of the great speculative bubble of the late 1990s (if, indeed, it was a bubble) was the intensification of this media effect in the economy. This was most evident with the Internet stocks, Shiller argues, but it is also an important feature in the genomics economy as well, with the daily and even hourly obsessive attention to genomics stock values through on-line news and stock services; and a multiplicity of narrative forecasts, projections, and other anticipatory stories channeled through television channels, newspapers, and magazines.