Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences (review)

Arnold Thackray, ed. Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences. The Chemical Sciences in Society Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. xi + 268 pp. Ill. $52.50.

When Edward R. Murrow declared in 1964, "the speed of communications is wondrous to behold," ¹ he could not have envisioned the even faster-moving future of biotechnology. Originating from a 1993 Chemical Heritage Foundation conference, this volume strives (as editor and CHF director Arnold Thackray notes in his introduction) to make an original "contribution to the new discourse on the structure and significance of biotechnology and the Biomolecular Revolution" (p. viii). But in the eighteen months since its press time, pundits of biotechnology have seen even their most up-to-date conclusions challenged by such "wondrous" developments as the first complete human chromosome sequence, the first gene-therapy death, and the first large-scale American public demonstrations against the genetically altered crops that dominate U.S. agriculture. So this whole enterprise begs some important historical questions: What constitutes a scientific revolution-in-progress? And how do its contemporaneous analysts best chronicle and understand it, especially when it is developing and changing so quickly?

The contributors to Private Science take these issues seriously, and as a result the volume provides a useful collection of narrative and methodological strategies for defining biotechnology and describing what makes it both similar to and different from earlier sciences of life. As the book's title suggests, one of the key themes is whether (and how) the private commercial sponsorship of biotechnology delineates it from previous academic- and government-sponsored biology done in the name of the "public good." The three essays in the first section mine the history of biotechnology for precedents. Robert Bud demonstrates that the word biotechnologie has a long history (it was first applied to pig husbandry enterprises in World War I!), and argues that, while new techniques transformed what was possible in the laboratory, scientists of the 1970s drew on this older rhetorical tradition for promoting their vision of biotechnology's social potential. Similarly, Lily Kay suggests that the perceived trend from pure to applied research in molecular biology reflects a misunderstanding of the field's founding discourse: it was conceived as a program of research for representing life as molecular and intervening accordingly to achieve social control. Finally, Angela Creager uses an excellent case study of Edwin Cohn's World War II plasma fractionation project to challenge the standard view that corporate social structures have only recently permeated biology.

The next five essays focus attention on the new structural forces at work within both science and society during the 1970s and 1980s. Daniel Kevles portrays the history of patenting living organisms (from oil-eating bacteria to transgenic mice) as an evolving political process shaped by the social and economic stakes of corporate involvement. In a comparative study of the genetic engineering debate in Britain and the United States, Susan Wright maintains that the scientific and technical elite were actively involved in crafting biotech's new global political economy during the 1980s. Researchers' practical values changed, she argues, to reflect their own social commitments to "momentum," industrial production, and, in turn, deregulation. Relatedly, Herbert Gottweis analyzes the internal politics of British biotechnology, and demonstrates how state-sponsored policy interventions "inscrib[ed] biotechnology as a response to a political-cultural crisis" in the 1970s--specifically, the destabilization of collective European identity (p. 106). But these policies failed, Gottweis suggests, because their "institutional logic" (p. 107) circumscribed necessary conflicts between parties in the debate--scientists, industrial R&D investors, the Thatcher government, and the Medical Research Council (to name just a few). Martin Kenney provides an economic perspective on the issue of privatization, showing how multinational corporations extended their sway into biotechnology by using the field's social and scientific capital to create a "new economic space...