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Biology’s Day at the Races I n t r o d u C t I o n “Gene jockeys”—as I learned as a biology graduate student at Stanford during the 1980s—were biologists working in the biotechnology firms that hired so many of my fellows at the time. Soon after, the term became the name of a lab computer program that found the correct position of DNA sequences. At a superficial level, the metaphor makes sense, because as a “gene jockey” a biologist spent most of his time moving DNA pieces from one place to another. But like many metaphors that catch on, this one is apt on a deeper level. Biotech in this early era was a festive contest closely akin to the premier horse racing circuit. Its venture capitalists, charismatic scientist-entrepreneurs, stock market investors, and of course its cloning races all have their close racecourse counterparts. And what does the metaphor say about the scientists, the main characters in this book? The typically ironic, self-deprecating but defiant usage reminds us that a gene jockey felt himself a smaller man in the eyes of academic counterparts, even if respected as an athlete. Essentially, this book is about how the biotech arena emerged when molecular biology, one of the fastest-moving and most important areas of basic science in the twentieth century, met the business world during the 1970s and 1980s. It studies five of the first products to come from the new enterprise of genetic engineering . All these products were drugs, and all were previously known natural proteins, commercialized by cloning the human genes into microbes or other cells that could be grown in vats. Since pharmaceuticals were always the economic driver of the biotech sector, and furthermore since these same five drugs (and minor variants) today still account for an enormous share of the wealth said to be created by biotechnology, I think this study represents a fair basis for generalizations about the interactions of science and commerce in the biotechnology of the period. 2 Gene Jockeys Although it does not directly address the biotechnology industry of today, this book may interest business scholars and economists, among whom there rages debate about the extent to which biotech has lived up to the economic promises trumpeted in its early days, and the extent to which biotech’s benefits have been increased or impaired by economic policies like the 1980 Bayh-Dole act that made it easier for US universities to patent publicly funded research.1 In brief, the relevant implications of my story are that the early fruits of genetic engineering , low-hanging and ripened through decades of publicly financed biological research, may have been harvested earlier through the policy-stimulated, entrepreneurial rush for profit around 1980. However, with the general advance of molecular biology they would soon have been developed into medicines regardless —when the established drug firms learned how to clone. And for reasons just as firmly grounded in biology rather than economics, these findings imply that after this rich early harvest the field would necessarily yield less, and more grudgingly. There is no longer such a large backlog of fundamental knowledge ripe for “application” or, as current jargon puts it, “translation” as medical technology . Thus policies based on the premise that anything like this first bounty can ever recur are flawed. Moreover, I shall, on several grounds, suggest that in calculating the benefits from biotech enterprise in the era, there were also social costs, among which even the economically assessable ones are overlooked by economists, that need to be weighed along with the economic benefits as measured by sales revenues. For these mixed outcomes the policies that encouraged the rapid flourishing of recombinant drug development described here also need to be held accountable.2 But the focus in this book is on the science, and money’s effect upon it and vice versa, rather than on the money per se. I will show that the development of the first-generation recombinant DNA drugs did not entail any great diversion or distortion of science. These projects were driven by biologists themselves, and in ways that grew out from traditional problems and values of the science(s) of molecular biology. Yet this is no “internalist” story of autonomous science, interacting only with society “outside” it to the extent that predestined discoveries are quickened or slowed (by funding, laws, etc.). Rather, this book’s perspective is that the science of genetic engineering was—like all...

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