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The first discussions relating to the regulation of recombinant DNA technology in the UK occurred in 1970, and were independent of similar discussions happening in the US from 1973. UK regulatory authorities were differently motivated by the range of concerns around risk posed by the new technology. UK authorities implemented a framework that was informed by a specific culture that had roots in scientific and laboratory work practices. The paper reflects on the early close relationships between UK biotechnology industry and university laboratory spaces, and the central concern around laboratory safety and workers rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years following the end of World War II saw a rapid increase in the rate of the introduction of new products by the pharmaceutical industry in Europe and North America. Patenting played an increasingly significant role in the industry and the companies, which were investing heavily in research, needed to develop strategies of appropriation to ensure that they recouped the rewards of innovation. This paper explores the use of patents by UK companies during the therapeutic revolution and beyond. It suggests that within a framework of competition, the use of patents and the practice of licensing, combined with the growing complexity of products led to the creation of networks of cross-licensing, often linked to a variety of collaborative arrangements. In this process, the companies created corporate capabilities which contributed to their growth and international development within the period covered by the paper. By the 1960s, however, the nature of licensing had changed but some collaborative arrangements and the capabilities they created continued to play a significant role in the further international development of the industry. From the late 1970s, as new drugs became more elusive and expensive, as well taking much longer to get into the market, patents for the much sought after 'blockbuster' drugs were eagerly pursued. Patents, licensing and various forms of collaboration assumed a new significance in the approaches made by the pharmaceutical corporations to the innovative discoveries of the biotechnology industry in the last two decades of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper's focus is on both the geography of entrepreneurship and on industry-collaborative links internationally, nationally and at the local level in the UK biotech industry, the world's second largest biotech industry. The paper reports on a pilot survey of the UK biotech industry. The survey has two goals: to understand the business goals of the firms and to examine the relative importance of local conditions to the business of biotech. Further evidence on these two themes comes from two studies of Oxfordshire, one of the UK's centres of biomedical science and biotechnology. The first is a survey of the county's biotech firms. The second, of academic spin-offs, demonstrates how the business of biotech in the UK is intimately tied to the national innovation system, which in turn is dependent upon highly localised elite science which in turn signals to world elites that the region is a hot-spot for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is an increasingly globalised phenomenon but the highest rates of visible innovation are found in and around cities. This paper explores the 'urban factors' that support innovative activity, focusing on English cities. Agglomeration economies can help explain both cities' resilience and the characteristics of urban markets, assets, networks and institutions that help innovation to take place. A high-level explanatory framework is set out, using the concepts of 'urban hubs' and 'local links' to draw together these ideas. The framework is then explored using five case studies from the UK and abroad. The findings suggest a number of different 'innovation trajectories' for different city types. Innovation policymakers should pay more attention to improving urban infrastructure, skills and critical mass, and should devolve strategy-making towards pan-regional and sub-regional actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology I described how competing visions of sustainable agriculture are currently battling for hegemonic status (Johnson 2006). One vision seeks to break the hegemony of productionism and the other seeks to continue down its path with a greater emphasis on biotechnology. In this paper, I wish to explore these visions further as they apply to actual existing strategies for sustainable farming and food in the UK. This paper uses discourse analysis to compare the UK government's vision for sustainable farming and food sectors with that of two NGOs: Friends of the Earth and Corporate Watch. The language and discourse in the government's and NGOs' strategy documents is examined for evidence indicating their ideological conception of agricultural sustainability. The paper concludes that, whilst the NGOs are pursuing a strong vision of sustainability, seeking to break productionism's hegemony, the UK government is pursuing an ideologically weak-to-moderate conceptualisation of sustainability, pursuing the high-technology modified version of agricultural productionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to political pressures arising from controversial science policy decisions, the United Kingdom (UK) government conducted a review of its biotechnology governance framework in 1999, identifying best practices of open government and creating strategic bodies to adopt them. Drawing from empirical data on the context and nature of the open government framework, this paper argues that the framework may be interpreted as elasticizing objectivity. Value-neutral scientific objectivity is essentially 'stretched' into a pluralist objectivity that purports to represent a spectrum of interests without privileging any, allowing the policy culture to retain its legitimating objectivity and authority. Governance implications of this analysis are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some selected topics seen as being most important in currently affecting the development of biotechnology in the UK. The importance of demand side factors such as the role of professional experts, regulatory bodies, retailers, public opinion and political activity in stimulating or discouraging innovation in biotechnology is discussed. Supply side factors are then analysed, particularly the major changes in the organizations which generate biotechnology innovations - especially collaborative alliances and network firms, and the restructuring of the chemical, pharmaceutical and agro-food industries which use biotechnology, via merger, acquisition, demerger and divestment. Two important aspects of the infrastructure for innovation, which are rapidly changing and generating debate and concern, are then considered. These are intellectual property regimes on the one hand, and corporate governance and the sources of finance for investment on the other. The issue of globalization of innovative activity in biotechnology and in the industries which use it is addressed next, and it is concluded that collaborative alliances are the main mechanism by which overseas sourcing of technology is taking place. Finally, future trends and some policy implications are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a special issue on the social and economic dimensions of biotechnology in Great Britain. Definition; Biotechnology-based companies; Social scientic issues.

This paper examines the economic prospects for the biotechnology industry, focusing on the UK position. I discuss some economic issues relating to the structure of the biotechnology industry and examine whether these factors can account for the relative success of the biotechnology sector in the UK compared to other European countries. I emphasize the importance of the science base, pharmaceutical companies and capital markets in giving the UK an advantage. Looking ahead I argue that prospects are good for the global growth of the industry due to supply and demand side factors. The UK is in a leading position in Europe but faces significant dangers, especially from the public towards biotechnology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the patterns of venture capital (VC) investment in dedicated biotech firms (DBFs) in the therapeutic and diagnostic sectors (bio-healthcare). We use a database of 655 UK bio-healthcare deals to map the geographical flows of VC investment and measure the co-location of investors and DBFs. Then, using 20 face-to-face interviews with venture capitalists (VCs) and DBF firms in Cambridge and Scotland, we study the strategic motives underlying the co-location of investors and investee companies and reflect on the catalytic role VCs play in context of the Scottish and Cambridge bio-clusters. From the viewpoint of VC-related policies, we find that our study is more in line with arguments stressing the attractive power of 'investor-ready' opportunities (Mason and Harrison 2003) than supply-side approaches that take for granted VC presence at the core of high-tech clusters. In line with Avnimelech, Rosiello, and Teubal (2008), we propose that VC policy should be consistent with the wider strategic objectives of innovation and technology policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon a survey of the life science and biotechnology regions of Oxford, Central Scotland and South West England to examine the innovation and embeddedness traits of the regions. The insights into the compositional weaknesses and strengths of the regions suggest opportunities and threats for the future development of the UK's life sciences and biotechnology. The discussion moves forward debates on biotechnology, regional innovation, regional economic development and policy by posing research questions relating to the gap of knowledge of two under-researched regions, the need for a differentiated view of regions and a public policy approach tailored towards them, as well as the prospects of 'engineering' high-tech regions. Some of the highlighted policy challenges are common to the three regions, while others are region-specific and reflect the variations of regional make-up and stage of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the 'new tools of governance' and how they might apply to the life science industries. Through a study of a number of UK government-industry 'task forces' and recent world events in drug regulation it identifies two opposing trends in play and suggests that there are actually limits to the all pervasive notion of governance. Instead, the multi-faceted policy and regulatory situation that applies to the life sciences is leading to the existence of a government-governance continuum where different aspects of genomics and life science technologies sit at different points; contrasting the role of the state in controlling and framing the context for the implementation of innovations in life sciences through the regulatory system with the more participative forms of policy-making that are being fostered both to promote national competitiveness and encourage public acceptance of these new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the regulation of biotechnology in Britain, Germany and the United States and shows that systematic differences have developed around four issues: abortion, assisted reproduction, stem cells, and genetically modified crops and foods. Policy choices with respect to these issues reflect the capacity of each nation's regulatory institutions to deal with the scientific, social and ethical uncertainties around biotechnology. National regulatory frameworks constitute an apparatus of collective sense-making through which governments and publics interpret biotechnology's risks and promises. Specifically, regulatory choices position the novel ontologies created by biotechnology either on the side of the familiar and manageable or on the side of the unknown and insupportably risky. The comparison shows that public responses to biotechnology are embedded within robust and coherent political cultures and are not ad hoc expressions of concern that vary unpredictably from issue to issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Biobank UK as its centrepiece, this paper analyses the politics of legitimation accompanying the emergence of population-based genetic databases and the contribution of bioethics to the power play therein. First, it explores the nature of the legitimation problem experienced by biotechnology and considers the extent to which bioethics can be regarded as an epistemic community capable of responding to that problem through a regulatory contribution. Second, drawing on a range of documentary and internet sources, it examines the ethical content of the policy discourse of biobank regulation in four countries in terms of the balance of power expressed therein between the rights of citizens, science, industry and the state in relation to the control of genetic information. Third, the analysis deals with the contribution of the international discourse and networks of bioethics to the policy debate of biobank regulation and the disciplinary identity of this divided epistemic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the rationale and results of a scenario exercise concerning possible future developments in UK biotechnology. The final output of this exercise is a 'consensus' vision of what success might look like for the UK in biotechnology in 2005. The 'success scenario' was developed during a two-day workshop through structured discussions in a group of people active in biotechnology in industry, research agencies, consultancies or academe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents quantified estimates of the prospective impacts on the UK economy over 2000-05 of the development of biotechnology. The study has proceeded by identifying the key effects that we expect biotechnology to have, determining on the basis of logic and economic theory the qualitative character of the expected economic consequences, constructing scenarios within the Cambridge Multisectoral Dynamic Model of the UK economy to represent these effects and examining and interpreting the consequences revealed by the model's results. Biotechnology is still at such an early stage that attention is mainly focussed on the impact of biotechnology production, rather than diffusion. The industrial application of biotechnology in relation to the overall economy is likely to remain modest through to 2005, but will probably be greater in the longer term as the producing sectors grow in importance and as the technology becomes more pervasive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In assessing the likely demand for biotechnology products it is not sufficient just to look at what is happening in firms and their immediate market environment. There is no one 'market' for biotechnology products: there are differences between sectors and between countries. You have instead to look at the institutional contexts of the biotechnology product's development. This paper reviews work which has been carried out by social scientists, especially those using 'social shaping' approaches, on the development of new products based on advances in biotechnology and on the creation of markets to go with these products. It examines work on public attitudes to the exploitation of the technology, focusing especially on the issue of social inclusion and exclusion and how biotechnology might make exclusion more likely. It concludes by considering what current differences in public attitudes to the development of some biotechnology-based products might mean for the development of markets for those products in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis on genetically modified (GM) food and crops in Great Britain and their political and public implications. It also identifies some key lessons for the regulation and governance of nanotechnologies. It also cites the process in evaluating the socioeconomic, health and environmental implications of the technology.

Drawing upon data collected within 20 focus groups with consumers from five European countries, in this article we investigate how perceptions of human health risk and current anxieties regarding agricultural food production affect citizens' acceptance of the use of an emerging biotechnology, synthetic biology, in the development of vaccines for animals bred for food production. In focus group discussions in Austria, the UK, Poland and Denmark, participants tended to value the positive potential of synthetic vaccines if they could solve existing problems. Participants argued that the technology could be beneficial for animal welfare and was a potential solution to the problem of risks to human health posed by the use of antibiotics on livestock. The perceived drawbacks of antibiotic use affected the discussions towards acceptance of synthetic biology and the use of vaccines in meat production despite concerns over the potential risks. The participants from Spain stood out in that their acceptance of the synthetic vaccine appeared to be disconnected from concerns about risks related to the use of antibiotics. Participants from all countries found the vaccine to have potential uses, but also expressed concerns about health risks for consumers. In general consumers were perceived as those bearing the heaviest burden of risk, while pharmaceutical companies were perceived as likely to benefit most from production of the vaccine. We found that institutional trust and national contexts of (dis)engagement with science influenced the participants' understandings of the degree to which the synthetic livestock vaccine had a fair risk-benefit balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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With reference to two comparative UK biotechnology case studies, spanning recent decades, this article outlines the main features of what might usefully be expressed as ‘reflex regulation’. This includes a set of reactive institutional habits, routines and reflexes that continue to characterise the regulation of the biosciences in the UK. Methodologically, the article draws on long-term social scientific engagement with policy-making in the field of xenotransplantation in the 1990s and, a decade later, the politics of trans-species embryo stem cell research. Our focus in this article is on questions of time and timing in the temporal relationships between developments in bioscience, policy-making and wider political deliberation. Both case studies exhibit a range of persistent policy-making features, specifically a range of temporal reflexes including: the largely uncritical susceptibility of policy communities to promissory scientific claims by key entrepreneurial scientific stakeholders; a perceived policy need to react rapidly to often unchallenged claims about imminent benefit; a tendency towards the construction of regulatory measures that are often poorly adapted to long-term socio-technical processes; and an institutionalised historical amnesia whereby policy communities fail to critically reflect on the periodicities of hype and disappointment. These features of science governance, we argue, continue to inhibit and narrow the opportunity for a potentially more ‘reflexive’ as opposed to ‘reflex’ science policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Controversies on emerging technosciences, such as agri-biotechnology and medical biotechnology, have been a formative aspect of the public response to technoscientific innovations for the last decades. Within these controversies, the problematization of technoscience has not always been framed in the same way. Debates on agri-biotechnological applications focus mostly on issues of risk and safety and on questions about evidence and uncertainty. In contrast, debates on medical biotechnologies center primarily on differences of opinion about the ascribed ontological status of the related objects and the ethical acceptability of the technoscientific interventions. The first controversy can be described as mainly risk-focused, the second controversy as mainly ethically framed. These two different modes of framing agri-biotechnology and medical biotechnology are compared and discussed, addressing public and regulatory discourse, the related polity systems and modes of governance. Empirical examples stem from Germany and Great Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the economy has globalized, it has also regionalized, which has led to the integration of different spaces across different scales. A number of theories contend that the endogenous assets of these locations provide them with the means to compete in this globalizing economy, especially in relation to knowledge- based sectors like biotechnology. Among these theories, the cluster concept stands out. However, there is little support for the arguments that local linkages are the central contributors to innovation. Extralocal linkages have also been highlighted, suggesting that other theories that account for these linkages may prove useful in the discussion of knowledge-based sectors, in general, and biotechnology, in particular. One such theory is the concept of global commodity chains, which explicitly concerns the interconnections within and across different geographic scales. As yet it has seldom been applied to the biotechnology industry. This article uses the approach to explore the U.K. biotechnology industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional capabilities and knowledge domain theses are proposed. Global biotechnology dynamics are analysed. Detailed research on Europe's leading bioeconomy, the UK, is presented. Global network analysis is performed based on research into collaborations between “star” scientists and their institutes in bioregions at a global scale, with regard to joint publication of bioscientific articles in US and European Union (EU) Science Citation Index representative and leading cited journals. The originality here lies in identifying the hierarchical structure and main network axes in the global bioscientific research system. The results show the expected in that the strongest bioregions are in North America, particularly around Boston, San Diego and San Francisco. For collaboration, using this measure, Sweden is revealed as a strong European research base, as is the UK. New bioregions are found rising in Asia, and Japan for long quiescent has at last begun to move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses key issues concerning secrecy in science and the exposure of the public to biological warfare agents. British biological warfare program; Secret preparation for Operation Cauldron, a biological warfare trial in 1952; The 'Carella' incident during the Cauldron series of trials.

Internet technology is creating a new corporate communications framework, which is affecting communication channels, corporate audiences, message content and form, communication feedback and corporate personae. Confronted with a complex communications environment, which is characterized by many conflicting views and highly sensitive topics, biotechnology companies have to transmit a clear and powerful message to their target audiences. This study analyses the projection of corporate images in the 'company profile' texts published on-line by biotechnology firms in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the perspective of young people on the risk and safety in relation to biotechnology in Great Britain. Application of science and technology to achieve the desires of human beings; Limits and barriers to human action in biotechnology; Relativistic attitude toward individual freedom of choice.

Public controversy has intensifed over the environmental effects of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) amid contending accounts of sustainable agriculture. In regulating these products, the UK has extended its 'consultative' style, seeking to maintain the appearance of expert neutrality. To anticipate and incorporate potential dissent, the government adopted precautionary legislation and established a broadly-based advisory committee. Although the UK regulation is officially 'risk-based', in practice it involves a qualitative assessment of the acceptability and plausibility of potential effects. In this way, the risk debate has become scientized: some uncertainties are translated into technical criteria, while others are downplayed or deferred. These official judgements have been seriously challenged, especially at the commercial stage of herbicide-tolerant crops. Pressure groups hold regulators publicly accountable for controlling risks which the government had excluded from GMO regulation. In all those ways, the UK consultative style has come under strain. The regulatory procedure faces dilemmas- between setting narrow regulatory boundaries versus gaining legitimacy for products; between enabling commercial use versus extending precautionary controls; and between providing some public access versus limiting participation. These strains are illuminated here by two theoretical perspectives- 'reflexive scientization' and 'national regulatory styles'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents news and views related to the environment as of 1991. Belief of the Agriculture and Food Research Council of Great Britain that traditional staple crops could be replaced by sunflowers, soya beans and navy beans; Comprehensive plans undertaken by the Republic of China for the development of biotechnology; Measures launched by peat producers in Great Britain in February 1990.