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At a time when neoliberalism and financial austerity are together encouraging academic scientists to seek market alternatives to state funding, this essay investigates why, a century ago, their predecessors explicitly rejected private enterprise and the private ownership of ideas and inventions available to them through the patent system. The early twentieth century witnessed the success of a long campaign by British scientists to persuade the state to assume responsibility for the funding of basic research ("pure science"): their findings would enter the intellectual commons; their rewards would be primarily reputational (financial only secondarily, through consequent career advancement). The essay summarizes recent research in three separate fields of British techno-science--electricity, aviation, and agricultural botany--all of which were laying claim, at this time, to a heightened commercial or military importance that raised new questions about the ownership of scientific ideas. It suggests that each of the three established an idiosyncratic relationship with the patent system or with other forms of "intellectual property," which would both influence their emergent disciplines and affect the extent to which commercial enterprise could remain a viable funding strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding of the gathering of nontimber forest products (NTFPs) in woodlands has focused heavily on politics surrounding public lands and harvester communities. Yet forest gathering may be far more universal. This paper reports the results of a survey of residents in New England, querying whether people gather wild things and for what purposes. The results suggest that gathering in New England, and elsewhere in the developed world, is not restricted to a unique type of community or economy, but instead is a form of practice. Those analytical approaches to NTFPs that seek to produce ‘alternatives’ to the dominant economy may therefore ironically work to reinforce a capitalocentric view of daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weeds have an important role in maintaining farmland biodiversity. This needs to be balanced with their potential negative impact on crop yield and quality. Mechanistic models of crop–weed competition are an important tool in striking this balance. A range of common UK annual weeds were screened for the eco-physiological traits required by the models. Using multivariate techniques, a number of functional groups with a similar pattern of productivity and competition were identified, based on trade-offs between traits. A scheme was developed to assign species outside of the data set to one of the groups, based on life cycle, seed mass, maximum height and time of first flowering. As well as having a similar competitive ability, species within a group also appeared to have a similar ecosystem function, in terms of supporting higher trophic groups. Two beneficial groups of species were identified that combined a relatively low competitive ability with a high importance for invertebrates and birds. The identification of functional groups in the UK arable flora is a useful tool for assessing a weed community in the context of reconciling biodiversity provision with crop production. Preserving beneficial plant functional types within the crop would complement non-cropped wildlife refuges, such as field margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biological education in Britain has developed since the eighteenth century from dependence on medicine and 'economic botany' to a vigorous and autonomous field. This progress owes something to an autodidactic tradition; to the influx of European ideas, principally German; to individuals, like T. H. Huxley; to the imported rigours of the physical sciences and, of course, to all those factors external to the discipline which helped to build our present system of higher education. This account deals with some aspects of these things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]