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The Historiography of Biotechnology

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Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Part of the book series: Historiography of Science ((HISTSC,volume 1))

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Abstract

Compared to the vast literature on the history of biology as a whole, scholarship on what we might term the “history of biotechnology” has only recently arrived in the past 30 years as historians have become interested in the field. Although scholars have studied the history of biotechnology for only a short length of time when contrasted with subjects such as Charles Darwin or genetics, histories of biotechnology have changed and diversified both in approaches and topics since biotechnology became a choice of focused study for historians in the early 1980s. Since that time, it has become a robust field of scholarly activity and promises to be an important part of the history of science, technology, and medicine in the future. In this essay, I provide a structure for understanding the progression of these histories from the the beginnings of the scholarly engagement in the early 1980s through the present.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, the 2015 History of Science Society meeting featured “Roundtable: The New Historiography of Science, Technology, and Intellectual Property Law,” History of Science Society Annual Meeting, November 19–22, 2015, San Francisco, California

  2. 2.

    The easiest way to see the growth of the terms “biotechnology” and “biotechnology revolution” is to track their usage within the English language using Google’s “ngram” viewer, which inspects millions of digitized materials. For further reading about google ngram data, see Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, no. 6014 (January 14, 2011): 176–82 and Yuri Lin et al., “Syntactic Annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus,” in Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations (Jeju Island, Korea: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012), 169–74, http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P12-3029

  3. 3.

    You can also see these fictional tropes invoked in other controversies, like those associated with organ transplantation in the 1960s and cloning and in vitro fertilization the 1970s, among many other controversies throughout the twentieth century. As just one pertinent example, in his article about recombinant DNA patents, Daniel Kevles included a 1980 political cartoon that depicted Dr. Frankenstein with his creature standing outside a U.S. Patent Office, see Daniel J. Kevles, “Ananda Chakrabarty Wins a Patent: Biotechnology, Law, and Society, 1972–1980,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 25 (January 1, 1994): 134)

  4. 4.

    Examples of these types of writings can be found in the conference proceedings of the 1962 conference “Man and his Future” – a name inspired by Medawar’s work – sponsored by the Ciba Institute, which featured multiple Noble Prize winners and famous public intellectuals. Gordon Wolstenholme, Ed., Man and His Future (Churchill; Ciba Foundation, 1963)

  5. 5.

    A good discussion of the various intellectual debates surrounding genetic engineering and its related sciences from this period through the 1990s can be found in John Evans’ Playing God?: Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

  6. 6.

    For a small sample, see Cook-Deegan 1995; Kolata 1998; Bowring 2003; Druker 2015; Knoepfler 2015

  7. 7.

    The number of books that could be cited here is immense, but good examples since 2010 include Collins (2010), Wohlsen (2011), Church and Regis (2012), and Venter (2014)

  8. 8.

    Bud is not the only historian who was attracted to the industrialization of biological products. See Neushul (1993)

  9. 9.

    For example, the types of histories that Philip Pauly illuminated in Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb & the Engineering Ideal in Biology (1987) which historians have found to be particularly useful in understanding the changes in twentieth-century biosciences that became relevant to the development of biotechnologies

  10. 10.

    Bud was tapping into the emerging literature during that time in the history of science and technology on “boundary objects,” which he implied was what biotechnology was for many actors in his story. He explored the concept of biotechnology as a boundary object more specifically in Bud (1991)

  11. 11.

    Discussing biotechnology in the context of biocapitalism is a particularly rich area of scholarship. For further reading see Fortun (2008), Helmreich (2008), Loeppky (2005), Parry (2004), Rajan (2003, 2006, 2012), and Thacker (2005)

  12. 12.

    There are great many examples that could be cited here, but perhaps most indicative of the intersection between historians of biotechnology, STS scholars, and social scientists can be seen in special issue journal volumes focused on biotechnologies such as the Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences special issue “Between the Farm and the Clinic: Agriculture and Reproductive Technology in the Twentieth Century,” vol. 38, June 2007, and the Social Studies of Science volume on post-colonial studies and biotechnologies, vol. 43, August 2013

  13. 13.

    Though carefully curated, one of the most important aspects of Hughes’ work relates to the series of oral histories that she helped conduct with the pioneers of these early biotech companies. Hughes used these oral histories as the basis of her book, and they are available through the University of California Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office, which can be found at the website for the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See http://vm136.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/ROHO/projects/biosci/oh_list.html, accessed February 16, 2016

  14. 14.

    Much of this paragraph was taken from my review of Rasmussen’s book (Journal of the History of Biology 2015)

  15. 15.

    Gaudillière also notes, much like I argue in this essay, that one of the main disagreements in the literature concerns whether molecular biology, particularly recombinant DNA technologies, should be seen as revolutionary or a part of a longer history. He labels this to fight the discontinuity/continuity argument and believes that it ultimately is a problematic way to understand the importance of biotechnologies during the twentieth and twenty-first century

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  1. History Department, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA

    Nathan Crowe

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  1. HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Michael Dietrich

  2. University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

    Mark Borrello

  3. Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

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Crowe, N. (2018). The Historiography of Biotechnology. In: Dietrich, M., Borrello, M., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiography of Science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_13-1

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