Quinn, Roswell (Author)
With increasing rates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a dearth of new and novel antibacterial compounds in the pharmaceutical industry's research and development (R&D) portfolio, many public health officials, eminent scientists, and government leaders point to a growing crisis. In response, these experts propose various economic incentives to jumpstart investment by the traditional pharmaceutical industry in antibiotic R&D. Such proposals, however, simply seek to strengthen a preexisting intellectual property regime which has expanded over decades to derive and secure industrial assets from public information and scientific production. By examining this predicament historically, this dissertation documents the U.S. pharmaceutical industry's transformation from a chemical industry to an information industry. In the decades following World War II, the pharmaceutical industry developed new scientific capacities. No longer dependent on brute chemical extraction, the pharmaceutical industry turned to the life sciences and in doing so employed microbes, biological processes, and later genes as means of pharmaceutical production. New scientific talents and staggering profits also provided the basis for new forms of cultural production, allowing the industry to convey new information about itself, its products, and the natural world in novel ways. Taken together these developments provided new grounds for monopoly creation, intellectual property enforcement, and cultural authority. Information and biological production, therefore, have been related activities for decades and must be analyzed in tandem, requiring a more complex analysis then the dominant proposals to foster antibiotic R&D consider. Employing archival research in conjunction with multiple theoretical disciplines within the field of communications research, this study documents the cultural, economic, political, and informational conditions that have shaped antibiotic R&D over the last sixty years. This historical examination delineates three important social aspects of the life sciences, each important to creating effective responses to the current antibiotic crisis: the life sciences mobilize informational and biological resources, fostering both their commodification and related intellectual property enforcement; they serve as a powerful symbolic tool to create, convey, and reinforce social agendas; and resulting industries most often use novel scientific information as a blueprint for standardizing corporate operations rather than a point of departure for future innovation. References References (235)
...MoreDescription “Documents the U.S. pharmaceutical industry's transformation from a chemical industry to an information industry.” (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 71/01 (2010). Pub. no. AAT 3392440.
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