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Thesis ID: CBB001560806

The Recombinant University: Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Biotechnology at Stanford, 1959--1980 (2008)

Princeton University
Creager, Angela N. H.

Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Advisor: Creager, Angela N. H.
Physical Details: 331 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Genetic engineering Commercialization Universities and colleges Science and industry Academically sponsored science 20th century, late United States Stanford University

This dissertation investigates the development of recombinant DNA research and technology from its academic origins in the 1970s to its commercialization in the 1980s at Stanford University. More specifically, this dissertation offers an alternative to standard histories of the development of recombinant DNA technology by revising the canonized history of the origins of genetic engineering that emerged during the patenting of Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer's recombinant DNA cloning procedures. I do so by approaching its history not from the usual perspective of its legal inventors, but from the perspective of Stanford biochemists, whose central role in its scientific development and whose reservations toward its commercialization have not been well acknowledged. Through this shift of investigative focus to Stanford biochemists, my dissertation offers a detailed, technical history of the development of recombinant DNA research and technology within molecular biology, one that is grounded on an appreciation of the dynamics of laboratory experimentation. The dissertation offers a technical analysis of the advent of recombinant DNA technology and follows the story of the commercialization of academic research through its shifting institutional, political, and cultural contexts. First of all, I situate Stanford biochemists' development of recombinant DNA technology in the context of a mass migration of biomedical researchers into the biology of higher organisms, which concurred with increasing calls for practical relevance in biomedical research. It was when molecular biology was experiencing this political and epistemological context that recombinant DNA technology emerged as a new research technology for eukaryotic biology. This dissertation then examines a series of unexpected experimental hybridizations through a research network formed around Stanford biochemists: first, the adoption of recombinant DNA as a research technology for cloning in plasmid and bacteria research; and second, the application of recombinant DNA technology for the analysis of the genome of Drosophila , which in turn opened an epistemological space for a molecular approach to the study of developmental biology. This dissertation in turn analyzes how recombinant DNA technology evolved from a research technology to a cultural-technological entity--biotechnology--in relation to changes in research patronage, market forces, and legal developments during the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, I examine the contentious transition from academic biomedicine to commercial biotechnology from the perspective of Stanford administrators and scientists. Taking account of the changing political and economic landscape for biomedical research during the 1970s, Stanford research administrators allied with some governmental officials to promote the private ownership of recombinant DNA technology as a viable means of technology transfer. I analyze those threads of policy-informed ideas that came together to affirm private ownership of scientific knowledge as germane to public interests. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of how Stanford biochemists tried to grapple with the increasing commercialization of biomedical research in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My investigation of Stanford biochemists' cautious engagements with the biotech industry illuminates the emergence of a "new moral economy of science" as well as a new form of "biomedical enterprise" deeply networked with the financial regimes of late twentieth century capitalism.

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Description Looks at the development and comercialization of academic research. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/08 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3324311.

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