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 chapter, I provide a structure for understanding the progression of these histories from the beginnings of the scholarly engagement in the early 1980s through the present.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 7.
- 8.
Bud is not the only historian who was attracted to the industrialization of biological products. See Neushul (1993)
- 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Much of this paragraph was taken from my review of Rasmussen’s book (Journal of the History of Biology 2015)
- 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
References
Berry D (2014) The plant breeding industry after pure line theory: lessons from the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 46:25–37
Boudry M, Pigliucci M (2013) The mismeasure of machine: synthetic biology and the trouble with engineering metaphors. Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 44(4, Part B):660–668
Bowring F (2003) Science, seeds, and cyborgs: biotechnology and the appropriation of life. Verso, London
Briggs L (2002) Reproducing empire: race, sex, science, and U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico. University of California Press, Berkeley
Brodwin P (ed) (2000) Biotechnology and culture: bodies, anxieties, ethics. Indiana University Press, Bloomington
Bud R (1991) Biotechnology in the twentieth century. Soc Stud Sci 21(3):415–457
Bud R (1992) The zymotechnic roots of biotechnology. Br J Hist Sci 25:127–144
Bud R (1993) The uses of life: a history of biotechnology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Bud R (1998) Molecular biology and the long-term history of biotechnology. In: Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia
Calvert J (2012) Ownership and sharing in synthetic biology: a ‘diverse ecology’ of the open and the proprietary? BioSocieties 7(2):169–187
Cambrosio A, Keating P (1998) Monoclonal antibodies: from local to extended networks. In: Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp 165–181
Campos L (2012) The Biobrick(TM) road. BioSocieties 7(2):115–139
de Chadarevian S (2011) The making of an entrepreneurial science: biotechnology in Britain, 1975–1995. Isis 102(4):601–633
de Chadarevian S, Kamminga H (eds) (1998) Molecularizing biology and medicine: new practices and alliances, 1910s–1970s. Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam
Church G, Regis E (2012) Regenesis: how synthetic biology will reinvent nature and ourselves. Basic Books, New York
Clarke AE (1998) Disciplining reproduction: modernity, American life sciences, and the problems of sex. University of California Press, Berkeley
Collins FS (2010) The language of life: DNA and the revolution in personalized medicine. Harper, New York
Cook-Deegan RM (1995) The gene wars: science, politics, and the human genome. W.W. Norton & Co., New York
Cooper M (2008) Life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. University of Washington Press, Seattle
Creager ANH (1998) Biotechnology and blood: Edwin Cohn’s plasma fractionation project, 1940–1953. In: Thackray A (ed) Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp 39–62
Creager ANH (2001) The life of a virus: tobacco mosaic virus as an experimental model, 1930–1965. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago
Creager ANH, Lunbeck E, Schiebinger LL (2001) Feminism in twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Druker S (2015) Altered genes, twisted truth: how the venture to genetically engineer our food has subverted science, corrupted government, and systematically deceived the public. Clear River Press, Salt Lake City
Evans JH (2002) Playing God?: human genetic engineering and the rationalization of public bioethical debate. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Fletcher J (1974) The ethics of genetic control: ending reproductive roulette. Anchor Press, Garden City
Fortun M (1998) The human genome project and the acceleration of biotechnology. In: Thackray A (ed) Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp 182–201
Fortun M (2008) Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE in a World of Speculation. University of California Press, Berkeley
Franklin S (2007) Dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. Duke University Press, Durham
Fujimura JH (1996) Crafting science: a sociohistory of the quest for the genetics of cancer. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
García-Sancho M (2012) Biology, computing, and the history of molecular sequencing: from proteins to DNA, 1945–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke
Garcia-Sancho M (2015) Animal breeding in the age of biotechnology. Hist Philos Life Sci 37(3):282–304
Gaudillière J-P (2001) The pharmaceutical industry in the biotech century: toward a history of science, technology and business? Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 32(1):191–201
Gaudillière J-P (2005a) Better prepared than synthesized: Adolf Butenandt, Schering Ag and the transformation of sex steroids into drugs (1930–1946). Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 36(4):612–644
Gaudillière J-P (2005b) Introduction: drug trajectories. Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 36(4):603–611
Gaudillière J-P (2007) The farm and the clinic: an inquiry into the making of our biotechnological modernity. Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci., Between the farm and the clinic: agriculture and reproductive technology in the twentieth century 38(2):521–529
Gaudillière J-P (2008a) How pharmaceuticals became patentable: the production and appropriation of drugs in the twentieth century. Hist Technol 24(2):99–106
Gaudillière J-P (2008b) Professional or industrial order? Patents, biological drugs, and pharmaceutical capitalism in early twentieth century Germany. Hist Technol 24(2):107–133
Gaudillière J-P (2009a) Living properties: making knowledge and controlling ownership in the history of biology. Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin
Gaudillière J-P (2009b) New wine in old bottles? The biotechnology problem in the history of molecular biology. Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 40(1):20–28
Gaudillière J-P, Rheinberger H-J (2004) From molecular genetics to genomics: the mapping cultures of twentieth-century genetics. Routledge, London
Haraway DJ (1997) ModestWitness@SecondMillennium.FemaleManMeetsOncoMouse: feminism and technoscience. Routledge, New York
Helmreich S (2008) Species of biocapital. Sci Cult 17(4):463–478
Hilgartner S (1998) Data access policy in genome research. In: Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp 202–218
Hilgartner S, Miller C, Hagendijk R (2015) Science and democracy: making knowledge and making power in the biosciences and beyond. Routledge, New York
Howard T, Rifkin J (1977) Who should play God?: the artificial creation of life and what it means for the future of the human race. Delacorte Press, New York
Hughes SS (2011) Genentech: the beginnings of biotech. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Huxley A (1932) Brave new world. Chatto & Windus, London
Jasanoff S (2005) Designs on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Jasanoff S (2006) Biotechnology and empire: the global power of seeds and science. Osiris 21(1):273–292
Kay L (1998) Problematizing basic research in molecular biology. In: Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp 20–38
Keating P, Cambrosio A (2003) Biomedical platforms: realigning the normal and the pathological in late-twentieth-century medicine. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Kenney M (1986) Biotechnology: the university-industrial complex. Yale University Press, New Haven
Kevles DJ (1994) Ananda Chakrabarty wins a patent: biotechnology, law, and society, 1972–1980. Hist Stud Phys Biol Sci 25(1):111–135
Kevles DJ (2002) Of mice & money: the story of the world’s first animal patent. Daedalus 131(2):78–88
Kevles DJ (2007) Patents, protections, and privileges: the establishment of intellectual property in animals and plants. Isis 98(2):323–331
Kirk RGW (2012) ‘Standardization through Mechanization’: germ-free life and the engineering of the ideal laboratory animal. Technol Cult 53(1):61–93
Kloppenburg JR (1988) First the seed: the political economy of plant biotechnology, 1492–2000. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Knoepfler P (2015) GMO sapiens: the life-changing science of designer babies. World Scientific Publishing Co., New Jersey
Kohler RE (1994) Lords of the fly: drosophila genetics and the experimental life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Kolata GB (1998) Clone: the road to Dolly, and the path ahead. W. Morrow & Co., New York
Kowal E (2013) Orphan DNA: indigenous samples, ethical biovalue and postcolonial science. Soc Stud Sci 43(4):577–597
Kowal E, Radin J, Reardon J (2013) Indigenous body parts, mutating temporalities, and the half-lives of postcolonial technoscience. Soc Stud Sci 43(4):465–483
Krimsky S (1982) Genetic alchemy: the social history of the recombinant DNA controversy. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Krimsky S (1991) Biotechnics and society: the rise of industrial genetics. Praeger, New York
Landecker H (2007) Culturing life: how cells became technologies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Leonelli S, Ankeny R (2011) What’s so special about model organisms? Stud Hist Phil Sci 42(2):313–323
Lesser W (ed) (1989) Animal patents: the legal, economic, and social issues. Stockton Press, New York
Loeppky R (2005) Encoding capital: the political economy of the human genome project. Routledge, New York
Mackenzie A (2013) Synthetic biology and the technicity of biofuels. Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci., Philosophical Perspectives on Synthetic Biology 44(2):190–198
Mamo L, Fishman J (2001) Potency in all the right places: viagra as a technology of the gendered body. Body Soc 7(4):13–35
Michel J-B, Shen YK, Aiden AP, Veres A, Gray MK, Pickett JP, Hoiberg D et al (2011) Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science (New York, NY) 331(6014):176–182
Munns DPD (2015) The phytotronist and the phenotype: plant physiology, big science, and a cold war biology of the whole plant. Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 50. (April:29–40
Neushul P (1993) Science, government and the mass production of penicillin. J Hist Med Allied Sci 48(4):371–395
Onaga LA (2014) Ray Wu as fifth business: deconstructing collective memory in the history of DNA sequencing. Stud Hist Philos Sci Part C: Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 46(June):1–14
Parry B (2004) Trading the genome: investigating the commodification of bio-information. Columbia University Press, New York
Pauly PJ (1987) Controlling life: Jacques Loeb & the engineering ideal in biology. Oxford University Press, New York
Rabinow P (1996) Making PCR: a story of biotechnology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Rader KA (2004) Making mice: standardizing animals for American biomedical research, 1900–1955. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Radin J (2013) Latent life: concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the international biological program. Soc Stud Sci 43(4):484–508
Rajan KS (2003) Genomic capital: public cultures and market logics of corporate biotechnology. Sci Cult 12(1):87–121
Rajan KS (2006) Biocapital: the constitution of postgenomic life. Duke University Press, Durham
Rajan KS (2012) Lively capital: biotechnologies, ethics, and governance in global markets. Duke University Press, Durham
Ramsey P (1970) Fabricated man: the ethics of genetic control. Yale University Press, New Haven
Rapp R (2000) Testing women, testing the fetus: the social impact of amniocentesis in America. Routledge, New York
Rasmussen N (1999a) Picture control: the electron microscope and the transformation of biology in America, 1940–1960. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto
Rasmussen N (1999b) The forgotten promise of thiamin: Merck, Caltech biologists, and plant hormones in a 1930s biotechnology project. J Hist Biol 32(2):245–261
Rasmussen N (2001) Biotechnology before the ‘Biotech Revolution’: life scientists, chemists and product development in 1930s-1940s America. In: Reinhardt C (ed) Chemical sciences in the 20th century. Wiley-VCH Verlag, Weinheim, pp 201–227
Rasmussen N (2002) Steroids in arms: science, government, industry, and the hormones of the adrenal cortex in the United States, 1930–1950. Med Hist 46(3):299–324
Rasmussen N (2014) Gene jockeys: life science and the rise of biotech enterprise. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
Rifkin J (1984) Algeny: a new word – a new world. Reprint. Penguin Books, New York
Rosenfeld A (1969) The second genesis: the coming control of life. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs
Saha M (2013) Food for soil, food for people: research on food crops, fertilizers, and the making of ‘modern’ Indian agriculture. Technol Cult 54(2):289–316
Shelly M (1818) Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, London
Shiva V (1991) The violence of the green revolution: third world agriculture, ecology, and politics. Zed Books, London
Shiva V (1997) Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge. South End Press, Boston
Shiva V (2001) Stolen harvest: the hijacking of the global food supply. Zed Books, London
Slinn J (2008) Patents and the UK pharmaceutical industry between 1945 and the 1970s. Hist Technol 24(2):191–205
Stevens H (2013) Life out of sequence: a data-driven history of bioinformatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Strasser BJ (2011) The experimenter’s museum: GenBank, natural history, and the moral economies of biomedicine. Isis 102(1):60–96
Taylor GR (1968) The biological time bomb. World Pub. Co., New York
Thacker E (2005) The global genome. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Thackray A (1998) Private science: biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia
Venter JC (2014) Life at the speed of light: from the double Helix to the Dawn of digital life. Penguin Books, London
Vettel EJ (2008) Biotech: the countercultural origins of an industry. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia
Waldby C, Mitchell R (2006) Tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. Duke University Press, Durham
Weiner C (1986) Professors and patents: a continuing controversy. Technol Rev 89(Feb/Mar):33–43
Weiner C (1987) Patenting and academic research: historical case studies. Sci Technol Hum Values 12(1):50–62
Wells HG (1896) The island of Dr. Moreau. Heinemann, Stone & Kimball, London
Wohlsen M (2011) Biopunk: solving biotech’s biggest problems in kitchens and garages. Reprint. Current, New York
Wolstenholme G (ed) (1963) Man and his future. Ciba Foundation, Churchill
Wright, Susan. 1986a. Recombinant DNA technology and its social transformation, 1972–1982. Osiris, 2 303–360
Wright S (1986b) Molecular biology or molecular politics? The production of scientific consensus on the hazards of recombinant DNA technology. Soc Stud Sci 16(4):593–620
Wright S (1994) Molecular politics: developing American and British regulatory policy for genetic engineering, 1972–1982. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Yi D (2007) The coming of reversibility: the discovery of DNA repair between the atomic age and the information age. Hist Stud Phys Biol Sci 37(supplement):35–72
Yi D (2008) Cancer, viruses, and mass migration: Paul Berg’s venture into eukaryotic biology and the advent of recombinant DNA research and technology, 1967–1980. J Hist Biol 41(4):589–636
Yi D (2009) The scientific commons in the marketplace: the industrialization of biomedical materials at the New England enzyme center, 1963–1980. Hist Technol 25(1):69–87
Yi D (2011) Who owns what? Private ownership and the public interest in recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. Isis; Int Rev Devoted Hist Sci Cult Influences 102(3):446–474
Yi D (2015) The recombinant university: genetic engineering and the emergence of Stanford biotechnology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Crowe, N. (2021). The Historiography of Biotechnology. In: Dietrich, M.R., Borrello, M.E., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiographies of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90119-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90119-0_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90118-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90119-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities