A tale of ‘cautious pessimism’: Biotechnology, recession and the ‘new economy’

Barack Obama’s best selling memoir, The Audacity of Hope [1] was first published in 2006. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Opportunity’, set out an agenda for rekindling an American economy that had entered into decline, despite the espoused prosperity of an enriched Wall Street venture capital culture. Obama’s vision of a reinvigorated America has since become a blueprint for recovery from the ‘third quarter crash’ (or credit crunch) of 2008. Obama’s plan is to reassemble the ‘New Economy’ of the 1990s in the 2010s, remodelling its least palatable features – ineffective Schumpeterian innovation policies [2,3], the Enron model of corporate ‘venturisation’, speculative investment in technology stocks, and the concentration of wealth generation capabilities within private equity houses and hedge funds (financialisation) [4]. These policy changes presage a ‘new deal’ for the life and environmental sciences, in which gross domestic product will depend on neither cars nor coal as the source of future wealth creation. Instead, current Whitehouse policy seems to pin its hopes on a virtuous cycle of patent-led bioscience, cleantech and computer industry engineered prosperity [5]. The United Kingdom (UK) is following suit in this respect, as seen in recent government responses to Sir David Cooksey’s report on the competitive position of the UK biotechnology [6], while the European Commissioner for Research, Janez Potocnik, has called for more investment in the biosciences to help ‘relaunch the economy’. The prevailing view assumes that as children of the ‘New Economy’ paradigm, biosciences and biotechnology can help rescue it, if they are made ready for this purpose. Thus, whilst a renewal of government commitments to science, engineering and biotechnology is always welcome, on this occasion, new investment may come with a heavy price tag

A tale of ‘cautious pessimism’: Biotechnology, recession and the ‘new economy’

Barack Obama’s best selling memoir, The Audacity of Hope [1] was first published in 2006. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Opportunity’, set out an agenda for rekindling an American economy that had entered into decline, despite the espoused prosperity of an enriched Wall Street venture capital culture. Obama’s vision of a reinvigorated America has since become a blueprint for recovery from the ‘third quarter crash’ (or credit crunch) of 2008. Obama’s plan is to reassemble the ‘New Economy’ of the 1990s in the 2010s, remodelling its least palatable features – ineffective Schumpeterian innovation policies [2,3], the Enron model of corporate ‘venturisation’, speculative investment in technology stocks, and the concentration of wealth generation capabilities within private equity houses and hedge funds (financialisation) [4]. These policy changes presage a ‘new deal’ for the life and environmental sciences, in which gross domestic product will depend on neither cars nor coal as the source of future wealth creation. Instead, current Whitehouse policy seems to pin its hopes on a virtuous cycle of patent-led bioscience, cleantech and computer industry engineered prosperity [5]. The United Kingdom (UK) is following suit in this respect, as seen in recent government responses to Sir David Cooksey’s report on the competitive position of the UK biotechnology [6], while the European Commissioner for Research, Janez Potocnik, has called for more investment in the biosciences to help ‘relaunch the economy’. The prevailing view assumes that as children of the ‘New Economy’ paradigm, biosciences and biotechnology can help rescue it, if they are made ready for this purpose. Thus, whilst a renewal of government commitments to science, engineering and biotechnology is always welcome, on this occasion, new investment may come with a heavy price tag

Stakeholder Responses to Regulatory Reform: Evaluating Governance Changes with the Field of Human Tissue Regulation

The United Kingdom's plethora of laws and regulations governing the procurement, handling, storage and disposal of human body tissue underwent significant reform in the 2000s. This research briefing note describes a 'model study' for investigating the impact of these changes across a field of regulation that incorporates museums and anatomy collections, bioscience establishments, universities, and hospitals; and is thus largely distinguished by patterns of sectoral and stakeholder heterogeneity. It is postulated within our discussion that one way of accounting for stakeholder heterogeneity in regulatory research may be to combine Locock and Dopson's (1999) conception of 'HQ' governance with Bourdieusian correlations of 'field dynamics'