THE BATTLE FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY - SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL PARADIGMS AND THE MANAGEMENT OF BIOTECHNOLOGY IN BRITAIN IN THE 1980S

This paper is about how institutions adapt and change to accommodate new technologies. Specifically it looks at how one set of institutions, the British Research Councils, accommodated to the emergence of biotechnology in the 1980s, charting the vicissitudes of their relationship and in particular the bitter quarrel which broke out between the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). It suggests that the key factor behind the conflict was not remit (i.e. defence of research territory) but differences in culture, with a lack of symmetry between the scientific paradigm which dominated the MRC's approach and the technological paradigm which drove the SERC's Biotechnology Directorate. Given this difference in cultures, it argues that some plurality of approach was inevitable and that attempts to impose a strong element of co-ordination would not have prevented conflict. However, lighter coordination might have helped, and this could in fact have been achieved had the British government at that time not abdicated from all leadership roles in relation to new technologies and provided no resources to help oil the wheels of change.