The promise of genetic engineering in the early 1970s to profoundly reshape the living world activated a variety of social interests in its future promotion and control. With public safety, gene patents, and the future of genetic research at stake, a wide range of interest groups competed for control over this powerful new technology. In this comparative study of the development of regulatory policy for genetic engineering in the United States and the United Kingdom, Susan Wright analyzes government responses to the struggles among corporations, scientists, universities, trade unions, and public interest groups over regulating this new field. Drawing on archival materials, government records, and interviews with industry executives, politicians, scientists, trade unionists, and others on both sides of the Atlantic, Molecular Politics provides a comprehensive account of a crucial set of policy decisions and explores their implications for the political economy of science. By combining methods from political science and the history of science, Wright advances a provocative interpretation of the evolution of genetic engineering policy and makes a major contribution to science and public policy studies.

The promise of genetic engineering in the early 1970s to profoundly reshape the living world activated a variety of social interests in its future promotion and control. With public safety, gene patents, and the future of genetic research at stake, a wide range of interest groups competed for control over this powerful new technology. In this comparative study of the development of regulatory policy for genetic engineering in the United States and the United Kingdom, Susan Wright analyzes government responses to the struggles among corporations, scientists, universities, trade unions, and public interest groups over regulating this new field. Drawing on archival materials, government records, and interviews with industry executives, politicians, scientists, trade unionists, and others on both sides of the Atlantic, Molecular Politics provides a comprehensive account of a crucial set of policy decisions and explores their implications for the political economy of science. By combining methods from political science and the history of science, Wright advances a provocative interpretation of the evolution of genetic engineering policy and makes a major contribution to science and public policy studies.

The promise of genetic engineering in the early 1970s to profoundly reshape the living world activated a variety of social interests in its future promotion and control. With public safety, gene patents, and the future of genetic research at stake, a wide range of interest groups competed for control over this powerful new technology. In this comparative study of the development of regulatory policy for genetic engineering in the United States and the United Kingdom, Susan Wright analyzes government responses to the struggles among corporations, scientists, universities, trade unions, and public interest groups over regulating this new field. Drawing on archival materials, government records, and interviews with industry executives, politicians, scientists, trade unionists, and others on both sides of the Atlantic, Molecular Politics provides a comprehensive account of a crucial set of policy decisions and explores their implications for the political economy of science. By combining methods from political science and the history of science, Wright advances a provocative interpretation of the evolution of genetic engineering policy and makes a major contribution to science and public policy studies.

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Herbert Gottweis explains how genetic engineering became so controversial. Beginning with an exposition of poststructuralist theory and its implications for research methodology, he approaches political analysis, emphasizing the essential role of narratives in the development of policy.

Scientists, investors, policymakers, the media, and the general public have all displayed a continuing interest in the commercial promise and potential dangers of genetic engineering. In this book, Herbert Gottweis explains how genetic engineering became so controversial—a technology that some seek to promote by any means and others want to block entirely. Beginning with a clear exposition of poststructuralist theory and its implications for research methodology, Gottweis offers a novel approach to political analysis, emphasizing the essential role of narratives in the development of policy under contemporary conditions. Drawing on more than eighty in-depth interviews and extensive archival work, Gottweis traces today's controversy back to the sociopolitical and scientific origins of molecular biology, paying particular attention to its relationship to eugenics. He argues that over the decades a number of mutually reinforcing political and scientific strategies have attempted to turn genes into objects of technological intervention—to make them "governable." Looking at critical events such as the 1975 Asilomar conference in the United States, the escalating conflict in Germany, and regulatory disputes in Britain and France during the 1980s, Gottweis argues that it was the struggle over boundaries and representations of genetic engineering, politics, and society that defined the political dynamics of the drafting of risk regulations in these countries. In a key chapter on biotechnology research, industry, and supporting technology policies, Gottweis demonstrates that the interpretation of genetic engineering as the core of a new "high technology" industry was part of a policy myth and an expression of identity politics. He suggests that under postmodern conditions a major strategy for avoiding policy failure is to create conditions that ensure tolerance and respect for the multiplicity of socially available policy narratives and reality interpretations.