ABSTRACT
Following the emergence of biotechnologies in the 1970s and 1980s, innovation in the life sciences underwent two major changes. The first concerned the extension of the market into the sphere of life sciences and fundamental scientific knowledge driven by changes in patent regulations. Since the 1980s, it is possible to confer ownership of biological materials, including genes. This “patentability” of living organisms led to the development of a market for biotechnological knowledge based on transformations in the economics of innovation. As numerous authors have pointed out (Dasgupta and David 1994; Eisenberg 1997; Coriat 2002), the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 was a real turning point, which for instance enabled American universities to patent the findings of publicly funded research and to grant exclusive licenses to private start-ups and partners. Secondly, the perception of the potentialities and threats that accompanied these techno-sciences (or were generated by them) gave rise to more critical attitudes from within a highly educated civil society. As such, the links between science and politics became more visible while scientific expertise, social protest movements, scandals, and controversies surrounding scientific and technological “risks” grew apace (Beck 1986; Joly 2007).
