The Birth of the Biotechnology Era: Penicillin in Australia, 1943–80 1

Abstract

As Australia and other countries seek to establish biotechnology industries, it is timely to review successes and failures in this field. One of the most notable stories is the development of penicillin, as a wartime project, to which Australians made major contributions. Australians during and immediately after the war contributed much to the scientific identification and purification of penicillin, and to the industrial scaling up in its production at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne. This was a classic instance of war accelerating innovations in public administration. Yet the nascent antibiotic industry was never allowed to gain international competitiveness, and was allowed to run down and eventually disappeared by the end of the 1970s. This article is concerned to tease out the puzzle posed by this contrast in aspirations, between the highest levels of scientific and technical achievement in bringing penicillin into widespread use (Australia being the first country in the world to provide penicillin to the civilian population in 1944) and shockingly poor performance in sustaining and developing a national antibiotics industry. As the stirrings of a biotechnology industry may be observed in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, it would be unfortunate to ignore the lessons of this earlier experience at the birth of the biotechnology era.     

The Role of Social Culture in Internet Adoption in Greece: Unpacking “I Don't Want to Use the Internet” and Frequency of Use

This article examines the role of social culture in Internet adoption in Greece. It employs Hofstede's five-dimensional framework of national culture and analyzes the European Social Survey 2008 data. It finds that social culture in general and particularly people's past or future orientation in life, and to a lesser extent their degree of openness to difference and novelty in life, are significant drivers of Internet adoption in Greece. It argues that the persistently low level of Internet adoption in Greece can be explained by pointing to a traditional, uncertainty-avoidant, and novelty-resistant culture that discourages technological development and innovation. It concludes that to explain that the statement “I don't want to use the Internet” and frequency of use and other such behavioral patterns, one should look beyond demographics, practical, and real-life factors and examine broader and socioculturally embedded drivers of Internet adoption.     

Civil Society and the Shaping of Communication–Information Policy: Four Decades of Advocacy

This article initiates exploratory empirical research on how civil society collective action has reacted to and affected communication–information policy (CIP), a policy domain that has been reshaped by technological and industrial change. It reviews the relevant theory on social movements, citizens groups, and interest groups from political science. Data are gathered on two dimensions of the research question: (1) We quantify the number of public interest advocacy groups focused on CIP in the United States from 1961 to the present, using organizational ecology methods. (2) We track the number of U.S. Congressional hearings held each year on CIP issues. The results show that CIP now exceeds other social movement issues (women, civil rights, the environment, human rights) as a major concern of Congressional activity, that the issues are becoming more interdependent, and that modes of citizens advocacy have undergone drastic changes in recent years.     

Engaging suppliers in CRM: The role of justice in buyer–supplier relationships

Given the crucial role of suppliers in collaborative supply chains, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to the nature and management of supplier relationships in the implementation of a retailer's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. To address this gap in the extant literature, the theory of organizational justice is used to explore the extent to which perceived fairness in buyer–supplier relationships supports or inhibits supplier engagement with the CRM process. The rationale is that suppliers who feel fairly treated by key retail customers are more likely to invest resources in the acquisition and use of data central to the retailer's CRM strategy. By empirically testing a conceptual model linking downstream CRM to upstream SRM, the results provide evidence to indicate that customer data use is significantly influenced by perceptions of fairness, particularly with respect to the distribution of rewards, and the transparency of decision-making processes. As a key criticism of CRM centers upon the failure of organizations to exploit the full potential of customer data, the results highlight the usefulness of understanding the relational linkages between buyers and suppliers and the consequential behavior of suppliers in terms of engagement with customer data vital to the success of retailers’ CRM strategies.     

The rich or the poor? Personal resources,do-it-yourself,and innovation in the household sector

Household sector innovation is significant in scale and scope. Thus far, it has been studied in isolation and with mixed evidence regarding the role of personal resources (consumers' income and discretionary time). We recognize that household sector innovation is embedded in the broader phenomenon of do-it-yourself (DIY) by consumers, as the literature reveals conceptual similarities, parallel motivations, and antecedents. The main distinction is that, whereas DIY goods may replicate existing products, household sector innovation is restricted to goods embodying a novel function. We explore if studying household sector innovation and DIY in an integrated framework helps to resolve previous inconsistent evidence on the role of personal resources. Based on a neoclassical model in which agents optimize their time allocation, we hypothesize that income and discretionary time positively relate to their DIY output, but—given that agents develop DIY goods—we hypothesize that income negatively relates to innovation. For discretionary time, we formulate a research question regarding its effect on innovation which we answer empirically. Our findings suggest that consumers with more personal resources derive more process benefits from DIY but that these benefits crowd out individuals' focus on the function of their objects, hence, the likelihood of developing innovations. Survey data from the United Arab Emirates (n = 2728) confirm our suppositions, showing that the relationship between personal resources and household sector innovation is more refined than suggested by previous studies.     

Truth in numbers? Emancipation,race, and federal census statistics in the debates over Black mental health in the United States, 1840–1900

To the keen observer of American political and medical history, a disturbing set of debates surrounded the sanity of free Black residents of the United States of America after the publication of the controversial 1840 census returns on race and insanity. This article analyzes how the census became a battlefield where physicians and other commentators fought over—and thus shaped—various political meanings of Black insanity before and after the American Civil War, up until the 1890s, as the South underwent a massive political and social transformation, from slavery to emancipation. It also highlights the arguments raised by authors such as James McCune Smith and Ramón de la Sagra who attempted to disprove the returns shortly after their publication, and whose arguments contributed to efforts to combat scientific racism.     

Searching for motives: Suicides of doctors and dentists in the Third Reich and the postwar period, 1933–1949

The criminal practices of National Socialism not only led to millions of murders, but also to increased suicide rates. The present study examines a specific aspect of this phenomenon: the suicides and corresponding motives of 275 German doctors and dentists in the period from 1933 to 1949. The analysis is based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. Most suicides were due to National Socialist repression, with peaks in 1938 and 1942. One fifth of the cases were among National Socialist perpetrators, with a peak of those suicides occurring in 1945. The motives for suicide ranged from despair to a lack of career prospects to a final act of self-determination and political opposition; many of the doctors experienced or expected a social downfall before attempting suicide.     

The skeleton in the closet: should historians of science care about the history of mathematics?

Up until the 1950s, the history of mathematics was an integral part of the history of science. To George Sarton and his contemporaries, mathematics was the rational skeleton that organized science and held it together, and its history was a fundamental component of the broader history of science. But when historians began focusing on the cultural roots of science rather than its rational structure, the study of mathematics was marginalized and ultimately excluded from the history of science. The alienation between the two fields is detrimental to both, and in recent years there has been a sustained effort to reestablish meaningful communication between the two. This time, however, mathematics is seen not as the static skeleton of science but, instead, as a dynamic and historically evolving field in its own right-just like science itself. The new approach allows for a culturally sensitive study of mathematics, as well as a new and fruitful relationship between the history of science and the history of mathematics. The essays in this Focus section offer a sampling of the new approaches, opening the way to a rapprochement between fields that have gone their separate ways but should by rights be closely interconnected.