Cultured meat and cowless milk: on making markets for animal-free food

According to its proponents, animal-free animal food products, such as cultured meat and synthetic cow’s milk, have the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making animal-free food products, critics have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives being produced. This paper considers animal-free food from a social studies of economies and markets (SSEM) perspective. As a market that currently mostly only exists in potential, an SSEM perspective can reveal the various social and material relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of animal-free foods in a political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.     

Materials Research in France: A Short-lived National Initiative (1982–1994)

This paper describes the French initiative in materials research against both a national and an international background, in an attempt to disentangle the local circumstances, which prompted this governmental initiative, and to characterize the specific profile of materials research in France. In presenting a biography of the interdisciplinary program in materials research (PIRMAT), we argue that: i) the PIRMAT denotes a failure of the French science policy in materials research; ii) the leadership of the CNRS led to a specific style of research, quite different from the engineering approach of Materials Science and Engineering, and characteristic of a French style in materials research.     

National,Regional and Global Perspectives of Higher Education and Science Policies in the Arab Region

In this paper we discuss the interaction between science policies (and particularly in the area of scientific research) and higher education policies in Gulf and Mediterranean Arab countries. Our analysis reveals a discrepancy between the two sub-regions with respect to integration in the global market, cooperation in scientific research and international mobility of students. The paper discusses the implications of the analysis of reform policies and higher education restructuring.     

Prediction as an Impediment to Preparedness: Lessons from the US Hurricane and Earthquake Research Enterprises

No matter one’s wealth or social position, all are subject to the threats of natural hazards. Be it fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, or drought, the reality of hazard risk is universal. In response, governments, non-profits, and the private sector all support research to study hazards. Each has a common end in mind: to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities. While this end goal is shared across hazards, the conception of how to get there can diverge considerably. The earthquake and hurricane research endeavors in the US provide an illustrative contrast. The earthquake community sets out to increase resilience through a research process that simultaneously promotes both high quality and usable – preparedness-focused - science. In order to do so, the logic suggests that research must be collaborative, responsive, and transparent. Hurricane research, by contrast, largely promotes high quality science – predictions - alone, and presumes that usability should flow from there. This process is not collaborative, responsive, or transparent. Experience suggests, however, that the latter model – hurricane research - does not prepare communities or decision makers to use the high quality science it has produced when a storm does hit. The predictions are good, but they are not used effectively. Earthquake research, on the other hand, is developed through a collaborative process that equips decision makers to know and use hazards research knowledge as soon as an earthquake hits. The contrast between the two fields suggests that earthquake research is more likely to meet the end goal of resilience than is hurricane research, and thus that communities might be more resilient to hurricanes were the model by which research is funded and conducted to change. The earthquake research experience can provide lessons for this shift. This paper employs the Public Value Mapping (PVM) framework to explore these two divergent public value logics, their end results, and opportunities for improvement.     

The Stakes in Bayh-Dole: Public Values Beyond the Pace of Innovation

Evaluation studies of the Bayh-Dole Act are generally concerned with the pace of innovation or the transgressions to the independence of research. While these concerns are important, I propose here to expand the range of public values considered in assessing Bayh-Dole and formulating future reforms. To this end, I first examine the changes in the terms of the Bayh-Dole debate and the drift in its design. Neoliberal ideas have had a definitive influence on U.S. innovation policy for the last thirty years, including legislation to strengthen patent protection. Moreover, the neoliberal policy agenda is articulated and justified in the interest of “competitiveness.” Rhetorically, this agenda equates competitiveness with economic growth and this with the public interest. Against that backdrop, I use Public Value Failure criteria to show that values such as political equality, transparency, and fairness in the distribution of the benefits of innovation, are worth considering to counter the “policy drift” of Bayh-Dole.     

How Technological Platforms Reconfigure Science-Industry Relations: The Case of Micro- and Nanotechnology

With reference to the recent science studies debate on the nature of science-industry relationship, this article focuses on a novel organizational form: the technological platform. Considering the field of micro- and nanotechnology in Switzerland, it investigates how technological platforms participate in framing science-industry activities. On the basis of a comparative analysis of three technological platforms, it shows that the platforms relate distinctly to academic and to industrial users. It distinguishes three pairs of user models, one model in each pair pertaining to how platforms act toward and conceive of academic users, the other model regarding users from industry. The article then discusses how technological platforms reconfigure the science-economy divide. While the observed platforms provide new institutional contact and interaction between academia and industry, new research collaboration does not necessarily materialize in practice. In this respect, science-industry mediation by way of technological platforms does not make science-industry boundaries more porous. Instead, the declared openness of public research with respect to industry, in the case of technological platforms, may contribute to maintain public science’s autonomy.