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  • Book Review
  • Published:

Rewriting biotechnology's story

Nature Biotechnology volume 17, page 723 (1999)Cite this article

Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences

Edited by:
  • Arnold Thackray
1998University of Pennsylvania Press 304 pages, $52.50 hardcover

The explosive development of molecular biotechnologies has already been described in several books such as The Interferon Crusade by Sandra Panem and, more recently, Paul Rabinow's Making PCR. Private Science has a more limited, but more original goal, which appears only after careful reading of its collected essays. In their twelve contributions, the authors try to articulate three different "events": the development of biotechnology, the rise of biomolecular sciences and genetic engineering, and the recent changes in the relationship between public and private science, that is, publicly funded academic research versus the commercial biotechnology industry. Some of the contributions are fully original, while others are short, synthetic presentations of previous studies—such as Robert Bud's contribution, which largely relies on his previous work The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology—with a specific emphasis on the events targeted in the book. Some are central to these events, others are more peripheral.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. professor in the department of biology at the École Normale Supérieure, 46 rue d'Ulm, Paris, 75230, Cedex 05, France

    Michel Morange

Author notes

  1. Michel Morange: An English translation of his book, A History of Molecular Biology, was recently published by Harvard University Press.

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    1. Michel Morange
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    Morange, M. Rewriting biotechnology's story. Nat Biotechnol 17, 723 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/10945

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