ABSTRACT This essay analyzes how academic institutions, government agencies, and the nascent biotech industry contested the legal ownership of recombinant DNA technology in the name of the public interest. It reconstructs the way a small but influential group of government officials and university research administrators introduced a new framework for the commercialization of academic research in the context of a national debate over scientific research's contributions to American economic prosperity and public health. They claimed that private ownership of inventions arising (...) from public support would provide a powerful means to liberate biomedical discoveries for public benefit. This articulation of the causal link between private ownership and the public interest, it is argued, justified a new set of expectations about the use of research results arising from government or public support, in which commercialization became a new public obligation for academic researchers. By highlighting the broader economic and legal shifts that prompted the reconfiguration of the ownership of public knowledge in late twentieth‐century American capitalism, the essay examines the threads of policy‐informed legal ideas that came together to affirm private ownership of biomedical knowledge as germane to the public interest in the coming of age of biotechnology and genetic medicine. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungBei der Durchsicht des Nachlasses von Rudolf Tomaschek fand ich ein 30 Seiten umfassendes Typoskript seines damaligen Assistenten Hugo Watzlawek aus dem Jahr 1944 mit dem Titel „Interatomare Energie“. Heute würde man eher von „inneratomarer Energie“, oder von „Kernenergie“ sprechen, da der Inhalt des Typoskripts „technische Kernphysik“ einschließlich ihrer potentiellen militärischen Anwendungen betrifft. Der Text bietet einen ungefilterten, erstaunlich kenntnisreichen, aber in vielem auch erschreckenden Einblick in die technokratische Gedankenwelt sowie den Wissensstand und Anwendungshorizont eines „technischen Kernphysikers“ im „Dritten Reich“, (...) der unter Verweis auf konkurrierende amerikanische Forschungen 1944 nachdrücklich um weitere Mittel für kernphysikalische und -technische Forschung sowie für die Entwicklung von Kernwaffen bittet. Der vorliegende Aufsatz kommentiert und kontextualisiert das Typoskript; meine ebenfalls online gestellte annotierte Transkription des Typoskriptes bietet ungekürzten Zugang zum Originaltext samt knapper, für dessen Verständnis notwendiger historischer und technischer Erläuterungen.Among the papers of Rudolf Tomaschek I discovered a 30-page typescript from 1944 by his then assistant Hugo Watzlawek entitled “Interatomare Energie”. Nowadays one would rather say ‘inneratomic energy’ or ‘nuclear energy’ since the typescript treats issues of nuclear engineering including its potential military uses. It presents an unfiltered, surprisingly informed view into the technocratic mindset, state of knowledge and application horizon of a “technical nuclear physicist” in the Third Reich. Watzlawek in 1944 urgently petitions for more funding for research in nuclear physics and technology, citing analogous research underway in America. The present paper places the typescript within its historical and technical context. My succinctly annotated transcription of the original text—also made freely available online—provides full accessibility to this document. (shrink)