Peter Wheale

Bio-patenting and Innovation: Nomads of the Present and a New Global Order

In The Consequences of Modernity (1990) Anthony Giddens characterises the present time as ‘late modernity’ or ‘high modernity’, rather than post-modernity. For Giddens, the essence of modernity is its dynamism — a dynamism of such pace and scope as to be discontinuous with traditional social orders. He argues that one characteristic of modernity is the emergence of four institutions: capitalism, industrialism, surveillance and military power. Figure 10.1 sets out these four basic institutional dimensions of modernity and indicates their interrelations. Innovations in science and technology generate utopian and dystopian expectations, which are sources of dynamism for each of these institutions. For industrialism, such innovations suggest new ways of controlling nature; for capitalism, new avenues of capitalist expansion; for surveillance, more penetrating technologies of observation and monitoring; and for military power, new ways of perpetrating violence. Elsewhere, we have applied Giddens’s framework to analyse how utopian and dystopian expectations of genetic engineering are shaping modernity (see Wheale and McNally, 1994; McNally and Wheale, 1994).

Patent trend analysis : the case of microgenetic engineering

This paper reviews the use of patent statistics. Contemporaneous patent profiles of ‘mutation/genetic engineering’ over the 1970s are compared and contrasted and a cumulative net cash-flow forecast is presented for the genetic engineering industry to the year 2000.