Bud Robert
Science Museum, London SW7 2DD, UK.
Notes Rec R Soc Lond. 2010 Sep 20;64 Suppl 1:S17-29. doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2010.0044.
In the late 1970s politicians and civil servants were acutely aware of the chronic decline of the manufacturing sector as a source of employment in Britain. At a time of fear of mass unemployment, sources of new work were urgently sought. Biotechnology had been promoted by visionaries since the early twentieth century. With oil prices soaring, its potential to produce substitutes for petroleum derivatives seemed newly attractive. At the beginning of 1976, John Bu'Lock at Manchester brought the attention of the new President of the Royal Society, Lord Todd, to the developments in enzyme and fermentation technologies. Both the Society and government began to take biotechnology seriously. In 1979 the Society organized a groundbreaking meeting, 'New horizons in industrial microbiology'. In parallel, John Ashworth, the chief scientist of the government think-tank the Central Policy Review Staff, prompted by American developments in genetic engineering, its commercial exploitation and regional development, led thinking among government officials. The Spinks enquiry into biotechnology was consequently formed in 1979 as a collaborative enterprise of the Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development, the Advisory Board for the Research Councils and the Royal Society. The recommendations for far-reaching collaboration between research councils, government and industry were not fully implemented. However, even the limited implementation led to new models of science that would be significant in the emergence of a reconstruction of science.
20世纪70年代末，政治家和公务员敏锐地意识到，制造业作为英国就业来源正长期衰退。在担心出现大规模失业的时期，人们迫切寻求新的工作来源。自20世纪初以来，空想家们一直在推动生物技术的发展。随着油价飙升，生物技术生产石油衍生物替代品的潜力似乎有了新的吸引力。1976年初，曼彻斯特的约翰·布洛克让皇家学会新主席托德勋爵注意到酶和发酵技术的发展。学会和政府都开始认真对待生物技术。1979年，学会组织了一次具有开创性的会议，即“工业微生物学的新视野”。与此同时，政府智囊团中央政策审查 staff 的首席科学家约翰·阿什沃思，受美国基因工程发展、其商业开发和区域发展的启发，引领了政府官员的思考。因此，1979年成立了斯平克斯生物技术调查委员会，作为应用研究与发展咨询委员会、研究委员会咨询委员会和皇家学会的合作项目。关于研究委员会、政府和工业界进行广泛合作的建议并未得到充分实施。然而，即使是有限的实施也催生了新的科学模式，这将对科学重建的出现具有重要意义。
