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As shown in the WTO Appellate Body's 1998 decision regarding Beef Hormones, industry protection, trade, and food safety may constitute fundamental issues on the global trade policy agenda. In this particular case, the WTO panel and the appeal body found that the EU enforced unjustifiable trade restrictions and that they veered away from the trading obligations established by the WTO. The fundamental problem lies in how the domestic administration of the measures imposed by the WTO SPS Committee can be influenced by domestic producers who attempt to obtain shelter against more competitive imports. As fresh food products are sensitive to deterioration, barriers to entry may come about, since foreign producers are unlikely to receive fair treatment. In this chapter, we explore the agricultural case in which the discriminatory application of sanitary and phytosanitary standards restricted trade in North America.

This chapter discusses the use of genetic engineering to make pharmaceuticals available for human medical use. It focuses in particular on human growth hormone (hGH) and to lesser extent, on insulin. hGH is a hormone which is a specific type of protein with a regulatory function in the body. Proteins are essential for life as all chemical functions in life are taken care of by proteins. Before genetic engineering, the supply of hGH was dependent on its purification from the pituitary glands of human cadavers. The extraction process was performed by different types of organizations. Genetic engineering has led and will continue to lead to major changes in both the pharmaceutical industry's products and in basic medical research. Genetic engineering has made a certain measure of mastery over nature possible. Even with our currently relatively rudimentary knowledge of the role of DNA in cell biology — to say nothing of our ignorance of the influence of the environment on the expressions of genes — genetic engineering has still opened up possibilities which were invisible or seemed like science fiction.

This chapter continues the analysis of early scientific and technological activities in the late 1970s which is now relevant to the commercial uses of genetic engineering. In late 1977, the somatostatin experiment described in the previous chapter indicated the potential feasibility and applicability of using genetic engineering techniques as a method of producing human proteins. This chapter follows the strategies and actions of the three firms, Lilly, Genentech, and Kabi in their attempts to generate and access scientific and technological knowledge and techniques for the economic environments in 1978. These three firms clearly affected the growth rate and direction of the scientific environment by developing closely related activities for other environments. The focus of this chapter is on scientific and technological activities for using genetic engineering to express insulin and human growth hormone in bacteria. It also shows that perceptions were based on ideas which could not be immediately realized because the necessary knowledge and/or techniques were not available.

This chapter examines the interdependencies between knowledge-seeking activities and agents setting environmental conditions over the definitions of multiple uses of, and markets for, the pharmaceutical human growth hormone. Pituitary hGH was approved to treat a condition called hypopituitary dwarfism. This chapter has concentrated on knowledge-seeking activities directly affecting or creating uses of, and markets for, hGH. Much of the focus has been on how firms identified and used technical and economic criteria to direct their activities to conform to existing criteria, and in the process create new, social selection criteria. The firms had incentives to invest in knowledge-seeking activities to generate legitimate uses of the pharmaceutical. In the best case, medical research would show multiple uses (indications) or else expand the range of uses for existing indications. The generation and selection of uses and markets for pharmaceutical hGH has depended on negotiations and interactions particularly among producer firms, medical researchers, and government regulatory agencies.

This chapter draws some conclusions about science and technology based on the theoretical and empirical discussions in previous chapters. Both scientific and technological activities involve searching for new knowledge and techniques, but it has been proposed that scientific activities are generally about understanding the world whereas technological activities are generally about controlling nature for human purposes. The focus of this chapter is on agents, environments, and knowledge-seeking activities from the 1970s to 1980s and first addresses how and why agents engage in scientific and technological activities in response to the four environments by analysing the historical material about genetic engineering for human growth hormone and insulin. The contribution of this book lies in uniting empirical and theoretical domains of enquiry in order to address questions about science-based, also known as high-tech, innovation processes. The book presents original empirical material about genetic engineering and biotechnology and analysis of how technological innovation processes occur.

This chapter sheds light on the flexibility of the moral economy of pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) in the first half of the twentieth century by exploring the science and selling of a hormone drug for sterility treatment (human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)), which received a considerable amount of attention when it was launched in Sweden in the 1940s. The analysis focuses on more or less hidden exchange relationships between medical science and the pharmaceutical industry and three types of practices that these relationships facilitated—conceptualized as consultation, procurement, and mediation—as well as the values these practices incorporated or gave rise to.