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This chapter examines the challenges of temporal uncertainty and how the state and bio-industry stakeholders have been forced to assume a new kind of political economic leadership role to stem people's growing impatience regarding the slow pace and unpredictability of commercial biotech development. It shows that biotech stakeholders in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have had to shift expectations about progress in the biotech industry away from “short-termism” to a more realistic “long-termism.” Due to the challenges of managing commercial biotech's temporal uncertainty, commercial biotech stakeholders in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have attempted to manufacture progress in the near term in order to sustain an appetite for biotech over the long term.

This chapter examines the state in the specific context of biotech innovation as well as the extent to which earlier patterns of state intervention and state organization have endured in the current era of knowledge-based industrial development. It argues that the diminishing coordinative capacity of the state in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore means that the state cannot pick winners any longer. More specifically, it discusses three reasons for the reorganization of the state apparatus and its retreat from coordinating the biotech sector: the decentralization of expertise among state-level actors; the absence of institutional leadership inside the state apparatus; and the articulation of new strategic rationalizations about the state's more modest role in managing the biotech industry's technological, economic, and temporal uncertainties. Finally, it shows that there have been significant continuities in how the state is organized and in how decision makers inside the state see their guiding role in biotech development.

This newly legitimized avenue for academic patenting challenged the moral economy of science at the laboratories of Stanford biochemists. Chapter 6 examines the diverse motives, rationales, and frustrations of scientists who participated in the biotechnology industry during the transforming academic environment of the 1980s.

This chapter proposes a more fundamental conceptual distinction between risk and uncertainty to show how decision makers make political economic bets and how they rationalize them in the face of two different modes of industrial upgrading, each with its own set of challenges. Focusing on the processes of growing biotech industries in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the chapter argues that Asia's postwar political economy was characterized by state intervention in the economy for the purposes of mitigating the risks of industrial upgrading. It also examines how the developmental state, despite failing to guarantee industrial success, demonstrated the capacity to reduce the risks of upgrading and technological “catch-up.” Finally, it contends that the strategy of mitigating risk is less effective when it comes to cutting-edge biotech. The biotech industry is currently facing tremendous technological, economic, and long-term uncertainty that decision makers cannot easily manage.

This chapter analyzes the cultural, political, and economic conditions under which “bioart” is being produced today. It uses the works of four well-known practitioners in the field, who employ different strategies in negotiating their existence as hybrid creations developed in response to a political ecology under the influence of a neoliberal ideology. The chapter calls on the need to focus on how the arts/science nexus works within new modes of neoliberal capitalism, and the possible positionings of the (bio-)artist within that framework.

This chapter presents case studies of the incorrect use of scientific terminology found in curatorial statements and other bioart-related writings, which often confound developments in tissue engineering with molecular biology and other genetic-based subfields of the life sciences. It argues that careless use of scientific language only furthers the public misunderstandings of science, and all too often plays right into the rhetoric promoted by the biotech industries and other funding beneficiaries, which have lots to gain by equating the field of biology with the (sub-)field of genetics. The chapter cites the “ethical, cultural, and political importance of experiential engagement with life manipulation as it can be an effective methodology to confront the complexities and contest dominant ideologies regarding the life sciences.”

I have said that the risk of catastrophe is growing because science and technology are advancing at breakneck speed. Oddly, this is a source of modest comfort. We do not know what the cumulative risk of disaster is today, but we know that it will be greater several decades from now, so there is time to prepare measures against the truly terrifying dangers that loom ahead. But we must begin. And the formulation and implementation of the necessary measures cannot be left to scientists, as we know. The role of law and the social sciences is crucial. The law, however, is making little contribution to the control of catastrophic risks. Likewise the social sciences, with the partial exception of economics, which has produced a significant scholarly literature on global warming. The legal profession may even be increasing the probability of catastrophe by exaggerating the cost to civil liberties of vigorous responses to threats of terrorism. Improvement in the response to catastrophic risks may require both institutional reforms and changes in specific policies, procedures, and doctrines. The legal system cannot deal effectively with scientifically and technologically difficult questions unless lawyers and judges—not all, but more than at present—are comfortable with such questions. Comfortable not in the sense of knowing the answers to difficult scientific questions or being able to engage in scientific reasoning, but in the sense in which most antitrust lawyers today, few of whom are also economists, are comfortable in dealing with the economic issues that arise in antitrust cases. They know some economics, they work with economists, they understand that economics drives many outcomes of antitrust litigation, and as a result they can administer—not perfectly but satisfactorily— an economically sophisticated system of antitrust law. Economics, however, although at least quasi-scientific in method and outlook, and increasingly mathematized, is easier for lawyers and judges to get comfortable with than the natural sciences are. Because it plays an important role in many fields of law, economics is taught in law schools, whether in special courses on economic analysis of law or more commonly as a component of substantive law courses, such as torts, antitrust, securities regulation, environmental law, and bankruptcy.