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This chapter examines eleven regions in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s that were all rich in resources—ideas, money, and skills—which might have led to the formation of life sciences clusters. Yet only three of the regions—the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and San Diego—developed into robust industrial districts for biotechnology. Most research on the emergence of high-tech cluster samples on successful cases and traces backward to find a developmental pattern. In contrast, rather than read in reverse from a positive outcome, the chapter builds networks forward from their early origins, revealing three crucial factors: organizational diversity, anchor tenant organizations that protect the norms of a community and provide relational glue across multiple affiliations, and a sequence of network formation that starts with local connections and subsequently expands to global linkages.

This chapter follows the trajectory of the life sciences into the present day, focusing on the larger question of industry or field evolution. In a field characterized by “gales of creative destruction,” the chapter considers how some types of organizations have managed to retain a position of centrality even as others exit and many newcomers arrive. It analyzes the emergence of a core group of organizations, diverse in form and function, which they label an “open elite.” The animating question is why this group of organizations, which constituted a structural backbone of the field, did not become ossified gatekeepers but remained active in expansive exploration. The answer is found in their multiconnectivity—the multiple, independent pathways that link research-focused organizations in a wide array of different activities.

This chapter summarizes the book's findings regarding cooperation, coordination, and collective action as well as adaptation and the role that organizations play in fostering cooperation. It first considers four vignettes, each highlighting a contrast between a situation in which cooperation did occur and one in which it did not: water as a common-pool resource, grassroots justice in Tanzania, slave rebellions, and coordinated and uncoordinated air traffic. It then offers some observations regarding the relationship between the social and life sciences, with particular emphasis on consilience, emergence, and the scientific division of labor. The chapter explains how consilience is made possible by emergence and cites the study of cooperation as an excellent example of how the division of labor among the sciences can lead to a wide range of complementary insights regarding specific social phenomena.

This chapter first considers where Avicenna envisions medicine within his general classification of the sciences. It next presents the general principles of the humoral medicine that Avicenna adopts, and then discusses Avicenna’s views about health and the causes of disease or malady more generally. It concludes by considering a concrete issue of a medical-philosophical nature treated in Avicenna’s writings, namely, a problem associated with embryonic development and specifically whether embryonic development occurs gradually, as observation seems to suggest, or in stages, as theory seems to dictate. In the end, the chapter hopes to show how Avicenna successfully wed the best medicine of his time with his own philosophical system.

Erik Hammerstrom’s chapter examines the participation of Buddhist intellectuals in the early 1920s “Science and Philosophy of Life” debates; he shows how Buddhist intellectuals adopted and promoted modern scientific taxonomies of knowledge and scientific empiricism in ways informed by their Buddhist thinking that subsequently tempered, complicated, expanded, and deepened the modern Chinese discourse on science even as they advanced it.

The book argues that the most important period for Chinese Buddhists engagement with modern science occurred in the ten years between 1923 and 1932. This chapter lays out the historical context for that period. It begins with a general outline of Chinese history from the mid nineteenth century to 1920, culminating in an explanation of the historical significance of the year 1923. The central third of the chapter describe the spread of modern science in China, particularly the professionalization institutionalization of the various sciences, which were generally complete by the mid 1930s. The chapter closes with a review of the history Chinese Buddhist during the entire period, underscoring the manner in which social changes served to compel Buddhists to engage with science.

This chapter summarizes important points that have been made in this book on the emergence of the animal spirit paradigm, its development, and how it was replaced by the notion of electricity. It reviews the ideas and concepts that led to the evolution of the animal spirit doctrine, and then discusses some notable individuals whose works helped improve current knowledge. This chapter also states that the present study tried to provide examples of how new ideas could emerge and how changes can occur in the life sciences.

This introductory chapter explains the main goal of this book: to define a traditional way of thinking life and to render plausible and relevant the task of carrying out a critical enquiry concerning it. Life has been traditionally understood as the self-appropriating and self-organizing process of not ceasing to be, or, as is also said, of taking care of one's own hunger. This conceptualization entails a particular understanding of time in natural processes conerning living beings and a particular conception of the being of living beings (for instance, as the “care” of not ceasing to be). It is held that the traditional concept of life has furnished the main paradigm for the concept of being, including in Heidegger's philosophy, so that the deconstruction of the traditional understanding of life entails a deconstruction of ontology. This introductory chapter includes a description of the content of the book.

This chapter analyzes the scientific context in which Leibniz's unique theory of organic bodies took shape. It begins by focusing on the biographical and historical context of Leibniz's model of organic bodies. In particular, it looks at the relation of Leibniz's model of organic body to the empirical life sciences of his era, especially to the seventeenth century's discovery of the ubiquity of subvisible living creatures as well as its growing awareness of the deep interdependence of all living entities. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the legacy of the model of individuality developed by Leibniz in today's philosophy of biology.

This chapter reviews the roots of innovation in life sciences, an industry that has been the second-largest recipient of federal research funding (after defense), and which is justly celebrated for the extraordinary productivity of the “innovation ecosystem” that links its public and private sectors. The nature of energy and climate change innovation is in many respects different in some fundamental ways from life sciences innovation; however, the evolution and structure of the life sciences innovation system offers an instructive comparison. The genesis and evolution of the life sciences innovation system is the consequence of a set of policy choices and a microeconomic environment that has allowed the United States to leverage a set of embryonic scientific discoveries into a platform for sustained innovation, which has had a significant impact on human health and welfare. Some key features of the life sciences innovation system, such as the set of interdependent firms, markets, institutions, and regulatory and legal frameworks responsible for this strong record of innovation, and some lessons from this sector for innovation policy in energy and climate change, are outlined in the chapter.

By the mid-1920s, scientific cooperation replaced Germany's medical assistance to Russia: defending German racial stocks from the ravages of epidemics and famine gave way to futuristic schemes of advanced research in genetics and pathology. The research into obscure illnesses from goitre to camel disease often in remote areas ostensibly demonstrated that two great nations were willing to cooperate in humanitarian medical research. But at the same time there were covert German national agendas: pathology, sero-anthropology, and genetics undermined the Treaty of Versailles by showing that it did not accord with the ethnic map of Europe, given the scattered nature of German communities in the east. Heinz Zeiss was crucial in sustaining German–Soviet medical cooperation. He laid the foundations for a wide-ranging programme of cooperation in medicine and the life sciences. Nikolai Lenin's sympathetic foreign policy towards Germany led to the Treaty of Rapallo of April 16, 1922. A German–Russian Laboratory or Institute for Racial Research was established in Russia. In the end, however, the ideological clash between Soviet communism and Nazism severed their residual academic and medical ties.

This chapter analyzes a second figure under which the deconstruction of the traditional way of thinking life is engaged. “Today, biologists no longer study life in laboratories,” François Jacob famously states. Following Rheinberger's historical epistemology, this chapter shows how the substantiality and regulative unity of the object “life” disappears as the horizon for the concrete empirical research in experimental systems. Research in life science does not presuppose the hermeneutical understanding or pre-understanding of the “being of life.”

In chapter 4 it is argued that already in historical times the romantic relation to technology cannot be reduced to mere opposition. It is shown how in the early nineteenth century romantics were not only fearful of, but also fascinated by the new science and technology. Drawing on Tresch (2012) and Holmes (2008) it is argued that there was a current in Romanticism which viewed science and the arts as entwined, and which tried to fuse the organic and the mechanic, life and science. These material romanticisms are neglected by philosophers of technology who reduce romanticism to escapism, nostalgia, or anti-machine thinking. This brings us to our age, with its life sciences and its robotics that share these deeply material-romantic aims. First it is shown how in the 20th century there was a romantic science (Freud) and how technology and romanticism became very much entangled: not only in science fiction but also in reality: born as hippie computing in the context of the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture, there is a development of what we may call romantic devices.

This book is located in the overlapping spaces developed by a half-century of rewriting life in genetic sciences and technologies and the centuries-old texts of law that represent one of the most durable monuments of human culture. It argues that periods of significant change in the life sciences and technologies should be seen as constitutional or, more precisely, bioconstitutional in their consequences. It tries to capture the dynamics of the contemporary bioconstitutional moment as it is unfolding in real time and globalized space. It also opens new ground in legal scholarship, science and technology studies, comparative politics, and bioethics. An overview of the chapters included in this book is given.

Luigi Galvani merits the lion's share of the credit for expanding the doctrine of animal electricity beyond the singular powers of a few fish, and for doing this in a way that would reshape the life sciences and markedly influence medicine. This chapter examines how Galvani's investigations led him to his revolutionary ideas about animal electricity, as expressed in his landmark publication of 1791. It shows how animal spirits—the elusive messengers of the soul that carried sensory and motor signals in classical and even later physiology—would only now start to be banished from science and medicine by newer electrical ideas.