CBAS/Paul Martin

This Tuesday at CBAS Dr. Paul Martin was giving a talk on the topic "Commercial exploitation of Biomedicine".

His aim was to show the socio-technical expectations, promises and visions wich are proposed for these new technologies and how social sciences deal with them. In fact, the social science reflection came a little bit short in his quite "techy" talk, but I think there are many links to topics like Innovation, Path Creation and Leitbilder, and network formation on which research is pushed forward inside STS. Martin illustrated how in the different areas (with different levels of success) value is created:

• Tissue Engineering
• StemCell Therapy
• Gene Therapy
• Molecular Diagnostics
• Pharmacogenetics

Martin argued that the not yet successful development of these fields has got several causes, especially unrealistic expectations and a wrong model of innovation. There is not enough translational research which tells us, how knowledge can be transferred from science to clinical application (are these two incommensurable?) and biotech should rather be seen as a incremental than a radical innovation. Complementary techniques to make use in the clinical practice are necessary, to embed the new forms of cure.

This is mainly, because the nature of medical knowledge. The central assumption, that medicine is a form of science is quite new (evidence based medicine came up in the 70s), and there are not enough sufficient bridges between laboratory and hospital. It is not even clear, what are criteria for clinical utility. Maybe even a new understanding of the human body is necessary, here social science plays a key-role.
In fact, Martin had a quite gloomy view on the new techniques, and tried to slow down all the big expectations laid on them.

There was a discussant, Dr Chris Mason, UCL, who did especially not agree with this last point, he argued for quick realisation and big opportunities in this area, evoking a comparission with the IT field, which also had some up and downs (some kind of wave-model was mentioned, i did not understand the name of the author which developed it). The discussion went to economic chances for investment in this field and later on on the very interesting role of military in pushing innovations. "It aims at injuring, not killing soldiers, right now, because of this money is pumped into the Biomed sector."

The discussion and the topic stayed quite on the surface - we should blame the short time and the interdisciplinary background of the participants for this, but I think we can see some interesting fields for research in this.

Abstract