Competition and the Transformation of Academic Labs in Biomedical Sciences in the 1980s

• In Event: Trans-organisational Collaboration in Different Sectors: Epistemic Values and the Dynamics of Co-production

Abstract

The debate in STS about how the academic life sciences have been changing since the late 1970s in both Canada and the U.S. has focused primarily on the influence of the increasing commercialization of academic research and enhanced university-industry ties. This study examines an episode that challenges the assumption in this debate that the organization of academic labs during this period has remained essentially the same: the emergence of larger academic labs in the biomedical sciences. Based on evidence of changes in practice revealed in work history interviews with older and retired professors done during a larger ethnographic study of work in academic labs, the main argument is that dependence on federal grants and a key shift in the nature of competition for those grants during the 1980s led to a transformation of the social organization of work in this field, including the emergence of larger hierarchically-organized labs. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of the contemporary academic scientist in this field are also discussed. The contribution of this paper to STS is to show that, contrary to assumption, there has been a significant reorganization of work in academic labs in the biomedical sciences since 1980, and how this is related to the political economy of science.


Biomedical research, academic labs, research funding, competition, political economy of science

Author

• Annalisa Salonius, Independent Scholar, formerly University of Pennsylvania