Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environment: Science, Policy, and Social Issues by Sheldon Krimsky and Roger Wrubel

Abstract

334 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE historians of technology. The author is sure-handed with the rDNA techniques, providing her readers with an excellent introduction to innovations profoundly impacting global drug discovery. As she per­ suasively demonstrates, the old linear model of science-technology relationships needs to be junked. So too with the clear-cut distinc­ tions between basic and applied research and research and devel­ opment. Most American scholars will be grateful, too, for the infor­ mation she provides on Swedish developments. For the most part, European firms lagged behind their U.S. counterparts in taking ad­ vantage of rDNA technology. McKelvey’s account helps us under­ stand why the lag existed and why it is gradually disappearing in recent years. McKelvey is also deft in her handling of economic theory. Her decision to explore evolutionary economics places her on an excit­ ing frontier of that discipline, a theoretical frontier closer to the work of historians of technology and business than any other with which we are familiar. McKelvey gracefully explicates the theory in terms that even the most economics-averse historian can under­ stand. She is tough-minded and insists that evolution is merely a useful metaphor that should be converted into a body of explicit theory before it can be used to develop explanations of technologi­ cal change. Her study makes an important contribution to the devel­ opment of that theory and to the growing body of work on the his­ tory of biotechnology and innovation. Louis Galambos Jeffrey L. Sturchio Dr. Galambos, whose major interest is innovation, teaches history atJohns Hop­ kins University. His latest book, with Jane Eliot Sewell, is Networks ofInnovation: Vac­ cine Development at Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Dr. Sturchio is a historian of science and technology. He is currently executive director, public affairs, Human Health— Europe, Middle East, and Africa, at Merck & Co. Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environment: Science, Policy, and Social Issues. By Sheldon Krimsky and Roger Wrubel. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. 294; figures, tables, notes. $47.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). The recently developed capacity to produce “designer genes” will probably revolutionize agriculture in the next few decades. Exactly how remains unclear, but it is one of the key technology policy issues we currently face. This work is an assessment, composed around 1993, of a rapidly changing field. While the initial chapter treats biotechnology in terms of theories of agricultural innovation and the final chapter examines “Cultural and Symbolic Dimensions of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 335 Agricultural Biotechnology,” most of the book consists of descrip­ tions of the state ofthe art and associated social, environmental, and policy issues in nine areas of agricultural biotechnology: herbicide-, pesticide-, and disease-resistant plants, transgenic plant products (e.g., plants engineered to produce pharmaceutical chemicals), mi­ crobial pesticides, nitrogen fixation, frost inhibition, animal growth hormones, and transgenic animals. Drawn mainly from the scientific literature and from formal policy documents, the literature reviews are wide ranging and include some consideration of economic, so­ cial, regulatory, and ethical questions. Advocated by some as the coming of a truly scientific and earthfriendly paradigm ofagriculture, agricultural biotechnology has also been much criticized. Complaints include that its products will lead to undesirable structural change, may be unsafe to humans or lead to uncontrollable ecological changes, and will encourage even fur­ ther dependence on manufactured inputs. Some critics view bio­ technology as an unethical tampering with nature. On most of the heated questions about the consequences of biotechnological agri­ culture, Sheldon Krimsky and Roger Wrubel are sober moderates. Although they usually downplay scenarios of catastrophic harm to environment, health, or society, they also deflate claims that we have finally found permanent solutions to longstanding problems. For example, there is no indication that widespread use of plants engi­ neered to include the insect-killing toxins of Bacillus thuringiensis, long a model “biological” solution ofalternative agriculturalists, will not induce the same evolution of resistance that chemical pesticides have done. On the much-debated question ofwhether vertical inte­ gration in the agricultural-inputs industry would inhibit develop­ ment of crops requiring fewer inputs, they find the record mixed. In...