TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 145 grouping six examples for heuristic convenience. What is more convincing, however, is that we have here a useful description of some of the circumstances under which the bridge between industry and academe was built. If it is true, as National Research Council figures suggest, that such collaboration grew rapidly in the period through World War II and then stagnated or declined, we can gain from this study a good idea of how they might in general have worked. That a large proportion of these were in biomedical areas makes this an even more important set of examples. The decline, insofar as it did occur, was primarily the result of the huge increase in government spending, largely in military-related research. By the 1970s this apparent decline was reversed, mainly owing to massive spending by biomedical corporations that took off tremendously in the early 1980s. The book is marred by some of the pitfalls of dissertation writing. It is often dense, jumpy, and rather too detailed; in reading the mass of description one occasionally loses sight of what is happening in these companies and in the industry, not to mention in industryacademe relations as a whole. Even so, this study of the origins of commercial relationships between companies and universities is a good place to observe dangers now too often skated over; the effects of secrecy in research, the limitations imposed by tying the careers of young researchers to sponsoring corporations, and, perhaps most threatening, the danger to academic disinterestedness in a system permeated by cooperative research. Jonathan Liebenau Dr. Liebenau is in the Department of Information Systems of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he teaches social studies of technology. He has written extensively on the history of medicine and medical technology and is the author of Medical Science and Medical Industry: The Formation of the American Pharmaceutical Industry and editor of The Challenge ofNew Technology: Innovation in British Business since 1850. Werkplaatsen van Wetenschap en Techniek: Industriële en Academische Laboratoria in Nederland, 1860—1940. Edited by R. P. W. Visser and C. Hakfoort. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1987. Pp. 184; illustra tions, notes. F 38.00 (paper). At present, laboratories fulfill a crucial role in scientific research, industrial innovation, and medical diagnosis. In modern countries they provide work for thousands of men and women, and tremen dous amounts of money are invested in instruments and buildings. However, as C. Hakfoort writes in the introduction of 'Werkplaatsen van Wetenschap en Techniek, the emergence of these important institu tions has not been studied deeply, and in the Netherlands there is no previous work on which to build. This collection of essays (each with 146 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE a short summary in English) must therefore be regarded as a first exploration of the subject for the Netherlands, and as such it is very useful. H. Lintsen and J. J. Hutter provide the groundwork for the book. Lintsen sketches briefly the kinds of knowledge required in Dutch industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries and how they were acquired. Laboratories hardly played a role in this until the end of the 19th century, when special apparatuses for testing and controlling raw materials and products were introduced. The development of new products and processes became a task of some laboratories only after World War I, mainly in the multinational firms now known as Shell, AKZO, Philips, and Unilever. Hutter attempts to give a quantitative survey of laboratories founded in the Netherlands between 1860 and 1940. This is no easy task, since the sources (periodicals, yearbooks, and memorial vol umes) are insufficient, especially concerning industrial laboratories. Nevertheless, his data reinforce Lintsen’s more impressionistic ac count and extend it into the 20th century. Government laboratories appeared from the early 1900s on, small firms collaborated in founding laboratories, and large firms started their own mainly after 1918. The number of scientists working in Dutch industry grew from about 350 in 1910 to 1,800 in 1940; most were chemists and electrical and chemical engineers. The other articles are short case studies that describe these trends in more detail. Snelders, Visser, and Beukers discuss university...