ABSTRACT

Making Knowledge Public, Making Knowledge Private: Bioinformatics and the Revolution in Biological Science and Technology

CRIC Discussion Paper No. 73

Mark Harvey and Andrew McMeekin

This extended paper addresses some key questions around one of the central aspects of contemporary capitalist economies, namely, the relationship between the growth of knowledge and economic growth. It tackles some complex issues surrounding what is meant by ‘public’ and ‘private’ in relation to knowledge and develops a process-based approach, with roots in economic sociology, which focuses on how the public and private character of knowledge and its role in the economy is continuously reconstituted and transformed. These transformations occur through interdependent historical changes in:

• public and private processes of production of knowledge;
• processes of dissemination of knowledge to differentiated publics and closed groups;
• the public or private processes of appropriation or ownership of knowledge;
• public or private uses of knowledge.

The paper is organised into three main sections. The first engages with some current debates in the ‘economics of knowledge’. The second outlines an alternative and integrated ‘instituted economic process’ approach, setting out four instituted process of production, distribution, appropriation/exchange and use/consumption in relation to knowledge. This is developed with specific reference to bioinformatics and the contemporary revolution in biological sciences and technologies. The third section presents the empirical grounding of this approach, taking some key aspects of the bioinformatics revolution, with five case studies, each with different epistemic characteristics, databases, software packages, and theoretical paradigms.

The ultimate conclusion of this analysis, we think, is a bold claim about the nature of capitalism, and the role of science in the economy. We think capitalist dynamics are multi-modal, that is to say, driven by changes occurring within and between the public and private, where public and private are seen to be dynamically interdependent. This contrasts with a model of capitalism, even mixed economy, where essentially the public is the infrastructural servant of a dynamic market economy, or in some cases, only the dynamism of the market is considered.

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