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On the transformative role of greed in global science and technology during the 1980s.
In the 1980s, a transformative era emerged where profit-driven motives and an entrepreneurial spirit dominated scientific research and technological innovation. This collection of essays, edited by Michael D. Gordin and W. Patrick McCray, examines how greed reshaped the global scientific community through the relentless pursuit of money, fame, and celebrity.
Profiting off science and technology was not a new phenomenon, nor were the soaring ambitions of some of its most fervent advocates. However, the global currents of knowledge production in the 1980s saw major cultural and scientific shifts: the increasing frequency of university patenting, the rise of academic entrepreneurship, and collaborations between industries and academia, for example. Greedy Science seeks to survey and understand the full range of these changes. Through insightful essays, contributors examine case studies ranging from the biotech boom—driven by early oil-firm investments—to the speculative market strategies in personal computing and alternative energy. This period saw the rise of the celebrity status of scientists and raised questions about the moral complexities of scientific greed.
The authors argue that greed was an ever-present and expansive trait of science during this time, encompassing a host of behaviors such as covetousness, acquisitiveness, rapaciousness, and conspicuous consumption. Greedy Science provides a nuanced analysis of how market dynamics and the quest for personal gain profoundly influenced scientific advancements and public perception during a pivotal decade in science and technology.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Greed, Science, and Greedy Science, by Michael D. Gordin and W. Patrick McCray
Part I: To the Market
1. Taking the Marks to the Market: The Oil Industry and the Entrepreneurial Turn, by Cyrus C. M. Mody
2. Taller Than a T-Rex: Celebrity and Leftist Politics in the Public Career of Stephen Jay Gould, by Myrna Perez
3. VisiCalc, Personal Computing, and the Speculative Entrepreneur of 1980s America, by Laine Nooney
Part II: Privatization
4. Thatcherism, Science, and Greed, by Jon Agar
5. Kids, Commerce, and Communists: Access to Space in the 1980s, by Margaret A. Weitekamp
6. Neoliberal Mutations, by Angela N. H. Creager
7. "Drugs Into Bodies": AIDS Activism and the Constitutional Limits of Biocapital, by Cathy Gere
Part III: Regions
8. Greedy Geography: The Localization of Biotechnology in Cambridge, by Robin Wolfe Scheffler
9. Science as Speculation: State Capitalism, Real Estate, and Singapore's Jurong Town Corporation, by Hallam Stevens
10. Science, Texas Style: How the Lone Star State Embraced Science in a Big Way, by Peter Westwick
Part IV: Speculations and Spectacles
11. "The Required Allocations Grew Considerably": Soviet Science, Military Imperatives, the Ambivalent Response to Reagan's Star Wars, by Asif Siddiqi
12. Extinction, Insurance, or a New Weapons Industry: Asteroid Impacts and the Triumph of the Apocalyptic Lobbyist, by Matthew Stanley
13. Service with a Smile, Or, How Profit Made Japanese Robots Personal and Personable, by Yulia Frumer
Afterword: From Groovy Science to Greedy Science, by David Farber
List of Contributors
Index
