edgerton britains struggle to succeed in biotechnology ft review

Remember biotechnology? It was to be the next big thing: after information technology, the gurus had found the future in new drugs made using recombinant DNA, monoclonal antibodies and genomics, the key techniques and products of molecular biology. Forty years on, biotech has not produced anything comparable to the sulphonamides or penicillin, cortisone or the pill. It has generated more money than advances in health, and much less money than hoped. Surprisingly it has not yet become passé futurology. The story of biotech was always much more than a story about a new science. It also stood for a new capitalism: spinouts from universities based on new forms of knowledge would grow to be gigantic new companies. A shallow misreading of Joseph Schumpeter as the prophet of “creative destruction” was added to the usual techno-scientific hype. Out would go giant old corporates, and in would come a new entrepreneurial capitalism. In fact, with a few exceptions, pharma is still dominated by companies longer in the tooth than molecular biology, most of which were going strong when Schumpeter argued that the routinisation of innovation would make entrepreneurial capitalism a thing of the past. In Science, the State, and the City, Geoffrey Owen, a noted business historian and a former editor of this newspaper, and Michael Hopkins of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex tell a rich story of British attempts to make the hype a reality. Stories of revolutionary transitions in biology and capitalism have deeply affected not only policy, but also how both have been written about. For example, this book asks why it was that, despite everything being in place — successful academic molecular biology, strong government support, newly available sources of capital, and a new entrepreneurial culture engendered by the remarkable political and economic transformation of the 1980s — Britain has not produced any large new biotechnological enterprise like America’s Amgen, Biogen or Gilead. Since the launch of Celltech (strongly supported by the National Enterprise Board) in 1980, it concludes, there is “a dearth of outstanding successes, whether in terms of consistently profitable firms or high-selling innovative drugs”. One reason this comes as a surprise is that the term “biotech” broadened its meaning to include distinctly old-fashioned methods of drug discovery and, indeed, the production of non-innovative drugs. It came to be used to mean no more than Small Pharma. It is the latter definition of biotech as new drugs companies that Science, the State, and the City openly adopts in its analysis, though its heart is in the much tighter definition of “biotech” as products of the new molecular biology, not least that pioneered in Cambridge. But as Owen and Hopkins rightly and devastatingly point out, modern British Small Pharma has not produced many new drugs from biotech pur et dur — only eight out of 100 were molecular-biological. It managed to take to market only nine niche chemical drugs, produced by old-fashioned methods. British Small Pharma essentially put together new formulations. The blame cannot be pinned on the usual suspects of anti-business universities and an indifferent stock market and government This disappointing performance, as the authors show, cannot be pinned on the usual suspects of anti-business universities and an indifferent stock market and government, for such characterisations are not accurate for the period since 1979 (and in my view never were). Nor did the rest of Europe, with its allegedly backward capitalism and universities, do markedly worse, or better, than Britain. What emerges clearly is that very special conditions in the US, really Boston and San Francisco, were such that even European companies sought finance and market opportunities there. Indeed, the global nature of the business makes a nonsense of the national focus. Two companies specialising in biotech proper, Celltech and Cambridge Antibody Technology, both emerging from the famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, still operate as research centres in the UK, but for multinational Big Pharma. The moral of the story is beware the claims of the gurus, about both science and capitalism, especially in techno-nationalist form. The story of innovation in pharma, big and small, biotech and non-biotech, is one of decelerating, increasingly expensive and less significant innovation. British pharma has hardly been immune. It could well be argued that its great days were in the pre-Thatcher 1970s, when British pharma and British scientists really did produce blockbusters. More generally, we need to be sceptical about exaggerated claims of a great current British strength in biomedical industries or academic research (the claim made by the chancellor in March 2012 that 20 per cent of bestselling drugs come from British research is not based on any evidence I can find). It is remarkable just how little realistic auditing there has been of the success or otherwise of British innovation policy over the past 40 years. This book offers the richest analysis we have of British research policy for any particular area, indeed the one in which the most hope was invested. That after 45 years of effort so little has emerged, that companies are still measured in terms of market valuations and not sales or employment, and that there is barely a mention of health benefits, should give pause to all policymakers. The lesson to be learnt, reading this book suggests, was not that things were done badly, but rather that the shared assumptions about the nature of capitalism, of science, and of “national innovation systems” need revisiting. Alas, this is unlikely: thinking about innovation is astonishingly conformist, unaware of its own lack of originality, and disconnected from anything that has ever happened or is likely to happen. Science, the State, and the City: Britain’s Struggle to Succeed in Biotechnology, by Geoffrey Owen and Michael Hopkins, OUP, RRP£35, 272 page David Edgerton is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology at King’s College London and author of ‘The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900’ (Profile)