Subproject 6: Value for Money? Cooperation and Competition in the Human Genome Mapping Project

• Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Kärin Nickelsen
• Researcher: Johannes Schuckert, M.A.

The life sciences rose to the status of a ‚flagship discipline’ since the 1970s. At the same time, a competitive market with open borders between science and the economy emerged under the label of biotechnology. The Human Genome Project (HGP, ca. 1990-2003) is paradigmatic for this development. In the project, laboratories especially from the US and Europe had joined forces to map and sequence the human genome.

Our project draws attention to the rarely studied Human Genome Mapping Project in the UK that was closely associated, but not identical with the HGP. We focus on the interdependency of cooperative and competitive modes of action, with special regard to strategies of research and epistemic goals, as well as to the effects of economization. Within British genomics of the 1980s/90s, new methods of cloning and sequencing DNA – their efficient implementation depending on secure funding and cooperative division of labour – met with a political climate informed by Thatcherism: new public management, budget cuts, and imperatives of efficiency and exploitability. Our project analyses the resulting dynamic on the micro and meso-level of the network.