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Greedy Science

Creating Knowledge, Making Money, and Being Famous in the 1980s

edited by Michael D. Gordin and W. Patrick McCray

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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...

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.

Reviews

Reviews

By assembling this extraordinarily insightful set of essays, Gordin and McCray explore how the neoliberal political culture of the 1980s generated the ideological and economic forcefield that sucked so much of the science and technology of that era into its orbit. Greedy Science is rich, variegated, and rewarding.

Is scientific research a public good or a private commodity? As this rich and wide-ranging collection makes clear, over the course of a pivotal decade policymakers, researchers, journalists, and investors around the world answered this fundamental question in starkly different ways. Greedy Science is a fascinating guide to that major transition.

A richly informative, wide-ranging, and fresh examination of a critical decade when scientists became celebrities and high technology became big business. Deftly weaving economic and political history into the history of science and technology, Greedy Science shows how the remaking of science's moral economy in the 1980s laid the foundations for our big-tech, big-money present.

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Book Details

Release Date
Publication Date
Status
Preorder
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
384
ISBN
9781421450865
Illustration Description
7 b&w photos, 2 b&w illus.
Table of 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

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

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Michael D. Gordin

Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he is the dean of the college. He is the author of Einstein in Bohemia.
Featured Contributor

W. Patrick McCray

W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the department of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture.