Cleantech and an Analysis of the Platform Nature of Life Sciences: Further Reflections upon Platform Policies

ABSTRACT

Most articles about life sciences begin from healthcare. This article reaches healthcare by an unusual route. It begins by trying to map out the complex content of the “Cleantech” platform. It then cross-connects important parts of that to the Agro-food industry, only finally relating important aspects of that to Healthcare biosciences. By Cleantech is meant the complex of industry activities dealing with energy-related agriculture, air and environment, materials, manufacturing, energy generation, efficiency, storage and infrastructure, recycling and waste treatment, transportation, water and wastewater that utilize renewable resources enhanced, as appropriate by life science technologies. The agro-food industry is large and less complex than Cleantech, but is currently still in thrall to its inheritance from agro-chemicals, food technology and nutrition science that dates from the post-war rise of industrial farming under corporate tutelage. Healthcare is also large, similarly traceable to fossil-based fine chemistry (drugs) and plastics (medical devices), dominated by large corporate businesses and, like agro-food assailed by a variety of attacks from alternative production paradigms. Cleantech, in part, seeks markets to rid the world of the pollutants of agro-food and healthcare as exemplars of the hegemonic US-led mass production/mass consumption paradigm. Tackling complexity on this scale requires new policy reflection, something with which the paper engages.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been read by numerous people and, fortunately, found interesting. The author would particularly wish to thank for detailed comments, Alessandro Rosiello, the present Guest Editor, his colleague at Edinburgh University, Emma Frow, who also suggested key references, particularly some critiquing biofuels, and at the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Phil Shapira. None is responsible for the present outcome.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Emma Frow, ESRC Genomics and Policy Research Forum, Edinburgh University, for drawing my attention to the probable major institutional and sustainability as compared to short-term market adjustments involved in transforming global energy policy. Moving away from corn bioethanol, currently heavily subsidized in the US, seems a pre-requisite.

2. I am grateful to Phil Shapira for this comment on my original draft.