Shooting Genes, Distributing Credit: Narrating the Development of the Biolistic Gene Gun

Abstract

Using oral histories with scientists, technology transfer managers and other collaborators who were involved with the development of the biolistic gene gun, I investigate how actors narrate their experiences of technology transfer. The individuals who worked on the gene gun draw on two different interpretive repertoires for describing the innovation process: a ‘localized’ repertoire that highlights defined moments and the conceptual contributions of a few individuals; and a ‘distributed’ repertoire that emphasizes longer time frames, the process of technical implementation and the importance of a network of collaborators. Each of these repertoires identifies a different assemblage of actors as deserving of credit and reward for the development of the gene gun. Examining how scientists employ these modes of describing the innovation process offers a way of thinking about how university inventors negotiate tensions around novel features of academic capitalism, such as personal profit arising from the commercialization of university technologies.

Keywords:

• Technology transfer
• entrepreneurial university
• biotechnology
• discourse studies
• oral history

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Stephen Hilgartner, Michael Lynch and Harald Kliems, who were patient enough to read multiple versions of this paper and offer their insights. The author also thanks the individuals involved with the gene gun project who agreed to be interviewed for this paper, and Edward Wolf and Nelson Allen for generously sharing their personal collections of newspaper clippings and documents relating to the gene gun. This project was supported by a grant from the US National Science Foundation on ‘Emerging Technologies’ (Award No. 0352000).

Notes

J. Sanford, interview with the author on 12 March 2009, Geneva, NY; E. Wolf, interview with the author on 19 May 2009, Trumansburg, NY; and N. Allen, interview with the author on 7 May 2009, Newfield, NY (all transcripts in possession of author).

R. Wu, interview with the author on 12 June 2006, Ithaca, NY; D. Loomis, interview with the author on 7 July 2009, Freeville, NY; and R. Cahoon, interview with the author on 30 April 2007, Ithaca, NY (all transcripts in possession of author). Walter Haeussler, who was the director of the Cornell Research Foundation during the development of the gene gun, was unavailable for an interview. Cahoon, one of the longest standing members of Cornell's technology transfer office, was hired with the funds from the sale of Biolistics Inc. and was trained by Haeussler. I also attempted to contact Theodore Klein, a postdoctoral researcher working with Sanford who contributed substantially to the development of the gene gun. Klein could not be reached for an interview.

Although other methods for introducing foreign DNA into living cells did exist in the 1980s, one of the major limitations of these techniques was that they were unsuitable for agriculturally important plants, including wheat, corn, rice and soybeans. Plants such as tobacco had been successfully transformed using agrobacterium, a method that uses a plant pathogen to infect plant cells and introduce foreign DNA, but this technique had not been successful with any of the major food crops.

The specifics of how they met is not entirely clear from the actors' accounts. Cahoon and Wolf recall that Haeussler was responsible for introducing them, but Sanford recalls it as a chance meeting.

Onions, while not a commercially important crop, had large cells that were easy to examine under a microscope to see whether the tungsten had penetrated the cell walls.

The gene gun resulted in a series of patents, the first of which was United States Patent 4945050, ‘Method for transporting substances into living cells and tissues and apparatus therefore’, filed 13 November 1984.

The helium gas version was manufactured by DuPont and is today the most widely used method for propelling the ballistic particles.

Barbara McClintock was also a researcher at Cornell University who won the Nobel Prize for her work on cytogenetics in corn plants. For a biography of McClintock, see Keller (1984).

Even today, after the gene gun's patents have expired and it has largely been replaced by other technologies for doing genetic transformation, the story of the gene gun still appears in Cornell publications, such as a short feature in the ‘Made@Cornell’ section of the spring 2007 edition of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences newsletter (Segelken, 2007).

CCTEC's 2008 Annual Report shows that over a five year period (2004–2008), CCTEC had a total revenue of approximately $39 million and total expenses of approximately $62 million.

On the breadth of patent protection and progress in scientific research, see also Heller and Eisenberg (1998).