This is a study in the history of the large scale science that emerged after the Second World War. The paper examines the Influence of industrial research practices on the work of two important American cancer research laboratories - the Sloan-Kettering Institute and The Institute for Cancer Research - during the period 1945-50. It is shown that even before the war the application of Industrial organization to cancer research was debated. Then it is demonstrated that the early post-war strategies of the two institutes drew upon Industrial experience. Finally it is argued that these Industrially influenced strategies were responsible for institutional emphases on chemotherapy research.

Why has the term `biotechnology' been so ambiguous, while hopes for the subject have been so high? Exploring biotechnology's historic role as a `boundary object' between engineering and biology offers an explanation. The word is shown to have been interpreted in a variety of ways since the beginning of the century. Here the translations and negotiations over its identity are uncovered, showing that the words Biotechnik and Biotechnologie were poineered around World War I, principally in Denmark, Germany and Hungary. Those ideas were used and modified in the writings and institutions of engineers and biologists in Britain, Sweden and the USA. The 1960s are identified as the period in which biotechnology acquired a single identity, but alternative meanings were in conflict and then merged in the 1970s and 1980s. The analysis suggests that the concept of a `biotechnology' is deeply entrenched in twentieth-century culture, and that current debates over regulation can be seen in terms of uncertainties over the proper boundary between engineering and biology.

Antibiotic development and usage, and antibiotic resistance in particular, are today considered global concerns, simultaneously mandating local and global perspectives and actions. Yet such global considerations have not always been part of antibiotic policy formation, and those who attempt to formulate a globally coordinated response to antibiotic resistance will need to confront a history of heterogeneous, often uncoordinated, and at times conflicting reform efforts, whose legacies remain apparent today. Historical analysis permits us to highlight such entrenched trends and processes, helping to frame contemporary efforts to improve access, conservation and innovation.

The discovery of antibiotics not only heralded a dramatically new approach to infection control and health care but also enabled nations to prosper and overturned the concept of health as a moral duty

The historiography of penicillin has tended to overlook the importance of developing and disseminating know-how in fermentation technology. A focus on this directs attention to work before the war of a network in the US and Europe concerned with the production of organic acids, particularly gluconic and citric acids. At the heart of this network was the German-Czech Konrad Bernhauer. Other members of the network were a group of chemists at the US Department of Agriculture who first recognized the production possibilities of penicillin. The Pfizer Corporation, which had recruited a leading Department of Agriculture scientist at the end of the First World War, was also an important centre of development as well as of production. However, in wartime Bernhauer was an active member of the SS and his work was not commemorated after his death in 1975. After the war new processes of fermentation were disseminated by penicillin pioneers such as Jackson Foster and Ernst Chain. Because of its commercial context his work was not well known. The conclusion of this paper is that the commercial context, on the one hand, and the Nazi associations of Bernhauer, on the other, have submerged the significance of know-how development in the history of penicillin.