Biotechnology: Potentials and Limitations : Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Biotechnology: Potentials and Limitations Berlin 1985

hurdle will be in the latter area. The technological hurdles will be formi- dable but will not limit what happens: once the basic ideas are available, the technology will be developed. The unique part of biotechnology will be to imagine what the possibilities are. There was a discussion in several of the groups on the problems of intro- ducing a novel science into a social and economic context. What biotech- nologists are learning on this matter is not novel, although that does not make it any less important or difficult. People in the development of elec- tronics and computers, in the pharmaceutical industry, and in many other types of industry that have grown from university research have had to face these problems in the past. It is the old situation of having to reinvent the wheel again and again. There is one aspect on which biotechnology seems to have handled this inherent difficulty better than some of our predecessor technologies: the people in the biotechnology companies by and large take a rather academic approach to free communication with one another at meetings such as this and open publication of many of their basic findings in the literature. This seems unique and certainly is different from the experience of the recent Silicone Valley Industry, which in other ways tries to emulate an academic environment, but not in open and free publication.