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Shooting Genes, Distributing Credit:Narrating the Development of theBiolistic Gene GunNicole Nelson aa Social Studies of Medicine , McGill University , Montreal ,CanadaPublished online: 21 Feb 2012.

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

NICOLE NELSON

Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

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.

KEY WORDS: Technology transfer, entrepreneurial university, biotechnology, discourse

studies, oral history

Introduction

Over the winter break in 1983, three researchers slipped on their clean room hats

and booties and went into the Submicron Facility at Cornell University, armed

with a modified air pistol and a bag of onions. John Sanford, Edward Wolf and

Nelson Allen had a goal: they wanted to create transgenic plants by firing

DNA-coated particles into plant cells. They recall that many in the scientific

Science as Culture

Vol. 21, No. 2, 205–232, June 2012

Correspondence Address: Nicole Nelson, Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, 3647 Rue Peel,

Montreal, QC H3A 1X1, Canada. Email: nicole.nelson@gmail.com

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/12/020205-28 # 2012 Process Presshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2011.614335

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community and in industry thought the idea was laughable or too crude to be of

much use, but Sanford and Wolf thought that they could start their own

company to manufacture and sell ‘gene guns’ for making genetically modified

plants. When the technology rights were sold to DuPont in 1990, it produced

the largest royalty payment to the Cornell Research Foundation up to that date

and is one of the most ‘readily recognized financial successes’ in the history of

Cornell technology transfer (Coffman et al., 2003, p. 10).

As an important symbol of modern agricultural production, the story of the gene

gun’s development has been told in many settings, from light-hearted treatments in

industry magazines to exhibits in highly trafficked venues such as the Smithsonian

Museum and the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World (Voiland and McCand-

less, 1999). The commercialization of the gene gun is also an example of a now fam-

iliar story about the rise of technology transfer offices, university patents and

increasingly close relationships between academic worlds and commercial

markets. Martin Kenney (1988) has argued that the American biotechnology field

in the late 1970s and early 1980s experienced a particularly rapid transformation

towards what he termed the ‘university–industrial complex’, where professors

increasingly engaged in activities such as consulting for biotechnology companies

and founding start-ups to commercialize work done in their laboratories. Scientists,

university administrators and public commentators remain deeply conflicted about

the costs and benefits of these interchanges between industry and academia. For

some, the development of the gene gun is an exemplar for would-be university

entrepreneurs, demonstrating how the commercialization of academic inventions

can provide benefits to universities, inventors and the public (see for example

Lang, 2000; Wolf, 2009). For others, the story of the gene gun raises concerns

about ownership of university intellectual property, and the potential dangers of

placing control of key agricultural technologies in the hands of corporations (see

for example Coffman et al., 2003, p. 24; Baum, 2004).

This paper examines how the actors involved with the gene gun—including the

scientists named on the patent, university technology transfer officials, and scien-

tific and technical collaborators—narrate their experiences of developing this

technology, and account for its invention and eventual commercial success.

Those who were involved with the project describe it as a kind of technology

transfer fairytale, a ‘Cinderella story’ where ‘everything just worked’ and ‘every-

one cashed out early’. What made it a success, in the eyes of these different actors?

Who were the key participants and what were the key events in their retellings of

the gene gun story? How are these actors’ accounts related to their different roles

in the technology transfer process, and can these accounts be understood as tools

for negotiating moral and political debates about the commercialization of univer-

sity technologies?

I argue that in their retellings of the gene gun’s development, participants in

technology transfer are drawing on different visions of the innovation process.

The first half of the paper demonstrates how actors’ descriptions of the gene

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gun’s history employ two different ‘interpretive repertoires’ (Mulkay and Gilbert,

1982a, 1982b) for describing innovation. In some instances, they employ a ‘loca-

lized’ repertoire that emphasizes the conceptual contributions of a small number

of individuals, while in other instances they draw on a ‘distributed’ repertoire that

highlights the importance of external resources and collaborators. The second half

of the paper analyzes how actors use these repertoires in different settings, and

how these ways of accounting for innovation shape who receives credit for the

development of new technologies. The localized and distributed narratives ident-

ify different sets of actors who receive different degrees and types of credit for

their participation in developing new techniques and technologies. In the case

of the gene gun, localized accounts enhance the patentability and marketability

of the technology by distancing it from other efforts to introduce foreign DNA

into plants, and they identify a few key actors as deserving of intellectual property

rights and financial reward. Distributed accounts, in contrast, enhance the scienti-

fic credibility of the technology by connecting it to previous efforts to transform

plants, and help to stabilize large collaborative networks by distributing forms of

credit such as authorship and public recognition.

Exploring how participants in technology transfer narrate the innovation

process offers a way of thinking about how actors negotiate the often contentious

terrain of technology transfer. The localized and distributed repertories provide

vocabularies for characterizing the contributions of particular individuals, ascrib-

ing motivations to participants in technology transfer and highlighting different

outcomes of the process of commercialization. When told in certain venues,

such as patent applications or publications, localized and distributed accounts

can shape perceptions of who should profit from and control new technologies,

issues that are at the heart of debates around the commercialization of university

innovations. Examining innovation narratives also reveals one of the ways in

which actors themselves participate in debates about the benefits and dangers of

academic capitalism.

Innovation and the Entrepreneurial University

Researchers in American universities today conduct their work in a complex land-

scape that often includes technology transfer offices, intellectual property rights

over the materials they work with and the inventions they produce, and funding

arrangements with industry partners. Since the late 1970s, the legal and insti-

tutional settings where biological research is conducted have undergone

particularly rapid transformations, especially in the nature and extent of the

relationship between academic research and the marketplace (Kenney, 1988).

The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980, which authorized universities to seek intellectual

property rights for inventions arising from federally funded research, is a fre-

quently discussed example of changing policies and attitudes in this era towards

entrepreneurial activities in the academy. While much recent scholarship has

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argued that the commercialization of university inventions does not constitute an

essentially new phenomenon (Shapin, 2003, 2008; Metlay, 2006; Popp-Berman,

2008), such activities are arguably much more widely and visibly pursued in uni-

versities today.

Public policies to encourage technology transfer, industry funding of academic

research, and prominent scientists who merge the pursuit of knowledge with

pursuit of profit have also become the subject of considerable debate and contro-

versy. For example, the idea that university inventors should receive monetary

rewards for their work, a novel feature of commercialization activities since the

1970s (Metlay, 2006), has generated considerable discussion. Particularly in the

late 1970s and early 1980s, when technology transfer was relatively uncommon

in the life sciences, the personal gains of some aspiring scientific entrepreneurs

created discord with university colleagues and made them ‘lightning rod[s] for

controversy’ about the nature of scientists’ participation in the emerging biotech-

nology industry (Jones, 2009, p. 821). Contemporary commentators have raised

questions about many aspects of commercialization in university settings, such

as who should be able to claim ownership over work produced in these settings

(McSherry, 2001), whether patenting actually stimulates innovation (Heller and

Eisenberg, 1998), and how corporate interests affect research agendas

(Krimsky, 2004).

Analysts have often characterized the controversy surrounding the commercia-

lization of academic work in terms of a distinction between the traditional and the

entrepreneurial research university, contrasting the Mertonian ideal of the disinter-

ested scientist with the more ‘exotic’ species of entrepreneurial academics that

have become prevalent since the 1980s (Merton, 1973; Metlay, 2006). For

some, the merger of industry and academic cultures represents a productive

ideal that universities should aspire to achieve (see for example Etzkowitz and

Leydesdorff, 1997; Etzkowitz, 2002). On Cornell University’s campus, analysts

and university officials argue that the outmoded perception that ‘real academics

don’t engage in patenting and licensing activities’ presents a barrier to successful

technology transfer (Coffman et al., 2003, p. 10; see also BenDaniel and Van

Maanen, 1997). Other analysts and public commentators view the increasing pres-

ence of industry partners, start-up companies and financial incentives as an

encroachment on academic life (see for example Greenberg, 2003; Krimsky,

2004). Researchers have argued that university–industry relationships have

changed the role of the university scientist, and not necessarily for the better,

creating new forms of ‘academic capitalism’ that alter structures and practices

of scientific work (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997).

This dichotomy between ivory tower academics and entrepreneurial research-

ers, however, tends to erase connections that have long existed between univer-

sities and industry, and ignores the ways in which academic scientists are able

to navigate and negotiate these tensions (Haraway, 1997; Tuunainen, 2005;

Metlay, 2006; Shapin, 2008; Lam, 2010; Murray, 2010). In qualitative interviews

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with academic researchers in the physical, biological and computer sciences, Lam

(2010) found that the majority of these scientists identified themselves as ‘hybrid’

figures falling somewhere in-between the ideals of a traditional academic

researcher and an entrepreneurial scientist. Shapin (2008) similarly argues that

appeals to the purity of the university present an idealized vision of academic

work that does not fit with the reality of how many researchers experience acade-

mia or industry, and that the ability to both produce knowledge and commercialize

it is increasingly seen as a mark of a successful scientist in some academic fields

(see also Thurs, 2007). These hybrid identities and hybrid practices offer a way of

negotiating tensions around the commercialization of academic work. Shapin

argues that the flexible identities of academic scientists erase some of the putative

tensions around personal profit, and that making money may be seen as ‘the

natural and praiseworthy accompaniment of acquitting such virtuous goals as

increasing economic productivity and curing cancer’ for the contemporary aca-

demic (2008, p. 216). Likewise, Murray (2010) demonstrates that biomedical

researchers working with mice incorporated new practices, like patenting, into

academic culture while at the same time asserting their identities as academic

scientists and resisting aspects of commercial logics.

Narrating Innovation: The ‘Localized’ and the ‘Distributed’ Repertoires

This paper explores how participants in the technology transfer process negotiate a

different tension in the controversial landscape of the entrepreneurial university—

the tension between different ways of understanding the innovation process. At

times, actors talk about the development of new technologies as a process that

requires the participation of many people and the availability of collective

resources, and in other instances they describe innovation as the result of

moments of inspiration. The tension between these two ways of describing

innovation is related but not reducible to the tension between academic and

entrepreneurial modes of knowledge production. Biagioli and Galison (2002),

for example, demonstrate that even within the academy there are vastly different

ways of conceptualizing and acknowledging the ‘author’ of an academic work,

suggesting that even within academic fields there are different concepts of inno-

vation and customs for assigning credit at play.

To analyze differences in the ways that actors describe innovation, I draw on

concepts from sociological studies of scientific discourse (Gilbert and Mulkay,

1984; Myers, 1990, 1995), especially Mulkay and Gilbert’s (1982a, 1982b)

concept of ‘interpretive repertoires’ in science. Mulkay and Gilbert examine

scientists’ discourse, paying particular attention to how it is ‘organized to

convey varying conceptions of scientific action and belief on different occasions

and in different contexts’ (1982b, p. 589). They identify two different ‘repertoires’

that scientists use to describe the research process. In formal publications, scientists

often adopt an ‘empiricist’ repertoire, presenting their conclusions as following

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logically from an ordered set of experiments in a way that reflects traditional con-

cepts of scientific rationality. In other (often less formal) circumstances, scientists

use a ‘contingent’ repertoire to talk about their research, highlighting the impor-

tance of accidents, unexpected events and serendipity in scientific work. Mulkay

and Gilbert argue that scientists draw flexibly from these two contrasting narratives

about how scientific research is done, presenting the research process in different

ways for different audiences and rhetorical purposes.

Building on the approach of Mulkay and Gilbert, I argue that there are two

repertoires that the actors in the gene gun story use to talk about the process of

innovation, which I call the ‘localized’ and the ‘distributed’ repertoires. These

repertoires differ in three important respects: the length of time in which the

action takes place, the number of actors involved, and the types of events included

in the story. The localized repertoire describes innovation in tightly delimited

terms, focusing the story on a small number of actors and short periods of time.

Conceptual developments and moments of inspiration are the focus of narratives

that draw on this repertoire. These stories are often told in a biographical mode,

focusing on the innovative characteristics of particular individuals and highlight-

ing the importance of specific moments of insight. In contrast, the distributed

repertoire describes innovation as a process rather than a moment, emphasizing

longer periods of development and a larger set of contributors. Newton’s

famous comment that he was able to ‘see further by standing on the shoulders

of giants’ epitomizes this way of describing innovation as a collective endeavor

that builds gradually on a foundation of other inventions and discoveries.

Technical implementation is often central to these stories, which highlight the

many people and resources that are involved in turning an idea into a working

technology or technique.

These two repertoires are not specific to the gene gun story; they are familiar

modes for talking about the innovation process. The story of the invention of

the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, for example, has been told in

both a localized and a distributed mode. In his autobiography, Kary Mullis

(2000) describes the invention of the PCR technique as a highly localized

event: he recounts that the idea occurred to him on a nighttime drive though the

mountains when he was visualizing the helical structure of DNA. In contrast,

Paul Rabinow’s (1996) ethnographic account of the making of the PCR technique

highlights the complex trajectory of the technology as it was developed at Cetus

corporation. In her exploration of the career of a research scientist working at a

large petroleum company, Mialet (2009) also highlights the tension between the

singular inventor and the resources that he or she draws upon. She argues that

the particular researcher she followed became more inventive as he became

more deeply embedded in networks of colleagues and resources at his institution;

but at the same time the more inventive he became, the more he appeared to be ‘a

genius who exist[ed] outside of social, material and cultural constraints’ (p. 257).

James Boyle (1997) identifies similar tensions in intellectual property law.

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He argues that stories about invention in intellectual property disputes are often

told in a way that highlights the contributions of individuals and downplays the

importance of collective resources. He calls this the ‘romantic author’ trope,

where invention is portrayed as the product of a creative lone genius. The two

existing ways of describing the innovation process, which I have called here the

‘localized’ and the ‘distributed’ repertoires, provide interpretive resources for

actors to draw on when narrating their own stories of the innovation process.

The Biolistic Gene Gun

Methods

The material for this paper comes from a set of oral history interviews with the

main actors involved in the development of the gene gun. Between 2006 and

2009, I interviewed the three individuals who are named as inventors on the orig-

inal patents for the gene gun: John Sanford, a professor of plant breeding at

Cornell; Edward Wolf, the director of the National Research and Resource Facility

for Submicron Structures (later called the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility, or

CNF); and Nelson Allen, a machinist at the Submicron Facility.1 Additionally,

I interviewed Ray Wu, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell

who collaborated with Sanford; Dale Loomis, who produced the first commercial

versions of the gene gun and later collaborated with Sanford; and Richard Cahoon,

the former director of the Ithaca branch of the Cornell Center for Technology

Enterprise and Commercialization (known in the 1980s as the Cornell Research

Foundation or CRF).2 I also analyzed published accounts of the gene gun story,

such as news articles, press releases, publicity documents and university

reports. These materials range from local publications in the Cornell Chronicle

and the Cornell Daily Sun to national and international newspaper articles, and

span roughly two decades, starting with newspaper coverage of the first successful

genetic transformations accomplished using the gene gun in 1987 and ending with

more recent retellings of the gene gun story.

In these interviews, I asked participants to tell me the story of the development

of the gene gun, beginning from the period directly preceding their work on the

project and continuing to the present. I also asked them to describe the factors

they thought were responsible for the success of the technology, what motivated

them to participate in the technology transfer process, and what they expected out

of it. I use these interviews and newspaper articles to examine how the individuals

involved in this story actively create their own histories of the gene gun. This

paper provides a basic outline of the history of the gene gun, but does not

attempt a detailed reconstruction of the sequence of events that led to the devel-

opment and commercialization of this technology. Using oral histories for this

purpose is problematic, since narratives of technology development (especially

retrospective narratives) tend to reduce the complexities and contingencies that

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actors faced as they developed a product (Deuten and Rip, 2000). Instead, I pay

close attention to differences in the ways that actors narrated the technology trans-

fer process, looking for instances where interviewees emphasized different

moments in the gene gun’s development or identified different factors as the

most important contributors to the technology’s success. These divergent ways

of telling and retelling the gene gun story reveal distinctive views of the inno-

vation and technology transfer process, expressed by actors with different struc-

tural positions in the university.

Developing the Gene Gun

The gene gun holds an important place in the history of agricultural biotechnology

because it solved a problem that many researchers in the field were actively

working on in the early 1980s; namely, how to transfer foreign DNA into plant

cells to create transgenic plants, including commercially important crops such as

wheat, corn and rice.3 The technology was widely adopted by academic researchers

and industry, and Sanford estimates that the majority of genetically modified

agricultural crops grown around the world today were transformed with the gene

gun (Sanford, 2000).

The ‘biolistic’ method, a term coined by Wolf meaning ‘biological ballistics’,

works by shooting tiny particles covered with DNA at a sample of cells. The first

versions of the gene gun used a nail gun cartridge that fired a nylon bullet covered

with DNA-coated metal particles down a metal tube towards a Petri dish. A

spring-loaded stopping plate caught the nylon projectile halfway down the tube

while the metal particles kept speeding towards the plant cells, blasting through

the cell membrane and carrying DNA with them into the cell (Figure 1). Many

of the plant cells were killed in this process (especially those near the center of

the blast, nicknamed the ‘zone of death’ by the inventors), but the outer edges

of the blast site often contained viable cells that could be regrown into genetically

altered plants. Later versions incorporated a vacuum chamber around the appar-

atus to allow the particles to be fired at a greater distance from the cells without

losing speed due to air resistance (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Diagram of the gene gun firing mechanism. The ‘micro-projectiles’ travel through the tubetowards the cell sample, shown at the far right. Credit: Image from US Patent no. 4945050, Figure 12

(accessed at http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4945050.html).

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In the early 1980s, Sanford was unsuccessfully experimenting with various

techniques for introducing DNA into plant cells and he approached Wolf for

assistance with this project.4 By late 1983, Sanford and Wolf had begun to specu-

late about the possibility of ‘shooting’ DNA into cells. Sanford, Wolf and Allen

conducted the first experiments to test these ideas, using a Crossman air pistol

modified by Allen so that it could be loaded with DNA-coated 4mm tungsten

pellets. A quick examination under a microscope of the onion cells they used as

test material showed that the tungsten particles could indeed penetrate the onion

cell wall.5

Shortly after these experiments, Sanford, Wolf and Allen contacted Walter

Haeussler at the Cornell Research Foundation (CRF) to draft a patent application

for the biolistic process.6 After filing a patent application, CRF attempted to find

companies that might be interested in licensing the technology from Cornell. By

1986, CRF had yet to find any interested parties, and Wolf suggested to Sanford

that they should start a company to develop the technology themselves. He pro-

posed that they license the technology from Cornell, who held the rights to the

patents, and give Cornell a 15% share in the company Biolistics Inc. This practice

is common in technology transfer today, but it was notable at the time since it was

the first occasion where CRF agreed to take equity in a company instead of a licen-

sing fee. Sanford and Wolf hired Allen to design and manufacture a commercial

version of the gene gun, which was produced by Loomis at Rumsey–Loomis, a

local machine shop.

Throughout the mid-1980s, Sanford continued academic research on creating

transgenic plants using the biolistic process. In 1984, Sanford hired Theodore

Klein, a postdoctoral researcher who Sanford says ‘played a critical role in

taking biolistics from a very primitive proof of concept to a working gene delivery

Figure 2. (Colour online) Promotional photograph of the first commercial version of the gene gunsold by Biolistics Inc. The right side of the apparatus contains the firing mechanism and a shelf forholding petri dishes of samples, and the left side contains a pump and vacuum chamber. Credit:

Photo by Jon Reis, provided as a courtesy by Professor Edward Wolf.

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system’ (Sanford, 2000, p. 305). Sanford, Wolf and Klein published an article with

Wu in Nature in the summer of 1987, showing that the genes introduced by the

biolistic method were expressed in onion cells (Klein et al., 1987), as well as

commercially important crops such as rice, wheat and soybeans (Wang et al.,

1988; Zhang and Wu, 1988). Sanford and Klein also collaborated with researchers

at the Pioneer Hi-Bred corporation to generate genetically transformed corn

(Klein et al., 1988), and with researchers at Duke University to transform chlor-

oplasts and mitochondria (Boynton et al., 1988; Johnston et al., 1988; Daniell

et al., 1990).

While Sanford conducted his research, Biolistics Inc. leased gene guns to other

academic and industrial researchers. Within two years, the company had leased

over 40 gene guns to public institutions and had entered into research agreements

with nearly every major agricultural biotechnology company (Sanford, 2000).

Wolf and Sanford decided to sell the technology rights in 1989 to DuPont for

approximately $15 million. As an equity holder in the company, CRF received

$2.28 million from the sale, and the agreement also included substantial research

support for Sanford and Wolf. Sanford continued to work with Loomis on devel-

oping new versions of the gene gun resulting in several more patents, including a

version that used blasts of helium gas to propel the particles, and a trauma-free

version of the gene gun that eliminated the ‘zone of death’.7

Narrating the Development of the Gene Gun

The previous section provided a basic historical outline of the gene gun’s develop-

ment. How do the narratives told by those involved with developing the technology

compare to this streamlined story? This section explores how actors employ the

‘localized’ and ‘distributed’ repertoires to highlight different aspects of the

technology’s development. I contrast two descriptions from Cahoon and Sanford

of the moment the gene gun was first conceptualized to illustrate some of the

features of localized and distributed innovation stories. Actors can also draw flex-

ibly from the two repertoires, switching from one type of account to another to

highlight particular moments in their innovation stories. I show two examples

where actors alternate between repertoires to emphasize short time frames and con-

ceptual contributions in some instances, and long time frames and technical

implementation in others.

Cahoon’s Narrative

Both Cahoon’s and Sanford’s accounts of the ‘moment of invention’ of the gene

gun incorporate a similar story, in which Sanford draws inspiration for the biolistic

method from a fall spent chasing away squirrels with a pellet gun. For Cahoon, this

episode features prominently in his narrative of the moment of invention. He

recalls:

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[Sanford] had this idea that ultimately became the biolistics process, and that

idea came to him when he was in his back yard trying to ward off the squir-

rels from his bird feeder with a pellet gun. He told me this, face to face, that it

came to him that he could use a pellet gun to introduce DNA into cells. Now,

I don’t know why exactly he thought that that would be feasible, but he did,

and he mentioned it to a few people, and most people gave him the same

reaction which was that’s pretty stupid. And so he ultimately . . . I don’t

know how long it took him from the time he actually had the aha moment

until he actually came in and talked to Walter Haeussler.

Cahoon’s narrative is localized both in the period of time that it describes and the

number of actors that it includes. Sanford is alone in his back yard, and has an orig-

inal idea that ‘comes to him’ in a sudden burst of inspiration, and leads to the

development of a novel technology. The moment of inspiration is sharply

defined and takes place in isolation, away from other people and resources.

Cahoon’s version of the invention of the gene gun focuses heavily on the

genesis of the concept and not on the technical implementation of the idea,

although this aspect later becomes important in his story. Cahoon recalls that

following this ‘aha moment’, Sanford came to talk to Walter Haeussler, the direc-

tor of CRF, about patenting the invention. Haeussler expressed reservations about

applying for a patent before the idea was ‘reduced to practice’; that is, before

Sanford had a mechanism or a working prototype that could propel the DNA-

covered bullets into plants. Cahoon recalls that Haeussler introduced Sanford to

Edward Wolf, who he thought might be able to help Sanford work through

some ideas for how to shoot DNA into cells. Cahoon describes the encounter:

John explained the size of the cell, and so they sat down and worked out what

the dimensions of a pellet would need to be, and Ed had this thing on the

shelf, a little vial of tungsten particles and they’re just about the right size.

So they went to work on this and they . . . I don’t know to tell you the

truth, if they actually . . . I don’t think they did actually test it. I think the

two of them, once they had this meeting and once they had these pellets,

then they started to think, well, how could we blast these into the cell, and

they came up with the general design of the invention, and they brought it

to Walter, and Walter said, okay, now you have a patentable invention.

Once again, the technical implementation of the idea is sidelined in this version

of the story. For Cahoon, the moment when the idea become a patentable inven-

tion came when Sanford and Wolf conceptualized a delivery mechanism, but

before a prototype was built or tested. Relatively few people are involved in

this version of the invention of the gene gun, and the time that elapses before it

is patentable seems quite short. In Cahoon’s narrative, the time before the techno-

logy becomes profitable is quite short as well. Cahoon recalls that ‘they published

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their first experiment, the Biolistics company published that announcement, I

believe in Science magazine, and they then sat back and waited, and the phone

started to ring’. This version of the gene gun story de-emphasizes the many

years that elapsed between the first experiments and the publication of the articles

that were spent investigating the conditions and technological configurations that

would allow for the creation of genetically altered plants.

What made the gene gun a success, in Cahoon’s version of the story? One of the

factors that Cahoon emphasizes in his narrative is the ‘craziness’ of the gene gun

concept. He describes Sanford himself as ‘quirky’ and ‘idiosyncratic’, and

recounts that Sanford’s plan to fire genes into plants seemed ‘crazy’, ‘stupid’

and even ‘ludicrous’ to colleagues and potential licensees. To him, the craziness

of the idea was a signal that the gene gun had the potential to become a technology

transfer success story. He says:

One thing that you’re always looking for in tech transfer, you’re looking for

things that are really groundbreaking, really paradigm shifts. So Walter was

willing to take a gamble, spend the money, and file a patent. So then Walter

did what CRF did then and does now and said okay, well, let’s line up the

potential licensees . . . [He] contacted these companies and he just essentially

explained to them what the invention was, and Walter told me that the reac-

tion was ranged from a polite ‘well thank you very much, don’t call us we’ll

call you’, to actual guffaws, you know, people just laughing and saying

you’ve got to be kidding me.

Rather than downplaying the initial failures to license the technology, Cahoon

highlights these false starts in his retelling of the story. Cahoon’s emphasis on

the negative reactions to Sanford’s idea underscores the originality of the

concept. His version distances Sanford and his idea from other contemporaneous

efforts in the research community and industry to find ways to create genetically

modified plants, and suggests that the idea that genes could be transferred into

cells in this manner was not something that was obvious to others at the time.

Emphasizing that the biolistic process seemed ridiculous to other people also

makes Haeussler and the technology transfer office seem particularly prescient,

having the foresight to ‘take a gamble’ on an invention that other institutions

and corporations might have passed by.

Sanford’s Narrative

Sanford’s description of the conceptualization of the gene gun also includes the

aforementioned war with the squirrels, but it takes place at a different moment

in his narrative. In a published memoir outlining the development of the gene

gun, he recalls that the idea for the gene gun came out of a series of discussions

that he had with Edward Wolf at the Submicron Facility about how to get DNA

into plant cells:

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I remember Ed calling me up and asking if we couldn’t shoot in ‘beams’ of

the DNA molecules themselves (they would have much more momentum

than particles such as electrons). I indicated that I doubted the DNA could

be accelerated as a free molecule, or that it would survive impact against

the cell, or that it would have sufficient momentum to penetrate a cell

wall. However, I remember later mulling over that idea, and then one of

us (I think me) called back and proposed using a larger solid particle as

the ‘bullet’, with the DNA going in with it . . . I recall Ed asked me how

fast I thought a micron-sized particle would have to be moving to penetrate

a cell wall. My intuitive response was—the speed of a ‘BB’, or pellet from a

‘BB’ or pellet gun (I had been engaged in a personal battle with marauding

squirrels that fall). Ed immediately realized that such speeds could be

achieved using a variety of relatively unsophisticated technologies, and cer-

tainly did not require ion beams and electrostatic accelerators! We deter-

mined to look at simple mechanical acceleration systems to test our

concept, to see if we could accelerate ‘macro’ particles into cells. In fact,

Ed wanted to test the BB-gun idea immediately, and within days bought

one of these toy pistols from Fay’s drug store (Sanford, 2000, p. 304).

Sanford depicts the invention of the technology as part of an evolving chain of

thought that developed through conversation with others. Sanford recalls that

his initial idea was to use the technology available at the Submicron Facility to

cut microscopic holes for inserting DNA in pollen cells. Wolf responded that

perhaps they could just make a beam of DNA particles instead, which led to the

collectively produced idea to shoot DNA-coated particles into cells. His crusade

against the squirrels became relevant only through these discussions with Wolf

about methods for introducing foreign DNA into plants.

Like Cahoon, Sanford also recalls that there were many people in the scientific

community who responded with skepticism to the idea of a gun that could shoot

genes into plants, but he describes these reactions as an impediment to the devel-

opment of the technology. Years after the initial patents were filed, Sanford recalls

that he was concerned that they would never be able to really get the gene gun

working. Frustrated by an inability to get papers published or get funding for

the project, at one point he even suggested to Ted Klein that he might want to

start looking for a new job. He recounts that it took nearly a decade’s worth of

research with Klein and other collaborators to demonstrate to the scientific com-

munity that the gene gun was a viable method for creating transgenic plants.

Sanford’s retelling of the gene gun story emphasizes the long time frame over

which technical problems were worked out, such as what parameters to use to

get high rates of penetration without killing too many cells.

Sanford describes the large network of colleagues and collaborators that he

maintained as central to the gene gun’s eventual success. Reflecting on his experi-

ences with the project, he says that one of the most valuable things that he learned

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was the importance of collaboration and team building. In his view, the scientific

process increasingly requires scientists to seek out interdisciplinary collaborations

in order to make new advances. He says:

I realized that in this day and age, there’s no lone rangers anymore. You

know, like the Barbara McClintock who goes off, out of civilization and

just her and her microscope, and 20 years later comes back with a discovery.

That just doesn’t happen anymore, and the reason is to move science

forward, it’s so far out there already that one person can’t push a new

front. It takes a collective effort.8

In developing the gene gun, he says that it was key to have collaborators like Ray

Wu, who was knowledgeable about and skilled in molecular biology. Sanford

recounts that his interest in creating transgenic plants led him into research

areas that were quite distant from his background as a small fruit breeder, and

he needed other expertise to be able to continue his research.

Drawing From the Localized and Distributed Repertoires

The localized and distributed repertoires for describing innovation offer actors

different cultural resources for imagining and articulating how the innovation

process works, conveying different impressions of the same innovation story.

Cahoon’s narrative is temporally and socially localized, and focuses on conceptual

developments. He emphasizes defined moments of inspiration and a relatively

small number of actors who were important for the genesis of the technology.

In contrast, Sanford’s narrative is temporally and socially distributed, and

focuses more on the technical implementation. He emphasizes the time that it

took to work through the gene gun concept and the importance of collaborative

networks.

Actors can also draw flexibly from each of these repertoires, using them to high-

light different moments in their innovation stories. In his recollection of the

moment of the gene gun’s invention, Edward Wolf alternates between the two

repertoires. He says:

We had been considering the use of heavier particles in previous discussions.

I did calculations on the required multiple charge to obtain reasonable

velocities using electrostatic acceleration of micron-size projectiles. As a

farm boy, I was looking for a simpler method. The combining of a pellet

gun and some micron-size tungsten powder that I had brought with me

from the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, California, came together in a

small eureka moment for me during discussions with John about particles,

cells and squirrels over at the Dairy Bar on campus . . . We demonstrated

rather quickly that the air-blast driven tungsten particles passed through

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several onion cells before stopping, but this was far from a usable gene gun,

which took John, Ted, Nelson and others more than two years to make a

reality.

Wolf employs the localized narrative when talking about conceptual develop-

ments. He uses biographical details (such as his childhood experience with phea-

sant hunting) and the specifics of particular settings (such as a discussion with

Sanford at the Dairy Bar on Cornell’s campus) to describe the circumstances of

possibility for a ‘eureka’ moment; but when discussing the events that followed

this moment of inspiration, he switches from a localized to a distributed mode.

He notes that while the initial experiments they conducted were enough to

submit a patent application, the modified pistol prototype required years of

improvements and assistance of several other people before it became a usable

scientific tool.

Dale Loomis, who built the first commercial versions of the gene gun, also uses

both repertoires to describe his involvement in the project. In some moments he

suggests that the idea for the gene gun was already well formed when he became

involved in the project, and describes his role as helping to realize that vision.

He recalls that he ‘worked with [Sanford] on getting it tuned so that it would

work. John had the gross concept, and I made the thing happen’. This description

locates the source of innovation in Sanford’s conceptual work. Other descriptions

that Loomis provides highlight the innovations that took place during the process of

technical implementation. For example, when Loomis recalls how the valve for the

trauma-free version of the gene gun was created, he suggests that conceptual work

alone was not enough to create a working technology. The configuration of the

valve, he says, was ultimately produced through a process of trial and error:

DL: Instead of spending all this time calculating something if you know you’re

going to be wrong anyway, you don’t know the physics of it, not exactly,

you just make a whole bunch of valves of a similar ilk. Here’s a family

group [he holds up half a dozen prototypes]. They’re all based on the

same premise, some side vents, a column to try and organize the gas, a

screen to be able to diffuse it.

NN: So these are just a dozen different versions and you just made a bunch and

tried them out?

DL: Right. This one had no effect, no effect, minor effect, very little effect, and

you just throw them away.

This description employs a distributed vision of the innovation process, where

important developments take place over a period of trials with different valves.

While the general idea for a trauma-free gun was already available, experimenting

with prototypes was key to developing a functional (and patentable) new

invention.

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Distributing Credit for the Development of the Gene Gun

So far, I have shown that the individuals involved in developing and commercializ-

ing the gene gun narrate the same story in different ways, employing different reper-

toires for depicting the innovation process. Why do actors draw on one repertoire or

the other when crafting their narratives, and with what consequences? One might

expect that those farther from the innovation process would produce shorter, less

detailed accounts; but as I explore below, the situation is often more complex.

This section analyzes some reasons why actors might use different interpretive

repertoires when telling innovation stories, and how these accounts shape the way

credit for innovation is attributed and rewards are distributed. While individuals

can draw from both the localized and the distributed repertoires to describe differ-

ent moments in their innovation stories, particular repertoires are used more fre-

quently in some actors’ narratives. Looking at narratives from actors with a

variety of structural positions inside and outside of the university makes these

differences especially clear, since these actors have different interests, are speak-

ing to different audiences and are allocated different forms of credit for their par-

ticipation in the technology transfer process.

Narrating Patent Claims and Scientific Claims

Stories of technology development can take different forms and serve different pur-

poses, from brief accounts that appear in newspaper articles or press releases to

lengthier versions that take the form of oral histories. In some venues, innovation

narratives perform important functions, such as marketing new technologies,

awarding public recognition, assigning authorship rights, or settling intellectual

property disputes. Myers (1995) argues that the different stages in the commercia-

lization process require distinct narrative strategies. In particular, he looks at two

important places where researchers create narratives about the discovery and devel-

opment of new technologies: patent applications and scientific articles. Following

two scientists through the process of drafting patents, he shows that patent appli-

cations and scientific articles build claims in contradictory ways. While academic

work gains credibility by relating discoveries to previous findings and existing

bodies of knowledge, patent claims become more valuable when new techniques

and technologies can be distanced from other existing patents and scientific work.

Myers’ work suggests that some ways of describing innovation tend to be more

effective for making certain types of claims about a new technology. The localized

repertoire, which distances inventors from other actors and resources, may be

especially compatible with the roles and interests of actors in technology transfer

offices, who are responsible for determining whether university technologies are

patentable and describing the value of new technologies to potential licensees.

Cahoon’s localized description of the gene gun’s development underscores its

originality and distance from other work on creating transgenic plants, potentially

enhancing the scope of patent claims that could be made and the marketability of

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the technology. While the academic researchers involved with the gene gun

project tended to rely on the distributed repertoire, some also used the localized

mode when talking specifically about intellectual property rights. For example,

Sanford employed a more localized description when discussing who should be

named as an inventor on patent applications on the gene gun. He recalls:

The conceptualization and the critical proof of concept experiment were

done before [they] joined us. We had at least a dozen people come

through the lab who were working on a Cornell payroll basis, but in terms

of conceptualization it often is very easy to identify the people who design

an experiment versus let’s say the technician who conducts it. That’s often

not ambiguous. I would say that postdocs are probably the most ambiguous,

because they’re often assigned to do the hands-on work but may or may not

have been conceptually involved.

In this description, Sanford makes a clear distinction between conceptual and tech-

nical work. While he recounts that many people were employed in his laboratory

to work on the gene gun project, he identifies a smaller subset of people who were

involved in generating the ideas and the initial experimental data that the patent

applications were based on.

The distributed repertoire’s emphasis on incremental developments that occur

over time might be more compatible with the role of academic scientists, who,

according to Myers (1995), typically construct knowledge claims by relating

their work to existing bodies of knowledge. Sanford’s distributed description of

the development of the biolistic technique reinforces the scientific credibility

of the idea by showing how it emerged from existing research trajectories. In

his account, Wu also described the gene gun as compatible with other contempora-

neous lines of research. He recalls:

We bombarded something through the cells and showed that the gene was

expressed to produce RNA, produce protein, and the protein product was

doing whatever it was supposed to do. Then later on, we and other scientists

tried to get so-called stable transformation, and we generated transgenic

plants. And in this way, I think several companies were ahead, because

they knew about this, and there was another gene gun developed after

John Sanford, based on more or less the same idea, developed by a

company called AgraCetus. And I happened to know that because I was con-

sultant, a scientific consultant for the company.

Wu’s matter-of-fact account of his collaboration with Sanford contrasts markedly

with other actors’ descriptions that emphasize the ‘craziness’ of the project and the

sideways looks from colleagues who smelled burnt onions and heard gun blasts

coming from Sanford’s laboratory. While Wu’s narrative presents their research

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as a more credible scientific endeavor, it also changes the impression of the

intellectual and commercial landscape in which the development of the gene

gun took place. In this description, Sanford’s research is portrayed as one of

several ongoing efforts to develop similar technologies, potentially lessening

the perceived originality and marketability of the gene gun technology.

Wolf’s narrative suggests, however, that the distributed repertoire does not

always conflict with the role of an entrepreneur. Wolf argues that Sanford’s

connections with other researchers were key to Biolistics’ success as a business,

because his collaborative experiments helped to demonstrate the value of the

technology and facilitate its uptake. Wolf says that Sanford is ‘correctly recognized

as the father of the gene gun’ not because his inventive contribution was more

substantial, but because he took the lead on finding collaborators who could help

prove the scientific worth of the gun and demonstrate the utility of the technology

to other scientists. Put differently, Sanford’s importance stemmed from his position

as the facilitator of a distributed network of academic and industry collaborators that

supported the commercial viability of the technology.

Distributing Forms of Credit in Technology Transfer

Narrative strategies can help actors construct claims for different audiences by

directing attention to different assemblages of people and resources that are

involved in the technology transfer process. The localized and the distributed reper-

toires identify different groups of people who are deserving of different types and

degrees of rewards. Many types of credit may be distributed in the process of com-

mercializing a university technology, including monetary rewards and forms of

symbolic capital like authorship and public recognition (Merton, 1973; Bourdieu,

1986). Retelling the gene gun story can itself be a mechanism for giving credit to

those who participated in its development.

Cornell administrators frequently use the gene gun story as an example of suc-

cessful technology transfer because it accomplished both of what a Cornell report

identifies as the twin goals of technology transfer: to develop technologies that

will benefit society, and to provide returns to Cornell through licensing revenue

(Coffman et al., 2003, p. 8).9 Stories about the development of the gene gun

from agents of the university focus largely on these two forms of symbolic and

monetary capital, and narrate the commercialization process in ways that harmo-

niously blend these two incentives. For example, a press release about the gene

gun describes the technology transfer process as follows:

Where there is money to be made, there are commercially viable technology

and license agreements to be negotiated. After the lawyers are satisfied,

commercialization begins and the technology begins to reach the growers

and the consumers for whom it was originally intended (Voiland and

McCandless, 1999, p. 1).

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The communications office identifies making money as the motivation for starting

the commercialization process, but the end result is a benefit for the public. In this

description of technology transfer, the profit motive enhances the development of

university technologies, moving them to the marketplace where consumers can

put them to use.

Press releases and news stories from Cornell foregrounded the revenue that the

sale of Biolistics Inc. produced for the university, noting the specific sum that the

university received and pointing out that it was substantially higher than what

most university technologies generate in revenue (Steele, 2005). Press releases

from the university also highlighted philanthropic uses of the gene gun technology,

such as drought-resistant rice and pest-resistant papaya that would ‘benefit the

world’s poorest’ (Moy, 1991; Lang, 2000). Shapin (2003) argues that since most

university technology transfer offices only cover their costs or even lose money,

the symbolic capital gained by commercializing technologies that provide a

public benefit is an important component of technology transfer activities.10

In addition to money and benefits to the public, the inventors and collaborators who

participated in the gene gun’s development discuss several other forms of capital,

such as public recognition and co-authorship. Wu recalls that he discussed authorship

rights and not intellectual property rights when he entered into his collaboration with

Sanford, although he commented that today a discussion on how to share intellectual

property would probably be mandatory for collaborations of this kind. For Wu, the

papers that he co-authored with Sanford in high profile journals like Nature were

an important part of his participation in the development of the gene gun.

One notable difference between stories from agents of the university and from

the scientists and collaborators involved with the gene gun project is the emphasis

placed on the importance of financial incentives. While Cornell’s technology

transfer office openly publicized the amount of money made from the sale of

Biolistics Inc., the figure earned by Sanford and Wolf on the sale of the company

was less widely advertised. The total amount of the sale was not disclosed in any

press releases or official statements from Cornell (see for example Segelken,

1989; Hassell, 1989), and several news articles on the gene gun reported incorrectly

that DuPont bought the technology from the scientists for $2.28 million, the sum

paid to the university (Anon., 1990; Kelly, 1990). In their accounts, Sanford and

Wolf also de-emphasized the importance of personal profit in their role in commer-

cializing the gene gun technology. Wolf recounted that for him, making money was

not the primary motivation for starting the company:

While there was an element of making money, I didn’t go up to John to start a

company with the idea that I would be able to retire in three or four years.

I went up there with the idea that Cornell hadn’t really been able to license

our gene gun patents, and that it seemed like we had a good opportunity

with John’s connections . . . and it just seemed to me that there needed to

be a push in that area. What came out of that was a surprise.

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Although he recalls that the potential for making a profit was part of his thinking,

he emphasizes the other one of the twin goals of technology transfer—the public

good. Wolf says that he wanted to see the technology in use, and recalls that he

saw a way he might be able to contribute to the technology’s uptake by starting

a company of his own. In his retrospective article, Sanford also writes that he

specialized in plant breeding out of a desire to find scientific breakthroughs that

could be used to help feed the world (Sanford, 2000, p. 303). After retiring

from active research, Sanford created a non-profit foundation called ‘Feed My

Sheep’ that promoted the use of biotechnology to feed the world’s poor. Wu simi-

larly recounts that he began working on creating transgenic rice with Sanford out

of a desire to find solutions to food shortages in his native China.

For many of the collaborators who worked with Sanford and Wolf on the

project, personal profit was not a large part of the equation. Nelson Allen, for

example, worked for Biolistics Inc., but he was not an investor in the company

and did not profit from its sale. He describes his motivations for working on the

gene gun project in quite personal terms. While Allen was working with

Sanford and Wolf on the initial gene gun experiments, his daughter was dying

of leukemia. He recalls that he saw the gene gun technology as something that

could contribute to curing illnesses like hers:

I was talking to one of her doctors in Upstate [Medical University], Syracuse,

and I was asking him what caused leukemia and he drew a genetic diagram

on a blackboard. And he said that there’s something missing in the genetic

makeup that would cause the leukemia to be able to attack the body. Well,

for some reason that stuck in my mind. I was inspired by this, by the

doctor and my daughter’s condition. And I was a great believer that [the

gene gun] was going to work, and it could work on anything.

Allen recalls that he decided he would work in the gene gun project ‘not for the

money or anything else, but to help people’. Like Wolf, Allen said he wanted

to see the technology developed, and was worried that it would be more likely

to ‘die out’ if he didn’t contribute to the project. Although Allen expresses

some understandable regrets that he was not able to invest in the company and

share in the proceeds from its sale, he says that ultimately he is satisfied to see

the technology being put to good use. ‘That’s my pay’, he says, ‘I get paid

every day’.

Locating Innovation: Allocating Credit, Profit and Control

The localized and distributed repertoires offer different ways of viewing the

network of people and resources that were involved in the development of the

technology, and of identifying who should be rewarded and with what type of

reward for their involvement. In the case of the gene gun, examining the

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distribution of profit shows a potential disconnect between these repertoires and

how they depict the allocation of incentives and rewards. The localized version

of the gene gun story identifies a small set of actors—Sanford, Wolf and Allen

as the three inventors and the university technology transfer office—and the mon-

etary rewards associated with developing the technology roughly map onto this

network. Providing universities and academic inventors with financial rewards

makes sense from within the framework of the localized narrative, because it pro-

vides an incentive for all parties to commercialize technologies. The distributed

narrative describes networks of individuals and resources that are potentially

much larger, including other collaborators who worked on the project at

Cornell, Duke and Pioneer, and those who were involved in the technical

implementation of the technology like Dale Loomis. From this perspective, finan-

cial rewards may not appear to be as effective in providing incentives for inno-

vation or as justly distributed throughout the network of participants.

The issue of personal profits for academic researchers is one that has, at times,

created discord between colleagues. Sanford recalls that when he helped introduce

the first patenting policy to the plant breeding department at Cornell in the early

1980s, several scientists in the department voiced concerns about who would

profit from these patents. Sanford says he suggested that all of the breeders

could sign their personal rights back to the department to avoid creating problems

of jealousy. Fellow researchers also took note of the money that he made from the

sale of Biolistics Inc. Sanford recalls:

Some people saw that I made money and could retire early, and for some

people who are prone to greed, that became their motto. Oh, I’m going to

make a lot of money from my research. I think that’s really bad, I don’t

think that’s a good motive. I didn’t think it was going to make money

until the very end and there was the opportunity, and you know if the door

opens you walk through it. But I actually don’t think that researchers

should have the perspective of I’m going to use my university position to

get patents and make money and start companies. I don’t think that’s whole-

some. That’s the one side. I do think it’s good to reward people. You want to

reward the right people, and so I do think it’s very important that patents be

rewarded, inventions be rewarded.

Sanford ascribes a dual nature to the profit motive that reflects the tension between

the localized and distributed repertoires: he suggests that personal profits can

stimulate innovation by rewarding the ‘right’ people, but can also create discord

amongst colleagues and disruptions to academic research communities.

The gene gun story suggests several strategies that actors might use to repair

potential mismatches between different ways of viewing contributions and allo-

cating rewards in the innovation process. Describing common motivations and

goals is one important way in which actors constitute and stabilize networks of

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people and resources that are essential for developing new technologies (Latour,

2005). Working towards the public benefits that might be realized from a technol-

ogy like the gene gun, such as creating disease resistant food crops, is a goal that

can be shared by all those involved in a distributed innovation network. Retelling

the gene gun story can also provide opportunities for distributing other forms

of public recognition and credit. Sanford recounts that when he wrote his retro-

spective piece on the development of the gene gun, he used it as an opportunity

to publicly recognize as many people who were involved with the project as

possible:

When I wrote this little paper, I went to great lengths to make sure I could

give credit to everybody I could think of, because I didn’t want to create

ill will or those type of feelings, like they’d been used. I do think that’s

important, it’s really important that people give people credit or you’re

exploiting them . . . So I think that people were treated fairly, I’m not

aware of anybody who felt that they were treated unfairly. It pretty much

advanced everybody’s careers who worked on it.

In particular, several of the actors that I interviewed argued that Nelson Allen’s

contributions are frequently under-represented in public retellings of the gene

gun story. Localized versions appearing in newspaper articles and press releases

that focused on a single inventive moment obscure contributions to the project

that came after the ‘aha’ moment, such as Allen’s ideas for new methods of

propelling the DNA-coated particles or for controlling the force of the gene gun

blast.

The way that these different interpretive repertories portray actors’ contri-

butions and distribute credit also has consequences beyond how specific actors

are rewarded in any innovation story. Certain forms of recognition, such as attri-

bution of inventorship on a patent application, confer not just the right to make

money from a technology but also the power to control how that technology is

developed (Hilgartner, 2009). Wolf notes that the broad patent rights that CRF

secured over the gene gun technology made their company more valuable, but

also generated concerns about other researchers’ ability to access the technology

later on. In deciding to sell their technology rights, Wolf and Sanford recognized

that they were giving up not just the right to profit from their invention, but also the

right to direct its development. Wolf recalls:

We wanted somebody, a company that had deep pockets, and that would write

the agreement such that they couldn’t sit on the technology but would have to

develop it. One of the problems that you often get into is that sometimes a

company will acquire a technology simply to keep it from progressing. Not

that we were avid skeptics, but we just wanted to make sure that the technol-

ogy would move forward, because we believed in it.

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Members of the Cornell community have criticized the exclusive license to the

gene gun technology that DuPont gained by purchasing Biolistics Inc., arguing

that DuPont’s strong patent position made it prohibitively expensive for academic

researchers to use this key technology (Atkinson et al., 2003; Coffman et al., 2003;

Kilman, 2003).

The localized repertoire is arguably the more conventional mode for describing

invention and innovation in contemporary society, and the consequences of

employing this repertoire deserve particular scrutiny. Boyle (1997) has argued

that the ‘romantic author’ trope is more than just a convenient shorthand for inven-

tion stories; it is a narrative that confers power on particular individuals by iden-

tifying who should count as an author or inventor in cases where the allocation of

property rights is unclear. The expansion of patent rights over materials such as

genes and cell lines concerns Boyle not only because it allows some actors to

profit and not others, but because it allows a small group of individuals to

control resources that are needed for stimulating further innovation.11 Localized

visions of innovation may also make it difficult to assign credit in the form of

property rights for knowledge developed through more collective processes,

such as traditional knowledge held by indigenous or local communities

(Hayden, 2005; Carolan, 2008). Retelling innovation stories in a distributed

mode may offer a way to restore elements of the innovation process that the domi-

nant localized narrative often occludes, not only for scientists who want to stabil-

ize inventive networks but potentially on a broader level as well.

Conclusion

In this paper, I examined how those who participated in the development of the

gene gun narrate their experiences of the technology transfer process. Drawing

on Mulkay and Gilbert’s (1982a, 1982b) concept of ‘interpretive repertoires’,

I have argued that actors in the gene gun case study draw on two different reper-

toires that describe how innovation occurs: one which depicts innovation as a loca-

lized event involving a circumscribed group of individuals, and another that

portrays innovation as a longer process that requires communal resources and con-

tributions from many people. Each of these repertoires identifies different key

moments and a different assemblage of actors as deserving of credit and reward

for the invention. Localized accounts direct attention towards a relatively small

network of people, who are often rewarded with patent rights that allow them

to profit from and control their inventions. Distributed accounts highlight the con-

tributions of a larger network of people and resources that do not always appear in

localized innovation narratives, such as those involved in the process of technical

implementation.

This framework of looking at different ways of narrating the innovation process

provides an alternative way of thinking about tensions in technology transfer

that have been conceptualized as tensions between the ‘traditional’ and the

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‘entrepreneurial’ academic researcher. Sanford’s repudiation of the profit motive

as an ‘unwholesome’ one for academics to hold seems to invoke a traditional view

of the role of the academic who pursues scientific knowledge in the absence of

market influence, yet Sanford and Wolf both fit the description of the contempor-

ary ‘scientific entrepreneur’: they are both qualified scientists and entrepreneurial

risk takers, and have worked in both university and industry settings to develop

technologies with commercial applications in mind. For researchers like

Sanford and Wolf, de-emphasizing the importance of personal profit in commer-

cializing university technologies might reflect their dual roles as entrepreneurs and

scientific network builders, rather than a desire for a more purified concept of the

academic researcher. Academic entrepreneurs might refrain from foregrounding

monetary capital and emphasize other forms of symbolic capital instead as a

way of creating and stabilizing valuable collaborative networks. For those who

are involved in university technology transfer, cultivating an awareness of the

visions of innovation that individuals draw from may help facilitate communi-

cation between participants, since scientists, technicians, manufacturers and

technology transfer managers may have different implicit understandings of

how innovation happens.

More broadly, comparing these two repertoires highlights different sets of

tensions about university scientists’ participation in commercialization and tech-

nology transfer. The contrasting ideals of the traditional and the entrepreneurial

research university emphasize important issues such as the ethical dimensions

of scientists’ participation in technology transfer, the norms of scientific knowl-

edge production and the role of the academy in producing technologies that will

benefit society. As I have shown in this paper, however, examining how partici-

pants in the technology transfer process draw on different culturally available

repertoires about the innovation process calls attention to a different set of

issues that are connected to the politics of technology development. Examining

the different ways in which actors narrate innovation raises questions about

what kinds of resources are important to stimulating future innovation, how

credit for participation is allocated and what kinds of contributions are rewarded,

and who retains control over how new technologies are developed in society.

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 clip-

pings 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).

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Notes

1J. 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).2R. 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 direc-

tor of the Cornell Research Foundation during the development of the gene gun, was unavail-

able 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.3Although 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.4The 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.5Onions, 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.6The 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 1984.7The helium gas version was manufactured by DuPont and is today the most widely used

method for propelling the ballistic particles.8Barbara 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).9Even 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).10CCTEC’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.11On the breadth of patent protection and progress in scientific research, see also Heller and

Eisenberg (1998).

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