Health consumers and stem cell therapy innovation: markets, models and regulation

Global health consumer demand for stem cell therapies is vibrant, but the supply of treatments from the conventional science-based model of innovation is small and unlikely to increase in the near future. At the same time, several models of medical innovation have emerged that can respond to the demand, often employing a transnational value chain to deliver the product. Much of the commentary has approached the issue from a supply side perspective, demonstrating the extent to which national and transnational regulation fails to impose what are regarded as appropriate standards on the 'illicit' supply of stem cell therapies characterized by little data and poor outcomes. By contrast, this article presents a political economic analysis with a strong demand side perspective, arguing that the problem of what is termed 'stem cell tourism' is embedded in the demand-supply relationship of the health consumer market and its engagement with different types of stem cell therapy innovation. To be meaningful, discussions of regulation must recognize that analysis or risk being sidelined by a market, which ignores their often wishful thinking.

University teachers' scientific research innovation incentive based on the three-party evolutionary game of the state, the colleges, and scientific researchers

Scientific research in colleges and universities is of great significance to national innovation. Based on the evolutionary game theory, this paper constructs a theoretical model of the state, universities, and researchers. This paper also conducts numerical simulation on the model. The results reveal that when the scientific researchers' success rate reaches a certain threshold, more and more scientific researchers will choose to invest in scientific research. Then, universities and the state will hold a long-term incentive attitude toward scientific research and scientific innovation. The study further found that the greater the success rate of researchers, the faster universities and the state will actively encourage scientific research.

[A brief history of the development of chromatography and its enlightenment to us]

This article describes the brief history of chromatography and clarifies a few confusions in some Chinese publications on the history of chromatography. Based on the analysis of several milestones in the development of chromatographic techniques, we summarized the enlightenment that the history tell us:(1) fundamental research has always been the source of advancements in science and technology, including chromatography; (2) the needs of social development have been the main driving force for the innovations in chromatographic methods; (3) interdisciplinary study has been an important approach to technological innovation; and (4) an unremitting persistence and courage to explore are the necessary conditions for technical innovation. Finally, the future development prospects of chromatography are also briefly discussed.

From 'making lists' to conducting 'well-rounded' studies: Epistemic re-orientations in soil microbial ecology

Soil microbial ecology is a relatively young research field that became established around the middle of the 20th century and has grown considerably since then. We analyze two epistemic re-orientations in the field, asking how possibilities for creating do-able problems within current conditions of research governance and researchers' collective sense-making about new, more desirable modes of research were intertwined in these developments. We show that a first re-orientation towards molecular omics studies was comparably straightforward to bring about, because it allowed researchers to gain resources for their work and to build careers-in other words, to create do-able problems. Yet, over time this mode of research developed into a scientific bandwagon from which researchers found it difficult to depart, even as they considered this kind of work as producing mostly descriptive studies rather than exploring interesting and important ecological questions. Researchers currently wish to re-orient their field again, towards a new mode of conducting 'well-rounded' interdisciplinary and ecologically-relevant studies. This re-orientation is, however, not easy to put into practice. In contrast to omics studies, this new mode of research does not easily enable the creation of do-able problems for two reasons. First, it is not as readily 'packaged' and hence more difficult to align with institutional and funding frameworks as well as with demands for productivity and career building. Second, while the first re-orientation was part of a broader exciting bandwagon across the life sciences and promised apparent discoveries, the current re-orientation goes along with a different sense of novelty, exploring complex environmental relations and building an understanding at the intersection of disciplines, instead of pushing a clearly circumscribed frontier. Ultimately, our analysis raises questions about whether current conditions of research governance structurally privilege particular kinds of scientific re-orientation over others.