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Globalization has affected science inevitably with a motto of ‘Knowledge conquers the mind’. However, global efforts and harmonization are needed and are established through international rules, laws, norms and standards. The potentially positive and negative results of globalization have altered the production relations and complicated the demographic scale.

Sociological studies of entrepreneurship focus on social and technical innovations in business. Using an illustration from molecular plant biology and the historical evolution of the term “entrepreneur,” I make a case for the theoretical and methodological importance of studying entrepreneurs and their ventures outside the scope of traditional business. Then, considering the scientific lab as a self-consciously entrepreneurial venture, I use the population of molecular biology labs studying the plant Arabidopsis thaliana to demonstrate a relationship less directly measurable among start-ups in business: diverse sources of funding accompany original activities and ideas within a venture. This is not, however, what predicts lab success. Lab size drives success, but hinders originality. Moreover, I show that established institutions in science are usually the ones that become innovations in business.

Purpose – The objective of this chapter is to examine and provide new perspectives on the contributions of public and private R&D to biotech crop improvement.

Methodology/approach – The chapter examines a set of topics that have affected the way that research is undertaken on plant germplasm improvement and how it has changed with the genetically modified (GM) trait revolution.

Findings – Although the basic science providing the foundations for GM crops was undertaken in the public sector, GM traits and GM crop varieties have been developed almost exclusively by the private sector. The biotech events leading to GM traits are currently being developed largely by five companies – all having ties to both the chemical and the seed industries. The GM crop revolution started in North American in 1996 and has spread slowly to the largest developing countries that have large agricultural sectors, including Argentina, China, Brazil, and India, but not to Europe or Japan.

Practical implication – To shed new light on the economic reasons for private sector dominance in GM crop varietal development in selected crops but not in others.

Social implication – Shows how GM traits have contributed to technical change and declining real food prices.

This chapter proposes an optimized innovative information technology as a means for achieving operational functionalities of real-time portable electronic health records, system interoperability, longitudinal health-risks research cohort and surveillance of adverse events infrastructure, and clinical, genome regions – disease and interventional prevention infrastructure. In application to the Dod-VA (Department of Defense and Veteran's Administration) health information systems, the proposed modernization can be carried out as an “add-on” expansion (estimated at $288 million in constant dollars) or as a “stand-alone” innovative information technology system (estimated at $489.7 million), and either solution will prototype an infrastructure for nation-wide health information systems interoperability, portable real-time electronic health records (EHRs), adverse events surveillance, and interventional prevention based on targeted single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) discovery.

Political scientists have taken up behavior genetics (BG) at a momentous time in the science of genetics. Momentous, because the science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift [Petronis, A. (2010). Epigenetics as a unifying principle in the aetiology of complex traits and diseases. Nature, 465(7299), 721–727]. This shifting paradigm poses a significant challenge to both the prevailing methodologies of behavior genetics – twin, family, adoption studies – and one of the most noteworthy findings to emerge from such studies, that is, which we can call the principle of minimal parental effects. This is the supposition that the effect of the shared parental rearing environment on the behavioral phenotypes of offspring is statistically equivalent to zero (Plomin & Daniels, 1987). It is not uncommon nowadays to find twin, adoption, and family studies utilized in the study of political behavior (e.g., Alford, J., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153–167.); likewise, the principle of minimal parental effects is frequently invoked in such studies (e.g., Mondak, J. J., Hibbing, M. V., Canache, D., Seligson, M. A., & Anderson, M. A. (2010). Personality and civic engagement: An integrative framework for the study of trait effects on political behavior. American Political Science Review, 104(1), 85–110.). As we shall see, the challenge comes from recent discoveries in genetics that are radically transforming our understanding of the genome and its relationship to environment.

The products of transgenic technology have captured the attention of enthusiasts and detractors, but transgenics are just one tool of agricultural biotechnology. Other applications enable scientists to understand biodiversity, to track genes through generations in breeding programs, and to move genes among closely related as well as unrelated organisms. These applications all have the potential to lead to substantial productivity gains.

In this chapter we provide an introduction to basic plant genetic concepts, defining molecular markers, transgenic and cisgenic techniques. We briefly summarize the status of commercialized biotechnology applications to agriculture. We consider the likely future commercialization of products like drought tolerant crops, crops designed to improve human nutrition, pharmaceuticals from transgenic plants, biofuels, and crops for environmental remediation. We identify genomic selection as a potentially powerful new technique and conclude with our reflections on the state of agricultural biotechnology.

Research at universities and other public-sector institutions, largely focused on advancing knowledge, has aroused enormous optimism about the promise of these DNA-based technologies. This in turn has led to large private-sector investments on maize, soybean, canola, and cotton, with wide adoption of the research products in about eight countries. Much has been made of the potential of biotechnology to address food needs in the low-income countries, and China, India, and Brazil have large public DNA-based crop variety development efforts. But other lower income developing countries have little capability to use these tools, even the most straightforward marker applications. Ensuring that these and other applications of biotechnology lead to products that are well adapted to local agriculture requires adaptive research capacity that is lacking in the lowest income, most food-insecure nations. We are less optimistic than many others that private research will fund these needs.

Heritability studies attempt to estimate the contribution of genes (vs. environments) to variation in phenotypes (or outcomes of interest) in a given population at a given time. This chapter scrutinizes heritability studies of adverse health phenotypes, emphasizing flaws that have become more glaring in light of recent advances in the life sciences and manifest most visibly in epigenetics.

Drawing on a diverse body of research and critical scholarship, this chapter examines the veracity of methodological and conceptual assumptions of heritability studies.

The chapter argues that heritability studies are futile for two reasons: (1) heritability studies suffer from serious methodological flaws with the overall effect of making estimates inaccurate and likely biased toward inflated heritability, and, more importantly (2) the conceptual (biological) model on which heritability studies depend – that of identifiably separate effects of genes versus the environment on phenotype variance – is unsound. As discussed, contemporary bioscientific work indicates that genes and environments are enmeshed in a complex (bidirectional, interactional), dynamic relationship that defies any attempt to demarcate separate contributions to phenotype variance. Thus, heritability studies attempt the biologically impossible. The emerging research on the importance of microbiota is also discussed, including how the commensal relationship between microbial and human cells further stymies heritability studies.

Understandably, few sociologists have the time or interest to be informed about the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of heritability studies or to keep pace with the incredible advances in genetics and epigenetics over the last several years. The present chapter aims to provide interested scholars with information about heritability and heritability estimates of adverse health outcomes in light of recent advances in the biosciences.

The 2005 APSR article by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing presented data from the Virginia 30,000 Health & Lifestyle Questionnaire (VA30K), AARP twin studies, and an Australian twin study (ATR) to test their hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors. Political attitudes, they suggested, were expected to be highly heritable and particularly so on issues most correlated with personality. They employed survey responses from the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory to measure political attitudes. To gauge heritability, they utilize the 2:1 genetic ratio between monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. The authors argued that while previous studies in political attitudes had concentrated on measuring the influence of environmental variables, their test added explanatory power by considering heritability (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005).

This chapter introduces readers to a complex adaptive systems approach for integrating research on genes, behavior, and social structures/institutions. Until recently, scientists have resorted to reductionism as a decoding and epistemological strategy for understanding human health. The complex bonds among health’s biological, behavioral, and social dimensions, however, cannot be fully grasped with reductionist schemas. Moreover, because reducing and simplifying can lead to incomplete understanding of phenomena, the resulting deficient knowledge has the potential to be harmful.

To achieve its purpose, this primer will: (1) introduce fundamental notions from complexity science, useful for inquiry and practice integrating research on genes, behavior, and social structures; (2) outline selected methodological strategies employed in studying complex adaptive/dynamic systems; (3) address the question, “Specifically, how can a dynamic systems approach be helpful for integrating research on genes, behavior, and social structures/institutions, to improve the public’s health?”; and (4) provide examples of studies currently deploying a complexity perspective.

The originality/value of this primer rests in its critique of the research status quo and the proposition of an alternative lens for integrating genomic, biomedical, and sociological research to improve the public’s health. The topic of complex adaptive/dynamic systems has begun to flourish within sociology, medicine, and public health, but many researchers lack exposure to the topic’s basic notions and applications.