Regenerative Medicine and New Labour Life Science Policy: Rhetorics of Success, Narratives of Sustainability and Survival

Advances in stem cell science and tissue engineering are being turned into applications and products through a novel medical paradigm known as regenerative medicine. This paper begins by examining the vulnerabilities and risks encountered by the regenerative medicine industry during a pivotal moment in its scientific infancy: the 2000s. Under the auspices of New Labour, British medical scientists and life science innovation firms associated with regenerative medicine, received demonstrative rhetorical pledges of support, aligned with the publication of a number of government initiated reports presaged by Bioscience 2015: Improving National Health, Increasing National Wealth. The Department of Health and the Department of Trade and Industry (and its successors) held industry consultations to determine the best means by which innovative bioscience cultures might be promoted and sustained in Britain. Bioscience 2015 encapsulates the first chapter of this sustainability narrative. By 2009, the tone of this storyline had changed to one of survivability. In the second part of the paper, we explore the ministerial interpretation of the ‘bioscience discussion cycle’ that embodies this narrative of expectation, using a computer-aided content analysis programme. Our analysis notes that the ministerial interpretation of these reports has continued to place key emphasis upon the distinctive and exceptional characteristics of the life science industries, such as their ability to perpetuate innovations in regenerative medicine and the optimism this portends – even though many of the economic expectations associated with this industry have remained unfulfilled.

“A Labour Leader in a Frothy Scoundrel”: Farce and Social Justice in the Popular Dramaturgy of George Shiels

In the financially precarious period which followed the partition of Ireland (1922) the Northern Irish playwright George Shiels kept The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, open for business with a series of ‘box-office’ successes. Literary Dublin was not so appreciative of his work as the Abbey audiences dubbing his popular dramaturgy mere ‘kitchen comedy’. However, recent analysts of Irish theatre are beginning to recognise that Shiels used popular theatre methods to illuminate and interrogate instances of social injustice both north and south of the Irish border. In doing so, such commentators have set up a hierarchy between the playwright’s early ‘inferior’ comedies and his later ‘superior’ works of Irish Realism. This article rejects this binary by suggesting that in this early work Shiels’s intent is equally socially critical and that in the plays Paul Twyning, Professor Tim and The Retrievers he is actively engaging with the farcical tradition in order to expose the marginalisation of the landless classes in Ireland in the post-colonial jurisdictions.