Abstract

"A Blue Economy: Horseshoe Crabs, Ocean Ecologies, and Biomedicine"

Kristoffer Whitney, Rochester Institute of Technology (kjwgla@rit.edu)

Co-creation in business history can usefully be thought of as market dynamics generated by the interactions between a range of human actors. But co-creation can, and perhaps ought, also be conceptualized as dynamic interactions involving the environmental factors (elements, plants, animals, microbes, etc.) that make those markets and businesses possible. This paper takes the example of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) specifically, and the concept of the “blue economy” generally, as examples of co-creation in business history that have involved the interactions of ocean waters, marine denizens, and biotechnology entrepreneurs. In the 1960s, medical researchers from Johns Hopkins University working with Limulus polyphemus (the Atlantic Horseshoe Crab) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts first isolated a chemical from the blood of the crabs known as Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), as a means to test for the presence of endotoxins – ubiquitous substances that can cause life-threatening fevers if introduced into the human body. Building on this work, scientists in academia, industry, and at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) developed medical applications, regulatory protocols, and commercial products that utilized LAL to test for toxins in a wide range of injectable drugs. By the 1980s, the FDA mandated that all intravenous pharmaceuticals and medical devices undergo the Limulus Amoebocyte Lysate (LAL) test to detect endotoxins. Since, the LAL test has become the global standard for endotoxin detection in bio-pharmaceutical industries, a hidden but vital part of public health infrastructure. LAL commercialization has also become known as something of an Ur-example of the so-called “blue economy”: sustainably using ocean biota to create novel products that protect human health. Using LAL as a case study, this paper shows the historical co-creation of a novel biotechnology industry, while also bringing attention to the ethical and environmental implications of this “blue” biotech.