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harmonization, in this case, served not just to standardize intellectual property but to redefine its nature. Yet the idea refused to go away. The reason for this was not that Plant's arguments about patenting were, in themselves, new. They were not. But Plant was the first economist to address science as part of a general issue. That issue was how to deal with cultural property in what he forecast would be a new kind of economy, grounded in information.24

TACIT PROPERTY

Claims that research is intrinsically inhospitable to rules and doctrines therefore emerged repeatedly in the mid-century furor over patents, science, and the public good. Shorn of their ties to intellectual property anxieties, such claims today bring to mind the work of the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, who maintained that research rested on tacit knowledge and therefore could not be subjected to planning. But his work should not be shorn from those ties. A chemist and refugee from Nazism, in Manchester Polanyi had become increasingly exercised by the questions of the nature and public role of science, and devoted years to answering them.25 His principal target at first was the crystallographer and Marxist,J. D. Bernal. Bernal and his allies -includingJ. B. S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, and junior partners like Dorothy Hodgkin, Eric Hobs- bawm, and Rosalind Franklin-maintained that science must be a socially engaged activity, with scientists taking responsibility for what theywrought. The enterprise ought to be overseen-"planned," in the term used by Polanyi's side-for the common good. Bernal extrapolated a future in which the natures of research and capitalism would prove incompatible and be supplanted by a harmonious union of science and society. But realizing the "social function of science" in this way must, he believed, involve repudiating "scientific property" Citing the American debates, Bernal insisted that a patents system perpetuated the subordination of science to an increasingly superannuated capitalism.26 Polanyi concurred in demanding an end to the association of science with property, but for a diametrically opposed reason.

As it became clear that the war would be won, realization dawned among opponents of state intervention like Plant that the "threat" loomed of a Labour government in Britain. Clement Attlee's partywas committed to nationalizing key industries and creating a socialized health service. Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies became the two best-known statements of the position against such policies, Hayek in particular warning of a slippery slope from state planning to totalitarianism. The Road to Serfdom backfired at the time, beingwidelyread as hyperbolic. When Labour did take power, Hayek and his allies retreated and formed themselves into the Mont Merin Society, a group dedicated to economic liberalism in what they perceived to be a hostile world. Polanyi was a founder-member. His view of science was an integral part of this commitment, and his transitory Society for Freedom in Science had had parallel aims. He conceived of the scientist as the exemplary practitioner of what he called "public liberty." That is, the scientist's independence from social control was at root the same as that of the witness, judge, and voter. Their conduct in such roles corresponded to no articulable principle or method beyond the practice itself, and must be unpredictable. But their freedom in those roles redounded to the benefit of all.

Polanyi insisted that research itself was similarly not a matter of methodological rules, but rather of "tacit knowledge." That is, it rested on ineffable techniques, preferences, and norms that together resembled a tradition more than a rational system. For that reason, while Hayekwarned that planned research was tyrannical, Polanyi believed it impossible. Research, to be genuine science, must play out in something like a marketplace, characterized by "the Liberal conception" of freedom. He insisted on the distinction between this and "applied" science