A few entrepreneurs and researchers in the private sector held these views, although perhaps not with today's clarity of hindsight. The characteristics of the industry did, however, deeply influence its international distribution amongst technology-donor and recipient countries.

In the 1970s and 1980s the terms of trade of agricultural and mineral products deteriorated and resource-based countries such as Australia and Canada declined sharply in their per capita incomes. Belatedly, public comprehension of the increasing importance of skill-based industries and of national weaknesses in these fields spread. The pharmaceutical industry, essentially research-based, is a typical, perhaps extreme, example of such an industry. As it rose from the scientific discovery of a few synthetic chemicals to become a mature industry with some 2 000 established synthetic drugs, the opportunities for, and cost of, entry into the industry changed drastically. Australian scientists, business and Government each reacted differently and not exactly in accord to these changes. In the 1980s, when chemotherapy was well past its midpoint of growth, if not at a stage of maturity world-wide, a second wave of pharmaceutical evolution appeared likely, although by no means as certain as some contemporary predictions asserted. Understanding of the DNA had opened up a new field of molecular manipulation, genetic engineering. Australia's industrial role in this field at the date of writing is as yet uncertain; a brief excursion through the period of chemotherapy may well hold some lessons for this next wave.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering