In response to the growth of the “entrepreneurial university” and increasing commercialisation of scientific and technological knowledge that has occurred since the 1980s, university-technology transfer has become the subject of multi-disciplinary debate. Over the last thirty years, against the backdrop of globalisation and neoliberal pro-market policies, this debate has intensified. A recent special issue of History and Technology added to the expanding literature on the subject by addressing what the editors, Joris Mercelis, Gabriel Galvez-Behar and Anna Guagnini, saw as an imbalance, namely the over-emphasis on institutions, at the expense of the individuals at the heart of the commercialisation of academic science and technology. They identified three kinds of commercial activities which scientists engaged in: consulting, patenting, and full-blown business entrepreneurship, and argued that focusing on individuals and their activities was far better suited to addressing issues of continuity and discontinuity than focusing on institutions. Such an approach also proves better able to question the models that have hitherto been proposed, and that are often skewed by their preoccupation with the US and efforts to challenge the – allegedly recent and somewhat unhealthy – alliance between academic science and the economic sphere. With the quantitative study carried out by Robin Mackie and Gerrylynn Roberts, this issue of Ambix answers Mercelis et al.’s call for more systematic surveys, before following the trajectories of individual consultants. It complements and adds to their work by paying special attention to scientists from a particular discipline, chemistry (broadly construed), who carried out the most common of the three activities – consulting – for a specific sector of the economy: the chemical industry (also

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化学、顾问和公司，c。1850-2000：简介

为应对自 1980 年代以来“创业型大学”的发展和科技知识日益商业化的趋势，大学-技术转移已成为多学科争论的主题。在过去的三十年里，在全球化和新自由主义亲市场政策的背景下，这场争论愈演愈烈。最近的历史与技术特刊通过讨论编辑 Joris Mercelis、Gabriel Galvez-Behar 和 Anna Guagnini 所认为的不平衡，即过分强调制度，而以牺牲处于学术科学和技术商业化核心的个人。他们确定了科学家从事的三种商业活动：咨询、专利申请、和成熟的商业企业家精神，并认为关注个人及其活动比关注机构更适合解决连续性和不连续性问题。事实证明，这种方法也能更好地质疑迄今为止提出的模型，而这些模型往往因对美国的关注和挑战学术科学与经济领域之间的联盟——据称是最近的，有些不健康的——而受到影响。通过 Robin Mackie 和 Gerrylynn Roberts 进行的定量研究，本期 Ambix 回应了 Mercelis 等人的呼吁，即在遵循个别顾问的轨迹之前进行更系统的调查。它通过特别关注来自特定学科的科学家来补充和增加他们的工作，