Regulators' attempts to balance conflicting interests and to convert the public's and politicians' feelings about technology into coherent action have fascinated students of industrial policy (Rothwell & Zegveld 1981; Grant 1989). By contrast historians, though in principle sharing such interests, have tended to treat regulators either as external brakes or as lubricants in processes controlled more directly by market forces and technological logic. Thus historians' interest in the chemical industry which gave rise to studies of companies and processes has not engendered a corresponding corpus of works on such regulatory bodies as the FDA or Britain's Alkali Inspectorate (see the still unmatched study of DuPont: Hounshell & Smith 1988). Now, however, with a new interest in technological systems, we are acquiring a few historical case-studies from modern industrial society in which regulators have themselves been considered central parts of the process, acting, so to speak, as components of the engine itself.

In particular, historians are now investigating policies which, since the 1930s, and latterly during the Cold War, encouraged the development of such state sponsored technologies as synthetic rubber, computing and semiconductors used by the space and military industries. The support of such academic categories as scientific instruments and cancer research is also being elucidated. Rarely, nonetheless, is regulation yet seen as a whole: promoters of new technology have still been conceptually divorced from those responsible for its constraint and from those responsible for the protection of the public and of workers.