The general conviction that we are living in an era which is in several respects different from the post-World War II age is based on the idea that technological innovation accelerates economic growth and produces change in society and inter-state relations. Those who see continuity in behaviour and economic management regard the notion as exaggerated, but the idea is already to be found in thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter.Many different discourses are used in the attempt to understand change in our societies, but sociologists and economists are almost unanimous in stressing the importance over the last thirty years of a whole group of new industries linked to computers, software, microelectronics, the Internet, cellular phones and biotechnology. The market assigns value to the information and knowledge found in these new industrial sectors, the development of which is sustaining a new phase of economic growth, and is taking place alongside profound changes in science, society and international relations. Bio-information, a very special type of information, is an integral part of that group of new industries which has arisen on the back of the promising results obtained by science and technology in the fields of information technology, materials technology and biotechnology based on recombinations of DNA. Since 1990 these industries account for most of the economic growth of the US and have come to be recognized as being among the main drivers of the world economy following the shock to the system caused by the stagflation of the 1970s. In this new situation there emerged a set of transnational social spaces and a tier of actors who cover the whole system,   with many of their relationships going beyond the nation-state and beyond even relations between nations. A decisive feature of the new global context was a body of doctrine favourable to the hegemony of the market economy, reflected in the compulsory liberalization of markets and changes in the relationship between capital and labour, leading to the reversal of workers' rights. The electronic revolution also played an important role in how the new situation emerged. That which makes it possible for national and transnational actors to move around the global marketplace is the existence of a constantly evolving technological base. This increases the ability to collect, handle and transmit information of various kinds. But communications technologies are also behind the profound changes which have taken place in the international economy through a variety of innovations impacting several aspects of twenty-first century economies and societies. One such situation is precisely the movement towards the global convergence of life sciences and technologies and the biotechnology industry. The technological infra-structure which is characteristic of this movement supports the use of the information processing capacities of computers and of the Internet to enable biological data to be exchanged at a world level.