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High-tech Facilities in the Life Sciences : What Should Public Policy be ? Relations between industry and the University became an important public policy issue at the beginning of the 1980s, broadening and diversifying in the following decade. Having first favoured collaboration agreements between industry and the University, public authorities strongly supported the transfer of technology via spin-offs and patents. The first biotechnology enterprises were created within universities and expanded their activities in laboratories with university teams, in order to share technical equipment and skills. Since the development of genomics and tools for exploring genes and proteins, instrumentation has become a major and extremely resource-consuming factor. Thus, in the same way as in the beginnings of biotechnology, the sharing of technical facilities has become a central issue both for the expansion of the sector and for individual enterprises. The aim of this text is to analyse ways of organising technical resource bases in function of scientific and technological advance.