Chieftess said:Nope, don't think so. It stays the same in vanilla and PTW.
I think it used to let you switch beakers to a different tech on older patch levels, but it was changed to start research over on the last patch for both versions. C3C started out that way. This change makes it vitally important that if you're researching something and have a long way to go, you'd better buy it once an AI gets it first, to avoid throwing away all that gold.