Eric James Vettel - Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors: GlendaGilmore, Michael Kazin, Thomas Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political andsocial change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, includingideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphereand the language and institutions of politics at all levels national,regional, and local. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse thefragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives onsocial movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, on consumption, andon intellectual history and popular culture.

Biotech

The Countercultural Origins of an Industry

ERIC J. VETTEL

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press All rightsreserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vettel, Eric James.

Biotech : the countercultural origins of an industry / EricJ. Vettel.

p. cm.(Politics and culture in modernAmerica) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3947-8ISBN-10: 0-8122-3947-4 (alk. paper)

1. Biotechnology industriesHistory. I. Title. II. Series.

HD9999.B442 V48 2006 338.4'76606 22

2006041846

To Maggie, Reed, and Whit, and for them, too.

Contents

Preface ix

1. TheSetting, 1946 ... 1

2. Patronageand Policy 8

3. ThePromise and Peril of the BVL 30

4. TheAscent of Pure Research 49

5. ResearchLife! 99

6. ASeason of Policy Reform 129

7. Crossingthe Threshold 157

8. Cetus:History's First Biotechnology Company 186 Conclusion: An End ... 216

Notes 229

Sources Consulted 267

Index 269

mm

Preface

We have had to run at full speed in order to stand still.

Robert Glaser, October 31, 1969 Dean of Stanford UniversityMedical School "Message to the Biosciences"

The seemingly unlimited reach of powerful biotechnologies,and the attendant growth of the multi-billion-dollar industry, have raiseddifficult questions about the scientific discoveries, political assumptions,and cultural patterns that gave rise to for-profit biological research. Givensuch extraordinary stakes, a history of the commercial biotechnology industrymust go beyond the predictable attention to scientists, discovery, andcorporate sales. It must pursue how something so complex as the biotechnologyindustry was born, and how it became both a vanguard for contemporary worldcapitalism and a focal point for polemic ethical debate.

This is the story of the industry behindgenetic engineering, recombinant DNA, cloning, and stem-cell research. It is astory about activists and student protestors pressing for a new purpose inscience, and about politicians trying to create policy that aids or alters thecourse of science, and also about the release of powerful entrepreneurialenergies in universities and in venture capital that few realized existed.Most of all, this is a story about peoplenot just biological scientists, butalso followers and opponents who knew nothing about the biological sciences yetcared deeply about how research was done and how its findings were used.

There are many paths through this story,but the one followed here runs through the biological sciences at the threemajor research universities in the San Francisco Bay Areathe University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of CaliforniaMedical Center at San Francisco (UCSF)during the thirty years following WorldWar II. It is not a detailed summary of all the key discoveries that led to thecreation of what is commonly known today as biotechnology,

or a comprehensive study of a new scientific industry; it isa work of historical interpretation. It is a story about a young, impatient,dynamic region where people took risks to shape and then lead a scientificfield. It is about the collision of culture, politics, economics, andsciencethat is, dramatic social and cultural change, a transforming politicaleconomy, and a sudden revolution in the biological sciences.

This is a book about the making of abiotechnology industry.

The historical narrative will follow thetwists and turns of the biological sciences as they careen back and forthbetween pure and applied discovery. The story begins in the early postwar erawhen small groups of biological scientists carved a spacious and autonomousexperimental niche within the larger discipline of life science. Thesebioscientists intended to trace the science of life to its natural beginnings,a pure science whose tributaries would converge on fundamental answers tolife's most basic questions. But suddenly, in the early 1960s, a series ofscientific mishaps occurredincluding the thalidomide scare, the CutterLaboratory polio outbreak, Rachel Carson's warning of permanent ecologicaldamagewhich cooled public support of unrestrained science that seemed emptyof purpose. By the mid-1960s, public opinion shifted as the political rightbegan to criticize New Deal-like government support of scientific research,while an influential political left saw pure biological research as a profoundbetrayal of the human side of the life sciences. By the late 1960s, the ideathat bioscience research should serve the needs of people had surged throughthe electoral system without the calming restraint of partisan attachment, aspolitical representatives from both parties and at all levels ofgovernmentfrom Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, from Willie Brown to ShirleyTemple Black lent rhetorical and financial support for any biological researchthat had practical purpose. At the same time, a deepening economic crisisforced policymakers to slash research budgets, which left venture capital asthe new resonant soulmate for biologists desperate for sustainable researchpatronage, even if it meant shifting experimental focus from pure to applied.

Scientists have long used terms like"pure" and "applied"and their respective synonymstodescribe two kinds of research: the former emphasizes fundamental discovery,the latter emphasizes practical application. However, as the discerning readerprobably already knows, both terms are unavoidably ambiguous and merely occupyopposite and extreme points on a continuous spectrum. Most experiments are neitherentirely one nor entirely the other, especially in the biological scienceswhere virtually any fundamental discovery can show some practical relevance tolife, and any practical application may lead to new knowledge. It is not myintention to engage an epistemological debate

about the relevance of these two terms, or explain thesociological function of these terms within a dynamic scientific community. Asubstantial body of literature on the epistemology or sociology of experimentalcommunities has been accumulating for some time. Rather, my goal here is toprovide an account that places the travails of basic bioscience research andits corollary, the ascendancy of applied bioscience research, in historicalcontext, and examine their relationship to the rise of the biotechnologyindustry.1

There is, in fact, ample evidence thatresearch categories like "pure" and "applied" arehistorically contingent. For example, in 1967, Science called for an open forumin which to discuss the significance and relevance of these two terms. That aleading academic journal thought it necessary to provoke debate provides animportant first clue that the meaning of pure and applied research might behistorically contingent. The tone of the debate was intense. Most of thearticles submitted to the journal expressed a deep revulsion with the categoriesand agreed that the difference between basic and applied research was oftenminimal and perhaps meaninglessone scientist went so far as to call it a"false consciousness." The defining features of all the essaysthehyper- defensiveness, the fierce rejection of overly simplistic descriptivecategories, and the surging sense that binary categories betrayed the unity ofscienceoffer a second clue that pure and applied bioscience research might beinextricably bound to historical context.2