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  • Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry
  • Daniel Charles (bio)
Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry. By Eric J. Vettel . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp xv+273. $33.95.

Many key discoveries that led to today's biotechnology industry emerged from laboratories around San Francisco Bay in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was also a place, and a time, of striking social and political upheaval. Coincidence? Eric J. Vettel doesn't think so. [End Page 666]

Vettel's book recounts a history of scientific discovery and academic infighting, spanning almost three decades, at the biological laboratories of Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco. These range from the meteoric rise and sudden fall of Berkeley's Biochemistry and Virology Laboratory in the late 1940s and early 1950s to the founding of the biotechnology company Cetus and the Asilomar Conference on recombinant DNA techniques in the early 1970s.

A single theme unites these stories: a struggle between "basic" and "applied" research. On one side stood a generation of scientists who believed in their right to explore fundamental questions of nature, irrespective of current political fashion or social need. This philosophy, according to Vettel, reigned triumphant during the 1950s and early 1960s. By 1967, however, it came under fierce attack from politicians, social activists, and a younger generation of scientists. The dissidents felt that the scientific establishment had become arrogant and morally irresponsible. They demanded a new focus on scientific research to meet urgent social needs.

This countercultural milieu and the "desperate response of biological scientists" to it, Vettel argues, provided a fertile seedbed for the biotechnology industry. As federal funding for basic research declined, scientists were forced to look for other funding sources, including private industry. Vettel also suggests that scientists entering laboratories in the 1960s were much more interested in life beyond the laboratory, and thus more inclined to pursue practical applications of their research. He does not, however, support this thesis with more than anecdotal evidence.

Vettel, now executive director of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia, does his best to inject drama into the story, but the results are sometimes comic, as in passages like this one, referring to the Asilomar Conference:

The savage collision of all the forces that had swirled around Bay Area bioscience programs since World War II—precarious interdisciplinary tension, a disruptive political culture, and an unraveling political economy, not to mention the dramatic surge of applied bioscience discoveries in recent years—occurred on 20 February 1975.

(p. 216)

Many of the tales collected by Vettel are fascinating in their own right. Several involve the ambitions and intrigues of academic leaders. Vettel describes the astonishing ability of Nobel laureate Wendell Stanley, head of Berkeley's Biochemistry and Virology Laboratory, to inspire confidence among university administrators and animosity among academic rivals. Stanley's empire collapsed when the world realized that DNA carried the code of life, rather than Stanley's specialty, proteins, thereby demonstrating vividly how quickly scientific fortunes can shift. Vettel's account of the early days of Cetus contains valuable material for historians of the biotech industry. [End Page 667] The book includes detailed accounts of the shifting political winds that buffeted the scientific community during the late 1960s.

Yet the various stories, at least for this reader, fail to make a convincing case for Vettel's theme. There certainly were significant protests, both in Washington, D.C., and in the San Francisco Bay region, against the scientific establishment of the early 1960s. It also seems clear that generational shifts were under way among scientists at that time. But Vettel has difficulty showing how this social upheaval gave the world genetic engineering and the biotechnology industry. Somehow, it still seems more like a coincidence.

Daniel Charles

Dan Charles, formerly a technology correspondent for National Public Radio, is author of Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (2005).

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