Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer

Crafting Science tells the tale of proto-oncogene research, the study of those segments of DNA now thought to cause normal cells to become cancerous. The story begins in the late 1970s with studies that identified, in humans, normal genes homologous to genes in viruses that caused cancer in laboratory animals. Researchers labeled these normal human genes “proto-oncogenes.” Somehow, they suggested, these proto-oncogenes would go wrong and mutate into oncogenes, which somehow caused cancer. Joan Fujimura claims that by 1986 biological textbooks proclaimed this hypothesis a fact. Where scientists had once portrayed “cancer” as a group of heterogeneous diseases distinguished by uncontrolled cell growth, they now saw it as a disease of human genes. Moreover, their conception of genetic disease was quite different from earlier notions of the heritability of cancer. For the first time researchers could point to a material entity—a particular fragment of DNA—as the genetic cause of cancer. The race was on to identify the proto-oncogenes responsible for particular cancers, to understand the mechanisms by which they caused the disease, to develop new genetic treatments, and, more generally, to explain why normal cells carried such a dangerous load. Within a few years thousands of scientists and millions of dollars had flooded into oncogene research. The field became the focus of a complex set of networks that linked basic scientists, oncologists, venture capitalists, and research-funding organizations.

The proto-oncogene model developed at a time when molecular techniques for cloning and sequencing DNA were becoming widely available. For Fujimura, the theory developed in dynamic relation to this new technology: they were, in her phrase, “co-constructed,” inextricably linked in what she styles a “theory-methods package” (p. 16). This package combined four elements: (1) methods, such as recombinant DNA and other molecular genetic technologies; (2) instruments, such as nucleotide sequencers, computer software, and databases; (3) materials, such as molecular probes, reagents, long-passage cell lines, and biologically engineered animals like Du Pont Corporation’s transgenic OncoMouse™, which physically incorporated specific oncogenes in the animal itself; and (4) a set of conceptual tools, such as “genes,” “cancer,” and “proto-oncogenes.” Together these elements allowed scientists to ask a range of questions about cancer at the molecular level that had previously been explored only at the cellular or organismic level. They also facilitated the spread of this new research by helping scientists to build bridges between different work activities. For example, the standardization of methods, protocols, and instruments in the package enabled their transportation between laboratories, and so expedited connections between different institutions and disciplines.

For Fujimura, the work of creating such associations was part of the routine of science, what she calls the construction of “doable problems” (p. 10). Her point is that proto-oncogene research involved more than the construction and solution of technical and theoretical questions: it also involved political, financial, and social action, everything needed to make an enterprise “doable.” Thus, her scientists did not deal with only the nuts and bolts of molecular biological research: as part of their problem-solving efforts, they also lobbied Congress for appropriations and negotiated with the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute, as well as stockholders, accountants, corporate managers, and professional and disciplinary colleagues. They had to bring together not only the elements of the theory-methods package, but all those who might help to promote proto-oncogene research. Fujimura provides a complex and subtle account of the transition from small, “doable” problems to that vast “bandwagon” that proto-oncogene research is today.

Fujimura thus treats science as a social enterprise. For her, there is no division between the content of science and its material and social practices. But this is a book that looks out from the social worlds of science to others beyond, and sketches the latter only faintly. Fujimura provides a useful account of the ways in which venture capitalists, pharmaceutical companies, the NCI...