Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry

Preface

Preface We have had to run atfull speed in order to stand still. -Robert Glaser, October 31, 1969 Dean ofStanford University Medical School "Message to the Biosciences" The seemingly unlimited reach of powerful biotechnologies, and the attendant growth of the multi-billion-dollar industry, have raised difficult questions about the scientific discoveries, political assumptions, and cultural patterns that gave rise to for-profit biological research. Given such extraordinary stakes, a history of the commercial biotechnology industry must go beyond the predictable attention to scientists, discovery , and corporate sales. It must pursue how something so complex as the biotechnology industry was born, and how it became both a vanguard for contemporary world capitalism and a focal point for polemic ethical debate. This is the story of the industry behind genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, cloning, and stem-cell research. It is a story about activists and student protestors pressing for a new purpose in science, and about politicians trying to create policy that aids or alters the course ofscience, and also about the release of powerful entrepreneurial energies in universities and in venture capital that few realized existed. Most of all, this is a story about people-not just biological scientists, but also followers and opponents who knew nothing about the biological sciences yet cared 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 three major research universities in the San Francisco Bay Area-the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco (UCSF)-during the thirty years following World War II. It is not a detailed summary of all the key discoveries that led to the creation of what is commonly known today as biotechnology, x Preface or a comprehensive study of a new scientific industry; it is a work of historical interpretation. It is a story about a young, impatient, dynamic region where people took risks to shape and then lead a scientific field. It is about the collision ofculture, politics, economics, and science-that is, dramatic social and cultural change, a transforming political economy , and a sudden revolution in the biological sciences. This is a book about the making of a biotechnology industry. The historical narrative will follow the twists and turns of the biological sciences as they careen back and forth between pure and applied discovery. The story begins in the early postwar era when small groups of biological scientists carved a spacious and autonomous experimental niche within the larger discipline of life science. These bioscientists intended to trace the science of life to its natural beginnings, a pure science whose tributaries would converge on fundamental answers to life's most basic questions. But suddenly, in the early 1960s, a series of scientific mishaps occurred-including the thalidomide scare, the Cutter Laboratory polio outbreak, Rachel Carson's warning of permanent ecological damage-which cooled public support of unrestrained science that seemed empty of purpose. By the mid-1960s, public opinion shifted as the political right began to criticize New Deal-like government support of scientific research, while an influential political left saw pure biological research as a profound betrayal of the human side of the life sciences. By the late 1960s, the idea that bioscience research should serve the needs of people had surged through the electoral system without the calming restraint of partisan attachment, as political representatives from both parties and at all levels of government-from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, from Willie Brown to Shirley Temple Blacklent rhetorical and financial support for any biological research that had practical purpose. At the same time, a deepening economic crisis forced policymakers to slash research budgets, which left venture capital as the new resonant soulmate for biologists desperate for sustainable research patronage, even if it meant shifting experimental focus from pure to applied. Scientists have long used terms like "pure" and "applied"-and their respective synonyms-to describe two kinds of research: the former emphasizes fundamental discovery, the latter emphasizes practical application . However, as the discerning reader probably already knows, both terms are unavoidably ambiguous and merely occupy opposite and extreme points on a continuous spectrum. Most experiments are neither entirely one nor entirely the other, especially in the biological sciences where virtually any fundamental discovery can show some practical relevance to life, and any practical application may lead to new knowledge. It is not my intention...