Notes
n o t e s Introduction • Biology’s Day at the Races 1. Rai AK and Eisenberg RS, Bayh-Dole reform and the progress of biomedicine, Law Contemp Probl 2003;66:289–314; Mowery D and Sampat B, The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and university industry technology transfer: a model for other OECD governments? J Technol Transfer 2005;30:115–27; Pisano G, Science business: the promise, the reality, and the future of biotech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006); Hopkins M, Martin P, Nightingale P, et al., The myth of the biotech revolution: an assessment of technological, clinical and organisational change, Res Policy 2007;36:566–89. 2. I refer among other things to enormous duplication of effort and the costly litigation noted in several chapters, to monopoly profits even greater than standard in pharmaceuticals due to Orphan Drug exclusivity on blockbuster products, and above all to the many thousands of deaths caused by the medically inappropriate overuse of erythropoeitin . The sales of this one drug were so great that their assessment plays a key role in the biotechnology sector’s overall economic record. See discussions of Epogen, Aranesp, and Procrit in chap. 5. Other best-selling first-generation biotechnology drugs also owe substantial sales to marketing-driven, medically inappropriate, and to some extent harmful use, but probably not much more so than successful new pharmaceuticals generally. 3. Durkheim E, On the division of labor in society, 2nd ed. (1893), Simpson G, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1933), preface. 4. For excellent examples of this genre, see Kenney M, Biotechnology: the universityindustrial complex (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Krimsky S, Biotechnics and society: the rise of industrial genetics (New York: Praeger, 1991); Kleinman D, Impure cultures: university biology and the world of commerce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Among the many early books in the business literature celebrating great benefits from biotech, one of the most valuable is Orsenigo L, The emergence of biotechnology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5. Mirowski P, Science mart: privatising American science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Also see Kleinman D, Impure cultures: university biology and the world of commerce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), and Krimsky S, Science in the private interest (Lanham, MD: Rowman-Littlefield, 2003). For a compatible, broader critique of neoliberal intellectual property and science policy, see Jaffey AB and 196 Notes to Pages 5–10 Lerner J, Innovation and its discontents: how our broken patent system is endangering innovation and progress, and what to do about it (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 6. Mirowski, Science mart. I resist a tragic emplotment because I do not see the molecular biology of the Cold War era as divorced from the drug industry. There was simply a different division of labor, and one not necessarily better for the public health or society generally. On historians and their narrative choices, see White H, Historical emplotment and the problem of truth in historical representation. In: Figural realism: studies in the mimesis effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999):27–43. 7. Ducor P, Patenting the recombinant products of biotechnology and other molecules (London: Kluwer, 1998). 8. There is one way in which the typicality of the five drugs selected here may be questioned. I have not studied two of the first recombinant drugs whose genuinely novel contribution to therapeutics has arguably been especially valuable, granulocyte colony stimulating factor (introduced by Amgen and used for boosting immune function in cancer chemotherapy patients) and interferon beta (introduced by Cetus/Chiron and Biogen , and used for retarding multiple sclerosis). In the latter case I decided to study the earliest of the interferons developed; in the former, no useful lawsuit materials could be found. The reader should thus observe caution in concluding from this study that no early recombinant drugs made a unique and novel contribution to medicine greater than the five drugs discussed here. Further empirical analysis would be required for this argument. 9. While I have relied extensively on Hughes’s interviews, her corporate history of Genentech was published very late in the writing of this book and was not read before I completed a full draft. See Hughes S, Genentech: the beginnings of biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 10. On “gentlemen” and patent litigation in the middle twentieth century drug industry , see Rasmussen N, On speed: the many lives of amphetamine (New York: New York University Press, 2008), chap 4. Chapter 1 • Biology, Industry, and the Cold...
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