From Research to Technology
Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry. Eric J. Vettel. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2006. 296 pp. $39.95 cloth (ISBN 9780812239478).
Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry appears in the University of Pennsylvania Press series on politics and culture in modern America. The series, edited by Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, and Thomas Sugrue, proclaims that it is “motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, on consumption, and on intellectual history and popular culture.”Bravo to the editors for including the history of science and technology as central to US history.
The author of this volume, Eric J.Vettel, received his bachelor's degree in history from Stanford and his PhD from the University of Virginia, then returned to the Bay Area as a Bancroft Fellow in US history at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2005, he began serving as executive director for the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia. Vettel's focus on history and his experiences in the Bay Area apparently shaped his decision to focus on the development of biotechnology research and industry in the San Francisco area.
Biotech offers a study of biological research in three Bay Area institutions, and of the move from the idealism of what was perceived as pure research to the development of the applied biotech industry. Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of California at San Francisco, the subjects of close analysis, exemplify the different types of universities responding to the expansion of research in the life sciences, with Cetus the example from the biotech industry. The implication is that because the biotech industry grew up in the San Francisco area, looking at the dominant institutions there will illuminate the origins of the industry.
The marketing claim on the book's dust jacket, that it “chronicles the story behind genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, cloning, and stem-cell research,” is surely overplayed. Biotechnology also arose in other places, notably the Boston area, and to get a broader and richer historical understanding of the industry, we would surely need to look beyond the three universities and one industrial example discussed in Biotech. Furthermore, much genetic engineering, cloning, and stem cell research has migrated to the Bay Area only recently and certainly did not emerge there. Nonetheless, solidly grounded history starts with careful description of selected cases, and that is what Vettel gives us. From the aggregation, we can begin to build an understanding of the complex of factors that allowed the transformation of what the researchers thought of as pure university research into its application through the biotech industry.
Vettel starts in the 1940s, in the period following World War II and in the relatively sleepy research environment that emphasized the physical sciences much more than the life sciences. First Berkeley and then Stanford sought to hire strategically in biology to take advantage of emerging interests in genetics, DNA, proteins, and biochemistry. Berkeley bet on Wendell Stanley, with his self-centered emphasis on basic bench research on crystallized tobacco mosaic virus. President Sproul looked particularly inspired when Stanley received a Nobel Prize just as Berkeley was hiring him. Yet Vettel shows how that great hope soon turned to disappointment, as Stanley failed to understand how to cultivate patrons such as Warren Weaver at the Rockefeller Foundation. What could have become more than a million dollars in funding dwindled to a $150,000 equipment grant because of personal misplaying of the process. Soon, other research programs prevailed, Stanley's shining star faded, and Berkeley was left with a major investment in the wrong place. Meanwhile, Stanford invested in another individual researcher, Arthur Kornberg. Kornberg better understood how to build a team and how to cultivate other actors in the process, and Stanford expanded the leadership by hiring others such as Paul Berg, but the enterprise remained focused on the importance of pure basic research.
By looking at three institutions, Vettel can show us each institution against the background of national and state funding, yet also illustrate the similarities and differences among the central individuals, administrations, and communities with whom they interacted with varying degrees of success. It is the interplay among individuals, the struggle for existence and dominance of different labs and different research approaches, and the relative success of administrators in shaping the development the way they wanted that Vettel reveals so effectively.
The 1960s brought new struggles and increasing calls for publicly funded science to have social value. In 1968 Berkeley became a political battleground, with chaos and divisions across many lines in the university and between the university and its communities.Vettel demonstrates nicely that the demand for conscience in science brought a strong sense of concern for humanity to the sciences. And this, he notes, had surprising implications: “Ironically, it was these bioscience humanists, although occasionally unpopular for their imperialist tendencies in the 1960s, who would eventually become the handmaiden for a commercial bioscience industry in the coming decade” (p. 128).
Two chapters look at the shifts from pure research, first to an acceptance of the need for applied science, and later to demands for successful technological products. These chapters could have become muddled and overly complex—there is so much material, so many other historians have looked at pieces of this picture, and so many individual players have their own interests in constructing and reconstructing the stories—but the author does a nice job of keeping his story under control.Vettel needed to have a clear set of selection criteria in mind to maintain his focus, and he succeeded. This means that there is much more to be told, and we can look forward to other historians' contributions of additional and alternative perspectives.
Vettel's version is compelling, well documented, and important. He leads us to a short chapter on Cetus, which he labels “History's First Biotechnology Company.” This chapter is necessarily a bit disappointing, if only because biotech companies are not inclined to let go of their secret negotiations and decisionmaking processes. We learn about the decisions, but less about the reasons for the choices made. The closing chapter offers a few pages on the story of the Asilomar Conference on recombinant DNA (a history that has appeared in much greater detail elsewhere, as Vettel knows) and a few pages of reflections. Instead of offering conclusions about what his case analysis means, however, Vettel ends by acknowledging that biotech development has its attractions and promises for improving our lives, while it also carries risks and costs.
This acknowledgment is hardly profound, but I think it constitutes one of the best features of this well-written book: Vettel does not succumb to reaching for bold and overdrawn conclusions, he does not moralize, and he does not preach. In giving us solid, empirically driven descriptive history and detailing episodes in the history of life sciences that have helped shape the way biotech has emerged, he gives readers something more substantial and more likely to retain its significance than overblown conclusions. He does not pretend that he has the answers; as he notes, we are only beginning to understand the questions. That is what makes this book appealing: It helps us begin to see some of the complex questions that we will have to address in deciding how much and which basic research, applied science, and technological application we want.
