A Medical Vietnam? Critics of the Cancer Establishment and the Demise of the Virus Cancer Program in the 1970s

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

This talk examines one of the earliest and biggest managerial experiments in biomedical research in the 1960s and 1970s, namely, the Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP), managed by the federal government. The Virus Cancer Program was established in 1964 with a $10 million special appropriation from Congress. The program put forward concrete objectives, such as the discovery of a human cancer virus and the development of cancer vaccines. In a bold attempt to accelerate medical solutions the program used the contract mechanism to accomplish these objectives. In 1972 the SVCP managed 1,000 researchers through $50 million contracts. In this talk I will follow the fate of the Virus Cancer Program in the 1970s, at a time when its managerial and scientific aspects came under relentless scrutiny. By examining controversies I will show how the program became a battleground for the nation’s biomedical research policy between academic scientists and government officials.

These debates ranged from the proper mode of research support in biomedicine to the plausibility of research planning. I will show how these debates, along with such new approaches in cancer research as environmental carcinogenesis, prompted the reevaluation of the Virus Cancer Program, leading to its demise in the late 1970s. In conclusion I will discuss the legacy of the program by showing how its history has been reconstructed as a case for or against a particular style of biomedical research.

Doogab Yi is interested in the history of biomedical research and biotechnology. He is preparing his first book, The Recombinant University, in which he analyzes how research patronage, market forces, and legal developments in the 1970s and 1980s influenced the evolution of recombinant DNA technology and reshaped the moral and scientific life of biomedical researchers in the age of biotechnology.

At CHF he plans to work on a new book project on the history of cancer research during the Nixon Administration’s War on Cancer in the 1970s. Tentatively titled A Medical Vietnam? this book project will analyze the Virus Cancer Program, one of the earliest large-scale, goal-oriented biomedical research projects in the context of Nixon’s War on Cancer campaign. His analysis of this prototype “biotechnology” project will contribute to our understanding of the history of biochemical research and pharmaceutical development, the politics and management of biomedicine, and the emergence of the biomedical-industrial complex in the 1970s and 1980s. He received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University.