[Sci-tech-public] MIT STS Special Seminar: ROBIN SCHEFFLER

[Randyn A. Miller]

MIT 
PROGRAM IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY 


SPECIAL SEMINAR

Cancer, Viruses, and Managing Biomedical Futures in the United States 1946-1982



ROBIN SCHEFFLER

YALE UNIVERSITY 


ABSTRACT
 
In 1964, the National Cancer Institute unveiled the Special Virus Leukemia Program, an ambitious application of Cold War defense planning methods to the production of a cancer vaccine. It would, as Life magazine enthused, “do more than hand out money and wait for results…it would plan research and make results.” Unlike other causes of cancer, the possibility of a cancer virus made the elimination of cancer in its entirety a thinkable goal. However, when the Program was established, no human cancer virus was known to exist!  Indeed, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, few areas of biomedical research generated more excitement—or controversy—than the search for a human cancer virus.

In this talk, I examine research into the link between viruses and cancer as a unique site for understanding the role that anticipatory moments of hope and crisis have played in biomedical knowledge production. Scholars in the anthropology and history of science have identified the significance of promissory or future-oriented regimes for entrepreneurial biomedical enterprises such as genomics or synthetic biology. I reveal the important role that these regimes also played in state support for the emergence of biomedicine. While the management of cancer virus research began as the cause of administrators within the National Cancer Institute, it soon provided a focus for a grassroots campaign demanding that the government plan and wage a “War on Cancer” in the late 1960s. Yet despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars and mobilizing thousands of scientists, the National Cancer Institute did not manage to develop a cancer vaccine.

While the War on Cancer disappointed activists and administrators alike, it was a boon for the academic molecular biologists that had been among its fiercest critics. The search for cancer viruses, enemies from without, had the ironic effect of revealing cellular oncogenes: enemies within. Subsequently, the infrastructure created by the War on Cancer and virus research played a critical role in the rise of biotechnology and mobilization against HIV/AIDS. In following the arc of cancer virus research during these decades, we are able to reflect on the importance of cycles of scientific anticipation and frustration—boom and bust—in defining particular regimes of knowledge production, citizenship, identity, and political economy. 

4 PM
WEDNESDAY
12 FEBRUARY 2014
E51-095
MIT CAMPUS | 2 AMHERST STREET


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