Can it Ever be Pure Science? Pharmaceuticals, the Pharmaceutical Industry and Biomedical Research in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In his celebrated book The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx undertook to explore how the myth of an idyllic rural domain was first confronted then incorporated and finally transformed by the reality of industrial technology in early-nineteenth-century America. In a passage referring to Thoreau’s Walden, Marx contrasts the images symbolically in these words:

[M]an-made power, the machine with its fire, smoke and thunder, is juxtaposed to the waters of Walden, remarkable for their depth and purity and a matchless. indescribable color — now light blue, now green, almost always pellucid. The iron horse moves across the surface of the earth; the pond invites the eye below the surface. (Marx 1964, pp. 251)

The more drugs that emerge from programs of blind screening the better. Each new active drug provides us with important research tools. Each new drug is a challenge that opens new fields in the basic medical sciences.

Gilman 1959, p. 348

I would like to thank participants at the conference ‘Des manufactures à la facture des connaissances’ held in Paris in 1994, especially Philippe Pignarre, and at the University of York in 1994 for comments on an earlier version of this chapter.