In the early twentieth century, fatigue research marked an area of conflicting scientific, industrial, and cultural understandings of working bodies. These different understandings of the working body marked a key site of political conflict during the growth of industrial capitalism. Many fatigue researchers understood fatigue to be a physiological fact and allied themselves with Progressive-era reformers in urging industrial regulation. Opposed to these researchers were advocates of Taylorism and scientific management, who held that fatigue was a mental event and that productivity could be perpetually increased through managerial efficiency. Histories of this conflict typically cease with the end of the First World War, when it is assumed that industrial fatigue research withered away. This article extends the history of fatigue research through examining the activities of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in the 1920s and 1930s. The Laboratory developed sophisticated biochemical techniques to study the blood of exercising individuals. In particular, it found that exercising individuals could attain a biochemically "steady state," or equilibrium, and extrapolated from this to assert that fatigue was psychological, not physiological, in nature. In contrast to Progressive-era research, the Laboratory reached this conclusion through laboratory examination, not of industrial workers, but of Laboratory staff members and champion marathon runners. The translation of laboratory research to industrial settings, and the eventual erasure of physiological fatigue from discussions of labor, was a complex function of institutional settings, scientific innovation, and the cultural meanings of work and sport.
In this article, we analyze the National Cancer Institute’s Virus Cancer Programs (1964–1978). The NCI’s organizational mandate established program goals that iteratively braided together both scientific research and public health outcomes. The distinctive environment of the NCI as a federal research institute made scientific programs accountable to evaluations of both experimental and administrative appropriateness. To this end, NCI scientist-administrators adopted management techniques drawn from the Cold War defense industry to direct open-ended exploratory research on virally induced cancers, aimed at developing a vaccine as a public health solution to cancer. Facing the limitations of the state of viral cancer research as simultaneously an administrative and experimental problem, the Programs launched a monumental effort to develop infrastructure for cancer virus studies through long-term planning initiatives utilizing defense-style networks of contracted academic laboratories throughout the US. The organizational mandate guiding the Programs contributed to conceptual and experimental changes that directly led to the subversion of its fundamental presupposition of viral causation in favor of the cellular oncogene theory. We thus propose a reinterpretation of the historiography of the oncogene hypothesis as a radical break from viral explanations of cancer etiology, a reinterpretation that re-centers the direct contributions this federal vaccine program made to current molecular biological explanations of cancer causation.
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