State planning, cancer vaccine infrastructure, and the origins of the oncogene theory

Abstract

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.

Environing Innovation: Toward an Ecological Pragmatism of Scientific Practice

“…Yet experimentation continued to be interpreted in light of the NCI’s planning techniques, and it was the lack of fit between scientists’ interpretations of what was at issue in experimental phenomena and the stakes embedded in the vaccine program that led to the emergence of a new theory of cancer causation (the oncogene theory) and the discovery of the first human oncogene ( src ) by a group of NCI contractors. Scheffler and Aviles (2022) demonstrate how this outcome emerged from efforts by NCI contractors to resolve persistent problems generated over several years of repeated experimentation oriented toward the NCI’s definition of the issues and stakes of cancer virus vaccine research, and how the innovative outcome was the product of complex interconnections between the material scaffolding of experimentation, social technologies of bureaucracy, and normative definitions of the situations scientists confronted.…”

“…Scheffler and Aviles (2022) use Rouse to analyze how a national infrastructure for molecular oncology research emerged over the decades of the 1960s and 1970s from efforts by National Cancer Institute scientists to generate laboratory evidence of a human cancer virus that would enable development of a vaccine-based public health intervention. NCI scientists—who also acted in their capacity as government bureaucrats to create new procedures and policies shaping the national landscape of cancer research—created novel planning techniques to realize their ambitions.…”

“…We can use Abbott’s linked ecologies to draw out a latent dimension of Scheffler and Aviles’s (2022) explanation that allows us to better understand how certain configurations of the meso-level environment around this new virus cancer vaccine infrastructure exerted distinct ecological pressures on innovation. In the case of the NCI, scientific statecraft emerges from the routine organizational efforts of organizational leadership to make cancer virus research and vaccine development accountable to both scientific publics and overseers in Congress.…”

“…Changes to the virus cancer vaccine programs of the NCI involved efforts to reconcile bureaucratic approaches to planning with the distinctive techniques and values of academic science. As Scheffler and Aviles (2022) show, it was in their ongoing, iterative efforts to perform accountability to both the NCI’s political and scientific publics that scientists reliant upon the virus cancer program’s infrastructure generated one of the most significant biomedical theoretical innovations of the twentieth century. It was only after state infrastructure led to the emergence of this oncogene theory that scientists redrew boundaries between themselves and private economic actors in ways that led to the fundamental reordering of macro-level institutional relations between academic scientists and the state that we recognize today (see Scheffler 2019).…”

“…It was only after state infrastructure led to the emergence of this oncogene theory that scientists redrew boundaries between themselves and private economic actors in ways that led to the fundamental reordering of macro-level institutional relations between academic scientists and the state that we recognize today (see Scheffler 2019). Scheffler and Aviles (2022) note that the sociological, historical, and STS literature overlooked significant connections between the state and molecular biology precisely because they did not adequately conceptualize the linked political and scientific ecology toward which NCI scientists defined the issues and stakes of their ongoing research as employees of a specific federal organization.…”