Governing, Financing, and Planning Cancer Virus Research: The Emergence of Organized Science at the U.S. National Cancer Institute in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This paper examines the fiscal, managerial, and institutional history of the Special Virus Leukemia Program (SVLP) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the 1950s and 1960s. It first investigates the discussions about the nature and mission of the NIH as a research organization in order to provide the broader institutional and political context for the emergence of developmental research as an exemplary organized science. This paper then analyzes how NCI administrators tried to articulate developmental research as a particular style of biomedical research that could mediate the governments obligation, scien-tists creative needs, and the publics call for medical progress. In turn, NCI admin-istrators and scientists, such as Carl Becker, Louis Carrese, and Frank Rauscher, developed and mobilized distinctive financing and management techniques for the SVLP, such as the contract mechanism and the convergence technique. Their efforts to institute the SVLP as an exemplary organized science that could be planned, pro-grammed, and managed enabled them to translate the publics demand for a cancer cure into a developmental research project, one that could link basic biomedical re-search to medical and pharmaceutical development. The SVLP in turn left a fiscal, managerial, and organizational legacy for the subsequent evolution of large-scale, goal-oriented developmental research projects in cancer from the 1970s, as exempli-fied by Nixons War on Cancer.