R&D and the arms race : an analytical look

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The professions of science in America: their ambivalent history

Science started to become professionalized in the United States during the Jackson~an period. A principal aim of professionalization was to secure the goals and standards of research from interference by laymen by the institutionalization of scientific autonomy. Then and since, the scientific professions have sought to legitimate themselves by promising various quid pro quos to the society in exchange for the privilege of autonomy. The promises have included the claim that the study of science would foster morally disinterested habits of thinking and that the results of research would lead to practical., material benefit. Since the turn of the century, the claims of legitimation have in many respects been substantially validated, and the scientific professions have grown and prospered. But the very success of science, particularly after it became a favored ward of the federal government, combined with the arrangements of autonomy to provoke popular resentment and, in the era of Vietnam, rebellion. The turmoil revealed that the American scientific professions, at once respected and suspected, esoteric yet indispensable, were destined to live in tension with the larger society indefinitely

Huxley and the popularization of science

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Renato Dulbecco and the New Animal Virology: Medicine, Methods, and Molecules

Animal virology -- the study of viruses that prey on animals and human beings -- deserves historical treatment if only because since the 1950s it has become one of the most important fields in the biomedical sciences. Nowadays, it is central to the understanding of many infectious diseases, including AIDS, and the non-infectious scourge of cancer. Yet the development of the new animal virology -- "new" because it was a biological science as distinct from an arm of clinical practice in medicine -- is richly suggestive not only because of its salient importance to medicine but also historiographically. It provides an opportunity to examine the role of several important issues in the development of modern biology, not least the interplay between medical goals and the practice of basic science, the influence of patronage on scientific development, and the role of methods, techniques, and research schools in the advancement of a field

The Enemies Without and Within Cancer and the History of the Laboratory Sciences

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Alison Winter (1965–2016)

In June 2016 brain cancer took the life of Alison Winter, age fifty, snuffing out the incandescent spirit that so brightened her professional and personal worlds. A professor of history at the University of Chicago at the time of her death, Alison was a leading scholar in the social, cultural, and legal history of the sciences of mind. She had published some two dozen articles, book chapters, reviews, and two prizewinning books—Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998) and Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (2012). In the interval between the two books, she and her husband, the historian Adrian Johns, had four children, each of whom was one of the joys of her life. Throughout her career, she imprinted her imaginative zest for living and learning and her love of music and literature on her colleagues, students, friends, and family alike

Medicare, Medicaid, and Pharmaceuticals: The Price of Innovation

Through much of the last half century, Medicare and Medicaid have not for the most part supported research intended to lead to new drugs. For their role in drug development, we need to look to infrastructure and incentives. The record of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) illustrates the potential of both for pharmaceutical innovation. The current budget of NIH, the big elephant in the zoo of the federal biomedical enterprise, is $30 billion, but apart from a dozen small programs devoted to targeted drug development, most of these billions are not aimed directly at pharmaceutical innovation