Managing the future: The Special Virus Leukemia Program and the acceleration of biomedical research

Ludwik Gross, Sarah Stewart, and the 1950s discoveries of Gross murine leukemia virus and polyoma virus

“…However, once researchers were able to replicate Gross's work on newborn mice and additional leukemia and tumor viruses were discovered by others who were inspired by his initial work, he finally received significant recognition. Hoping to extend and generalize Gross's initial findings the NCI invested significant financial resources into tumor virology and began the Special Virus Leukemia Program (SVLP) (Scheffler, 2014). They believed that further significant discoveries would require teams of researchers.…”

“…The discoveries of murine leukemia virus and polyoma virus and the subsequent rise of quantitative tumor virology 67 allowed for the large growth in NCI funded tumor virology research in the early 1960s (Gaudillière & Löwy, 1998;Scheffler, 2014), the growth in molecular biology in the late 1960s and 1970s (Yi, 2008), and eventually for the discovery of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes in the 1970s and 1980s (Morange, 1993;Van Helvoort, 1999). With the development and refinement of cell culture, the cutting edge of molecular virology would move from the study of organisms like mice to the study of immortalized cell lines.…”

How to produce ‘marketable and profitable results for the company’: from viral interference to Roferon A

“…Pestka was interested in the mechanisms by which different antibiotics inhibited protein synthesis. At the National Cancer Institute, the Special Cancer Virus Program was gaining momentum (Scheffler 2014, 2019; Zoon 2017). Pestka had developed an interest in the molecule that a decade earlier had been hailed as viral penicillin: interferon.…”

Mapping the methodologies of Burkitt lymphoma

“…1028 In other words, this inversion of the expected ratio of leukaemia and lymphoma cases within the belt led to the suspicion that lymphoma syndrome was perhaps an unusual manifestation of lymphoblastic leukaemia. If this was true, and given the interest in finding an infectious aetiology for leukaemia in the United States (Scheffler, 2014), it suggested that BL too might be caused by a virus of some kind. In concert with the other evidence, it suggested that the syndrome might be due to an arthropodvectored virus (Burkitt, 1962a, 234;Burkitt, 1962b, 217e9;Burkitt, 1962d, 77).…”

“…This role of cancer virus research within major biomedical research programmes (particularly in the USA) has been developed in work that tends to emphasise its planned and institutional character. For example, cancer virus research may be discussed in the context of major planned research efforts (Gaudillière, 1998;Scheffler, 2014), in the institutional interactions between biomedical research establishments and other quasi-governmental institutions, such as prisons (Stark & Campbell, 2014), or as contributor to research in other fields, such as molecular biology (Gaudillière, 1998). As John Pickstone points out, this alignment of the historiography of cancer virus research largely along institutional lines is of a piece with other social histories of medicine, where both the form of the work and the intensions of the historian have largely been imported from other contexts.…”