Collaboration in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Changing Relationships in Britain and France, 1935–1965

Viviane Quirke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134390984
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Business

Examining the issue of 'British decline' after the war, this fascinating text describes the evolution of cooperation in Britain and France, and argues that the relationship between these two countries helped to disseminate a culture of research, resulting in the transformation of the medical sciences and the pharmaceutical industry in both countries.

Of interest to a wide range of academic disciplines, this highly relevant book discusses topics including penicillin, sulphamide drugs, and the effects of war in both countries.

Part I

Blurred Boundaries

Drug Research and Production in Britain and France before World War Two

Introduction

Historians have argued that the form and content of science have shaped the institutions and professional standards of modern medicine.¹ They have also shown the reverse to be true: the institutions and professional standards of modern medicine have shaped the form and content of science.²

What have bound science and medicine together have been the reforming medical élites and their networks.

However, what exactly science has meant to medicine, when and where it has been embraced by the medical profession, has become the centre of historical debate. In the United States, the rise of the medical profession has been traced to the transformation of medicine in the nineteenth century, from a theory based on the specificity of disease, to knowledge generated and validated by experimental science. This new, experimental approach to medicine helped to place therapeutics at the centre of American physicians’ professional identity.³ However, therapeutics did not play an important part in the rise of the medical profession in all countries, for instance Austria, where the Vienna Medical School was characterized by ‘brilliant clinical diagnosis’, often accompanied by a skepticism of drugs and other interventive treatments.⁴ Moreover, an anti-science movement persisted in German medicine until World War Two, under the influence of practitioners such as Erwin Liek.⁵ In Britain, clinicians began adopting experimental methods during the inter-war period, although a certain amount of resistance persisted until World War Two.⁶ In France, the shift from a more purely clinical to a predominantly scientific approach to medicine took place later still, in the 1960s, with the creation of Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM).⁷

This book can only lightly touch upon the resistance to science and therapeutics experienced in countries like Britain and France, whilst focusing on change, which the co-operative relations between scientists and pharmaceutical companies helped to bring about. Nevertheless, in the chapters that follow, it will become clear that resistance and change are interconnected. As Lord Robert Platt, a clinician associated with the MRC, put it:

[...] the phenomenal success of modern medical treatment seems to have depended almost wholly on non-clinical, often non-medical scientists, frequently working in, or in close collaboration with, the pharmaceutical industry.⁸

Platt suggested that the blame for resisting modern medical treatment might rest, at least in part, with clinicians. At the same time, he argued that the cooperation between scientists and pharmaceutical firms had contributed to the rise of modern medicine, i.e. one dominated by experimental medicine, centered on therapeutics. These scientists were often based in university or government laboratories, and were usually sought for their knowledge and expertise in chemistry, and the firms with which they collaborated had started developing their research facilities in search for novel treatments in the emerging fields of chemotherapy and replacement therapy. Their contribution is the subject of this book.

There are two angles from which to approach such a topic: the scientists, and the companies. Both are examined in Chapter 1, beginning with a description of the institutes of medical research, and ending with a history of the pharmaceutical industry in the two countries. However, I question the distinction between them, at least for the period between the wars.⁹

Hence, I refer to it as a period of ‘blurred boundaries’, that is to say one in which research and production, and science and industry closely intermingled.¹⁰ The French and British pharmaceutical industries showed strong similarities. Both shared an interest, if not a ‘passion’ for science, reflected in the growth of research laboratories between the wars.¹¹ Nevertheless, some differences between Britain and France are identified. In France, there was greater centralisation at institutional and national levels. In contrast, Britain was characterized by an extensive institutional network, loosely coordinated by the MRC through a system of committees.

Chapter 2 describes the expansion of co-operative research. In both countries, the most important collaborative relationships developed around the development of chemotherapeutic remedies, because of the perceived need to ‘catch up’ with Germany where chemotherapy had been ‘invented’. This need was made all the more real by World War One, which interrupted supplies of German synthetic drugs. The shock of war reinforced notions of French ‘backwardness’ and British ‘decline’, and stimulated the development of co-operative networks in order to bring the two countries’ pharmaceutical industry up to a par with its German counterpart. In France, it gave impetus to the close relationship between Ernest Fourneau’s team at the Pasteur Institute and Poulenc Frères (part of Rhône-Poulenc after the 1928 merger). In Britain, it led to a network of university departments, pharmaceutical firms and government research institutions, under the aegis of the Royal Society and the Medical Research Committee (later Council) and Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Subsequently, whereas in the field of vaccines and sera there tended to be competition rather than co-operation between medical research institutions and pharmaceutical firms, in the field of the new biological remedies — hormones, vitamins and glandular extracts — co-operation blossomed, particularly in Britain, where it gave rise to a network of ‘reputable companies’. These collaborated with the MRC for the production of insulin, and were to form the core of the Therapeutic Research Corporation, which became instrumental in developing penicillin in World War Two, and will be the subject of Chapter 3, in Part 2 of the book.

1	Research Institutions and Pharmaceutical Laboratories before World War Two

A. Introduction

This chapter describes the scientific and industrial context for the collaborations that burgeoned before World War Two. It begins with the institutes of medical research, which embodied a particular approach to the prevention and cure of disease, immunotherapy, associated with the sciences of bacteriology and immunology, and with the manufacture of vaccines and sera.¹ However, around the time of World War One, an alternative approach appeared within these institutes. It was chemotherapy, that is to say the prevention and treatment of illnesses using chemical substances.² Developed as a theory and a set of laboratory practices by Paul Ehrlich at the Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt-am-Main, chemotherapy was exported along with Salvarsan and the other synthetic drugs that came out of the Institute and German industrial laboratories, such as Bayer’s, whose research programme was inspired by Ehrlich’s.³ Chemotherapy required the collaboration between organic chemists, physiologists, and bacteriologists.⁴ Therefore, it became a privileged site for the development of co- operative networks of scientists and pharmaceutical firms. Thus, the history of the parallel, and at times conflicting, development of immuno-therapy and chemotherapy constitutes the common ground for a comparison between Britain and France. It was common, because it was shared by an expanding international scientific community.⁵

In France, the Pasteur Institute dominated medical research until World War Two; hence it is studied in greater detail. In Britain, by contrast, an extensive network of institutions grew under the aegis of the MRC. Special attention is paid to the Lister Institute, which was modelled on the Pasteur, and allows a comparison to be made between the institutional structures and scientific cultures of the two countries. Thus, significant differences between Britain and France are identified. In France, there was greater centralisation at institutional and national levels,⁶ and the style of leadership was more autocratic. In contrast, Britain’s institutional network was loosely co-ordinated by the MRC through an ever-widening system of committees, which included the Salvarsan, Chemotherapy, Insulin and Therapeutic Trials Committees, and the style of leadership could be described as consensual.

Another difference that has been much discussed in the historiography is the relative stagnation of the biological and medical sciences in France compared with other countries, including Britain, where the inter-war period is widely recognized as the heyday of the British school of physiology.⁷ The backwardness of French science has perhaps been over-stated by historians, keen to draw a contrast between the inter-war years and the spectacular take-off of the post-war period.⁸ They may also have been influenced by contemporary accounts of decline that were a rhetorical device at the hands of reforming élites.⁹ Although the evidence suggests that French science may indeed have suffered from relative stagnation, a number of inter-war research projects laid the foundations for innovative post-war developments, and deserve a mention.¹⁰ For instance, the research on bacterial growth factors in the 1920s and 1930s by the microbiolo-gist André Lwoff later led to ground-breaking work in genetics, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine jointly with Jacques Monod and François Jacob in 1965.¹¹ In the pharmaceutical field, Ernest Fourneau and his team, which included a future director of the Pasteur Institute (Jacques Tréfouël) and a future Nobel Prize winner (Daniel Bovet), carried out innovative research on drugs of the sympathetic nervous system, sulphonamide drugs and synthetic anti-histamines.¹² The latter led Rhône-Poulenc to the neuroleptic drug chlorpromazine (Largactil), a discovery that transformed psychiatric care and stimulated the growth of psychopharmacology after World War Two.¹³

Despite the differences outlined above, the chapter, which ends with a study of the French and British pharmaceutical industries, also highlights strong similarities between the two countries. Both shared an interest, if not a ‘passion’ for science, reflected in the growth of research laboratories between the wars.¹⁴ Furthermore, in both countries, the new biological remedies, including vitamins, hormones and organ extracts, opened up a third therapeutic way, which provided opportunities for collaborative research and underpinned the development of many small and medium firms.¹⁵ A number of these, taking on the manufacture of vitamins and insulin, expanded greatly after World War Two with the production of antibiotics and corticosteroid drugs, and became major players in the international pharmaceutical industry, for instance Glaxo in Britain, and Roussel-Uclaf in France.¹⁶

B. France: an Institutional Mosaic

Some research was carried out in a number of Medical Schools, Science Faculties, in the Provinces as well as in Paris, and from 1927 also in the Institut de Biologie physicochimique.¹⁷ However, in the inter-war period the Pasteur Institute dominated French medical research. It requires to be studied in detail, not only because it was the principal institute of medical research, but also because it served as a model for many other institutes, in France and abroad.¹⁸ As such, it provides a useful testing ground for hypotheses about the relative stagnation of French science between the wars and, more pertinently here, about the link between institutional structure and co-operative behaviour.

Table 1.1 Chronology of Institutional Developments in Britain and France

...

Date	Institutional Developments
1881	Creation of Poulenc Frères in Paris
1888	Creation of the Pasteur Institute in Paris
1891	Creation of the Lister Institute in London
1896	Creation of the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories (WCRL) in London

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A History of Collaborative Relationships
• Part I: Blurred Boundaries: Drug Research and Production in Britain and France before World War Two
• Part II: Collaborative Networks in War and Peace
• Part III: Continuity and Change in Medical Science and Industry after World War Two
• Conclusion: The Power of Rhetoric, and a Tale of Two Cultures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index