Collaboration in the Pharmaceutical Industry Changing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quirke, Viviane.
Collaboration in the pharmaceutical industry: changing relationships in Britain and France, 1935-
1965 / Viviane Quirke.
p.; cm. -- (Routledge studies in the history of science, technology, and medicine; 18)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-30982-0 (hardback: alk. paper)
1. Pharmacy--Research--France--History--20th century. 2.
Drugs--Research--France--History--20th century. 3. Pharmaceutical industry--France--History--20th
century. 4. Pharmacy--Research--Great Britain--History--20th century. 5. Drugs--Research--Great
Britain--History--20th century. 6. Pharmaceutical industry--Great Britain--History--20th century. 7.
Pharmacy--Research--International cooperation. 8. Drugs--Research--Interrnational cooperation. 9.
Pharmaceutical industry--International cooperation. I. Title. II. Series.
[DNLM: 1. Drug Industry--history--France. 2. Drug Industry--history--Great Britain. 3. History,
20th Century--France. 4. History, 20th Century--Great Britain. 5. International Cooperation--history--
France. 6. International Cooperation--history--Great Britain. 7. Technology, Pharmaceutical--history-
-France. 8. Technology, Pharmaceutical--history--Great Britain. QV 711 FA1 Q8c 2007]
RS122.Q57 2007
615’.1--dc22 2007011046
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A History of Collaborative Relationships
PART I
Blurred Boundaries: Drug Research and Production in Britain and France before World War Two
1 Research Institutions and Pharmaceutical Laboratories before World War Two
2 Scientific Communities and Networks before World War Two
PART I
Conclusion
PART II
Collaborative Networks in War and Peace
3 Mobilizing for War: Making Pennicillin in Britain and the United States
Collaboration and Resistance: Developing Penicillin and the Synthetic Anti-Histamines in
4
France
PART II
Conclusion
PART III
Continuity and Change in Medical Science and Industry after World War Two
5 ‘Continuity through Revolution’ in France
6 ‘Revolution through Continuity’ in Britain
PART III
Conclusion
Conclusion: The Power of Rhetoric, and a Tale of Two Cultures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book is based on my doctoral thesis, carried out at Oxford University,
and completed in 2000. I am grateful for the guidance and opportunities,
which my two supervisors Robert Fox and Paul Weindling gave me then,
and continue to give me today. I have since then worked in collaboration
with Frank James, Judy Slinn, and Roy Church. I thank all three for
associating me with their stimulating projects. I am indebted to the
Wellcome Trust, which funded my post-doctoral fellowship as well as my
D.Phil., enabling me to continue working on pharmaceutical archives in
France as well as in Britain. Working on these archives has been a rare
privilege, for which I thank especially AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Aventis, and
all those responsible for keeping their records and making them accessible
to me, in particular Olivier de Boisboissel, Audrey Cooper, Dr Jean
Gaillard, Carolyn Naylor, Dr David McNeillie, and Gérard Nichele.
Over the years the staff of the Pasteur Institute have given me invaluable
assistance: Denise Ogilvie, Stéphane Kraxner, and Daniel Demellier in the
archive centre, and Annick Perrot in the photographic library. Similarly,
Hélène Chambefort has kindly guided me through the archives of INSERM,
as has Eric Sidebottom, through the photographic collection of the Sir
William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford. The staffs of the Public
Record Office (now the National Archives Centre), the Contemporary
Medical Archives Centre, and the Bodleian Library, also deserve my
acknowledgements for their hard work and dedication.
I am particularly grateful to scientists for granting me interviews, and
allowing me a glimpse of their lives, especially the late Norman Heatley,
whose kindness and encouragement gave me confidence as I embarked on
what was for me then an unfamiliar subject, the history of penicillin. This
book is therefore the result of a long, personal journey, which has taken me
from the French school of social history, to the British school of history of
science, technology and medicine. Along the way I have been lucky enough
to receive help from numerous colleagues, many of whom I would now
count as my friends. The meeting I had with Jonathan Liebenau and Mike
Robson at the London School of Economics many years ago helped to
launch me on my project to compare the French and British pharmaceutical
industries. Since then, it has been enriched by published and unpublished
material kindly made available to me by Pnina-Abir Am, Jon Agar, Carol
Beadle, Jaye Chin-Dusting, Roger Cooter, Tony Corley, Diane Dosso,
Desmond Fitzgerald, James Foreman-Peck, Jean-Paul Gaudillère, François
Guinot, Sally Horrochs, Jean-Claude Jaignault, Christopher Lawrence,
Muriel Le Roux, Ilana Löwy, Séverine Massat-Bourrah, Kim Pelis,
Dominique Pestre, Judy Slinn, Jeff Sturchio, Steve Sturdy, Charles
Suckling, and Keith Williams.
It has also benefited from discussions with colleagues who have read
various chapters, especially Sophie Chauveau, Frank Bennetts, Jean-Paul
Gaudillière, Muriel Le Roux, Jean-François Picard, Eric Sidebottom, and
Judy Slinn. I am particularly grateful to John Krige, for his faith in the
book, and for his constructive comments on an earlier draft. Needless to say
any mistakes or shortcomings are entirely my own.
Finally I would like to thank Nick, whose career in industry and
academia inspired this project, for his feedback and support. I dedicate the
book to Thomas and Amélie, for whom it has been an almost constant
companion over the years. May it encourage them to learn about and enjoy
their two cultures, as I have done.
Introduction
A History of Collaborative Relationships
[Let us attempt] a small experiment in collaboration. One of your factory
chemists, for example, could contact me in order to pursue Mr
Firmenich’s research, even if it means sending Firmernich the results of
the work later for a publication.1
I agree with you that the scheme in the form which it has now reached is
of little interest. I think however that it may still have a token value and
may be useful in the future […] This is truly an experiment in
collaboration if nothing else!2
The importance of co-operation in the conduct of everyday life, and in the
organization of economic and political affairs has long been recognized.3 In
the last decades of the twentieth century, it has generally become accepted
that innovation in high-tech industries is underpinned by collaboration
between companies and scientists, especially academic scientists.4 Although
academic-industrial connections have sometimes led to concerns about
academic freedom and conflicts of interest, it has also been observed that
scientific advances often depend on these connections.5 Reflecting the
developments taking place in science and industry, the role of co-operation
in generating scientific, technological and medical change has therefore
received keen interest from historians and sociologists.6 Network theory in
particular has proved a rich vein for them to follow.7 More recently,
scholars studying the development of academic-government-industrial
linkages in the second half of the twentieth century have written about the
appearance of a ‘triple helix’,8 and, by analogy with the scientific-military-
industry complex of the Cold War, about the development of a ‘biomedical
complex’.9 However, there have been relatively few histories of
collaboration, and the exceptions have tended to focus on the United States
of America.10
This book is on the history of collaborative relationships between
scientists and drug companies, and the contribution these have made to the
growth of the biomedical complexes of two countries usually left out of
theliterature on academic-industrial relations, Britain and France. It
identifies the two countries’ principal pharmaceutical research networks,
and follows their development from the 1890s, when they emerged, until
the 1980s, when faced with the rise of the new biotechnology and with
global competition in the pharmaceutical industry, they underwent their
most recent wave of change. The purpose of the book is therefore threefold:
1) to describe the growth of collaborative networks between scientists and
drug companies in Britain and in France; 2) to analyse the changes that
affected them; 3) to propose an explanation for these changes.
A. Sources and Argument
While medical researchers are often less likely to confess their links with
industry, chemists or pharmacists are generally less reluctant to admit to
them. Nevertheless, because in the standard biographical material their
importance is often played down, the best way to study such links is to look
at primary, unpublished sources.11 Using new evidence, based on private as
well as public archives, and adopting a comparative approach in order to
emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between Britain and
France, I argue that, contrary to the common perception that scientists and
companies in Britain and France learnt to co-operate as a result of World
War Two12 collaborations were already well established before the conflict
broke out. Fruitful academic-industrial relations had developed between a
small number of scientists and companies in response to growing scientific
and industrial competition at the turn of the century.13 They were
strengthened by World War One, and expanded throughout the inter-war
period. Although World War Two constituted an important turning point in
the history of academic-industrial interactions, the relationship between
scientists and pharmaceutical firms did not grow closer as a result of the
conflict. The one-to-one relations that had been predominant until then were
replaced by a looser, triangular relationship with the state, which thereafter
became more actively involved in the ‘experiments in collaboration’ that
were drugs. The period at the heart of this study (1935–65), which is often
referred to as the ‘golden age of drug discovery’ or the Therapeutic
Revolution,14 was therefore one of transition, from one social order or
model of behaviour to another. These changes, common to Britain and
France, mirror the evolution of co-operative research in America, which has
been described by John Swann.15 This shared evolution begs an
explanation.
It was the product of a common geopolitical context, but it was also
driven by the science and technology that were embodied in drugs and, with
them, crossed institutional and national boundaries. Thus, like the conflict
out of which it emerged, penicillin was a turning point in the history of
academic-industrial relations. The science and technology that produced
penicillin also transformed the institutions, the companies and, beyond
them, wider society.16 The scientists quoted above were well aware that
society, as well as science and technology, was being fashioned in their
laboratories.17 The evidence provided by this book fully supports their
view. However, before summarizing it, I describe a basic problem which
has long pervaded the literature on the interaction between science and
industry. It is the problem of ‘backwardness’ and ‘decline’.18
B. Science and Industry in Britain and France, or the Problem of
Backwardness and Decline
The alliance between science and industry has often been seen as the key to
economic success.19 Two countries whose economies underwent a
considerable expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Germany and the United States, have had their success attributed in large
measure to the growth of industrial research laboratories, and to the close
contacts established between these laboratories and academic institutions.20
Conversely, when economic failure or industrial backwardness have been
diagnosed, they have often been attributed to a poorly developed
relationship between science and industry, as in the case of Britain and
France for the same period.21 These historical analyses echo the concerns of
contemporaries, worrying about the state of decline of their two great
nations.22
Such analyses, originally made about the sectors that led the Second
Industrial Revolution (the chemical and electrical industries), have also
been applied to the pharmaceutical sector, which came to greater
prominence in the twentieth century. The literature on Germany and the
United States suggests that, before World War Two, the co-operative
relationship forged between academic scientists and drug companies was an
important feature of the development of a modern pharmaceutical industry,
that is to say an industry that is innovative, and characterized by high levels
of concentration and investment in research.23 In his book Medical Science
and Medical Industry, Jonathan Liebenau has linked the growth of
Philadelphia-based companies to the strong connections they developed
with local medical practitioners.24 Similarly, in the co-operative relationship
established between academic scientists and firms such as Eli Lilly, Swann
has seen the key to the expansion of the American pharmaceutical industry
in the 1920s and 1930s.
On the other hand, the pharmaceutical industries of Britain and France,
like their economies as a whole, have traditionally been considered as
relatively backward until after World War Two.25 It has also been assumed
that their recent success has been due to the changes that occurred when,
finally, they learnt from the example of their rivals, invested in research and
development (R&D), and developed better links with academic
institutions.26 Such a body of literature prompts three questions. These
provide the framework for the book, which is in three parts.
C. The United States: A Model?
The first question is therefore whether the American example, which is
often held up as the epitome of modern entrepreneurship,27 could be used as
a model for the study of other countries. Could the argument be reversed,
and could it be that where the pharmaceutical industry had not developed
modern characteristics to the same degree as in the United States, for
instance in Britain and France, there was little co-operation between
companies and scientists outside the industry? In his thesis comparing the
French and British pharmaceutical industries in the 1920s and 1930s, Mike
Robson has suggested that this was indeed the case.
1. Comparing Britain and France with the United States
Robson has written that the co-operation between academic scientists and
drug companies was less well developed in France than in Britain, and, in
turn, was less well developed in Britain than in the United States.28 He has
reached his conclusions after applying the typology established by Swann
for the same period.
Swann has distinguished between three types of collaboration at the time
of expansion in university-industry interactions: there were collaborations
with scientists as general consultants, as specialist-consultants, and as
project researchers. Swann’s typology is derived from the company Eli
Lilly’s own ‘very elaborate system of contacts with the community of
academic biomedical scientists’.29 It is therefore based on the various
functions scientists fulfilled for the benefit of a particular pharmaceutical
firm. It is meant as a heuristic device, inviting comparisons with other
sectors of the economy and with other countries. However, it also rooted in
the institutional and organisational culture of the United States, and
historians carrying out comparative investigations might wish to question
its value as a tool for assessing other national contexts.30
Nevertheless, in his thesis Robson has attempted to apply Swann’s
typology to Britain and France. Although he has found that Swann’s
typology held quite well in the case of Britain, in the case of France, apart
from Ernest Fourneau, he has seen no other example of general consultancy.
Rhône-Poulenc’s interaction with the Pasteur Institute seemed to have been
mainly on the basis of particular research projects. The closest one came to
specialist consultants in France was with the contacts established between
companies and medical faculties for the clinical testing of new drugs.
Robson has concluded that co-operation between scientists and the
pharmaceutical industry was less well developed in France than it was in
Britain.31 However, he has admitted that the information was lacking in
order to assess the French situation properly, especially with respect to
small and medium companies.
Yet, Robson has found that the British and French situations represented
a departure from the American model in two significant respects: the greater
importance of institutional links, and the greater mobility of scientists
between academic and industrial positions on this side of the Atlantic. In
Britain, he has identified the Medical Research Council (MRC)’s Chemo-
therapy Committee, the National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR),
which at times acted as ‘a broker for technical information’, and the Lister
Institute-Allen & Hanburys connection.32 To his British examples I would
also add the enduring link between the Pasteur Institute and Rhône-Poulenc
in France.
In Britain and France scientific institutions therefore played a similar role
to that played by companies in the United States, in helping to shape the co-
operative behaviour of scientists and pharmaceutical firms. However,
individual researchers and their networks were also important. Thus, there
was greater mobility between academic and industrial circles in Britain and
France than there appeared to be in the United States. In Britain, there were
many examples of career switches by senior scientists. In France, the
practice of cumul, the accumulation of academic and/or industrial positions,
at a senior level at least, created permeable boundaries between the
academic and industrial realms. Before World War Two, the scientific
professions may therefore not have been ‘fixed’ as either academic or
industrial to the same extent in Britain and France as they were in the
United States, or as they became later.33
As well as these two major differences between the model proposed by
Swann and the French and British cases, there is another important aspect
of the American example that is not necessarily applicable to either Britain
or France. It is the extent to which interactions were regulated. As Leigh
Hancher has pointed out in her book on government and the pharmaceutical
industry, much of the literature on economic regulation is of American
origin. As a result, it has ‘been influenced by the historical, legal, and
political development of regulation in the USA’ and ‘reflects certain implicit
assumptions about the proper place of regulation in modern democratic
systems’.34
This may also be true of the study of academic-industrial co-operation.
The tendency to regard the United States, or Germany, as a model that other
countries had to emulate in order to progress has long permeated the
historiography on the interaction between science and industry, and has
carried with it two assumptions: the first, that there is basically one road to
progress, and that countries that deviate from it have in some way ‘failed;35
the second, that there is a scale of development, from ‘backward’, to less
backward, to more advanced, which makes it possible to measure this
progress.36 A more fruitful approach may be to study academic-industrial
relations on their own merits, without any preconceived ideas about
whether they are the cause, or result, of economic success or failure.
2. Different kinds of co-operation?
There are a number of different typologies of co-operation, which suggests
that the form and content of academic-industrial relations may not only vary
according to the context in which they develop, but that they may also
change over time. One such typology is Chin-Dusting et al.’s ‘common
types of academic-industrial relationships’:
1. Consultations and fee for service including contract research
outsourcing;
2. Competitive grants sponsored by industry;
3. Industrial sponsorship of investigator-led research;
4. institute-institute liaisons;
5. academia, industry and the government;
6. academic spin out companies.37
Although their typology fits particularly well the end of the twentieth/
beginning of the twenty-first centuries in modern, Westernized nations, the
authors have noted that the term ‘relationship’ implies a special
connectivity, which goes far beyond the joint effort detailed under each
heading.38 The term ‘collaborative relationships’ is therefore broadly
applicable to different times and different contexts. Hence it is used
throughout this book, which spans both sides of the Channel, as well as a
relatively long time period.
The collaborative relationship forged between Ernest Fourneau and
Poulenc Frères (from 1928 a part of Rhône-Poulenc), which set the tone for
other relationships in France,39 was not based on a formal contract. As to
Henry Dale, who influenced the development of a collaborative relationship
in Britain,40 he did not consult for industry after he left the Wellcome
Physiological Research Laboratories (WPRL) for the NIMR. Nevertheless,
before World War Two, co-operation with scientists occurred in Britain and
France. However, it was often informally organized, in an ad hoc fashion,
and was based on strong personal connections.
Consequently, it may be more difficult in Britain and France to reduce
the interaction to the service rendered by scientists to drug companies,
unlike in the United States where industry was the ‘prime mover’ in co-
operative research. Until World War Two, British and French scientists and
