Staging cancer research
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Staging cancer research Robin Wolfe Scheffler: A contagious cause: the American hunt for cancer viruses and the rise of molecular medicine. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019, 368pp, $120.00 HB $40.00 PB Robert Dean Smith1 Published online: 23 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In A Contagious Cause, Robin Wolfe Scheffler documents the emergence and validation of cancer virus research in the USA across the twentieth century. This book traces how public, philanthropic, and scientific actors negotiated the place of cancer virus research within political culture at a time when the existence of cancer viruses in humans was unproven, and analyses the debates regarding the moral imperative to address cancer. With the stakes extending beyond the bench and the bedside, securing funding for cancer virus research required more than just “rational” biomedical progress. Scheffler shows how the success of cancer virus research necessitated mobilizing public sentiments of hope and fear, securing public interest through grandiose, often nearly theatrical engagement, and drawing upon visual materials inscribed with rhetorical arguments which suggested the “progress” of research. In Chapters 1 and 2, Scheffler introduces cancer virus research through anecdotes about the public perception of cancer, beginning with a report of a “cancer epidemic” in Illinois in 1961. Lacking an understanding of the etiology of cancer, public and scientific perception alike associated cancer with miasmatic germ theory. Theories of cancer causation ranged from speculations of “conditions of earth and water common to all the individuals attacked” (27) to hereditary transmission. Without a knowledge of cancer’s etiology, “a multifactorial model of causation allowed accommodation” for competing theories (45). This lack of understanding generated a fear amongst the public which in turn promoted a sense of urgency for scientists to address the problem of cancer. These chapters frame the book, which tells a story of cancer research that was often dependent upon more than the validity of knowledge, resting upon the hopes and fears of publics which in turn fostered confidence in scientific knowledge.
* Robert Dean Smith [email protected] 1
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
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Metascience (2020) 29:437–440
In Chapters 3 and 4, Scheffler returns us to the 1930s when the networks that would later be necessary to support cancer virus research began to crystallize. At first, cancer research was stalled by the medical profession’s “hardening resistance” to the involvement of public, philanthropic, and private actors due to fears that this involvement might “infringe on the discretion of doctors” (65). With little known about cancer, by the 1940s the medical profession had established their authority over the disease, stressing its “biological complexity” and promoting a general pessimism which aimed to “limi
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