Is Washington Bottlenecking SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH? - private sector has been responsible for medical breakthroughs

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1999 by Aaron Steelman

The private sector, which has been responsible for some of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, finds that the Federal government increasingly is crowding out investment and philanthropic giving.

In December, 1997, Pres. Clinton's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS issued its second progress report. It said that---despite establishing the Office of AIDS Research and declaring the development of an AIDS vaccine "a new national goal for science," one comparable to Pres. John F. Kennedy's call for the U.S. to put a man on the moon--the Administration's efforts have been subpar.

"Progress in the federal response to AIDS has stalled in recent months," charged the report, and funding for AIDS research "remains inadequate." Concurring with its general thrust, Sean Strub, publisher of Poz, a magazine for people with HIV and AIDS, said that the Clinton Administration "is immune to rhetoric; they just don't give a damn."

Central to the arguments of such critics is the assumption that the Federal government must do something about AIDS because, if it doesn't, nobody else will. Although government AIDS researchers have produced little, they are, the activists maintain, the best hope for progress against the dreaded disease.

Is that true? Should individuals dying of AIDS, or those who simply are concerned about the disease, place all their eggs in one basket--namely, in the hands of the Federal government? The historical record leads one to believe that the answer to those questions is no. The private sector has a long and distinguished record in advancing scientific research, having been responsible for some of the most significant scientific breakthroughs this century. If given the chance, the private sector likely would produce tangible results in the area of AIDS research as well.

* In the 1780s, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, began work on a vaccination for smallpox. After more than a dozen years of experiments funded entirely out of his own pocket, he found one. Jubilant, Jenner wanted to share his discovery with the public that had been terrorized by the dreaded disease. He approached the Royal Society of London, hoping that the government-sponsored group would publish the results of his work. He was turned down, told that the concept was too revolutionary and the evidence weak. So, he decided to publish his research himself. Appearing in 1798, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolae Vaccinae quickly became one of the most important books of its kind. In addition to helping slow the spread of smallpox, it sparked research into vaccinations for a number of other ills.

* In the late 1880s, Henry Mulford purchased the Old Simes drugstore in Philadelphia. Shortly after he acquired the business, he became bored and decided to enter pharmaceutical development, as did more than 140 other firms in Philadelphia during that period. Although the H.K. Mulford Company initially was not profitable, Mulford and his investors carried on. In 1894, they approached Joseph McFarland of the University of Pennsylvania to see if he would be interested in working for the company. McFarland conditioned his acceptance upon the receipt of a monthly salary of $100. Although money was tight and the company needed to sell 100 shares of stock in order to finance his research, the Board of Directors agreed. McFarland's first project was to develop a diphtheria antitoxin. He accomplished his goal within a year, and, in the early summer of 1895, Mulford was able to offer for sale the first commercial diphtheria antitoxin produced in the U.S. The breakthrough was, as historians Louis Galambos and Jane Eliot Sewell have written, "a credit to an entrepreneurial firm."

* The discovery of the structure of DNA largely was a product of private action. As Terence Kealey reports in The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, O.T. Avery became the first person to learn that DNA was the molecule of inheritance while working on a cure for pneumonia at the privately funded Rockefeller Institute in the 1940s. "Once Avery had discovered the importance of DNA," writes Kealey, "the subsequent development of molecular biology was inevitable-thus the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 became a race between three teams, Linus Pauling's in CalTech, Watson and Crick in Cambridge, and Franklin and Wilkins in London."

* Max Delbdick--who began his career as a physicist, but switched fields to genetics in the mid 1930s, eventually earning the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the genetic structure of viruses--also considered the financial assistance he received from the Rockefeller Foundation to be critical: "Without the encouragement of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937 and their continuing support through the mid-forties I believe I would hardly have been able to make my contributions to biology."

* The Rockefeller Foundation was instrumental in bringing penicillin to the market as well. Penicillin had been discovered in 1929 by English scientist Alexander Fleming, but most scientists--including Fleming--believed it was an unstable substance and doubted the medicinal value. Nevertheless, Oxford University researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Chain continued to explore the practical applications of penicillin and, in early 1939, applied to the government-run Medical Research Council in England for funding. Their request was rejected, so they turned to the Rockefeller Foundation. Florey, according to author Gwyn Macfarlane, "decided to appeal to them for a grant that would support his penicillin research for three years. He asked, in November, 1939, for 1,670 [pounds sterling] per annum for salaries and recurrent expenses and 1,000 [pounds sterling] for the initial cost of equipment, and he got even more than he asked for, since the Foundation gave him grants for five years. Chain and Florey were naturally elated. With financial worries allayed they could attack the real problem--the production, purification and testing of penicillin--from every available angle." Less than two years later, Chain and Florey had completed their work and Merck & Co. was producing penicillin for both the English and American markets. Chain and Florey shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Fleming in 1945.