Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- 1 1894: “The foremost medical question of the day”
- 2 The Mulford Story
- 3 A Sharp & Dohme Interlude
- 4 The Virology Network and a New Program at Merck Sharp & Dohme
- 5 Hilleman's Innovations: First Phase
- 6 Dangerous Interlude
- 7 Transforming Bacteriology: A Second Phase
- 8 New Networks, New Leadership: The Hepatitis B Vaccines
- 9 Vaccine Innovation in the Nineties: New Strategies, New Opportunities, and Public Confrontations
- 10 Historical Perspectives on the Process of Innovation
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- A WORD ABOUT SOURCES
- INDEX
- Plate section
PREFACE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- 1 1894: “The foremost medical question of the day”
- 2 The Mulford Story
- 3 A Sharp & Dohme Interlude
- 4 The Virology Network and a New Program at Merck Sharp & Dohme
- 5 Hilleman's Innovations: First Phase
- 6 Dangerous Interlude
- 7 Transforming Bacteriology: A Second Phase
- 8 New Networks, New Leadership: The Hepatitis B Vaccines
- 9 Vaccine Innovation in the Nineties: New Strategies, New Opportunities, and Public Confrontations
- 10 Historical Perspectives on the Process of Innovation
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- A WORD ABOUT SOURCES
- INDEX
- Plate section
Summary
ALL OF THOSE readers who were rendered nervous by Richard Preston's bestseller, The Hot Zone, may find comfort in the following account of a century of increasingly successful efforts to develop vaccine and serum antitoxin defenses against infection. They will be comforted, we believe, but not entirely relieved of concern. The search continues. Viruses and bacteria continue to emerge and evolve, posing new threats to human life and health. The quest for preventive medicines has a history with chapters but no conclusion. As long as there is human life, we will need institutions that will sustain the search for innovative means of fighting infection.
In Networks of Innovation, our emphasis is on the private sector's contribution to the process of innovation in vaccines and antitoxins. But as our title indicates, we placed the activities of the H. K. Mulford Company, Sharp & Dohme, and Merck & Co., Inc., in their historical context – a context that identifies the complex, loosely integrated institutional and personal networks that fostered innovation in this industry. The first of the networks that we examine took shape in the late nineteenth century around the central ideas of the bacteriological revolution. Other networks with distinctive leaders, values, scientific findings, and organizations followed during the twentieth century. Many of the relevant institutions in these networks were nonprofit professional organizations; many of the leaders were scientists in universities and research organizations. There were, as well, public institutions, including a rich array of public health organizations at the local, state, and federal levels in the United States. Other institutions in these networks were international in scope.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Networks of InnovationVaccine Development at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–1995, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996