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La fondation Rockefeller et la recherche médicale |
Contents
1 . Helping Science to Develop
2 . Medical Research : a European Model
3 . Scientific Philanthropy: an American Invention
4 . An Institute for Medical Research in New York
5 . From Public Health to Medical Education
6 . Tuberculosis and Public Health
7 . A Science Fund to support Scientists
8 . Paris, Berlin, London
9 . The Economic Crisis and the Philanthropy
10 . Scientific New Deal
11 . « What Is Life? »
12 . The Peculiar Case of Biology in France13 . Modernization or Americanization of French Medicine?
14 . Research Becomes a Government Affair
Abstract
Why did the Rockefeller Foundation support medicine and biology above all, given the vast number of other possibilities open to scientific philanthropy? The initial answer follows from the utilitarian ethic which guided most American philanthropists who sought to work « for the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world », according to the famous logo of the Rockefeller Foundation. This implied choosing the place where their intervention could be the most effective, in order to respond to criticisms of the « Robber Barons », the crude architects of unbridled capitalism.
Another reason which is no less important, arose from the appearance of a new scientific medicine in Europe during the nineteenth century. In 1900, American medicine remained an empirical and largely ineffective practice which regarded with curiosity, but as a spectator, the creation of the first medical research institutes in Paris, London, and Berlin. As a result, the history of the Rockefeller philanthropies developed along three lines. The first was the creation of a Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, inspired by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which specialized in vaccination to support the implementation of public health policies. Next was the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation on the eve of the First World War, an organization whose goal was the modernization of medical education by supporting the development of research and the creation of medical schools at the great universities of the United States and elsewhere.
The progress in cell physiology and biochemistry soon convinced certain Rockefeller officers that modernization of medicine would gain more from biological research than public health programs. Following a reorganization prompted by the Great Depression, the Rockefeller Foundation helped support, through its new Natural Sciences division, the emergence of a new discipline: molecular biology. The Foundation was, therefore, an essential player in the development of a new approach to healing which saw the meeting of medicine and biology. In the case of France, the intervention of the American philanthropy played a crucial role by introducing the new biology into the laboratory (CNRS and INSERM) along with the new model of scientific medicine which exists to this day.
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