Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Biologics: An Introduction
- Part I Producing Nature
- Part II The Body Politics of Biologics
- Part III The Making of Contested Biologics
- 8 The Science of Measuring Vitamins: Quality Control and Competition in the Dutch Vitamin Industry before the Second World War
- 9 The German Pharmaceutical Industry and the Standardization of Insulin before the Second World War
- 10 ‘There is a Frog in South America / Whose Venom is a Cure’: Poison Alkaloids and Drug Discovery
- Commentary: Biologics, Medicine and the Therapeutic Revolution: Towards Understanding the History of Twentieth-Century Medicine
- Notes
- Index
8 - The Science of Measuring Vitamins: Quality Control and Competition in the Dutch Vitamin Industry before the Second World War
from Part III - The Making of Contested Biologics
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Biologics: An Introduction
- Part I Producing Nature
- Part II The Body Politics of Biologics
- Part III The Making of Contested Biologics
- 8 The Science of Measuring Vitamins: Quality Control and Competition in the Dutch Vitamin Industry before the Second World War
- 9 The German Pharmaceutical Industry and the Standardization of Insulin before the Second World War
- 10 ‘There is a Frog in South America / Whose Venom is a Cure’: Poison Alkaloids and Drug Discovery
- Commentary: Biologics, Medicine and the Therapeutic Revolution: Towards Understanding the History of Twentieth-Century Medicine
- Notes
- Index
Summary
No doubt few things had more impact on the academic field of biochemistry in the interwar period than industry's involvement in the production of vitamins and other pharmaceuticals. Hendrik Westenbrink, who worked as an administrator in one of the most important scientific laboratories for vitamin research in the Netherlands in the 1920s, harked back nostalgically to the time before the Great War, when ‘university laboratories were the only places where scientific activities could unfold and where researchers could work on the most topical subjects with the help of modest resources’. In a paper published in 1938 Westenbrink added that:
Nowadays different branches of industry are so interested in developing biochemistry in certain directions, that the mighty industrial research laboratories as well as the university laboratories funded by industry have taken the lead. All because of the large sums of money needed for human resources and instruments … The expenses for the rapid purification [of vitamins] are commonly only covered by those who expect to make a profit in the short or long run.
What Westenbrink described here had far-reaching consequences for university scientists. The more academic vitamin research grew dependent on commercial funding, the more scientists had to cope with the pressure and influence of industry.
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- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014