‘ATLANTIC CROSSINGS’ AND NETWORKS IN SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Griffith Edwards' diary extract 1 provides a snapshot of the American alcohol scene in the early 1960s as seen through the eyes of a British observer; but it also tells us something valuable about networks in science and medicine and how they worked, at least then. Recently historians have become interested in a phenomenon which they have termed ‘Atlantic crossings’2. By this they mean the flows of influence which operated across the Atlantic during the inter-war period. Rather than seeing those years as characterized by an isolationist United States, uninterested in socialized forms of health-care in Europe, this strand of research has focused upon the interactions with Europe which took place: the ‘policy transfer’ of ideas and practices. In all this the work of the Rockefeller Foundation in conjunction with the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO), the predecessor of the World Health Organization (WHO), was important. Recently the French historian, Lion Murard, has given us a particular example of that interaction, in his careful analysis of how the model of US community health statistics was transmuted in Europe in the 1930s into the League of Nations life, environment and health indices 3. Those networks may have been disrupted in the immediate postwar period. Certainly it came as a great shock to Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll when they were about to publish their initial work on the connection between smoking and lung cancer in 1950, to find that two Americans, Wynder and Graham, were publishing similar results. However, thereafter contacts developed apace in the emergent field of smoking research. The US tobacco industry, too, was sending its fact-finding observers to the United Kingdom in the 1950s 4. Edwards' piece shows how such networks were established, or perhaps re-established, during the postwar years in the developing field of alcohol studies and psychiatry. The United States was the exciting place to be and to find out what was going on, one had to visit. This practice was institutionalized in other areas of science. When the Medical Research Council wanted to find out what the Americans were doing in the organization of randomized controlled trials for childhood leukaemia in the 1960s, they sent the distinguished haemaotologist Leslie Witts to the United States on a fact-finding tour to report back to his committee 5. Being on the spot and making contacts personally was important. Different areas of science had different modes of networking across national boundaries. Jenny Stanton's work has pointed to the ‘blood brotherhood’ of those who worked on hepatitis B research in the 1970s, sharing tissues and samples 6. Nor did those traditions die away. Richard Hartnoll helped to develop European indices for capturing the prevalence of drug use through the ‘multi-city study’ which led ultimately to European epidemiological investigation under the aegis of the Lisbon Observatory. However, an initial impetus for that European exercise was the meetings of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-supported community epidemiology study in the 1970s (Richard Hartnoll, personal communication). Informal networks such as these have been of enormous importance for postwar science, yet have been little studied. Edwards points to the importance of such an experience early on and I agree. An opportunity in the late 1970s for me to visit the United States for other reasons was turned, with Edwards' help, and through his contacts, into a tour where I met some leading US drug researchers. With his introduction, key US researchers gave lunch, drinks or dinner to an unknown British historian. Nowadays, the ways networks operate are different. The opportunities for foreign travel are much greater and the number of overseas conferences when one can visit and meet other researchers much extended. In the last year a young historian working in our Centre has been to conferences in Canada and in Lisbon. Both would have been big events at one time for an historian, but now they are quite routine. That means, however, that contacts are narrower and discipline-specific. America is no longer so important—at least for historians—and Europe looms much larger, with networks which have existed only since the 1980s or 1990s. The value of a pre-planned tour, nevertheless, lies in the possible exposure to different modes of thought and ways of seeing. None.

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