TY - JOUR
AU - Kinkela,, David
AB - In a thoughtful and informative book, Renilde Loeckx, the former Ambassador of Belgium to the Czech Republic, tells the story of a committed group of scientists who, through collaboration, discovery, and trial and error, developed a series of antiviral drugs to combat the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). For Loeckx, the discovery of Viread in 2001, the first of many antiviral drugs, marked an important moment in the history of science. But, as the book reveals, this scientific breakthrough was the culmination of nearly fifty years of antiviral research that transcended hostilities and the contentious politics of the Cold War. It is a story, Loeckx suggests, that “straddles the working of scientists across oceans and continents,” and also “across deep political and ideological divides” (10). Cold War Triangle focuses primarily on the work of prominent Czech scientist Antonín Holý and Belgium physician and biologist Erik De Clercq, who together developed Tenofovir disoproxil, which was marketed under the name Viread. Through their collaboration, however, Holý and De Clercq forged an international network of professional scientists amid the evolving political instability of the Cold War world. Holý, for example, flourished as a young scientist in pre-1968 Czechoslovakia, even serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Plank Institute in West Germany. As Soviet tanks crushed the promise of the Prague Spring, Holý’s collaboration with the West came to an abrupt halt. His isolation, however, would be short lived. De Clercq, who in 1964 became a researcher at the famed Belgian Rega Institute for Medical Research, travelled widely, building connections across the Cold War divide. It wasn’t until a 1976 symposium in Göttingen, West Germany, that Holý and De Clercq met and began a collaboration that was to outlast Cold War tensions. While the book focuses on the work of Holý and De Clercq, the final piece of the “Cold War Triangle” was John Martin, an American chemist and junior executive from the pharmaceutical multinational Bristol-Myers. Martin would later join and become the CEO of the American biotech firm Gilead Sciences, which not only produced Viread, but also developed other important anti-HIV drugs, including Emtrivia, Truvada, and Atripla. According to Leockx, “the triangular partnership, formed during the Cold War between Belgian, Czech, and American scientific teams, led the way to the most effective [HIV] treatment in the world today” (16). In describing the transnational networks of science that Holý, De Clercq, and Martin forged, Loeckx offers a revealing look into the work of scientists and the institutions in which they operated. From Cold War institutions like NATO to national and international organizations like the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB, Czechoslovakia), National Institute of Health (NIH), International Union of Biochemistry (IUB), and Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), scientists navigated the structures of power that both limited and expanded collaboration across borders. Indeed, the strength of this book is that it shows how states and institutions shaped the work of scientists throughout the Cold War period. In this regard, the search for antiviral drugs was not simply a scientific endeavor, but one defined by politics, whether cast by Cold War geopolitics or the political maneuvering to identify potential funding for research and conferences. Even though Loeckx emphasizes the apolitical goals of antiviral researchers in their search for scientific truth, the book also exposes how Cold War science required scientists to act politically to advance their individual or collective research agendas. Science and politics were never far apart. When the AIDS crisis emerged in the 1980s, the geopolitical realities of the Cold War hardened. U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who took a firm stance against the Soviet Union and communist allies, remained silent as the disease ravished communities throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It was not until 1985 that Reagan used the term AIDS in a public address. By that time, over 12,000 Americans had died from the disease, while thousands more succumbed globally. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to the Cold War, but the global impact of AIDS cast a dark shadow on the promise of a new historical moment. Yet, the dislocation of the Cold War divide unlocked new opportunities for scientific collaboration to tackle the escalating public health threat. Despite her lack of scientific training, Loeckx explains the evolution of antiviral research in much depth. She provides a nuanced description of scientific discovery, including wonderful portrayals of those promising research paths that came up empty. In doing so, she calls attention to different approaches to scientific inquiry that shaped the story of antiviral research and the discovery. Her story is not about science writ large, but rather biochemists, biologists, physicians, chemists, and virologists that chartered the path of discovery. These distinctions serve as important reminders about the limits of disciplinary knowledge within the broader framework of Cold War science. Leockx is also not a historian by training. As such, Cold War Triangle tells an important story, but one that suffers from the lack of sourcing and engagement with the secondary literature on history of Cold War science. Written with the intent of documenting a lost or ignored story, the book does not offer the analytical rigor one might expect from a historical monograph. Indeed, most of the citations are explanatory in nature although the story is rooted in primary documents. And the larger history of Cold War science and diplomacy is essentially absent, making the story of antiviral research devoid of other scientific debates that shaped the history of the Cold War in profound ways. This does not mean that Cold War Triangle is a bad book; it is not. But it does suffer from a framing that elides a broader discussion about the influence, impact, and legacy of Cold War science, diplomacy, and the search for antiviral answers to complex medical problems. Despite these limitations, Cold War Triangle provides an insightful description about some of the most important medical discoveries in recent history. It is a story of substance, and one that sheds light on the complexity of scientific discovery in an ever-changing political environment. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Discovering Antiviral Drugs in a Cold War World
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhy100
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/discovering-antiviral-drugs-in-a-cold-war-world-zeG0IP3A8J
SP - 592
VL - 43
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -