After World War Two, the applications of basic discoveries in biology took off—and became
big business.
Today, we’ll look at the rise of Big Pharma and GMO foods.
We’ll also discuss how life-science technologies fundamentally changed reproduction: it’s
time to invent In Vitro Fertilization and clone a sheep!
[Intro Music Plays]
When we left medicine and the brain sciences,
one had antibiotics and the other had talk therapy—which were major developments.
But many disorders still lacked effective treatments.
That changed during the Cold War.
Brain science took off, and several researchers found, starting with animal models, that treating
brains with different chemicals could affect mood and behavior.
One of the first blockbuster brain drugs was a compound called chlorpromazine, better known
by the brand name Thorazine.
Approved for psychiatric use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1954, Thorazine
is an antipsychotic.
It reduced the need for electroconvulsive treatment.
More patients returned to their families.
And it’s still used today.
Another early blockbuster was meprobamate, the first of the
“minor tranquilizers”—nowadays, called anti-anxiety medications.
Different companies marketed versions of meprobamate, the biggest of which was Miltown.
Miltown became the bestselling drug in the U.S.
Some historians estimate that five percent of all Americans were on Miltown by the late
1950s.
It became normal to take tranquilizers.
There was even a Miltown Martini—the Miltini!
Kids at home (and irresponsible adults): do not put tranquilizers in alcohol!
Tranquilizers were the first scientifically created, advertising-promoted drugs for the
“worried well”—people who mostly functioned in society, such as problem children and those
neurotics in talk therapy.
Then in the early 1960s, drug company Roche developed diazepam, the first
anti-anxiety drug of the benzodiazepine family.
“Bennies,” which you may know from the brand name Valium, worked faster and longer
than Miltown.
Like Miltown, Valium affected culture.
These pills became commonplace.
You might have heard them called “mother’s little helpers.”
This nickname tells the story of the U.S. at the time: most women worked at home, many of them suffering
from the “problem with no name”—which we now might call Depression and Anxiety,
owed in part to a lack of options, respect, and rights.
The new anti-anxiety pills worked to calm worried brains—but they didn’t change
a patriarchal culture.
More openly debated at the time was the first drug to treat mood disorders such as bipolar
disorder, lithium.
Starting around 1950, some psychiatrists called for the naturally occurring element lithium
to be used prophylactically as a mood stabilizer—that is, to prevent a mood disorder.
Lithium can cause serious side effects, however, that make patients feel sluggish and out of
it—“stable” but not exactly great, depending on the dose.
So the FDA only approved lithium for prophylactic use in 1974.
Drugs for major depressive disorder were also controversial.
In the 1960s, psychiatrist Joseph Schildkraut put forward the chemical imbalance theory:
basically, since antidepressants seem to work by elevating levels of norepinephrine and
serotonin, depression may be caused by a lack of these critical neurotransmitters.
This theory is widely talked about, but it’s never been proven.
Where are you, scientific method?
Still, in 1987, the antidepressant fluoxetine—marketed as Prozac—was sold as the first selective
serotonin reuptake inhibitor, based on the imbalance theory.
But pills were not the only ways of making money from research on bodies.
Another was the ability of medical researchers to turn certain samples of human tissues into
immortalized cell lines using tissue engineering.
These cells don’t die out, but keep growing indefinitely.
Experimenting on living humans can be dangerous and complicated.
Trying out new drugs on a dish full of human cells is cheaper and safer.
But the cells came from a specific human, and the new practice of immortalizing cell
lines raised thorny questions about ownership.
Help us out, ThoughtBubble.
The very first human cell line to be immortalized has been experimented upon on every continent
and in outer space, helping thousands of researchers develop new therapies.
And it came from someone who didn’t give consent and received no reward.
Henrietta Lacks was an African-American housewife in Baltimore who showed up at Johns Hopkins
in 1951 complaining of abdominal pain.
She was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer.
As he’d done with hundreds of incurable cancer patients before, cell biologist George
Gey took a biopsy, or tissue sample, and tried to keep it alive, giving it the
kind of nutrients it would get from the body, but in a machine he’d designed called a
roller drum.
Lacks’ tumor cells could keep growing, unlimited by the size of a dish.
His idea was that, since cancer cells divide aggressively and don’t rely on a plan from
the body, they might be easier to keep alive forever outside of one.
Gey had tried and failed many, many times before, so he was surprised when Lacks’
cells seemed to happily divide and divide, never dying out.
His persistence paid off!
Gey freely shared the cells with other researchers, and the cell line—HeLa—became
the most important cell line in biomedical research and remains so today.
By 1954, this strain of cells was being used by Jonas Salk to develop a polio vaccine!
And HeLa would later be used for cloning human cells and developing in vitro fertilization.
Buuut…
Henrietta Lacks—the human, with a family and friends and dreams and bills—was long
dead.
She had never consented to having her cells used for research.
Her family was not aware of HeLa’s existence until 1975.
And they didn’t receive any compensation.
Thanks, ThoughtBubble.
As historian Hannah Landecker explains, HeLa is a particularly loaded technology.
To Gey and many scientists, it was clearly a gift to science.
To the Lacks family, the cell line clearly represented the historical and continuing
oppression of black women: black body parts used by white people to make knowledge and,
in the process, make money…
Eerily reminiscent of slavery.
At least HeLa doesn't cost anything.
This is not the case with all cell lines.
In 1976, John Moore underwent treatment for hairy cell leukemia at the UCLA Medical Center
under the supervision of Doctor David Golde.
He developed tissue from Moore’s cancer into a cell line, Mo, that was later commercialized
for millions of dollars.
In 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled that Moore had no right to any share of the
profits realized from the commercialization of anything developed from his “discarded”
tissue.
The lucrative cell line is owned by the regents of the University of California—not the
man from whose body the cells were taken.
New technologies also raised new questions in agriculture.
You’ve probably heard of GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.
A GMO has had its genome, or DNA blueprint, edited to include genes from another organism.
Genetically transforming microbes took off starting in 1973.
The first genetic engineering techniques didn’t work with complex organisms, but new techniques
soon followed.
In 1977, a biologist named Mary-Dell Chilton
used an altered form of a common bacterium called Agrobacterium tumafaciens to insert
genetic material from a foreign species into a plant.
Agrobacterium works by forming a plant tumor, called a gall, on the roots of a plant.
Chilton’s breakthrough was followed by similar work in Belgium.
But she became—and remains—the “Queen of Agrobacterium.”
In the 1980s, chemical companies used her work to develop GMO crops.
In 1983, John Sanford and Edward Wolf invented a mechanical means of genetically transforming
plants at Cornell—the gene gun.
This was also used to make GMOs.
The first approved GMO was a pest-resistant tobacco in China, in 1992.
The same year, the U.S. approved the first GMO to eat—a bruising-resistant tomato,
the “Flavr-Savr,” marketed under the farmy-sounding name “MacGregor’s.”
These tomatoes contained a gene that turned off the enzyme that breaks down pectin.
This kept them from going soft on long truck-rides from Mexico.
In the 1990s, a company developed the super-fast-growing AquaAdvantage salmon—the first GM animal
for food.
Canada approved it, and the FDA ruled the salmon safe in 2015.
But the next year, they postponed AquaAdvantage’s release “until final labeling guidelines
for informing consumers of such content are published.”
And they’ve postponed every year since.
But the big money GMOs, which at first faced little pushback from consumers, are grains
In 1995, Bt corn was registered with the EPA.
Farmers have used Bt, a pesticide derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis
, since 1920.
On its own, the pesticide is considered organic!
Around the same time, Monsanto introduced
“Roundup Ready” soybeans, resistant to their top pesticide, glyphosate.
The soybeans were followed by corn in 1998.
Each chemical company set up a vertical system, selling GM seeds and related herbicides.
And making tons of money as farmers buy both.
GMO grains are common throughout the United States, China, Argentina, and India, but largely
resisted in Europe.
The market for GMOs today is estimated at over three hundred billion dollars, all from
only four crops—soy, canola, cotton, and corn—modified with only two properties—herbicide
tolerance, insecticidal action, or both.
None of these makes foods more nutritious or better tasting.
These properties are all about yields for grains that are fed to animals or used as
ingredients.
So much of the recent controversy about GMOs isn’t really about the technology of changing
plant genomes, but the why behind these changes.
Other advances in genetics technologies were
more readily accepted: assisted reproductive technology.
In 1978, in England, Louise Brown became the first baby born using in vitro fertilization
or IVF.
“In vitro” means “ in glass”—babies conceived in dishes instead of wombs.
Basically, IVF and similar techniques involve isolating gametes, or sex cells, and moving
them around in labs.
Egg donation became possible soon after, in the 1980s.
Today, IVF, the donation of gametes, and other forms of assisted reproductive technology
are widely accepted.
But these technologies are often expensive, so not everyone has equal access to them.
Meanwhile, in agriculture, other cell biologists pushed new reproductive technologies.
Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, the first animal created using the technique somatic
cell nuclear transfer or SCNT—widely described as “cloning.”
Dolly was created by embryologist Ian Wilmut and others at the Roslin Institute of the
University of Edinburgh—and named after Dolly Parton!
SCNT is surprisingly simple: somatic cells are body cells, like from skin.
The nucleus of a somatic cell contains a DNA blueprint.
But it’s not normally enough to make a new organism—that requires gametes.
But with SCNT, the egg’s nucleus is sucked out by a micropipette, and the nucleus from
a somatic cell is inserted.
This causes the egg to start dividing—to make a baby—and means the genetic material
is from that somatic cell.
The baby is a “clone” of the somatic donor!
With new reproductive technologies, it’s technically possible to clone a baby human,
but that’s banned in most countries.
Also, cloning wouldn’t result in an exact copy of the single “parent,” just a child
with a similar genome.
Experience would turn certain genes on and off: this is called epigenetics.
And environmental stimuli matter more than genes in many cases: breathing in polluted
air, for example, is bad no matter how good the genes related to your lungs are.
Next time—we’ll introduce the life sciences equivalent of the atomic bomb: it’s time
for the Human Genome Project, forensic genetics, and a new “personalized” era in biotechnology.
Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all this nice people and our animation team is
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