Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley)
And the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)
Jeremy Greene
Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women's Hospital
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The Abnormal and the Pathological: Cholesterol and the Statins, 1950-2000
The early identification and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors, such as diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol, became central to American public health and private practice in the second half of the twentieth century. But the rise of cholesterol in this pantheon of prevention did not simply unfold directly from epidemiology and basic research into clinical practice; rather, the fall and rise of cholesterol-as-disease was tightly linked to the career of available therapeutics. Early optimism in cholesterol as a modifiable risk factor was undercut by the failure of pharmacologic and dietary interventions to demonstrate benefit during the 1950s and1960s, and consensus around the clinical importance of cholesterol reached a nadir in the 1970s. This talk maps the decline and fall of a promising cardiovascular risk factor, and traces the successful repathologization of cholesterol mediated by the National Cholesterol Education Program and the launch of the statin drugs in the 1980s and 1990s. As therapeutic reformers made clinical trials data the centerpiece for devising public health strategies and clinical guidelines, the private funding of post-marketing clinical trials became a vital linkage between economies of medical knowledge and economies of pharmaceutical development. This talk explores the interconnected history of drugs and diseases, and traces the historical relationship between commercial clinical trials, expert guidelines, and promotional strategies in the expansion of the target populations for cholesterol lowering therapy.
4:00PM
Monday, May 1, 2006
140 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: diana@berkeley.edu
