Malaria chemotherapy and the "kaleidoscopic" organisation of biomedical research during world war II.

The paper describes the organisational and scientific evolution of the US antimalarial program during World War II. This program screened some 14,000 compounds for antimalarial activity, selected atabrine as the drug of choice in 1943, and later identified chloroquine as a superior compound. It became, arguably, the largest biomedical research effort of the first half of the twentieth century, involving chemical and pharmaceutical companies, diverse university researchers, and non-profit and government laboratories. Beyond scientific research, the innovations of the wartime antimalarial program were chiefly in three areas, communication, scale and administration. The program drew on resources - intellectual, material and organisational - created in Germany by researchers at Bayer, and in the US by the Rockefeller Foundation and Institutes. The paper examines the antimalarial program as one of the formative models for later programs such as the National Institutes of Health. This account supports the claim that wartime work was essential to the development of NIH, if only because the confused and faltering structures of the early war years, 1939-1943, do not suggest that all the organisational infrastructure for large scale, multi-centre co-operative research was in place prior to World War II.