Standardization of biological medicines: the first hundred years, 1900-2000.

The use of materials of biological origin in medicine has a long history. These materials, including tissue, organ and microbial extracts, blood and its derivatives, antibodies and hormones, share the feature that for much of the last century the ability to characterize and quantify the active substance was limited. Quantification of these substances depends on biological standardization, a discipline that was refined to a science by the Medical Research Council from the 1920s onwards, and which, with contributions from several prominent Fellows of the Royal Society, including principally Sir Henry Dale, the UK has led the world to the present date.