Basic scientific research on drug addiction in the United States represents a large scale public investment in science. Yet there is still virtually no systematic information, much less an organized body of knowledge, about the individual and social factors that contribute to the evolution of a specialist field like addiction studies (Edwards 2002, 383). The co-PIs have been gathering oral histories from a generation of scientific researchers who are on the cusp of retirement. We have built up substantial trust between ourselves and the scientific communities we study, which are composed of medicinal chemists, behavioral pharmacologists, neurobiologists, and geneticists whose work is centered on elucidating the basic mechanisms of drug addiction. The completed and proposed interviews form the evidence base for the individual and joint scholarly work we are proposing: Campbells current book project, Science Says: The Laboratory Logics of Substance Abuse Research, which traces the succession of scientific approaches from the 1940s to the early 1980s, and Spillanes ongoing series of articles on the history of drug abuse liability assessment. These intellectual projects will be strengthened by completion of the historical record through the remaining interviews proposed. The interviews will also provide the basis for two new articles that characterize the conceptual, methodological, and institutional production of scientific knowledge in the field of substance abuse research. We are seeking support to complete the interviews, and to transcribe, edit, and archive them on a searchable web-based database that we have already designed. The proposed study has two primary aims: 1) To create new knowledge in the form of books and articles analyzing how scientific research has been organized in this highly interdisciplinary field, and how it is shaped by social and technological change, shifting patterns of public scrutiny, and the persistent recurrence of drug abuse as a social problem; and 2) To make our data available to the wider public, drug policy makers, and especially to the scientific research community itself. The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in its substantial contribution to the science and technology studies (STS) literature on translation of basic research into useful knowledge and the design of interdisciplinary research collaborations. The project provides a case study on public investment in science, showing what factors facilitate or impede translation of basic research into wider use. The second source of the projects intellectual merit lies in the production of a new supply of primary data in the form of oral histories of scientists and a searchable, web-based archive that will make this material accessible. The broader impacts of the proposed study will be to make available knowledge and experience gained by a scientific community that has been engaged in national and international drug policy making over the past thirty years. Results of the study will be used to stimulate more reasoned public debate on the conduct of drug abuse liability testing, and on relations between the pharmaceutical industry, government, and academia more generally. Finally, it is intended to increase the visibility of the substance abuse research field by mapping the social organization of a public science. It will assist those who seek to attract younger scientists to an ongoing social and scientific problem.
