Some might argue that protecting the nation in times of crisis is precisely what leaders are elected to do. History, however, gives us ample evidence that nationalism is counterproductive when it comes to meeting international medical challenges. Past emergencies suggest that major outbreaks are much more effectively contained through organized collaboration and cooperative diplomacy. When governments treat therapeutic breakthroughs as their exclusive national property, nobody wins.
As a case in point, we need look no further than the most transformative of all 20th-century medical technologies: penicillin. As the catalyst for the entire modern pharmaceutical industry, penicillin tells us much about both the promises and pitfalls of international medical cooperation. And like many of today’s coronavirus vaccines, this revolutionary drug was also once the subject of a transnational crash program.
The effort had its origins at the University of Oxford during the early years of World War II. There, medical researchers realized that fungal penicillin was so effective at killing bacteria that it might fundamentally alter the treatment of infectious diseases.
The scientists had a problem, however. British factories were not only already working at full capacity for the war effort, they were also being bombed nightly by the Luftwaffe. The only option to develop their breakthrough drug for mass distribution, it seemed, was to work bilaterally with the United States. The decision to share a potentially world-changing discovery with another country was not one to take lightly, but joint development promised to save more lives than either nation might do alone.
The Oxford team set off for the United States, smearing penicillin mold into the lining of their coats in case their flight was intercepted by Nazi saboteurs. Arriving safely in the United States, they settled in at a U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in Peoria, Ill., where they joined forces with American fermentation scientists. Although the United States had not yet entered the war, the Peoria scientists quickly understood that the two countries’ pooled knowledge might take penicillin to the next level. Together, the Anglo-American team devised dramatically effective new techniques to isolate, grow and mass-produce the fungus.
So successful were their advances, in fact, that the U.S. government’s main research agency took over the program, creating a medical “Manhattan Project” that brought together the enormous resources of the federal government, the scientific talents of American universities and the production knowledge of private companies such as Merck, Pfizer, Squibb and Lilly.
The U.K. continued sponsoring research on its side of the Atlantic, too, and London shared it freely with the Americans, while British diplomats worked to send new U.S. developments to British firms like Glaxo and Imperial Chemical. The intensity of the challenge and the speed of advancement broke down the usual barriers of national self-interest.