Hailing a Miracle Drug: the Interferon

Abstract

In the 1970s cancer therapy became the focus of the increasingly politically powerful, critical health movement in America, highlighting the failures and severe side-effects of conventional cancer treatments: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Faced with unprecedented public criticism of the low success rate of the costly ‘battle against cancer’, the American cancer establishment was seriously under attack. It needed a scientific promise that suited the growing public demand for effective and less toxic cancer remedies. The politically well-informed supporters of a new type of cancer agent, named ‘interferon’, capitalized on this need and the popular desire for more natural and organic remedies. In publicly emphasizing the presumed non-toxic and natural qualities of interferon as both an unorthodox organic and science-based promise in the fight against cancer, they succeeded in getting interferon absorbed in the accelerating politics and economics of the American cancer scene. With the press blossoming into the most important agenda-setting forum, a boom in expectations was fuelled world wide, resulting in interferon acquiring ‘miracle drug’ status in the late 1970s.