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Machines in Our Hearts: The Cardiac Pacemaker, the Implantable Defibrillator, and American Health Care (review)

drug, was deemed necessary. Many companies were interested, but eventually the National Cancer Institute handed over its responsibility for and interest in Taxol to Bristol-Myers Squibb, who successfully, and unusually, trademarked the common name “Taxol” to denote their proprietary substance. A publicly funded search had resulted in a private compound. This informative work explores several different worlds. That of the plant collectors, taxonomists, forest rangers, and loggers who collected the initial trial plants in the 1950s and filled the large orders for Taxus bark in the 1960s and 1970s is contrasted with that of the political activists and environmentalists who questioned the ownership of the forest and its products in the 1980s, and of the chemists, pharmacologists, and toxicologists who investigated the plant extracts and their properties, and the clinical practitioners and policy makers eager for a cancer cure at almost any price. The authors have been diligent in searching conventional archives and records and the published scientific and government records, and in resourcefully using the personal interview and oral history sources that are increasingly necessary to historians of the recent past. The only drawback to the book is the occasional intrusion of the analytical tool of actor-network theory, which emphasizes the “biographical” nature of the project. This examination of what Taxol was and is to many different communities and individuals at different stages of its development stands as a comprehensive and gripping book without such unnecessary diversions.