In Hot Blood: The Dog Days of Pharmacology

• In Event: Nonhuman Innovations, Nonhuman Disruptions - I: Life & Capital

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of pharmacokinetics, the study of how drugs move through the body. Pharmacokinetics, born around 1937 but not an established discipline until the late 1960s, has been central to establishing dosages for contemporary pharmaceuticals, safe treatment paradigms, and has shaped broader conceptualizations of the drug-using body. Although “species-specificity” was important to pharmacological study for much of the twentieth-century, it became particularly vexing for researchers hoping to understand whether drugs would be shaped by test animals in the same ways that they were shaped by humans.⁠ One result was the emergence of a concept, “interspecies scaling,” which helped establish thresholds across species lines.⁠ This paper argues that assumptions built into “interspecies scaling” calculations have been critical to ongoing debates over the use of certain antibiotics, including recent caution by the FDA about the heart risks of fluoroquinolones.

Author

• Brad Bolman, Harvard University