Or How A Future Twitter-Warrior’s Discovery of HeLa Cells Is Going to Ruin a Campaign

In the past, the history of medicine often sounded a triumphant narrative: a history of great (white) men discovering and implementing a series of scientific and clinical breakthroughs building upon one another for the improvement of humanity.

In more recent years, medicine’s story has come to not only evaluate progress, but also phases of stagnation, regression, or outright failure. Today, the history of medicine might be described as explaining our present complaints in healthcare: how we ended up with myriad of often contradictory beliefs and imperfect institutions focused on preserving and improving human health – and making a profit doing so.

Certainly, strategists whose work focuses on introducing brands to patients or HCPs, demand broad context. The content knowledge and analytical toolkit history offers remains extremely useful – especially in the wake of COVID 19.

Historical toolkits focus on analyzing and communicating narratives – and framing stories matters

Humans communicate and understand one another via narrative. We trade stories about our past, our communities, and even our day-to-day to bond with one another. Building brands means identifying narratives and experiences centrally important to an audience. The idea of a patient journey grounds many of the tactics we employ today. That is not only because it reflects data that delineates segments but because stories provide meaning, connection, community, and hope to those with clinical need.

Historians specialize in analyzing past narratives. Building an evidence-based argument as to why or how past events unfolded forms the core task of history as discipline. Like patients today, historical accounts of illness emphasize the complex feelings of isolation, disconnection, and need for comfort and community we experience when sick.

As we’ve become more digital, more awash in data, it has driven a need to recenter on the human elements of our work.  An ability to empathize, to frame and tell stories, to pry for the significance in narratives, remains incredibly valuable. Data is vitally important, but only insomuch as it’s context provides understanding.

Historical content knowledge helps rebuff claims about brand’s intentions.

As we have seen with misinformation during the COVID pandemic, untruths and half-truths spread on social media continue to pose a threat to brands seeking to communicate with HCPs, patients, and the especially the general public.

When a recent chemotherapy launched, Twitter (now X) activists and historians on my feed were quick to point out the links between nitrogen mustard chemotherapies and mustard gas, one of the First World War’s more horrifying weapons. These elementary connections generally ascribed a level of cut-throat, unscrupulous behavior to “Big Pharma.”

Ironically, this is far from the case. In the aftermath of World War I, scientists discovered some victims of mustard gas suffered from persistently low white blood cell counts. In the 1940s, concern for allied soldiers exposed to mustard gas in Italy spawned more rigorous investigations into nitrogen mustards. In an attempt to ameliorate its effects, researchers at Yale isolated the molecules that ravaged bone marrow. In 1951, Nobel laureate Gertrude Elion would synthesize mercaptopurine, or 6-MP, the first mass commercial treatment for lymphoma — and later ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.

Nitrogen mustards have been used safely in a clinical setting to treat ACL and APL since the mid-1950s. These were literally our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ cancer treatments.

Nitrogen mustards are by no mean the only issue here. There are dozens of such derivations that carry risk of striking social and political issues. Personally, I wait on X users to rediscover Henrietta Lacks whenever new gene therapies or cancer treatments reach market. So many of our successful therapies have involved derivations of HeLa cells, cells harvested without consent from a black mother, that this is one such issue that could easily erupt depending on the research lineage of a particular drug.

Until then, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Between Lacks’ death in 1951 and today, we’ve become much more race conscious across advertising and medicine. But that doe does not make the non-consensual collection of her tissue any less reprehensible, even if it unlocked hundreds of new avenues of research and therapies.