As Timothy Lenoir has argued, science is a cultural activity linked "in a seamless web" with social and political concerns and practices. The Committee on Drug Addiction's structural links to the federal drug policy bureaucracy, to university research departments, to the American Medical Association, and to the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the influences these groups exerted on the scientific research overseen by the committee, illustrate just how science is embedded in and part of a larger social world. A network of overlapping groups agreed on drug development as a useful approach to solving the social problem of addiction, creating a mosaic of interests within which each group achieved specific internal gains while offering support to a larger effort.
The parties involved included academic chemists and pharmacologists, philanthropies and social reformers, organized medicine as represented by the AMA, pharmaceutical firms, clinicians, public health officials, and law enforcement officials. A research problem that was compelling to all of these constituencies had the ingredients to secure durable funding and maintain long-term research interest. The quest for a nonaddicting analgesic thus functioned as a "boundary object" in the sense portrayed by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer. The project represented a meaningful objective for all the participating groups and thus provided a focus for coalition and collaboration. At the same time, it embodied different kinds of interests and different internal meanings within each group, so that each could pursue its distinct aims, while remaining allied in pursuit of the shared objective.
