In 1972, the US and the USSR embarked on an ambitious program of scientific cooperation that included an active exchange in Malignant Neoplasms. A central focus of this exchange was furthering the drug development programs of both countries, and in the subsequent decade leading Soviet and American oncologists swapped chemotherapeutic preparations, protocols and scientific personnel in an effort to not only further the progress of chemotherapy but to provide a paradigmatic model of anti-cancer drug development for the rest of the world to follow.

But while successful interdisciplinary drug development programs were operational in both countries at the time, effective cooperation—to say nothing of the production of a paradigmatic model for the rest of the world—proved elusive. It wasn’t just that Cold War tensions erected bureaucratic barriers and strained personal relationships. Nor could the difficulties the exchange participants encountered in their attempts to design joint protocols and agree on common metrics be attributed to the usual difficulties associated with the production of universal knowledge by means of inherently local practices. Rather, as I argue in this paper, the cooperative project was stymied by the absence of a common rationality among the participants. Soviet and American researchers not only adhered to different protocols and employed competing metrics—they also had divergent understandings of biomedical science.