Abstract
Since the 1930s the rise of molecular biology has been intimately connected with the rise of Rockefeller-inspired “biopower”, the visionary program developed by Warren Weaver that aimed to promote research and application of the life sciences, including psychology, to the aims of social control. For Weaver, a physicist, control of nature meant understanding processes at the most fundamental level of organization — atoms and molecules — leading to the greater power of prediction that such understanding would give. Inspired also by the Comtean view of the unity of the sciences, Weaver sought to make biology molecular by funding the disparate areas of genetics and biochemistry. This paper focuses on the “trading zone” between these two fields, and cryptanalysis (decoding practices) developed during World War II, to trace the evolving models and metaphors of gene structure (protein or nucleic acid) and function (information transfer) between 1930 and 1965. Such models led eventually to cracking the genetic code by Marshal Nirenberg and Heinrich Mattei in 1961.
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For example, Ernst Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1986), especially, “On Sensation and Orientation”, pp. 282–308; August Comte, The Essential Comte: Selected from the Course de philosophie positive, S. Andreski, ed. (London: Croom Helm, and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974 ). For an excellent treatment of the subject, see, Roger Smith, The Human Sciences ( New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997 ), Chapter 12.
Juan Enriquez, “Genomics and the World’s Economy”, Science, 281 (1998), pp. 925 926; Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Micro physics ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ), Chapter 9.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978). See also, Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Numbers”, Humanities in Society, V (1982), and The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Lily E. Kay, “Rethinking Institutions: Philanthropy as an Historiographic Problem of Knowledge and Power”, Minerva, 35 (1997), pp. 283–293.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). The title is taken from William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). But Wilson’s thesis is not merely an epistemic manifesto. It is also meant to be a weapon in the “culture wars” blaming the relativism of the social sciences, humanities, and the postmodern turn on their lack of incorporation into the sciences.
Raymond D. Fosdick, The Old Savage and the New Civilization (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), pp. 80–81; Rockefeller Archive Center (hereafter RAC), RG3, 915, Box1.1, from N-S Section, Annual Report, 18 April, 1933; and Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life. Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), Chapter 1.
RAC, RG3, 900, Box 24.184, Report of the Committee on Appraisal and Plan, 11 December, 1934, p. 25; Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life (cit. n. 5), p. 46; Warren Weaver, “Molecular Biology: Origins of the Term”, Science, 170 (1970), pp. 591–592.
Warren Weaver, “A Quarter Century in the Natural Sciences”, The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report (1958), pp. 28–34; Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life,Introduction.
Soraya de Chadarevian and Harmke Kamminga, Molecularizing Biology and Medicine: New Practices and Alliances, 1910s-1970s (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), especially, Steve Sturdy, “Reflections: Molecularization, Standardization, and the History of Science”, pp. 273–292; Kay, “Rethinking Institutions” (cit. n. 3).
Thomas H. Morgan, “Study and Research in Biology”, Bulletin of the California Institute of Technology, 36 (1928), p. 87.
Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob, “Teleonomic Mechanisms in Cellular Metabolism, Growth, and Differentiation”,Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 26 (1961) pp. 389–401
Lily E. Kay, “Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools: The Biology of Physicist Max Delbruck”,Journal of the History of Biology 18 (1985), pp. 207–246; SeymourBenzer, “The Elementary Units of Heredity”, in The Chemical Basis of Heredity, William D. McElroy and Bentley Glass, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), pp. 70–93; Joshua Lederberg, “Genetic Studies of Bacteria”, in Genetics in the Twentieth Century, Leslie C. Dunn, ed. ( New York: McMillan, 1951 ), pp. 281–292
See Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History, Osiris (Seccion Series) 2 (1986) pp. 225–264.
On the epistemic and social dimensions of the protein paradigm, see, Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life, Interlude l (cit. n. 5). RAC, RG2, 100, Box 170.1235, General Correspondence, Warren Weaver, 28 August, 1939 (Weaver citd T.R. Parsons, Fundamentals of Biochemistry, 5th ed. (Baltimore: W. Wood and Co., 1935 ). On the tetranucleotide hypothesis see, Robert C. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix ( London: Macmillan, 1974 ) Chapter 6.
RAC, RG1.1 205D, Box 4.23, grant application, Pauling to Weaver, 4 December, 1945, p. 2; Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I983); Kay, “Life as Technology: Representing, Intervening, and Molecularizing”, Rivista di Storia della Scienza (sec. II), I (1993), pp. 85–103.
California Institute of Technology Archives, Historical File, Box 88, Pauling File; “The Next Hundred Years”, KRCA-Channel 4, 13 December, 1958, p. 12
On the economy of discourse, see, Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon, ed.,(New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 92–133; on discourse and institutions see, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 222–224; and Kay, “Rethinking Institutions” (cit. n. 3).
Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A history of the Genetic Code ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 ), Chapter 1.
James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”, Nature,171 (1953), pp. 737–738. On Gamow, see, Richard M. Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetoric of Vitality and Post-Vitality in Molecular Biology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? (cit. n. 17), Chapter 4.
Sydney Brenner Files, Archive Box 2; Gamow to Watson and Crick, 8 July, 1953; see also, Lily E. Kay, “A Book of Life? How the Genome Became an Information System and DNA a Language”, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 41 (1998), pp. 504–528
Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? (cit. n. 17), Chapter 4.
Marshall W. Nirenberg synthesis in E. Coli upon naturally occurring or synthetic polyribonucleotides Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences47 (1961), pp. 1588–1602; Kay Who Wrote the Book of Life? (cit. n. 17), Chapter 6. and Heinrich J. Matthaei, “The dependence of cell-free protein
New Gains Cited on Genetic Code“, New York Times, 24 January, 1962, p.35; On early reactions (since 1963) to genetic engineering based on research on the genetic code, see, Charles Weiner, ”Anticipating the Consequences of Genetic Engineering: Past, Present, and Future“. In The Social Consequences of the New Genetics, Carl F. Cranor, ed., (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 2–31.
Carl E. Woese, The Genetic Code: The Molecular Basis for Genetic Expression ( New York: Harper, 1967 ), p. 17.
On the rise of biotechnology industries, see, Martin Kenney, Bio-Technology: The University-Industrial Complex (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Susan Wright, Molecular Politics: Developing American and British Regulatory Policy for Genetic Engineering, 1972–1982 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Herbert Gottweis, Governing Molecules: The Discursive Politics of Genetic Engineering in Europe and United States (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Linus Pauling, “Molecular Theory of General Anesthesia”, Science, 134 (1961), pp. 15.
Walter Gilbert, “Vision of the Grail”, in Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, eds., The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 ), pp. 83–97.
Postgenomics? Historical, Techno-Epistemic, and Cultural Aspects of Genome Projects (International Conference), Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin,Reprint 110 (1998)
On the behavioral genetics of Seymour Benzer, see, Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and his quest for the Origins of Behavior (New York: Knopf, 1999), and for a thoughtful review, see, Helen Epstein, “The Fly in the DNA”, New York Review of Books, (June 24, 1999), pp. 14–18. On neuroscience and consciousness, see Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988 ); Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness ( New York: Basic Books, 1989 ).
Roger Smith, “The Human Sciences as a Human Science”, Paper presented at the Boston Colloquia, December 7, 1998; Edelman, The Remembered Present (cit. n. 27), Chapter 15.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, “What is Life?” in Biology Today,John H. Painter Jr., ed. (Del Mar: CRM Books, 1972), pp. xxiv.
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Kay, L.E. (2001). Biopower: Reflections on the Rise of Molecular Biology. In: Allen, G.E., MacLeod, R.M. (eds) Science, History and Social Activism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 228. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2956-7_6
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