Review: Molecular Biology, Macroscopic History

Reviewed Work(s):A History of Molecular Biology by Michel Morange; Matthew Cobb

Bruno J. Strasser

BioScience, Vol. 49, No. 11. (Nov., 1999), pp. 929-931.

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0006-3568%28199911%2949%3A11%3C929%3AMBMH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W

BioScience is currently published by American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/aibs.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.orgTue Nov 13 16:49:38 2007

Books

Freemuth J. 1991. Islands Under Siege: National Parks and the Politics of External Threats. Lawrence (KS):University of Kansas Press.

Frome M. 1992. Regreening the National Parks. Tucson (AZ): The University of Arizona Press.

Kay C. 1994. Aboriginal overkill: The role of Native Americans in structuring western ecosystems. Human Nature 5: 359-398.

LeopoldA, Cain S, Cottam C, Gabrielson I, Kim-ball T. 1963. Wildlife management in the national parks. Transactions of the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conferences 28: 2 9 4 4 .

Parsons D, van Wagtendonk J. 1996. Fire research and management in the Sierra Nevada national parks. Pages 25-48 in Halvorson W, Davis G, eds. Science and Ecosystem Manage-ment in the National Parks. Tucson (AZ): The University of Arizona Press.

Sellars R. 1997. Preserving Nature in the Nation-al Parks: A History New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.

Wagner F. In press. Values, science, and policy: How best to serve the national parks. The George Wright Forum 16.

Wagner F, Kay C. 1993. "Natural" or "healthy" ecosystems?Are US national parks providing them? Pages 257-270 in McDonnellM, Pickett S,eds. Humans as Components of Ecosystems: Subtle Human Effects and the Ecology of Pop-ulated Areas. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Wagner F, Foresta R, Gill R, McCullough D, Pel-ton M, Porter W, Salwasser H. 1995. Wildlife Policies in the US National Parks. Washing-ton (DC):Island Press.

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, MACROSCOPIC HISTORY A Historyof MolecularBiology.Michel Morange. Translated by Matthew Cobb. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998. 336 pp. $39.95 (ISBN O-674-39855-6 cloth).

It has been 20 years since anyone attempted to write a history of mole-

cular biology from its inception up to its disciplinary maturity. Thus, A Histo-ry of Molecular Biology is a much-await-ed translation of the recently published French version (1994). This book is aimed at a wide public and should indeed be of the highest interest to sci-entists, historians, and anyone else who wants to learn about the origins of our "biotechnological age." The author, Michel Morange, is a molecular biolo-gist who was trained in Frantois Jacob's laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in

Paris. In addition, during the last 20 years he has contributed to the history of science by publishing articles on the development of molecular biology in leading journals of the field. However, his book is, fortunately,not a collection of papers, as is too often the case today, but a "grand narrative" covering the period from the 1930s to the 1980s. It proposes a syntheticview of the forma-tion of molecular biology, from its very beginnings up to its recent biotechno-logical turn. This book mainly investi-gates experimental and theoretical aspects of the field, for the most part leaving aside social aspects.

A History of Molecular Biology is divided into 21 short chapters, some of which address scientific themes, others of which address historiographic themes. Morange discusses the well-known landmarks in the history of molecular biology, such as the "one gene-one enzyme hypothesis" and the discoveries of the double helix, mes-senger RNA, and the genetic code. He thus covers, although in much more synthetic fashion, the same events as Judson's (1979) The Eighth Day of Cre-ation. But the overlap with Judson is restricted to the first half of the book (chapters 1-14) because in the second half (chapters 15-21), Morange explores the virtually unwritten about ground between 1965 and 1980. He is the first to address this period in such breadth and to contextualize it in the longer history of molecular biology. He dis-cusses the discoveries of oncogenes, RNA splicing, and introns and the development of genetic engineering technologies. He also elaborates on broader issues, such as the role of physicists' "migration" to biology, the influence of the Rockefeller Founda-tion on promoting molecular biology research, the relationship between molecular biology and traditional dis-ciplines, and the nature of the biotech-nological revolution.

Although Morange is a scientist, he avoids the two main pitfalls for insider historians: hagiography and Whiggish history. He remains highly critical of molecular biologists as a collective because of both their dogmatism in

the late 1960s and their occasionally oversimplistic thinking. Even more important, the author's narrative is not Whiggish, that is, it does not merely look for "precursors" or simply evalu-ate the past in view of present knowl-edge. Consequently,Morange is able to consider episodes of the history of sci-ence that, because they have been dis-carded from current scientific dis-course, have also been left out of many historical narratives. For example, he discusses Linus Pauling's experiments on in vitro synthesis of artificial anti-bodies, not as the result of some aber-rant theoretical speculations, but as a genuine piece of scientific research of the 1940s. Thus, he takes into account the "principle of symmetry:' that is, the idea that scientific successes and fail-ures should be accounted for in the same way, as emphasized by David Bloor and other sociologists of science in the mid-1970s.

Morange also uses other interesting historiographic resources. For exam-ple, he takes inspiration from the his-torian Fernand Braudel to write a his-tory that follows different overlapping "rhythms and tempos." Morange's view of molecular biology "as the result of three parallel but different histories" allows him to address the century-long reductionist trend in the life sciences, the decades-long forma-tion of disciplines, and the year-long controversies around particular exper-iments. Finally, Morange makes fre-quent use of the concept of "postma-ture discovery:' a term coined by Joshua Lederberg and Harriet Zucker-man that refers to discoveries that in principle could have been made earlier because all the intellectual and materi-al resources had already been available for some time. However, his overfre-quent application of this concept (e.g., to the "one gene-one enzyme"hypoth-esis, the discovery of mRNA, and the development of the PCR technique) makes it doubtful that the concept has much explanatory power.

On a more general level, Morange sometimes expresses Popperian views of science (i.e., science progresses by falsifying theories) through a few

vember 1999 / Vol. 49 No. 1I BioScience 929

Books

somewhat unsatisfactory statements, such as: "fortunately, biology is a sci-ence and all models or hypotheses fade away in the glare of contradictory experimental results" (p. 132) and "this theory was thoroughly 'scientific' in that it could easily be put to the test of refutation" (p. 128). It remains a mys-tery to me why so many scientists still hold such Popperian views in spite of the fact that these views are contradict-ed by the everyday practice of science. Fortunately, Morange's rare general remarks of this kind do not seem to influence his subtle and persuasive his-torical studies. He is much more insightful when he makes statements such as: "scientific knowledge is 'con-structed' and scientists are free to define their strategy to elaborate their models, but only within the narrow limits left to them by the experimental systems they use" (p. 8), even if current debates among historians of science show that the narrowness of these lim-its will be debated for years to come, or when he writes, "a scientific experi-ment does not have intrinsic value: it counts only to the extent that it forms part of a theoretical, experimental, and social framework" (p. 49).

As a "grand narrative," covering half a century of recent history, this book deviates from the contemporary trend in science studies, which emphasizes local settings, such as particular labo-ratories, or specific pieces of scientific research over a short period of time. Examples of such approaches toward the history of molecular biology include Lily Kay's The Molecular Vision of Life (Kay 1993),which is about Cal-tech and the Rockefeller Foundation, and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things (Rhein-berger 1997), which is about in vitro protein synthesis in the 1950s.Howev-er, this trend makes Morange's book all the more necessary: It will set the stage for many forthcoming "micro-histori-cal" studies and pave the way to new inquiries in the recent history of mole-cular biology, Scientists who want to learn about the early history of molec-ular biology will find in this book an incomparable introduction to the sub-

ject as well as most references to the historical literature. Historians will benefit most from Morange's guidance through the difficult science of the recent history of molecular biology and genetic engineering.

On the "classical" issues, Morange's treatment of Franqois Jacob and Jacques Monod's work on the operon model is particularly valuable. For example, he tries to separate what belongs to Jacob from what belongs to Monod in the elaboration of this mod-el. His treatment of the "French school" of molecular biology is espe-cially enlightening. Conversely, his partial neglect of the contribution of the British crystallographers is some-what unfortunate for an otherwise well-balanced book.

In addition to the many positions Morange takes on specific issues in the history of molecular biology, he also has a major thesis about its develop-ment. He claims that, far from under-going a smooth expansion up to the present day, molecular biology entered a deep crisis in the mid-1960s that last-ed until the early 1970s. According to Morange, around 1965, "molecular biologists did not think they had solved all the mysteries of biology, but their understanding of fundamental molecular mechanisms appeared suffi-cient to imagine how the unresolved problems (morphogenesis, the origin of life) might be approached. This impression of completeness was shared by most molecular biolo-gists,...and it led some of them to turn to what appeared to be the final fron-tier of human knowledge-the ner-vous system" (p. 167). In the next few years, the "conviction that the essen-tials of the new science had been dis-covered inevitably led to dogmatism and a refusal to accept any results that tended to question-no matter how slightly-what was considered already proven" (p. 168). Morange discusses, among other examples, the difficulties molecular biologists had in believing Howard Temin's evidence for reverse transcription.

Molecular biology emerged from this crisis only once it left aside its

"brutal reductionism" and adopted a new approach, that of making "con-nections among the molecular level, the hierarchical structural organiza-tion of organisms, and the finalism of their behavior" (p. 183). This "new molecular biology:' as Morange calls it, also incorporated the tools of genetic engineering, which allowed its practi-tioners to return to in vivo studies by creating transgenic organisms. Mor-ange, somewhat unnecessarily, sum-marizes this interesting thesis with the simplistic conclusion that "molecular biology has metamorphosed from a science of observation to a science of intervention and action" (p. 216). Morange's thesis, which had been sug-gested in part by the molecular biolo-gist Gunther Stent in 1968, when he wrote that all that was left to molecular biologists was to "iron out the details:' will certainly receive due attention, and only thorough investigations will prove it right or wrong.

Morange calls, finally, for a "peace treaty" between, on one side, the vari-ous disciplines that have contributed to the making of molecular biology (for Morange, these are mainly genet-ics and biochemistry; he leaves out microbiology and biophysics, for rea-sons that are unclear), and, on the oth-er side, "molecularized" disciplines, such as embryology and cell biology. Although molecular biology has at times claimed supremacy over the lat-ter disciplines, for Morange it is not that any of them were simply "reduced" to molecular biology but rather that they entered into "intimate relationships" with molecular biology in which each partner played comple-mentary roles. What about the future? Morange envisions a new interaction between molecular biology and evolu-tionary theory, which, he asserts, have not interacted so far. The reader will find many more interesting insights in Morange's book, always stated with clarity, and the necessary explanations to make the issues understandable to nonspecialists.

However, there is one central ques-tion that disciplinary histories such as Morange's leave unanswered. Because

930 BioScience November 1999 / Vol. 49

Books

such histories seem to take the bound-aries of disciplines for granted, they cannot address the processes by which such boundaries come to be defined. These histories envisage the develop-ment of disciplines as being like filling a bathtub: Scientificresearch is poured into a preexisting rigid structure, which represents the boundaries of the discipline and the broad questions it tries to answer, and can only fill it up without changing its shape. However, what counted as molecular biology for the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940swas not identical to the molecu-lar biology of the 1960s,which was in turn rather different from molecular

References cited Abir-Am P. 1992.The politics of macromolecules:

Molecular biologists, biochemists, and rhetoric. Osiris 7: 164-191.

de Chadarevian S. 1996. Sequences, conforma-tion, information: Biochemistsand molecular biologists in the 1950s.Journal of the History of Biology 29: 361-386.

Gaudilliere J-P. 1993. Molecular biology in the French tradition? Redefining local traditions and disciplinary patterns. Journal of the His-tory of Biology 26: 473498.

Judson HE 1979. The Eighth Day of Creation. Reprint, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Lab-oratory Press, 1996.

Kay LE. 1993. The Molecular Vision of Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rheinberger H-J. 1997. Toward a History of Epis-temic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford (CA): Stanford University

biology today. Furthermore, the scope Press. Stent GS. 1968. That was the molecular biologyand range of molecular biology did that was. Science 160: 390-395.

not simply expand over time, because- . -several research programs that were once considered part of molecular biology, such as radiobiology, belong to a different discipline today.

This evolution of molecular biology shows that disciplines are social con-structions that are historically and cul-turally situated. Their shaping is a matter of negotiations by all of the actors involved-those at the laborato-ry bench as well as in political spheres-as historians of science such as Soraya de Chadarevian (1996),Jean-Paul Gaudilliere (1993), and Pnina Abir-Am (1992) have shown. The greatest obstacle in writing discipli-nary histories arises from the concep-tual difficulties in thinking about mul-tiple, overlapping, and non-hierarchical allegiances, whether political, cultural, or scientific. In the case of molecular biology, showing how these negotia-tions are carried out, how they delin-eate the moving boundaries of the dis-cipline, and how they define the individual and collective identities of its practitioners is a worthy historio-graphic project-one that Morange's book challenges other historians to take up.

BRUNO J. STRASSER Max-Planck-Institute for the

History of Science Wilhelmstrasse 44

10117 Berlin, Germany

NEW TITLES The Biology of Business: Decoding the

Natural Laws of Enterprise. J. H. Clippinger, ed. Josey-Bass Inc, San Francisco, CA, 1999. 276 pp., illus. $28.50 (cloth).

The Biology of Lakes and Ponds. C. Bronmark & L. A. Hansson. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998. 216 pp., illus. $85.00 (cloth).

Comparative Primate Socioecology. P. C. Lee, ed. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999.412 pp., illus. $74.95 (cloth).

The Diatoms: Applications for the Environmental and Earth Sciences. E. F. Stoemer & J. P. Smol, eds. Cam-bridge University Press, New York, 1999.469pp., illus. $115.00 (cloth).

Epidemic Modelling: An Introduction. D. J. Daley & J. Gani. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999. 213 pp,, illus. $49.95 (cloth).

Estuaries of South Africa. R. B. Allan-son & D. Baird, eds. Cambridge Uni-versity Press, New York, 1999. 340 pp., illus. $140.00 (cloth).

The Evolution of Avian Breeding Sys-tems. J. D. Ligon. Oxford University Press, New York, 1999.504 pp., illus. $98.00 (cloth).

Fast Oscillations in Cortical Circuits. R. D. Traub, J. G. R. Jefferys & M. A.

Whittington. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999. 324 pp., illus. $50.00 (cloth).

Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons. S. Levin. Perseus Books, Reading, MA, 1999. 256 pp., illus. $27.00 (cloth).

Has Feminism Changed Science? L. Schiebinger. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,MA, 1999.252 pp. $27.95 (cloth).

Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sci-ence, and Politics. L. Otis. Johns Hopkins University Press, Balti-more, MD, 1999. 210 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

Nature's Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment. W. D. Nordhaus &E. C. Kokkelenberg,eds. National Academy Press, Washing-ton, DC, 1999. 262 pp., illus. $44.95 (cloth).

The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming. M. Jouvet. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.211pp., illus. $25.00 (cloth).

Regulation of Acid-Base Status in Ani-mal and Plants. S. Egginton, E. W. Taylor & J. A. Raven, eds. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999. 379 pp., illus. $105.00 (cloth).

Savannas, Barrens, and Rock Outcrop Plant Communities of North Amer-ica. R. C. Anderson, J. S. Fralish & J. M. Baskin, eds. Cambridge Universi-ty Press, New York, 1999. 470 pp., illus. $110.00 (cloth).

Walker's Mammals of the World. 6th ed. R. M. Nowak. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1999. 1936 pp., illus. $99.95 (cloth).

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

The Biology of Polar Habitats. G. E. Fogg. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998. 263 pp., illus. $35.00 (paper).

Environmental Management: Princi-ples and Practice. C. J. Barrow. Routledge, New York, 1999.326 pp., illus. $27.99 (paper).

vember 1999 / Vol.49 No. 11 BioScience 931