Angela N. H. Creager

Tobacco Mosaic Virus: Pioneering Research for a Century

One century ago, M.W. Beijerinck contended that the filterable agent of tobacco mosaic disease was neither a bacterium nor any corpuscular body, but rather that it was a contagium vivum fluidum ([Beijerinck, 1898][1]). Beijerincks contribution followed A. Mayers path-breaking work on tobacco

Science without Laws. Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines. Contributors Rachel A. Ankeny Angela N. H. Creager Amy Dahan Dalmedico John Forrester Clifford Geertz Carlo Ginzburg E. Jane Albert Hubbard Elizabeth Lunbeck Mary S. Morgan Josiah Ober Naomi Oreskes Susan Sperling Marcel Weber M. Norton Wise

Feminism in twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine

What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities for women. The essays in this volume explore how feminist theory has had a direct impact on research in the biological and social sciences, in medicine, and in technology, often providing the impetus for fundamentally changing the theoretical underpinnings and practices of such research. In archaeology, evidence of womens hunting activities suggested by spears found in womens graves is no longer dismissed; computer scientists have used feminist epistemologies for rethinking the human-interface problems of our growing reliance on computers. Attention to womens movements often tends to reinforce a presumption that feminism changes institutions through critique-from-without. This volume reveals the potent but not always visible transformations feminism has brought to science, technology, and medicine from within. Contributors: Ruth Schwartz CowanLinda Marie FediganScott GilbertEvelynn M. HammondsEvelyn Fox KellerPamela E. MackMichael S. MahoneyEmily MartinRuth OldenzielNelly OudshoornCarroll PursellKaren RaderAlison Wylie

Tracing the politics of changing postwar research practices: the export of ‘American’ radioisotopes to European biologists

Abstract This paper examines the US Atomic Energy Commission’s radioisotope distribution program, established in 1946, which employed the uranium piles built for the wartime bomb project to produce specific radioisotopes for use in scientific investigation and medical therapy. As soon as the program was announced, requests from researchers began pouring into the Commission’s office. During the first year of the program alone over 1000 radioisotope shipments were sent out. The numerous requests that came from scientists outside the United States, however, sparked a political debate about whether the Commission should or even could export radioisotopes. This controversy manifested the tension between the aims of the Marshall Plan and growing US national security concerns after World War II. Proponents of international circulation of radioisotopes emphasized the political and scientific value of collaborating with European scientists, especially biomedical researchers. In the end, radioisotopes were shipped from the Commission’s Oak Ridge facility to many laboratories in England and continental Europe, where they were used in biochemical research on animals, plants, and microbes. However, the issue of radioisotope export continued to draw political fire in the United States, even after the establishment of national atomic energy facilities elsewhere.

After the Double Helix

Rosalind Franklin is best known for her informative X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA that provided vital clues for James Watson and Francis Cricks double-stranded helical model. Her scientific career did not end when she left the DNA work at Kings College, however. In 1953 Franklin moved to J. D. Bernals crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she shifted her focus to the three-dimensional structure of viruses, obtaining diffraction patterns of Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) of unprecedented detail and clarity. During the next five years, while making significant headway on the structural determination of TMV, Franklin maintained an active correspondence with both Watson and Crick, who were also studying aspects of virus structure. Developments in TMV research during the 1950s illustrate the connections in the emerging field of molecular biology between structural studies of nucleic acids and of proteins and viruses. They also reveal how the protagonists of the “race for the double helix” continued to interact personally and professionally during the years when Watson and Cricks model for the double-helical structure of DNA was debated and confirmed.

Wendell Stanley's dream of a free-standing Biochemistry Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

ConclusionScientists and historians have often presumed that the divide between biochemistry and molecular biology is fundamentally epistemological.100 The historiography of molecular biology as promulgated by Max Delbrücks phage disciples similarly emphasizes inherent differences between the archaic tradition of biochemistry and the approach of phage geneticists, the ur molecular biologists. A historical analysis of the development of both disciplines at Berkeley mitigates against accepting predestined differences, and underscores the similarities between the postwar development of biochemistry and the emergence of molecular biology as a university discipline. Stanleys image of postwar biochemistry, with its focus on viruses as key experimental systems, and its preference for following macromolecular structure over metabolism pathways, traced the outline of molecular biology in 1950.Changes in the postwar political economy of research universities enabled the proliferation of disciplines such as microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, immunology, and molecular biology in universities rather than in medical schools and agricultural colleges. These disciplines were predominantly concerned with investigating life at the subcellular level-research that during the 1930s had often entailed collaboration with physicists and chemists. The interdisciplinary efforts of the 1930s (many fostered by the Rockefeller Foundation) yielded a host of new tools and reagents that were standardized and mass-produced for laboratories after World War II. This commercial infrastructure enabled “basic” researchers in biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s to become more independent from physics and chemistry (although they were practicing a physicochemical biology), as well as from the agricultural and medical schools that had previously housed or sponsored such research. In turn, the disciplines increasingly required their practitioners to have specialized graduate training, rather than admitting interlopers from the physical sciences.These general transitions toward greater autonomy for biochemistry and allied disciplines should not mask the important particularities of these developments on each campus. At the University of Caliornia at Berkeley, agriculture had provided, with medicine, significant sponsorship for biochemistry. The proximity of Lawrence and his cyclotrons supported the early development of Berkeley as a center for the biological uses of radioisotopes, particularly in studies of metabolism and photosynthesis. Stanley arrived to establish his department and virus institute before large-scale federal funding of biomedical research was in place, and he courted the state of California for substantial backing by promising both national prominence in the life sciences and virus research pertinent to agriculture and public health. Stanleys venture benefited significantly from the expansion of Californias economy after World War II, and his mobilization against viral diseases resonated with the concerns of the Cold War, which fueled the states rapid growth. The scientific prominence of contemporary developments at Caltech and Stanford invites the historical examination of the significance of postwar biochemistry and molecular biology within the political and cultural economy of the Golden State.In 1950, Stanley presented a persuasive picture of the power of biochemistry to refurbish life science at Berkeley while answering fundamental questions about life and infection. In the words of one Rockefeller Foundation officer,There seems little doubt in [my] mind that as a personality Stanley will be well able to dominate the other personalities on the Berkeley campus and will be able to drive his dream through to completion, which, incidentally, leaves Dr. Hubert [sic] Evans and the whole ineffective Life Sciences building in the somewhat peculiar position of being by-passed by much of the truly modern biochemistry and biophysics research that will be carried out at Berkeley. Furthermore, it seems likely that Dr. Ss show will throw Dr. John Lawrences Biophysics Department strongly in the shade both figuratively and literally, but should make the University of California pre-eminent not only in physics but in biochemistry as well.101 Stanley, Sproul, Weaver, and this officer (William Loomis) all testified to a perceptible postwar opportunity to capitalize on public support for biological research that relied on the technologies from physics and chemistry without being captive to them, and that addressed issues of medicine and agriculture without being institutionally subservient. What is striking, given the expectation by many that Stanley would ‘be able to drive his dream through to completion,” was that in fact he did not. Biochemists who had succeeded in making their expertise valued in specialized niches were resistant to giving up their affiliations to joint Stanleys “liberated” organization. Stanleys failure was not simply due to institutional factors: researchers as well as Rockefeller Foundation officers faulted him for his lack of scientific imagination, which made it difficult for him to gain credibility in leading the field. Moreover, many biochemists did not share Stanleys commitment to viruses as the key material for the “new biochemistry.”In the end, Stanleys free-standing department did become a first-rate department of biochemistry, but only after freeing itself from Stanleys leadership and his single-minded devotion to viruses. Nonetheless, the falling-out with the Berkeley biochemists was rapidly followed by the establishment of a Department of Molecular Biology, attesting to the unabating economic and institutional possibilities for an authoritative “general biology” (or two, for that matter) to take hold. In each case, following Stanleys dream sheds light on how the possible and the real shaped the (re)formation of biochemistry and molecular biology as postwar life sciences.

Technical matters: method, knowledge and infrastructure in twentieth-century life science

Conceptual breakthroughs in science tend to garner accolades and attention. But, as the invention of tissue culture and the development of isotopic tracers show, innovative methods open up new fields and enable the solution of longstanding problems.

A high melting structure in DNA distinguishes phases of the cell cycle

Differential scanning microcalorimetry of the nuclei of dividing CHO cells revealed DNA structures that showed structural transitions at 60, 76, 88, and 105 degrees C (transitions I to IV, respectively). In cultures synchronized by isoleucine deprivation the enthalpies of transitions I and II were rather constant throughout the cell cycle. While the sum of the enthalpies of III and IV was nearly constant, the ratio of IV to III varied substantially from one phase of the cycle to another. A high IV:III ratio of 6 characterized G1 while S phase gave a IV:III ratio of about 2. Cells containing metaphase chromosomes also showed a IV:III ratio near 2. The IV:III ratio for CHO cells showed a progressive decrease as the cells were maintained in isoleucine-free medium from 0 to 6 days.

A Chemical Reaction to the Historiography of Biology

This article examines the often-overlooked role of chemical ideas and practices in the history of modern biology. The first section analyses how the conventional histories of the life sciences have, through the twentieth century, come to focus nearly exclusively on evolutionary theory and genetics, and why this storyline is inadequate. The second section elaborates on what the restricted neo-Darwinian history of biology misses, noting a variety of episodes in the history of biology that relied on developments in – or tools from – chemistry, including an example from the author’s own work. The diverse ways in which biologists have used chemical approaches often relate to the concrete, infrastructural side of research; a more inclusive history thus also connects to a historiography of materials and objects in science.

The committee on the biological effects of atomic radiation

On March 3, 1863, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts rose in the Senate chamber to, as he told his colleagues, “take up a bill...to incorporate the National Academy of Sciences.” He read two short paragraphs concerning membership and the obligation of the Academy to “whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” The Senate passed the bill by voice vote, and a few hours later, the House passed it without comment. Later that evening, President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law. In the century and a half since 1863, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has grown from a small band of 50 charter members—each of whom was specified in the founding legislation—to an organization of more than 2,500 national members and foreign associates. In 1916, the Academy created the National Research Council, which today recruits thousands of specialists each year from the scientific and technological communities to participate in the Academys advisory work. The establishment of the National Academy of Engineering in 1964 and the Institute of Medicine in 1970 resulted in a multifaceted institution that investigates issues ranging widely across the sciences, technology, and health. The charter members of the Academy, who met for the first time on April 22, 1863, in the chapel at New York University, scarcely could have envisioned what their fledgling organization would become. To celebrate the Academy’s sesquicentennial, the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences, with additional support from the W. M. Keck Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, held a meeting in Washington, DC, on October 16–18, 2013, entitled “The National Academy of Sciences at 150: Celebrating Service to the Nation.” The meeting began the evening of October 16 with the … [↵][1]1E-mail: solson{at}comcast.net. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1