TY - JOUR
AU - Rasmussen, Nicolas
AB - In this weighty but well-written tome, nearly double the size of the its 1994 predecessor A History of Molecular Biology, biologist-historian Michel Morange revises and extends his synthetic history into the present, post-genomic era. The new book falls into four sections, the first three of which correspond almost exactly in structure to the original book. The first two sections cover the origins and emergence of molecular biology from the 1930s to the solidification in the early 1960s of the field’s ‘paradigm’ with the cybernetic theory of gene regulation associated with Jacob and Monod. In these sections, the new book essentially updates the old, bringing in some more recent historiography of life science but not materially changing its argument. Here, Morange’s vision of the rise of molecular biology is distinct but never radically departs from ideas voiced by one or another of the first generation of historians who preceded him. For instance, he follows Evelyn Fox Keller in stressing the importance of Schroedinger’s wartime What is Life and the generation of young physical scientists inspired by it to move into biology, and he adopts (without quite admitting) Robert Olby’s notion of two early schools of molecular biology, Informational and Structural. But Morange adds his own valuable refinements to such older conceptualisations. For example, Morange argues that protein biochemistry only gradually shifted its concept of specificity from one dominated by rigid lock-and-key metaphors to ones stressing conformational dynamics and selection. And he stresses that young scientists trained in physical science did not import concepts like ‘coding’ into biology—importantly, he points out that cybernetic ideas came simultaneously into biology and physics as part of a new post-war worldview—so much as they simply brought a style of research that sought formal simplifications of complex problems. The second half of the book, the revised third and the novel fourth sections, diverges more from the original. Morange’s overarching argument is that the molecular biology that solidified and reached its apogee of intellectual prestige and cultural influence in the 1960s was not—or not for long—a distinct discipline that invaded other life sciences but a toolbox and style of research (the descendant of that introduced a generation earlier by physicists), which was taken up by and informed the other biological fields. Here, Morange does a great deal of spadework augmenting the sparse historiography on ‘molecularisation’ of life science in the 1980s and beyond, tracing the ways in which molecular biology affected fields from evolution to cell biology, with citations drawn almost exclusively from the scientific literature. In this, he creatively forges pathways for later historians, sketching and commenting upon a wide range of relatively recent developments like (to name just a couple that stuck in my mind) the discovery of RNA interference and its implications for the regulation of gene expression and the emergence of modern concepts of epigenetics. Unlike the overarching argument noted earlier, which to me seems indisputable if not altogether original, these provocative forays into previously untouched historical terrain are likely to be addressed and, sometimes, disputed by future historical work. But therein lies what is probably the greatest value in this already impressive, synoptic biologist’s eye view: it will stimulate and inform a new generation of scholarship; essential reading for any historian of modern life science. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology: A History of the Molecular Revolution
JF - Social History of Medicine
DO - 10.1093/shm/hkaa120
DA - 2021-02-13
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/michel-morange-the-black-box-of-biology-a-history-of-the-molecular-JWsdyt8TNQ
SP - 1048
EP - 1049
VL - 35
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -