A History of Molecular Biology

  • Michel Morange
Harvard University Press: 1998. 342pp $39.95, £24.95)

Although molecular biology is still a relatively young science, it has already inspired a considerable corpus of historical writing. First, there is Horace Judson's account of the early days of molecular biology, The Eighth Day of Creation, and Robert Olby's account of the work that preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Path to the Double Helix. Then there are all the memoirs and autobiographies written by the main participants, beginning, of course, with James Watson's The Double Helix.

Historians are inclined to distrust the personal memoir, which, in their view, relies too much on memory and is seen only from one point of view. They heed the message of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's story Rashomon (1915; better known through the later film), where different witnesses testify about a rape and murder, each, including the dead man himself, giving a different account of the same events. The scientific literature itself is not a very useful source as, in historical terms, most papers are constructs, deconstructing the historical events themselves, to reassemble them in a document written in a standard style and shaped by whatever journal editors and their referees happen to think is scientifically appropriate at the time.

Michel Morange is a biochemist who has written a history of molecular biology that also includes a history of genetic engineering, taking up the story more or less where Judson leaves off. He also wants to place more emphasis on the role of biochemistry, and to give the French School (as he calls it) a greater role in the history of the subject than has been ascribed to it by British and US writers. He throws interesting light on why the subject developed so slowly in France. Apart from the obstacles posed by a gerontocracy largely of biochemists, there was the legacy of conservative French biology which never quite accepted Darwin and the theory of natural selection. This is curiously French; their Cartesian views of the world had no place for a theory in which nature behaved as an Anglo-Saxon empiricist.

Although he accepted it intellectually, Jacques Monod remained uncomfortable with Darwinian theory. In his book, Chance and Necessity, which brought the new ideas of biology to the French public, Monod thought that nature should have a project, that is, he wanted the finished product to exist somewhere so that natural selection could achieve it. It was also the French who proposed replacing the term teleology with teleonomy — a wolf in sheep's clothing with a sheep in sheep's clothing. I am happy to say that neither are much used today.

Morange also wishes to press on historians of molecular biology the importance of the distinction made by François Jacob and Monod between structural and regulatory genes. The distinction is, of course, much older than the 1960s, except that nobody could do anything about it until all the basic concepts of molecular biology had been established. Morange's account of the history of genetic engineering and of the developments that followed shows how molecular biology went from a highly intellectualized subject to one that became technologized and began to interact with the world outside. The heroes of the past are replaced by the managers and bureaucrats of today.

Ulf Lagerkvist also believes that it is important to explain science and scientists to the public and he thinks this is best done through a combination of history and personal memoir. He, too, moves biochemistry to the centre of the stage, and his history starts far back in the history of chemistry. But in other ways his book is very different. Miescher, the discoverer of DNA, is given a central role in the story. I knew that in 1895 Edmund Wilson wrote in his book, The Cell in Development and Heredity, that chromatin and its main component, nuclein, was the physical carrier of heredity, but I did not know that Miescher rejected this and entertained the absurd idea that inheritance was mediated by enantiomeric forms of protein molecules.

The book culminates with an account of the life and work of Arthur Kornberg, whose work on DNA polymerase is much admired by the author. The book has a certain charm to it, and it is interesting to have another Rashomonic view of the history where Watson and Crick do not occupy all of the stage and where the names of Luria, Delbrück and other members of the phage school do not even appear in the index.

Lagerkvist, like others of his generation, laments the fact that the students of today are not interested in the background of their science. Perhaps only the old read history, because the past is more familiar; the young are interested only in creating the future.

DNA Pioneers and Their Legacy

  • Ulf Lagerkvist
Yale University Press: 1998. 184 pp. $20, £15.95