DNA Pioneers and their Legacy by Ulf Lagerkvist, Yale, 拢15.95, ISBN
0300071841 Death of Life by Stanley Shostak, Macmillan, 拢45, ISBN
0333633202 A History of Molecular Biology by Michel Morange, Harvard,
$24.95, ISBN 0674398556
THESE days we can鈥檛 escape from molecular biology鈥攏either its
achievements nor its hype. From cloned sheep to sterile corn, we are surrounded
by more or less informed debates about what its effects will be. So I often have
to remind myself just how young a science it really is. As recently as the
1960s, biochemists regarded it as a cuckoo in their nest鈥攁 contempt
immortalised by nucleic acid pioneer Erwin Chargaff, who referred to Crick,
Watson and their successors as 鈥減ractising biochemistry without a licence鈥�.
Molecular biology is growing so rapidly that the half-life of papers is but a
few months, and students and postdocs rarely read or refer to anything published
more than three years ago. Not surprisingly, a science that has grown so fast
needs, but has rarely found, time to understand its own history. Instead, it
trades in myths about its past. So three new books written by biologists, rather
than professional historians, that attempt to get beyond these myths are
welcome.
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While all three cover the same ground, their approaches could hardly be more
different. Traditionally, scientists writing about the history of their subject
describe a steady progress from darkness and mystery into the light of reason,
achieved by men (sic) of brilliance conducting crucial experiments. Such
complacent accounts are interspersed with random and often apocryphal anecdotes
about the researchers themselves. Worse still, they are largely
鈥渋nternalist鈥濃�攖hat is, they treat the science as self-contained, as if it
were not influenced by wider social currents or by funding priorities, although
they accept the importance of technical advances, such as the ultracentrifuge,
electron microscope and electrophoresis.
Ulf Lagerkvist is a medical biochemist, and DNA Pioneers and Their
Legacy is very much in this mould. It begins with a claim for the
traditional values of science as the pure search for truth by dedicated and
poorly rewarded individuals. It ends with a personal account of working with
Arthur Kornberg, who discovered DNA polymerase, a key enzyme in DNA metabolism.
I found this an unchallenging read, designed to inspire young (male鈥攚omen
appear only insofar as they are wives and helpmeets to the great men)
researchers to enter the field. Crucially, for me, Lagerkvist鈥檚 internalist
account is untouched by the more critical approach to the growth of scientific
knowledge that comes from historians, philosophers and sociologists.
The other offerings are quite different. Both Stanley Shostak, a
developmental biologist, and Michel Morange, a biochemist, have spent a great
deal of time immersed in the writings of science鈥檚 critics. From the historian
and philosopher Thomas Kuhn to French postmodernists, these critics have
challenged science鈥檚 claims to be a way of determining definite (if revisable)
truths about the world. They, in turn, have been vociferously counterattacked by
the defenders of the 鈥渢rue faith鈥� of science.
In Death of Life Shostak has produced an impassioned polemic against
the 鈥渃hemists and physicists鈥� who have entered biology. In the name of molecular
biology, they have destroyed what is to him the essence of our
science鈥攔espect for and understanding of living processes. He scolds
鈥渞eductionists鈥� as those who, in the words of William Wordsworth, 鈥渕urder to
dissect鈥� and lambasts those who are more interested in payoffs in the forms of
Nobel prizes, money and power than in scientific advance.
He argues that molecular biologists suffer from a delusion (he calls it
鈥渄elirium genetica鈥�) that the unfolding of living processes in the four
dimensions of space and time can be read off the one-dimensional strand of DNA.
To cure molecular biology鈥檚 illness, he argues for a form of neo-Lamarckism,
drawing on ideas ranging from Stuart Kauffman鈥檚 self-organising networks of
mutually-catalysing reactions, James Lovelock鈥檚 Gaia hypothesis, to the
postmodernist philosophy of Jacques Derrida.
As I share much of Shostak鈥檚 distaste for crude reductionist ideology, I had
expected to be much more in sympathy with his account than with Lagerkvist鈥檚.
Sadly, this is the kind of book which gives this kind of book a bad name.
Shostak is so angry he is incoherent. He fails to explain the relevance of the
postmodern stuff, and jumps from context-free internalist descriptions of key
experiments into what are frankly just tirades. His editors have served him
poorly; words are misspelt and material repeated and sometimes contradicted from
chapter to chapter. A pity, because there are important themes buried here.
It was with relief, then, that I turned to Morange鈥檚 well-researched and
clearly written A History of Molecular Biology, which appeared in French
in 1994 (elegantly translated by Matthew Cobb). Morange begins his story later
than the others: after a brief establishing chapter, he opens with the
hypothesis, proposed by George Beadle and Edward Tatum in 1941 that each gene
produces precisely one enzyme, and concludes with Kary Mullis鈥檚 1983 invention
of PCR, the polymerase chain reaction which makes multiple copies of a DNA
strand.
Like Shoskak, Morange is critical of the triumphalist and reductionist claims
of molecular biology, and ends the book by reflecting on its place in the life
sciences. Writing from Paris, he is able to stand back from the orthodox story
with its focus on 鈥渓es Anglo-Saxons鈥�, giving credit to others such as Nobel
prizewinners such as Andr茅 Lwoff, Jacques Monod and Fran莽ois
Jacob.
His method is to separate out particular themes in the history of molecular
biology鈥攖he breaking of the DNA code, the influence of the Rockefeller
Foundation鈥檚 funding priorities, or the school of non-biologists grouped around
Max Delbruck, who shared his conviction that the way to study biology was to
examine the simplest possible systems, the phages which infect bacteria. Some
chapters tell an orthodox internalist story, some are punctuated with historical
vignettes, and others are more socially and philosophically framed. The result
is a bit disjointed, but where there are so many different styles of history to
be told, this may be the only way for a nonhistorian to do it.
En route Morange makes some interesting re-evaluations. He discounts the
experimental achievements of the Delbruck school, claiming that their
findings鈥攅ven the famous Hershey-Chase experiment identifying DNA and not
protein as the hereditary material鈥攚ere either minor or merely
confirmations of what was known already. What he praises is their role in
setting a research style and bringing the physicists鈥� confident reductionist
clarity of thought to biology. And he re-establishes the prophetic significance
of Erwin Schr枚dinger鈥檚 famous 1945 essay 鈥淲hat is Life?鈥� in which he
claimed that the hereditary material would turn out to be a 鈥済iant aperiodic
肠谤测蝉迟补濒鈥�.
Altogether, for a sophisticated theoretical and technical account of the
strengths and weaknesses of the claims and the history of molecular biology,
Morange鈥檚 book will take some beating.