Institutionalizing molecular biology in post-war Europe: a comparative study

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Abstract

The intellectual origins of molecular biology are usually traced back to the 1930s. By contrast, molecular biology acquired a social reality only around 1960. To understand how it came to designate a community of researchers and a professional identity, I examine the creation of the first institutes of molecular biology, which took place around 1960, in four European countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland. This paper shows how the creation of these institutes was linked to the results of post-war economic reconstruction. Then, it compares how the promoters of these different institutional projects delimited the goals of their discipline, reflected on its history, and suggested how research should be organised. I show how they carefully positioned their new discipline within the emerging national science policy discourse of the 1950s, and aligned it with the current vision of scientific modernity. In particular, I discuss how they articulated the meaning of molecular biology with respect to five common themes: the role of physics in the atomic age, the relations between fundamental research and medical applications, the ‘Americanisation’ of scientific research, the value of science in the reconstruction of national identities, and the drive towards interdisciplinary research. This paper thus demonstrates that beyond the local and national accounts there is a European history of molecular biology.

Introduction

In September 1963, 25 scientists from Europe, the United States, and Israel met in Ravello (Italy), where they decided to set up a European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO). They elected a provisional executive committee composed of researchers from very different scientific backgrounds: crystallography (Max Perutz and John Kendrew from the United Kingdom), microbiology (François Jacob from France and Ole Maaløe from Denmark), biochemistry (Hans Friedrich-Freksa and Adolf Butenandt from Germany), biophysics (Edouard Kellenberger from Switzerland, Charles Sadron from France and Arne Engström from Sweden), physical chemistry (Alphonso Liquori from Italy and Ephraim Katchalski from Israel), embryology (Jean Brachet from Belgium) and genetics (Adriano Buzzati-Traverso from Italy).1 In the following months, they invited 140 other prominent scientists to join the organisation.

A decade earlier, however, most of these researchers had not know each other, and were hardly interested in each other’s work. They had identified themselves, not with molecular biology, but with the speciality in which they had acquired their training. According to John Kendrew, in the 1940s and 1950s, phage geneticists and crystallographers for example, were ‘almost entirely isolated from each other’ (Kendrew, 1967, p. 141). In 1963, both communities considered their research to be at the centre of a new field called molecular biology.

It was only shortly before the foundation of EMBO that the term ‘molecular biology’ acquired its social reality and began to be used in Europe and in the United States to identify a field of research, a professional identity, and the research institutions associated with it. The Journal of Molecular Biology, for example, was founded in 1959 under the leadership of John Kendrew. Between 1957 and 1962, several of these future EMBO members designed large scale projects that were addressed to national funding agencies, in order to create institutions devoted to their new field in Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium. In the sense that they led to the creation of the first institutes of molecular biology in their respective countries, these various projects were demonstrably successful in contributing to the establishment of the field.

The institutional history of recent scientific fields is usually framed within a local or national perspective, and historians of science have now, generally speaking, moved away from ‘top-down’ master narratives to more confined accounts. The history of molecular biology is no exception, as can be seen, for example, in Lily Kay’s masterly study of the ‘molecular vision of life’ at the California Institute of Technology (Kay, 1993). Similarly, the rise of molecular biology in Europe has recently been studied through two of its key institutions, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Medical Research Council laboratory in Cambridge (Gaudillière, 1993, Gaudillière, 2002, de Chadarevian, 1994, de Chadarevian, 2002). In these studies, local factors—such as personal networks and particular organisational configurations—play a crucial role in the institutionalisation process, along with national factors, such as national research traditions, academic systems, science policy, and the war legacies. The very different national war-time experiences, for example, were shown to affect profoundly the development of molecular biology in the post-war period (Gaudillière, 1991, de Chadarevian, 2002). In the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe, the Rockefeller foundation played an essential role in fostering the development of molecular biology. Thus, through their focus on local dynamics, these studies also address more global trends.

One might wonder, however, whether these more global trends could not profitably be identified by bringing different local stories, despite their contingent aspects, into a common perspective. In particular, could not the creation in Europe around 1960 of different new institutes for molecular biology be brought into a common framework extending beyond the national portrayals, since the promoters of these institutes, unlike their American counterparts, confronted comparable political, economic and cultural forces specifically related to the post-war European situation? Thus, could the European post-war context, rather than the very diverse national wartime experiences, provide a useful framework to compare these different cases? Could this shared framework highlight connections between the different cases and common factors not apparent in the national or local stories?2 Since the promoters of these different institutes defined the meaning of molecular biology in their local context, would the comparison of these cases not permit a better understanding of the broad meaning that molecular biology had acquired at that time, at least in Europe?

In order to answer these questions, this paper proceeds via a ‘bottom-up’ approach. It re-examines and compares the institutionalisation of molecular biology in four local contexts that have been studied previously: Cologne (Germany), Cambridge (United Kingdom), Paris (France), and Geneva (Switzerland), and focuses more specifically on four projects that were submitted to national funding agencies for the purpose of creating new institutions devoted to molecular biology. As one would expect, a comparison between these four documents reveals the many differences arising from the various local and national contexts, but also the striking similarities consequent upon the post-war European situation. This comparison proceeds in two steps. First, it examines how molecular biology was construed, and second, how this new field was legitimised and acquired its broader meaning.

Focusing only on these institutional plans would, of course, be insufficient to draw meaningful comparisons between the four cases. I have relied therefore on broader archival work as well as on the detailed histories that can be found in the work of Soraya de Chadarevian on Cambridge (de Chadarevian, 2002, de Chadarevian, 1996, de Chadarevian, 1994), Jean-Paul Gaudillière on France (Gaudillière, 2002, Gaudillière, 1993, Gaudillière, 1994), Ute Deichmann on Cologne (Deichmann, 1996, Ch. 7) and my own on Geneva (Strasser, 2002a).3

Two main reasons have led to the choice of these four cases. Firstly, they include the two major players in the development of molecular biology in Europe, namely the Medical Research Council research group in Cambridge and the Pasteur Institute group in Paris, as well as two somewhat more peripheral groups.4 Secondly, each case documents the creation of the first institute of molecular biology in its respective national context.5

Section snippets

Local contexts

The German document was the first to be issued, on 20 November 1957. On that day, Joseph Straub, a professor of botany at Cologne University, addressed a long letter to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the main state agency supporting German research.6 Straub requested DM 2.5 million in order to found a ‘modern institute

Defining molecular biology, its history and its social organisation

I now wish to take a closer look at the way in which the authors of the four documents defined the new field that they wished to institutionalise. In their proposals, they delimited the goals of their discipline, reflected on its history and suggested how research should be organised. In previous years, these authors had not identified themselves with molecular biology, but with disciplines such as biophysics, genetics, microbiology, or biochemistry. They therefore elaborated definitions of

Legitimating molecular biology

In 1961, the MRC explained its decision to build a laboratory of molecular biology by the fact that ‘a strong case existed on scientific grounds’.35 I wish to demonstrate here that the British plan, as well as the other attempts to institutionalise molecular biology in Europe, did not succeed solely because ‘a strong case existed on scientific grounds’, but

Conclusion

This paper has tried to explain how, around 1960, the promoters of molecular biology in Europe defined their new discipline. It has therefore brought the question concerning the origin of molecular biology into a different light. The term ‘molecular biology’ has indeed been previously employed in two different contexts. First, intellectual historians have taken it to designate scientific research (from the 1930s onward) of the kind that, in the 1960s, came to be carried out under the name of

Acknowledgements

I am intellectually indebted for this paper to Soraya de Chadarevian, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Ute Deichmann, Jean-François Picard and Pnina Abir-Am. Robert Olby and Bernardino Fantini critically read this manuscript, and I benefited from constant discussions with Marc Geiser. The archivists at the California Institute of Technology, the Pasteur Institute, the CNRS, the French Ministry of Education, the Public Record Office and the University of Geneva have also been extremely helpful. My warmest

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