Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.2 (2003) 472-474

Michel Morange. A History of Molecular Biology. Translated by Matthew Cobb. Originally published as Histoire de la médecine moléculaire (1994). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 336 pp. $19.95 (paperbound, 0-674-00169-9).

In this richly informative book, Michel Morange, a biochemist and historian of science in Paris, provides a masterful overview of the molecular biological [End Page 472] revolution, from its origins to recent years. He gives balanced attention to the several disciplines that shaped the field, tracing its birth and early development during the middle third of the twentieth century through the efforts of geneticists, a number of them renegade physicists, to identify the nature of genes and their means of replication, and of biochemists to understand the synthesis of proteins and enzymes and the role of genes in the process. He judges that the physicists—notably Max Delbrück, a leader of the phage group—insinuated an "operational" approach into molecular biology, establishing an intimate connection between theories and experimental manipulation. This transformation of outlook, Morange wryly suggests, helps to explain the "striking contrast" between the phage group's sizable reputation and the "relative scarcity of its results" (p. 44).

By the 1960s, a conceptual revolution in genetics had been completed, culminating in the deciphering of the genetic code and the identification of genetic regulation. The time had come to move to higher organisms such as mice, but "the road from the bacterium to the elephant was extremely hard," Morange writes (p. 179).

Morange offers a pioneering account of post-1960s developments, which hitherto have been treated only fragmentarily. The way to further progress was opened when in 1972 a group headed by Paul Berg demonstrated that foreign genes could be introduced into mammalian cells, and that bacteria could be used to amplify hybrid genetic constructs in vitro. Morange credits the Berg group's paper with the same "founding value" as Watson and Crick's on the structure of DNA in 1953 (p. 188). Once the technology of recombinant DNA provided molecular biologists with the means to manipulate genes at will, the conceptual revolution turned into an engineering revolution. Morange devotes the last third of his book to showing how molecular biology moved into a new, expansionist phase, using its engineering powers to study higher organisms and infiltrating ever more branches of biomedicine, such as oncology.

The book is dotted with provocative commentary on historical and historiographic issues. Morange judiciously weighs the influence on the development of molecular biology of sociological as well as technical circumstances. He concludes, for example, that the Rockefeller Foundation's patronage did not create the field but did greatly assist its progress. He acknowledges that the leaders of the French school—notably Jacques Monod and François Jacob—achieved the "molecularization" of other biological fields by institutional means, not primarily by sheer force of facts.

Yet for Morange, technical content counts heavily. He is careful to treat the past in its own technical terms, rather than by projecting later understandings back onto it. He dismisses the claim of one historian that a research program at Cambridge University lost out merely because of funding politics at the Rockefeller Foundation (the program was scientifically problematic); and that of another, implicitly, that nature has no reality independent of the investigator who describes it. While the constructivist vision of science may be "seductive" in highly abstract models of particle physics, Morange notes, "it is difficult to see how the [End Page 473] double helix could be one of many possible human constructions rather than a reflection of reality" (p. 115).

Morange recognizes that the story of molecular biology is in part a tale of innovations in methods, techniques, and instruments, a number of them imported from other fields such as bacteriology, protein chemistry, and physical chemistry. He outlines the origins and uses of the most important ones, including ultracentrifugation, electrophoresis, restriction enzymes, molecular hybridization, transfection, DNA sequencing, and, at chapter length, PCR (polymerase chain reaction).

This history, originally published in French...