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The Molecular Basis of Evolution and Disease: A Cold War Alliance

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An Erratum to this article was published on 10 May 2017

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The appearance of the concept of good and evil, interpreted by man as his painful expulsion from Paradise, was probably a molecular disease that turned out to be evolution. Subjectively, to evolve must often have amounted to suffering from a disease. And these diseases were of course molecular (Zuckerkandl and Pauling, 1962, p. 190).

Abstract

This paper extends previous arguments against the assumption that the study of variation at the molecular level was instigated with a view to solving an internal conflict between the balance and classical schools of population genetics. It does so by focusing on the intersection of basic research in protein chemistry and the molecular approach to disease with the enactment of global health campaigns during the Cold War period. The paper connects advances in research on protein structure and function as reflected in Christian Anfinsen’s The molecular basis of evolution, with a political reading of Emilé Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling’s identification of molecular disease and evolution. Beyond atomic fallout, these advances constituted a rationale for the promotion of genetic surveys of human populations in the Third World, in connection with international health programs. Light is shed not only on the experimental roots of the molecular challenge but on the broader geopolitical context where the rising role of biomedicine and public health (particularly the malaria eradication campaigns) had an impact on evolutionary biology.

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  • 10 May 2017

    English possessives with apostrophe mark.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Jean Gayon and Philippe Huneman for inviting me to participate in the project ‘‘Revisiting the Evolutionary Synthesis,’’ David Depew, Anya Plutinsky, and Michael Dietrich for detailed comments, and the participants at three productive sessions at the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology at Montpellier (July 2013), the University of Chicago (November 2014), and the History of Science Society Annual Meeting at San Francisco (November 2015). I also thank two generous reviewers of this paper, whose comments helped to improve it. This research has been funded by research grants no. 152879 from CONACyT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología), and grant no. IN401017 from PAPIIT-UNAM (Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).

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  1. Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Av. Universidad 3000 Copilco, Coyoacán, 04510, Mexico City, Mexico

    Edna Suárez-Díaz

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Correspondence to Edna Suárez-Díaz.

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The original version of this article has been revised: English possessives with apostrophe mark, like Beatty’s or Paul’s, were erroneously transformed and written as letters with a Spanish accentuation mark (e.g. Beattýs, Pauĺs)

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Suárez-Díaz, E. The Molecular Basis of Evolution and Disease: A Cold War Alliance. J Hist Biol 52, 325–346 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-017-9476-9

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