Conclusion
Scientists and historians have often presumed that the divide between biochemistry and molecular biology is fundamentally epistemological.100 The historiography of molecular biology as promulgated by Max Delbrück's phage disciples similarly emphasizes inherent differences between the archaic tradition of biochemistry and the approach of phage geneticists, the ur molecular biologists. A historical analysis of the development of both disciplines at Berkeley mitigates against accepting predestined differences, and underscores the similarities between the postwar development of biochemistry and the emergence of molecular biology as a university discipline. Stanley's image of postwar biochemistry, with its focus on viruses as key experimental systems, and its preference for following macromolecular structure over metabolism pathways, traced the outline of molecular biology in 1950.
Changes in the postwar political economy of research universities enabled the proliferation of disciplines such as microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, immunology, and molecular biology in universities rather than in medical schools and agricultural colleges. These disciplines were predominantly concerned with investigating life at the subcellular level-research that during the 1930s had often entailed collaboration with physicists and chemists. The interdisciplinary efforts of the 1930s (many fostered by the Rockefeller Foundation) yielded a host of new tools and reagents that were standardized and mass-produced for laboratories after World War II. This commercial infrastructure enabled “basic” researchers in biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s to become more independent from physics and chemistry (although they were practicing a physicochemical biology), as well as from the agricultural and medical schools that had previously housed or sponsored such research. In turn, the disciplines increasingly required their practitioners to have specialized graduate training, rather than admitting interlopers from the physical sciences.
These general transitions toward greater autonomy for biochemistry and allied disciplines should not mask the important particularities of these developments on each campus. At the University of Caliornia at Berkeley, agriculture had provided, with medicine, significant sponsorship for biochemistry. The proximity of Lawrence and his cyclotrons supported the early development of Berkeley as a center for the biological uses of radioisotopes, particularly in studies of metabolism and photosynthesis. Stanley arrived to establish his department and virus institute before large-scale federal funding of biomedical research was in place, and he courted the state of California for substantial backing by promising both national prominence in the life sciences and virus research pertinent to agriculture and public health. Stanley's venture benefited significantly from the expansion of California's economy after World War II, and his mobilization against viral diseases resonated with the concerns of the Cold War, which fueled the state's rapid growth. The scientific prominence of contemporary developments at Caltech and Stanford invites the historical examination of the significance of postwar biochemistry and molecular biology within the political and cultural economy of the Golden State.
In 1950, Stanley presented a persuasive picture of the power of biochemistry to refurbish life science at Berkeley while answering fundamental questions about life and infection. In the words of one Rockefeller Foundation officer,
There seems little doubt in [my] mind that as a personality Stanley will be well able to dominate the other personalities on the Berkeley campus and will be able to drive his dream through to completion, which, incidentally, leaves Dr. Hubert [sic] Evans and the whole ineffective Life Sciences building in the somewhat peculiar position of being by-passed by much of the truly modern biochemistry and biophysics research that will be carried out at Berkeley. Furthermore, it seems likely that Dr. S's show will throw Dr. John Lawrence's Biophysics Department strongly in the shade both figuratively and literally, but should make the University of California pre-eminent not only in physics but in biochemistry as well.101
Stanley, Sproul, Weaver, and this officer (William Loomis) all testified to a perceptible postwar opportunity to capitalize on public support for biological research that relied on the technologies from physics and chemistry without being captive to them, and that addressed issues of medicine and agriculture without being institutionally subservient. What is striking, given the expectation by many that Stanley would ‘be able to drive his dream through to completion,” was that in fact he did not. Biochemists who had succeeded in making their expertise valued in specialized niches were resistant to giving up their affiliations to joint Stanley's “liberated” organization. Stanley's failure was not simply due to institutional factors: researchers as well as Rockefeller Foundation officers faulted him for his lack of scientific imagination, which made it difficult for him to gain credibility in leading the field. Moreover, many biochemists did not share Stanley's commitment to viruses as the key material for the “new biochemistry.”
In the end, Stanley's free-standing department did become a first-rate department of biochemistry, but only after freeing itself from Stanley's leadership and his single-minded devotion to viruses. Nonetheless, the falling-out with the Berkeley biochemists was rapidly followed by the establishment of a Department of Molecular Biology, attesting to the unabating economic and institutional possibilities for an authoritative “general biology” (or two, for that matter) to take hold. In each case, following Stanley's dream sheds light on how the possible and the real shaped the (re)formation of biochemistry and molecular biology as postwar life sciences.
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References
This story has been recounted to the author by nearly everyone Stanley recruited to his new department; it was clearly one of his favorite anecdotes. Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat has recorded it this way: “It is supposedly due to a snowstorm grounding of two planes in the wild American West, that Stanley was forced to have a long talk with the President of the University of California, Robert Gordon Sproul, a conversation which laid the groundwork to Stanley's coming to Berkeley as chairman of the new department of biochemistry and to the creation of the Virus Laboratory there” (Proc. Robt. A. Welch Found. Conf. Chem. Res., 20 (1977), 253–261 on 254). Greer Williams offers more specific timing: “In the late spring of 1946 he was flying out to the University of California to collect one of his eight honorary degrees, ... when he was set down for three hours in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, airport because of engine trouble. Among the grounded passengers was a tall man with a deep voice, who introduced himself as Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California” (Virus Hunters [New York: Knopf, 1959], p. 458). The story was included in Stanley's obituary in the New York Times in 1971.
Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry in Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
On the legacy of instruments from Rockefeller Foundation funding, see Robert E. Kohler, “Instruments of Science”, in Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 358–391. For the historiography concerning the Rockefeller Foundation's role in directing twentieth-century life science, see Robert E. Kohler, “The Management of Science: The Experience of Warren Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation Programme in Molecular Biology”, Minerva, 14 (1976), 279–306; Pnina G. Abir-Am, “The Discourse on Physical Power and Biological Knowledge in the 1930s: A Reappraisal of the Rockefeller Foundation's ‘Policy’ in Molecular Biology”, Soc. Stud. Sci., 12 (1982), pp. 341–382; and Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Lily E. Kay, “Laboratory Technology and Biology Knowledge: The Tiselius Electrophoresis Apparatus, 1930–1945”, Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 10 (1988), 51–72.
Boelie Elzen, “Two Ultracentrifuges: A Comparative Study of the Social Construction of Artifacts”, Soc. Stud. Sci., 16 (1986), 621–662; idem, “Scientists and Rotors: The Development of Biochemical Ultracentrifuges”, Ph.D. diss., University of Twente, 1988, pp. 367–373. On the role of commercialized instruments in scientific work, see Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ilana Löwy, eds., The Invisible Industrialist: Manufactures and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Macmillan, in press), esp. the contribution from Nicolas Rasmussen.
See J. L. Heilbron, Robert W. Seidel, and Bruce R. Wheaton, Lawrence and His Laboratory: Nuclear Science at Berkeley (Berkeley: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Office for History of Science and Technology, University of California, 1981); Kohler, “Instruments of Science” (above, n. 3), pp. 371–375.
Daniel J. Kevles, “A Physicists' War”, chap. 20 of The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Kevles also discusses the prominence of the Berkeley physicists, particularly Lawrence and Oppenheimer, during the interwar period in the context of the larger U.S. physical science community.
An important theme in the historiography of molecular biology has been the relationship of molecular biology to physics. (For one summary of this view, see Evelyn Fox Keller, “Physics and the Emergence of Molecular Biology: A History of Cognitive and Political Synergy”, J. Hist. Biol., 23 (1990), 389–409). Notwithstanding the authority that molecular biologists derived by appealing to physics, they sought and achieved institutional independence from the physical sciences in the postwar period. Nicolas Rasmussen has outlined the similar efforts to create disciplinary autonomy for biophysics immediately after World War II, in “The Midcentury Biophysics Bubble: Hiroshima and the Biological Revolution in America” Hist. Sci., 37 (forthcoming, 1997).
The boundaries around molecular biology, even when articulated, changed significantly over time; see Doris T. Zallen, “Redrawing the Boundaries of Molecular Biology: The Case of Photosynthesis”, J. Hist. Biol., 26 (1993), 65–87. For an exploration of the contentious discussion that erupted in the 1960s over the status of molecular biology with respect to biochemistry, see Pnina Abir-Am, “The Politics of Macromolecules: Molecular Biologists, Biochemists, and Rhetoric”, Osiris, 7 (1992), 164–191.
Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry (above, n. 2).
See Charles E. Rosenberg, “Toward an Ecology of Knowledge: On Discipline, Context, and History”, in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 440–455. On the importance of the land-grant legacy in shaping both the departmental structure and the funding of research at the University of California at Berkeley, see Verne A. Stadtman, The University of California 1868–1968 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 202–203, 213; Jane A. Miller, “Women in Chemistry”, in Women of Science: Righting the Record, ed. G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 319–320.
On the importance of nutrition research to biochemistry before World War II, see Arthur Kornberg, “The Vitamin Hunters”, in For the Love of Enzymes: The Odyssey of a Biochemist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1–28.
University of California, “To Expand the Knowledge of Vital Life Factors”, in Free Enterprise and University Research (Berkeley: University of California, 1954), 76–79.
Hormone Research Laboratory, 1950–1980, ed. Choh Hao Li (privately printed by the University of California [1981]), courtesy of R. David Cole.
As Robert Kohler has noted, the use of heavy isotopes as biochemical tracers was pioneered at Columbia University by Robert Schoenheimer in conjunction with Harold Urey. The development of radioactive isotopes in Berkeley in the late 1930s created competition for the Columbia inventors of heavy isotope labels. (Radioisotopes from heavy elements had been used in biological research previously - and somewhat differently — by George von Hevesy to study fluid transport in plants and animals). Not until Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben discovered 14C in 1940 was it evident that radioactive isotope use would outstrip the application of heavy isotopes for labeling experiments. (And although the potential uses of 14C were manifold, the radioisotope was not readily available until after World War II). See Robert E. Kohler, “Rudolf Schoenheimer, Isotopic Tracers, and Biochemistry in the 1930s”, Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 8 (1977), 257–298.
J. L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory (California: University of California Press, 1989), esp. pp. 398, 405–406; Kohler, From Medical Chemistry (above, n. 2), p. 329; Martin D. Kamen, “A Cupful of Luck, a Pinch of Sagacity,” Ann. Rev. Biochem., 55 (1986), 1–34; David M. Greenberg, “Recollections of the History of Biochemistry at the University of California,” 1970, box 11, folder 170, Barker Papers, University of California archives at the Bancroft Library (hereafter UCB), CU-467, San Francisco, Calif.
Kamen, “Cupful of Luck” (above, n. 17).
Susan Spath, “A New Order of Things for a New Biology: R. Stanier, C. B. van Niel and the Procaryote/Eukaryote Distinction” (manuscript in preparation); idem, “The Unity of Life: C. B. van Niel's Conception of General Microbiology,” paper presented on July 18, 1993, at the Sixth Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, Brandeis University.
Doudoroff and Stanier subsequently developed close connections with Jacques Monod at the Pasteur Institute, as reflected in their contributions to, The Origins of Molecular Biology: A Tribute to Jacques Monod, ed. André Lwoff and Agnes Ullman (New York: Academic Press, 1979).
H. A. Barker, “Explorations of Bacterial Metabolism,” Ann. Rev. Biochem., 47 (1978), 1–33, on 15.
Melvin Calvin oral history, “Chemistry and Chemical Biodynamics at Berkeley, 1937–1980,” UCB 85/141c. On the development of medical physics, and later biophysics, around the cyclotrons, see Peter Westwick's fine analysis, “Abraded from Several Corners: Medical Physics and Biophysics at Berkeley,” Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 27:1 (1996, forthcoming).
Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry in Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). p. 325. For a more extensive analysis, see Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Between Biology and Medicine: The Formation of Intermediary Metabolism (Berkeley: Office for the History of Science and Technology, University of California at Berkeley, 1992).
Kohler, From Medical Chemistry.
See Barker, “Explorations” (above, n.21).
Ibid. This program was separate from the relatively large graduate program in the medical school's Division of Biochemistry: “Greenberg says that there is a definite trend in the University of California toward building an upper division school. This is reflected in the department, in that an expansion at the graduate level has occurred, that there are forty candidates, exclusive of medicine, for M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biochemistry. The department serves the non-medical sciences more than the medical” (diary, February 1947, box 11, file 155, RG 1.1, 205D, Rockefeller Archive Center (hereafter RAC), North Tarrytown, NY).
Robert G. Sproul to C. B. Hutchison, January 10, 1946, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5, “Special Problem, 1946–54.”
Excerpt from Warren Weaver diary, November 14, 1947, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
Letter from committee to recommend a new chairman for the Biochemistry Division to Robert G. Sproul, July 30, 1946, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5, “Special Problem, 1946–54.”
On the relative prominence of these subfields in the biochemistry of the 1940s, see Robert E. Kohler, “Epilogue: Toward a Molecular Biology?” in From Medical Chemistry in Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). pp. 324–335.
Lily E. Kay, “W. M. Stanley's Crystallization of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, 1930–1940,” Isis, 77 (1986), 450–472.
On the importance of universities with the postwar “federal research economy,” see Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Stanley's intention to unify biochemistry from its dispersed campus functions into an institutionally autonomous discipline is explicit in his letter to Robert G. Sproul, May 11, 1949, Presidents' Files, “Special Problem: Virus Laboratory, Part I: 1946–50,” UCB, CU-5: 1946, 420-Biochem.
George W. Corner, A History of the Rockefeller Institute, 1901–1953: Origins and Growth (New York: Rockefeller Institute Press, 1965), p. 43.
Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry in Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). p. 283. After World War II at Harvard there was a sustained search for a chair to head a new department of biochemistry that would bring together researchers from the medical school and some members of the departments of chemistry and biology across the river in Cambridge. Despite strong administrative backing, this new department failed to materialize, due to the failure of some high-profile recruits and the subsequent ambition of one of the disliked medical school biochemists to chair the department. See Cohn papers, especially the folder “Harvard University 1949 Confidential Division of Biochemistry — Candidates,” Rare Books Room, Francis Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass. Rockefeller Foundation officer William Loomis's amusing account of the demise of the plan can be found in his diary excerpt, box 141, folder 1746, RG 1.1, 200D, RAC.
W. M. Stanley to President Robert G. Sproul, March 11, 1948, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5: 1948, 420-Biochem.
I am referring to Fred Carpenter, Charles A. Dekker, Arthur B. Pardee, and Donald L. MacDonald; see University of California General Catalogue, 1951–52 (Berkeley: University of California Press, September 1951).
Horace A. Barker to Vice President Wellman, August 12, 1952, box 6, folder 34, Barker Papers, UCB, CU-467.
Wendell Stanley to Warren Weaver, October 29, 1953, box 612, file 5240, RG 1.2, 200V, RAC.
Robert E. Kohler, “Walter Fletcher, F. G. Hopkins, and the Dunn Institute of Biochemistry: A Case Study in the Patronage of Science,” Isis, 69 (1978), 331–355.
See Corner, History (above, n. 34).
I do not mean to suggest that the Rockefeller Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation were programmatically united — but the Princeton laboratories, and particularly Stanley's group, did represent the kind of research that Warren Weaver's program fostered elsewhere. For different views regarding the motives and effects of the Foundation program's science policy, see the references in n. 3 above.
Wendell Stanley to Warren Weaver, February 1, 1952, box 7, folder 50, RG 1.2, series 205D, RAC. (Weaver declined the invitation, and Detlev Bronk, president of the Rockefeller Institute, gave the talk on “molecular biology” instead.)
On Weaver's programmatic vision and his hesitancy to employ his own invented term “molecular biology,” see Robert Kohler, “Warren Weaver and His Program,” in Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. pp. 275 ff.
Newspaper clipping, San Francisco News, July 21, 1948, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5: 1948, 420-Biochem.
Stanley's commitment to virology distinguished his vision of autonomous biochemistry from that of Hopkins: whereas the Dunn Institute was focused on a variety of materials and problems, each of which related to dynamic metabolism, Stanley's group was focused most prominently on viruses.
Wendell Stanley to Warren Weaver, September 17, 1948, copy in Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5, “Special Problem: Virus Lab, Part I, 1946–1950.”
Loomis diary, February 6, 1951, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
Wendell Stanley to Warren Weaver, September 17, 1948 (above, n. 47).
As Robert Kohler elaborates in the last chapter of From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry, “the late 1930s saw the beginning of a remarkable expansion in biochemists’ interests in biological oxidation, intermediary metabolism, biosynthesis, and macromolecules” (“Epilogue” [above, n. 30], p. 325).
Moreover, the plant biochemists were distressed by Stanley's relative disinterest in metabolism, as indicated by his appointments to the new department. In 1952, one wrote: “Anyway — since the trend was to gripe, I spoke strongly in terms of appointing somebody who knows something about metabolism. I stated that all over the campus much concern was expressed concerning the one-sided policy of Stanley. He said he would be pleased to appoint somebody next year to fill that gap” (Paul Stumpf to Barker, “Night before election,” 1952, box 6, folder 34, Barker Papers, UCB, CU-467).
See Soraya de Chaderevian, “Sequences, Conformation, Information: Biochemists and Molecular Biologists in the 1950s,” J. Hist. Biol., this issue.
Interview with R. David Cole, Berkeley, Calif., February 24, 1993. (It was also Cole who referred to Stanley as the “Biochemistry Czar.”)
“Research Activities in the Virus Laboratory,” attached to letter from Wendell Stanley to Warren Weaver, October 29, 1953, box 612, file 5240, RG 1.2, 200V, RAC.
“The approach to, the attack of, the entrance into and the metabolic behavior of a virus within a cell are being studied by biological, chemical, physical and tracer methods using a variety of virus-cell combinations. Energy and enzymatic relationships within normal, malignant and virus diseased cells are being investigated” (ibid.).
Rockefeller Foundation officers were also put off by Stanley's presumption of support, even as they approved the soundness of his plan for a Virus Laboratory: “G.[Gasser] is certainly not favorable to any building gift to California for W. M. Stanley, and WW [Warren Weaver] infers that he would not favor any large gift there for that purpose. G. emphatically dislikes the fact that California takes on Stanley with the assumption that S. has all sorts of important connections which will assure large support for him, and he equally dislikes the fact that Stanley probably himself approves of this procedure” (Warren Weaver, diary note on conversation with Dr. H. S. Gasser, January 9, 1948, box 7, file 88, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC). After refusing Stanley a capital grant, the Rockefeller Foundation did in fact support his research quite substantially. Despite the fact that Weaver was always annoyed by Stanley's salesmanship, he acknowledged that Stanley was “planning a scientific development at Berkeley which will be absolutely first-rate in its concept, in its personnel, and in its setting” (interview notes, Warren Weaver diary, June 15, 1948, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC). Another Foundation officer echoed these sentiments: “On objective grounds it is difficult to deny that $1,000,000 devoted to a virus laboratory may produce results of as great intrinsic importance as those to be derived from the cyclotron and telescope - and of far greater importance to human welfare” (Memo on W. M. Stanley proposal by Robert S. Morrison, January 30, 1948, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC).
In the copy of the publicity release for Stanley's acceptance of the university position, the following sentence is added by hand to the description of the relevance of virus research to disease control: “The fact that penicillin and the sulfa drugs are not effective in the treatment of most viruses diseases emphasizes the importance of the new approach” (University of California Office of Public Information, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5, “Special Problem, 1946–54”). On the development of penicillin, see Peter Neushul, “Science, Government, and the Mass Production of Penicillin,” J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 48 (1993), 371–395.
Wendell Stanley to Warren Weaver, January 8, 1948, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
Loomis diary, April 17, 1950, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
“Location of the Virus Research Laboratory,” a memo to Mr. Corley, September 28, 1948, UCB, CU-5: 1948, 420-Biochem.
“Information Concerning the Biochemistry and Virus Laboratory,” enclosure with letter from Stanley to Weaver, February 1, 1952 (above, n. 43).
Warren Weaver diary, November 10, 1952, box 7, file 50, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
Kohler, “Instruments” (above, n. 3).
Newspaper clipping, Oakland Post Enquirer, July 20, 1948, UCB, CU-5: 1948, 420-Biochem.
Warren Weaver, diary, November 14, 1947, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
Unlabeled newspaper article, from Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5: 1948, 420-Biochem.
Stanley, “Research Activities” (above, n. 54). On molecular biologists' recourse to physics, Abir-Am, “Discourse” (above, n. 3); Keller, “Physics” (above, n. 8); Rasmussen, “Biophysics Bubble” (above, n. 8).
Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 75–76.
Heilbron and Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory (above, n. 17).
See, by way of comparison, Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Unlabeled newspaper article (above, n. 66).
“We plan an extensive program of research on viruses affecting people, animals, plants, and bacteria. We are primarily interested in the elucidation of the mode of reproduction and mutation of viruses, but do expect to work with viruses of social and economic importance. The State of California loses about 100 million dollars annually from virus diseases of animals and plants and I am confident we will be able to do something about this. We plan work on several plant and animal viruses. Work is now under way on viruses causing tumors or cancers in animals. I expect to push this aspect because I am convinced that the viruses provide the best possible experimental approach to the cancer problem” (Wendell Stanley to Dr. Benjamin W. Carey of Lederle Laboratories, from the Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5: 1950, 420-Biochem.). Not insignificantly, Stanley became on of the key organizers of cancer research funding, serving on the board of the American Cancer Society.
Funding details are drawn from the information enclosed with the letter from Stanley to Weaver, February 1, 1952 (above, n. 43). On the funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, see above, n. 56.
Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). esp. pp. 73–82.
Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). p. 74.
The restructuring of federal funding for basic life science research opened up new funding sources at both the National Institutes of Health (through their program of extramural grants) and the National Science Foundation. The National Institues of Health was to focus entirely on disease-related research, leaving public health issues (epidemiological tracking, etc.) to the newly created Communicable Disease Center. The National Science Foundation also included funding for basic life science research, including molecular biology. Before the NSF was founded, some of Stanley's biochemists were supported by the Office of Naval Research, which funded basic research immediately after World War II. My survey of Berkeley grants records from the 1950s and 1960s reveals that all of these sources were important in supporting research in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, although Public Health Service (NIH) grants were most frequent. On the restructuring of the research mission at the National Institutes of Health, see Victoria A. Harden, “Epilogue,” in Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Policy, 1887–1937 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 179–191. On the establishment of biological research funding at the NSF, Toby Appel is completing a monograph on the National Science Foundation and federal patronage of biology, 1945–1975 (forthcoming). G. Burrough Mider offers an overview of federal funding of biomedical research: “The Federal Impact on Biomedical Research,” in Advances in American Medicine: Essays at the Bicentennial, vol. II, ed. John Z. Bowers and Elizabeth F. Purcell (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation in conjunction with the National Library of Medicine, 1976), pp. 806–871.
Henry Palm, article from July 21, 1948, unidentified newspaper, in Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5: 1948, 420-Biochem.
Stanley to Sproul, August 23, 1950, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-5: 1950, 420-Biochem. Stanley was ambiguous (probably intentionally) about whether a “national emergency” requiring expert virologists involved the threat of combating bacterial warfare or the more conventional needs by the armed forces for vaccines.
See Andrew Rolle, “California after World War II,” in California: A History, 4th ed. (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1987), pp. 452–467. For another view of the historical impact of the Cold War on molecular biology, see Lily E. Kay.
Carl L. A. Schmidt, The Chemistry of the Amino Acids and Proteins, 2nd ed. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1945).
See letter from Zev Hassid to H. A. Barker, November 17, 1952, box 6, folder 34, Barker Papers, UCB, CU-467.
See letter from H. A. Barker to President Sproul, copy enclosed with a letter to Dr. Harry Wellman, Vice President, dated October 27, 1952, box 6, fold 34, Barker Papers, UCB, CU-467.
Roger Stanier to H. A. Barker, November 6, 1952, ibid.
The last two stanzas were: “I became so great it occurred to ME/That I really might have ability./I thought for awhile that I should have spent/At least one day on an experiment./I never did but its [sic] just as well/For now I am director of the BVL./Now students all whoever you may be/If you want to gain success like ME/Be sure and never go near a lab/For all you really need is the gift of gab./I have this gift as you can tell/For I soon became director of the BVL” (copy of “lyrics” in box 6, folder 34, Barker Papers, UCB, CU-467).
Warren Weaver diary, November 10, 1952, box 7, file 50, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
One plant biochemist wrote into a committee report: “It should be noted that not until six weeks later did we learn from Dr. Stanley that he attributed his resignation largely to the fact that we had been ‘uncooperative.’ We believed his resignation was the result of the failure of the Biochemistry staff to support his ‘unification’ policy” (Report to the Pitzer Committee, September 26, 1953, p. 11, box 6, folder 34, Barker Papers, UCB, CU-467).
“Memo of Conference with Professor Snell, Department of Biochemistry,” drafted by Lincoln Constance, Dean, May 1, 1957, President's Files, UCB, CU-149: 1959, 400-Vir.
Interview with Horace A. Barker, February 23, 1993, Berkeley, Calif.
The timing of the founding of the Department of Virology also reflected the fact that Stanley was being courted by University of Pittsburgh to fill a Vice Presidency: “One of our keep-Stanley programs was to push fast on the establishment of the proposed Dept. of Virology, approved by the AAC, Ed Policy, the Budget Committee and you” (Memo ”Re: Stanley-Dept. of Virology,” February 17, 1958, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-149: 1959, 400-Vir.).
Memo from Dean Lincoln Constance to Chancellor Strong, Presidents' Files, UCB, CU-149: 1961, 400-Vir.
Letter from Chancellor Strong and Robley C. Williams, quoted by C. A. Knight in “Department of Molecular Biology,” July 14, 1965, drawn up for the University Centennial publication, box 23, file “History of M. B. Dept.,” Stanley Papers, UCB, 78/18c.
Report of the Committee to Plan the Scope and Activities of a New Department Concerned with Relating Biology and the Physical Sciences,” pp. 1–2, October 22, 1962, ibid. The members of the committee were Robley C. Williams (chair), Daniel Mazia, Roger Y. Stanier, Howard K. Schachman, and Gunther S. Stent. The report's positioning of molecular biology with respect to the physical sciences posits it as the cognate of physics, which is presented as more fundamental than chemistry (whose cognate would be zoology). On the rhetorical power of the comparison with physics, see Keller, “Physics” (above, n. 8).
“Report” (above, n. 92), p. 3.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 14.
Knight, “Department of Molecular Biology” (above, n. 91).
“Report” (above, n. 92).
See Elzen, “Two Ultracentrifuges” (above, n. 5); Kay, “Laboratory Technology” (above, n. 4); and Nicolas Rasmussen, “Making a Machine Instrumental: RCA and the Wartime Origins of Biological Electron Microscopy in America, 1940–45,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 27 (1996), 311–349. A very telling account of changes in biochemical instrumentation has been given by the Berkeley medical biochemist David Greenberg, who elaborates on how new methods and tools transformed the biochemistry research laboratory beginnings at the end of the 1930s: see “Recollections” (above, n. 17), pp. 35–36.
On the development of spectroscopy in particular, see Doris T. Zallen, “The Rockefeller Foundation and Spectroscopy Research: The Programs at Chicago and Utrecht,” J. Hist. Biol., 25 (1992), 67–89; and Kohler, “Instruments” (above, n. 3).
For example, see Scott F. Gilbert, “Intellectual Traditions in the Life Sciences: Molecular Biology and Biochemistry,” Perspect. Biol. Med., 26 (1982), 151–162.
Loomis diary, April 17, 1950, box 7, file 49, RG 1.2, 205D, RAC.
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Creager, A.N.H. Wendell Stanley's dream of a free-standing biochemistry department at the University of California, Berkeley. J Hist Biol 29, 331–360 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00127379
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00127379