Abstract
Historical analyses of what metabolism has been conceived of, how concepts of metabolism were related to disciplines such as nineteenth-century nutritional physiology or twentieth-century biochemistry, and how their genealogies relate to the current developments may be helpful to understand the various, at times polemic, ways in which the boundaries between metabolism and heredity have been re-drawn. Against this background, a small number of scholars gathered in Berlin for a workshop that equally aimed at bringing new stories to the fore, and at considering seemingly known ones in a new light. Some aspects of the discussions are summarized in this paper.
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Notes
Landecker (2013b) discusses the shifting boundaries between metabolism and reproduction in the history of the life sciences. It is interesting to note that metabolism was quite visible in the historiography of the life sciences until the early 1990s, such as in the works of Robert Kohler (1975) or Frederic Holmes on biochemistry (e.g. Holmes 1992). After that, molecular genetics progressively moved into the focus of attention.
See the forthcoming book: K. Nickelsen (2015). Explaining Photosynthesis. Modelling Biochemical Mechanisms 1840–1960. Dordrecht: Springer.
In 1952, microbiologist C.B. van Niel, one of Kluyver’s former assistants argued that “the enormous clarification brought about by the enunciation of the ‘unitarian approach’ […] has become so much a part of our thinking that the very fact of its once having been started is no longer taken into account.” (van Niel 1953, p. 11).
Elizabeth Neswald (2011) has argued for the central role of the necessary interaction and cooperation between experimenters and animals in nineteenth-century nutrition experiments. Since the workshop papers focused on bacteria, plants, and chemical engineering, this issue perhaps did not arise, but it should be important for a broader perspective on metabolism that includes research on humans and animals.
In this latter molecular biological, informational version, the ways organisms “make proteins” has become part of the history of molecular biology, as epitomized in the 1968 Nobel prize for the “genetic code” to Robert Holley, Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall Nirenberg. See Kay (2000) and Rheinberger (1997) for more details.
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Grote, M., Keuck, L. Conference report “Stoffwechsel. Histories of metabolism”, workshop organized by Mathias Grote at Technische Universität Berlin, November 28–29th, 2014. HPLS 37, 210–218 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-015-0071-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-015-0071-0