TY - JOUR
T1 - A chemical reaction to the historiography of biology
AU - Creager, Angela N.H.
N1 - Funding Information:
This legacy plays out in a peculiar way in the historiography of biology that I know best. From the late nineteenth century, many of life’s key agents seemed to lie just beyond the reach of the microscope, in the no-man’s-land between molecules and cells. Chemical instruments, reagents, and approaches were critical to reckoning with this realm, and so to apprehending the “physical basis of life.”49 By the late 1930s, a host of researchers were exploiting various tools from physics and chemistry to answer biological questions, many funded through Warren Weaver’s Natural Sciences Program at the Rockefeller Foundation. Given that Weaver himself coined the term “molecular biology” to describe this endeavour, it is perhaps not surprising that the ideas, instruments, and initiatives coming out of this programme have been assimilated into the historical emergence of that field.50 Yet the research projects Weaver selected for funding were a motley array compared to the current understanding of “molecular biology.”51 More importantly, the growing importance of genes in molecular biology after World War II has drawn historians’ attention away from the many mid-century attempts by biologists to understand the non-hereditary aspects of life in physical, chemical, and mathematical terms, attempts that have continued to this day. The telos of genetics and evolutionary biology is like a large magnet of ironclad presentism that tends to overwhelm the chemical charms of a more diverse group of life scientists.
Publisher Copyright:
© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2018.
PY - 2017/10/2
Y1 - 2017/10/2
N2 - This article examines the often-overlooked role of chemical ideas and practices in the history of modern biology. The first section analyses how the conventional histories of the life sciences have, through the twentieth century, come to focus nearly exclusively on evolutionary theory and genetics, and why this storyline is inadequate. The second section elaborates on what the restricted neo-Darwinian history of biology misses, noting a variety of episodes in the history of biology that relied on developments in - or tools from - chemistry, including an example from the author’s own work. The diverse ways in which biologists have used chemical approaches often relate to the concrete, infrastructural side of research; a more inclusive history thus also connects to a historiography of materials and objects in science.
AB - This article examines the often-overlooked role of chemical ideas and practices in the history of modern biology. The first section analyses how the conventional histories of the life sciences have, through the twentieth century, come to focus nearly exclusively on evolutionary theory and genetics, and why this storyline is inadequate. The second section elaborates on what the restricted neo-Darwinian history of biology misses, noting a variety of episodes in the history of biology that relied on developments in - or tools from - chemistry, including an example from the author’s own work. The diverse ways in which biologists have used chemical approaches often relate to the concrete, infrastructural side of research; a more inclusive history thus also connects to a historiography of materials and objects in science.
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U2 - 10.1080/00026980.2017.1412136
DO - 10.1080/00026980.2017.1412136
M3 - Article
C2 - 29310539
AN - SCOPUS:85040998324
SN - 0002-6980
VL - 64
SP - 343
EP - 359
JO - Ambix
JF - Ambix
IS - 4
ER -