Bruce Charlton describes in trenchant tone and terms the state of contemporary modern science in what I've called its decadent third stage (Bauer 2013). Lacking citations, the book is really an extended essay, but no informed observer will doubt the comprehensive accuracy with which Charlton points to present-day careerism, bureaucracy, overspecialization, dysfunctional incentives, and snowballing dishonesty; there is too much "science" (Bauer 2014) and too much influence of self-interested forces from outside science (commerce, politics, the media), and insiders fear to (...) rock the boat even when they recognize that it needs rocking. All of that is in the starkest contrast to the popular misconception of science (Charlton's "Real Science") as a disinterested search for truth. Charlton dates the "extraordinarily rapid-yet dishonestly concealed-collapse" from that ideal Real Science (in my view accurately [Bauer 2013]), from about the middle of the 20th century, paralleling what has happened outside science (Barzun 2000). Though Charlton describes his aim as "opening eyes to the obvious, of clarifying the already-known" (p. 135), the book nevertheless illuminates causes and connections in ways that can be fresh and useful, for example in asserting inevitability: "The main problem is that when science becomes big, as it is now, the social processes of science come to control all aspects of science" (p. 116). (shrink)

The history of biochemistry and molecular biology is replete with examples of erroneous theories that persisted for considerable lengths of time before they were rejected. This paper examines patterns of dissolution of three such erroneous hypotheses: The idea that nucleic acids are tetrads of the four nucleobases (‘the tetranucleotide hypothesis’); the notion that proteins are collinear with their encoding genes in all branches of life; and the hypothesis that proteins are synthesized by reverse action of proteolytic enzymes. Analysis of these (...) cases indicates that amassed contradictory empirical findings did not prompt critical experimental testing of the prevailing theories nor did they elicit alternative hypotheses. Rather, the incorrect models collapsed when experiments that were not purposely designed to test their validity exposed new facts. (shrink)

Fred Sanger, the inventor of the first protein, RNA and DNA sequencing methods, has traditionally been seen as a technical scientist, engaged in laboratory bench work and not interested at all in intellectual debates in biology. In his autobiography and commentaries by fellow researchers, he is portrayed as having a trajectory exclusively dependent on technological progress. The scarce historical scholarship on Sanger partially challenges these accounts by highlighting the importance of professional contacts, institutional and disciplinary moves in his career, spanning (...) from 1940 to 1983. This paper will complement such literature by focusing, for the first time, on the transition of Sanger’s sequencing strategies from degrading to copying the target molecule, which occurred in the late 1960s as he was shifting from protein and RNA to DNA sequencing, shortly after his move from the Department of Biochemistry to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both based in Cambridge (UK). Through a reinterpretation of Sanger’s papers and retrospective accounts and a pioneering investigation of his laboratory notebooks, I will claim that sequencing shifted from the working procedures of organic chemistry to those of the emergent molecular biology. I will also argue that sequencing deserves a history in its own right as a practice and not as a technique subordinated to the development of molecular biology or genomics. My proposed history of sequencing leads to a reappraisal of current STS debates on bioinformatics, biotechnology and biomedicine. (shrink)

Interest in contemporary scientific history has concentrated on physics and engineering and its most obvious growth has been in America. By contrast, there has been a relative neglect of the biological sciences, especially in Great Britain. This concern with contemporary scientific history has been an autonomous growth among physical scientists and engineers. There has not yet been any significant development of an historical dimension among modern biologists. Most of those who do study the history of biology are concerned with natural (...) history in the nineteenth century and before, with the largest group concentrating on the Darwinian Revolution. Students of the history of twentieth century biology are just beginning to emerge, but may find themselves uniquely disadvantaged compared with observers of the sciences from earlier centuries, or even of the physical sciences and engineering in the twentieth century, unless certain things are done rather quickly. (shrink)