Hugo de Vries (1848–1935) would without doubt turn in his grave if he could be told about the various perspectives from which historians have studied his ideas and works. His would not be an exceptional case, of course, for many before and after him have fallen victim to the irony of history. Still, I am inclined to grant de Vries that he would have some reason for his distress, for the irony has hit him particularly hard. In 1922, de Vries (...) was invited to attend the Mendel centennial celebrations at Brünn (Brno). He declined the invitation, suspecting, among other things, that the tenor of the commemoration would be pro-Mendel and anti-Darwin, and he heartily refused to share in either sentiment. Now contrast this with de Vries' imputed role in the historiography of genetics and evolutionary theory as ‘rediscoverer’ of Mendelism and as co-executor of the ‘eclipse of Darwinism’, and the irony will be clear. (shrink)

The general problem around which this Special Issue revolves is that the way in which science is organized into specialties can have negative consequences on the progress of knowledge [...].

This paper focuses on the structural development of institution-based interest in genetics in Anglo-North American medicine after 1930 concomitantly with an analysis of the changes through which ideas about heredity and the hereditary transmission of diseases in families have passed. It maintains that the unfolding relationship between medicine and genetics can best be understood against the background of the shift in emphasis in conceptualisations of recurring patterns of disease in families from ‘biological relatedness’ to ‘related to chromosomes and genes’. The (...) paper begins with brief considerations of the historical confluences of, first, heredity and medicine and, second, genetics and medicine which, in a third section, leads to a discussion about a uniquely ‘genetics-based approach’ to medicine in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

One area of genetics particularly dominated by German-speaking geneticists (Brücher, Correns, Lehmann, Michaelis, Oehlkers, Renner, von Wettstein) during the interwar period was research in the field of cytoplasmic inheritance (Plasmon-Theory). The controversy between the botanists Lehmann (Tübingen) and Brücher (Jena, Tübingen) about the function of “supressor genes” in Epilobium cell division was central to debates about cytoplasmic inheritance. The failure of Brücher, Michaelis and Oehlkers to replicate Lehmann's Epilobium experiments ultimately forced Lehmann to admit his error.

Bernard Norton's friends in the history of science have had many reasons for commemorating, with admiration and affection, not only his research and teaching but no less his conversation and his company. One of his most estimable traits was his refusal to beat about the bush in raising the questions he thought worthwhile pursuing. I still remember discoursing at Pittsburgh on Darwin's route to his theory of natural selection, and being asked at the end by Bernard what were Darwin's views (...) on heredity. I answered with the conventional waffle to the effect that the theory concerned the populational fate rather than the individual production and transmission of heritable variation, so that whatever views Darwin had on heredity had only a subsidiary place in his theorizing. Bernard was not fooled. ‘I would have thought’, he said, ‘that in order to understand anyone's theorising about evolution it would be necessary to look at his views on heredity’. (shrink)

We present two case studies from contemporary biology in which we observe conflicts between established and emerging approaches. The first case study discusses the relation between molecular biology and systems biology regarding the explanation of cellular processes, while the second deals with phylogenetic systematics and the challenge posed by recent network approaches to established ideas of evolutionary processes. We show that the emergence of new fields is in both cases driven by the development of high-throughput data generation technologies and the (...) transfer of modeling techniques from other fields. New and emerging views are characterized by different philosophies of nature, i.e. by different ontological and methodological assumptions and epistemic values and virtues. This results in a kind of conflict we call “epistemic competition” that manifests in two ways: On the one hand, opponents engage in mutual critique and defense of their fundamental assumptions. On the other hand, they compete for the acceptance and integration of the knowledge they provide by a broader scientific community. Despite an initial rhetoric of replacement, the views as well as the respective audiences come to be seen as more clearly distinct during the course of the debate. Hence, we observe—contrary to many other accounts of scientific change—that conflict results in the formation of new niches of research, leading to co-existence and perceived complementarity of approaches. Our model thus contributes to the understanding of the pluralization of the scientific landscape. (shrink)

The technique of nuclear transplantation – popularly known as cloning – has been integrated into several different histories of twentieth century biology. Historians and science scholars have situated nuclear transplantation within narratives of scientific practice, biotechnology, bioethics, biomedicine, and changing views of life. However, nuclear transplantation has never been the focus of analysis. In this article, I examine the development of nuclear transplantation techniques, focusing on the people, motivations, and institutions associated with the first successful nuclear transfer in metazoans in (...) 1952. The conflict between embryologists and geneticists over the mechanisms of differentiation motivated Robert Briggs to pursue nuclear transplantation experiments as a way to resolve the debate. Briggs worked at the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute, a research facility devoted to the study of cancer. The goal of understanding cancer would play a role in the development of the technique, and the story of nuclear transplantation sheds light on the role that biomedical contexts play in biological research in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Advocates of “Mendelism” early on stressed the usefulness of Mendelian principles for breeders. Ever since, that usefulness—and the favourable opinion of Mendelism it supposedly engendered among breeders—has featured in explanations of the rapid rise of Mendelian genetics. An important counter-tradition of commentary, however, has emphasized the ways in which early Mendelian theory in fact fell short of breeders’ needs. Attention to intellectual property, narrowly and broadly construed, makes possible an approach that takes both the tradition and the counter-tradition seriously, by (...) enabling a more complete description of the theory-reality shortfall and a better understanding of how changing practices, on and off the Mendelians’ experimental farms, functioned to render that shortfall unproblematic. In the case of plant breeding in Britain, a perennial source of lost profits and disputes over ownership was the appearance of individual plants departing from their varietal types—so-called “rogues.” Mendelian plant varieties acquired a reputation for being rogue-free, and so for demonstrating the correctness of Mendelian principles , at a time when Mendelians were gradually taking control of the means for distributing their varieties. Mendelian breeders protected their products physically from rogue-inducing contamination in such a way that when rogues did appear, the default explanation—that contamination had somehow occurred—ensured that there was no threat to Mendelian principles. (shrink)

The article reevaluates the reception of Mendelism in France, and more generally considers the complex relationship between Mendelism and plant breeding in the first half on the 20th century. It shows on the one side that agricultural research and higher education institutions have played a key role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in France, whereas university biologists remained reluctant to accept this approach on heredity. But on the other side, plant breeders, and agricultural researchers, despite an interest in (...) Mendelism, never came to see it as the breeders' panacea, and regarded it instead as of only limited value for plant breeding. I account for this judgment in showing that the plant breeders and Mendelism designed two contrasting kinds of experimental systems and inhabited distinct experimental cultures. While Mendelian geneticists designed experimental systems that allowed the production of definite ratios of different forms that varied in relation to a few characters, plant breeders' experimental systems produced a wide range of variation, featuring combinations between hundreds of traits. Rather than breaking this multiple variation down into simple elements, breeders designed and monitored a genetic lottery. The gene was a unit in a Mendelian experimental culture, an "epistemic thing" as Rheinberger put it, that could be grasped by means of statistical regularities, but it remained of secondary importance for French plant breeders, for whom the strain or the variety -- not the gene -- was the fundamental unit of analysis and manipulation. (shrink)

By the onset of the Second World War, the British scientific periodicalNature– specifically,Nature's ‘Letters to the editor’ column – had become a major publication venue for scientists who wished to publish short communications about their latest experimental findings. This paper argues that the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford was instrumental in establishing this use of the ‘Letters to the editor’ column in the early twentieth century. Rutherford's contributions setNatureapart from its fellow scientific weeklies in Britain and helped construct a defining (...) feature ofNature's influence in the twentieth century. Rutherford's participation in the journal influenced his students and colleagues in the field of radioactivity physics and drew physicists like the German Otto Hahn and the American Bertram Borden Boltwood to submit their work toNatureas well, andNaturecame to play a major role in spreading news of the latest research in the science of radioactivity. Rutherford and his colleagues established a pattern of submissions to the ‘Letters to the editor’ that would eventually be adopted by scientists from diverse fields and from laboratories around the world. (shrink)