This paper extends previous arguments against the assumption that the study of variation at the molecular level was instigated with a view to solving an internal conflict between the balance and classical schools of population genetics. It does so by focusing on the intersection of basic research in protein chemistry and the molecular approach to disease with the enactment of global health campaigns during the Cold War period. The paper connects advances in research on protein structure and function as reflected (...) in Christian Anfinsen’s The molecular basis of evolution, with a political reading of Emilé Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling’s identification of molecular disease and evolution. Beyond atomic fallout, these advances constituted a rationale for the promotion of genetic surveys of human populations in the Third World, in connection with international health programs. Light is shed not only on the experimental roots of the molecular challenge but on the broader geopolitical context where the rising role of biomedicine and public health had an impact on evolutionary biology. (shrink)

It is time to escape the constraints of the Systematics Wars narrative and pursue new questions that are better positioned to establish the relevance of the field in this time period to broader issues in the history of biology and history of science. To date, the underlying assumptions of the Systematics Wars narrative have led historians to prioritize theory over practice and the conflicts of a few leading theorists over the less-polarized interactions of systematists at large. We show how shifting (...) to a practice-oriented view of methodology, centered on the trajectory of mathematization in systematics, demonstrates problems with the common view that one camp straightforwardly “won” over the other. In particular, we critique David Hull’s historical account in Science as a Process by demonstrating exactly the sort of intermediate level of positive sharing between phenetic and cladistic theories that undermines their mutually exclusive individuality as conceptual systems over time. It is misleading, or at least inadequate, to treat them simply as holistically opposed theories that can only interact by competition to the death. Looking to the future, we suggest that the concept of workflow provides an important new perspective on the history of mathematization and computerization in biology after World War II. (shrink)

The use of molecules and reactions as evidence, markers and/or traits for evolutionary processes has a history more than a century long. Molecules have been used in studies of intra-specific variation and studies of similarity among species that do not necessarily result in the analysis of phylogenetic relations. Promoters of the use of molecular data have sustained the need for quantification as the main argument to make use of them. Moreover, quantification has allowed intensive statistical analysis, as a condition and (...) a product of increasing automation. All of these analyses are subject to the methodological anxiety characteristic of a community in search of objectivity. It is in this context that scientists compared and evaluated protein and nucleic acid sequence data with other types of molecular data – including immunological, electrophoretic and hybridization data. This paper argues that by looking at long-term historical processes, such as the use of molecular evidence in evolutionary biology, we gain valuable insights into the history of science. In that sense, it accompanies a growing concern among historians for big-pictures of science that incorporate the fruitful historical research on local cases of the last decades. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century calls to modernize natural history motivated a range of responses. It was unclear how research in natural history museums would participate in the significant technological and conceptual changes that were occurring in the life sciences. By the 1960s, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the few university-based natural history museums that were able to maintain their specimen collections and support active research. The MVZ therefore provides a window to the (...) modernization of natural history. This paper concentrates on the directorial transitions that occurred at the MVZ between 1965 and 1971. During this period, the MVZ had four directors: Alden H. Miller (Director 1940–1965), an ornithologist; Aldo Starker Leopold (Acting Director 1965–1966), a conservationist and wildlife biologist; Oliver P. Pearson (Director 1966–1971), a physiologist and mammalogist; and David B. Wake (Director 1971–1998), a morphologist, developmental biologist, and herpetologist. The paper explores how a diversity of overlapping modernization strategies, including hiring new faculty, building infrastructure to study live animals, establishing new kinds of collections, and building modern laboratories combined to maintain collections at the MVZ’s core. The paper examines the tensions between the different modernization strategies to inform an analysis of how and why some changes were institutionalized while others were short-lived. By exploring the modernization of collections-based research, this paper emphasizes the importance of collections in the transformation of the life sciences. (shrink)

Between December 14 and 20, 1965, the World Health Organization Scientific Group on Haemoglobinopathies and Allied Disorders metatthe Geneva agency's headquarters. The group comprised eight well-known physicians including Tulio Arends, a leading Latin American human geneticist from the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigations. Others came from North America, Northern and Southern Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia, an array that reflected the delicate geopolitical equilibriums of postwar international health programs, but also the development of highly specialized biomedical research (...) around the globe. They elected Herman Lehmann, from the Abnormal Haemoglobin Research Unit of the Medical Research... (shrink)

Using a recent environmental controversy on the U.S. east coast over the conservation of red knots as a lens, I present a history of North American efforts to understand and conserve migratory shorebirds. Focusing on a few signal pieces of American legislation and their associated bureaucracies, I show the ways in which migratory wildlife have been thoroughly enrolled in efforts to quantify and protect their populations. Interactions between wildlife biologists and endangered species have been described by some scholars as “domestication”—a (...) level of surveillance and intervention into nonhuman nature that constitutes a form of dependence. I pause to reflect on this historical trajectory, pointing out the breaks and continuities with older forms of natural history. Using the oft-mobilized Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon as a foil, I question the utility and ethics of too-easily declaring “domesticated” wildlife an act of “biopower.” Instead, I argue that Jacob von Uexküll’s “umwelt” from early ecology and ethology, and more contemporary Science and Technology Studies analyses emphasizing multiple ontologies, offer more illuminating accounts of endangered species science. Neither science, conservation, nor history are well-served by the conflation of wildlife “surveillance” with the language of Foucauldian discipline. (shrink)

This is the story, told in the light of a new analysis of historical data, of a mathematical biology problem that was explored in the 1930s in Thomas Morgan’s laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. It is one of the early developments of evolutionary genetics and quantitative phylogeny, and deals with the identification and counting of chromosomal inversions in Drosophila species from comparisons of genetic maps. A re-analysis of the data produced in the 1930s using current mathematics and computational (...) technologies reveals how a team of biologists, with the help of a renowned mathematician and against their first intuition, came to an erroneous conclusion regarding the presence of phylogenetic signals in gene arrangements. This example illustrates two different aspects of a same piece: the appearance of a mathematical in biology problem solved with the development of a combinatorial algorithm, which was unusual at the time, and the role of errors in scientific activity. Also underlying is the possible influence of computational complexity in understanding the directions of research in biology. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes (...) tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell’s practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political “biases” of biodiversity research and its problem of “reproducibility.”. (shrink)

The Bermuda Principles for DNA sequence data sharing are an enduring legacy of the Human Genome Project. They were adopted by the HGP at a strategy meeting in Bermuda in February of 1996 and implemented in formal policies by early 1998, mandating daily release of HGP-funded DNA sequences into the public domain. The idea of daily sharing, we argue, emanated directly from strategies for large, goal-directed molecular biology projects first tested within the “community” of C. elegans researchers, and were introduced (...) and defended for the HGP by the nematode biologists John Sulston and Robert Waterston. In the C. elegans community, and subsequently in the HGP, daily sharing served the pragmatic goals of quality control and project coordination. Yet in the HGP human genome, we also argue, the Bermuda Principles addressed concerns about gene patents impeding scientific advancement, and were aspirational and flexible in implementation and justification. They endured as an archetype for how rapid data sharing could be realized and rationalized, and permitted adaptation to the needs of various scientific communities. Yet in addition to the support of Sulston and Waterston, their adoption also depended on the clout of administrators at the US National Institutes of Health and the UK nonprofit charity the Wellcome Trust, which together funded 90% of the HGP human sequencing effort. The other nations wishing to remain in the HGP consortium had to accommodate to the Bermuda Principles, requiring exceptions from incompatible existing or pending data access policies for publicly funded research in Germany, Japan, and France. We begin this story in 1963, with the biologist Sydney Brenner’s proposal for a nematode research program at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge. We continue through 2003, with the completion of the HGP human reference genome, and conclude with observations about policy and the historiography of molecular biology. (shrink)

This article follows shorebirds—migratory animals that have gone from game to nongame animals over the course of the past century in North America—as a way to track modern field biology, bureaucratic institutions, and the valuation of wildlife. Doing so allows me to make interrelated arguments about the history of wildlife management and science. The first is to note the endurance of observation-based natural history methods in field biology over the long twentieth century and the importance of these methods for the (...) persistent contribution of amateurs. The second major line of argument advances the historical significance of scientific, government bureaucracies as sites of natural knowledge production. Historians of biology and ecology have tended to stress scientists with institutional homes in universities, museums, and at land-grant field stations—particularly as various forms of field biology became professionalized over the twentieth century. In contrast, migratory animals like shorebirds, whether under the auspices of the US Biological Survey or the contemporary Fish and Wildlife Service, were primarily studied and conserved by biologists in bureaucratic agencies. Mid- to low-level bureaucrats, along with avocational birders, have mainly been responsible for developing what we know about shorebird migration, behavior, and life history. And third, shorebirds foreground the importance of bureaucratic context for the valuation of nature, from their economic value to agriculture in the early twentieth century to their value as rare, endangered species in the twentyfirst. (shrink)

The concept of ‘Fifth Business’ is used to analyze a minority standpoint and bring serious attention to the role of scientists who play a galvanizing role in a science but for multiple reasons appear less prominently in more common recounts of any particular development. Biochemist Ray Wu published a DNA sequencing experiment in March 1970 using DNA polymerase catalysis and specific nucleotide labeling, both of which are foundational to general sequencing methods today. The scant mention of Wu’s work from textbooks, (...) research articles, and other accounts of DNA sequencing calls into question how scientific collective memory forms. This alternative history seeks to understand why a key figure in nucleic acid sequence analysis has remained less visibly connected or peripheral to solidifying narratives about the history of DNA sequencing. The study resists predictable dismissals of Wu’s work in order to seriously examine the formation of his nucleic acid sequence analysis research program and how he shared his knowledge of sequencing during a period of rapid advancement in the field. An analysis of Wu’s work on sequencing the cohesive ends of lambda bacteriophage in the 1960s and 1970s exemplifies how a variety of individuals and groups attempted to develop protocol for sequencing the order of nucleotide base pairs comprising DNA. This historical examination of the sociality of scientific research suggests a way to understand how Wu and others contributed to the very collective memory of DNA sequencing that Wu eventually tried to repair. The study of Wu, who was a Chinese immigrant to the United States, provides a foundation for further critical scholarship on the heterogeneous histories of Asian American bioscientists, the sociality of their scientific works, and how the resulting knowledge produced is preserved, if not evenly, in a scientific field’s collective memory. (shrink)