There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...) for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream. (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)

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)

The importance of viruses as model organisms is well-established in molecular biology and Max Delbrück’s phage group set standards in the DNA phage field. In this paper, I argue that RNA phages, discovered in the 1960s, were also instrumental in the making of molecular biology. As part of experimental systems, RNA phages stood for messenger RNA, genes and genome. RNA was thought to mediate information transfers between DNA and proteins. Furthermore, RNA was more manageable at the bench than DNA due (...) to the availability of specific RNases, enzymes used as chemical tools to analyse RNA. Finally, RNA phages provided scientists with a pure source of mRNA to investigate the genetic code, genes and even a genome sequence. This paper focuses on Walter Fiers’ laboratory at Ghent University and their work on the RNA phage MS2. When setting up his Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Fiers planned a comprehensive study of the virus with a strong emphasis on the issue of structure. In his lab, RNA sequencing, now a little-known technique, evolved gradually from a means to solve the genetic code, to a tool for completing the first genome sequence. Thus, I follow the research pathway of Fiers and his ‘RNA phage lab’ with their evolving experimental system from 1960 to the late 1970s. This study illuminates two decisive shifts in post-war biology: the emergence of molecular biology as a discipline in the 1960s in Europe and of genomics in the 1990s. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes how academic institutions, government agencies, and the nascent biotech industry contested the legal ownership of recombinant DNA technology in the name of the public interest. It reconstructs the way a small but influential group of government officials and university research administrators introduced a new framework for the commercialization of academic research in the context of a national debate over scientific research's contributions to American economic prosperity and public health. They claimed that private ownership of inventions arising (...) from public support would provide a powerful means to liberate biomedical discoveries for public benefit. This articulation of the causal link between private ownership and the public interest, it is argued, justified a new set of expectations about the use of research results arising from government or public support, in which commercialization became a new public obligation for academic researchers. By highlighting the broader economic and legal shifts that prompted the reconfiguration of the ownership of public knowledge in late twentieth‐century American capitalism, the essay examines the threads of policy‐informed legal ideas that came together to affirm private ownership of biomedical knowledge as germane to the public interest in the coming of age of biotechnology and genetic medicine. (shrink)

In 1948, a dynamic junior member of the Johns Hopkins Biology Department, William McElroy, became the first director of the McCollum—Pratt Institute for the Investigation of Micronutrient Elements. The Institute was founded at the university to further studies into the practicalities of animal nutrition. Ultimately, however, the Institute reflected McElroy's vision that all biological problems, including nutrition, could be best investigated through basic biochemical and enzymes studies. The Institute quickly became a hub of biochemical research over the following decade, producing (...) foundational work on metabolism and a respected series of symposia. In this paper, I argue that McElroy's biochemical vantage on biology also permeated the traditionally morphological and embryological Biology Department at Hopkins. Largely due to the activity of McElroy and the Institute, the faculty, course offerings, and research underwent a radical reorientation toward biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s, even while maintaining a commitment to developmental biology. While the history of postwar biology is often told as the ascendancy of the "new" biology over "traditional" biology, the case of McElroy and the McCollum—Pratt Institute affords an opportunity for historical examination of biochemical and molecular science as a lens through which all branches of biology at an institution were reconceived and unified. (shrink)

The discovery and ongoing investigation of microRNAs suggest important conceptual and methodological lessons for philosophers and historians of biology. This paper provides an account of miRNA research and the shift from viewing these tiny regulatory entities as minor curiosities to seeing them as major players in the post-transcriptional regulation of genes. Conceptually, the study of miRNAs is part of a broader change in understandings of genetic regulation, in which simple switch-like mechanisms were reinterpreted as aspects of complex cellular and genome-wide (...) processes. Among them are the activities of small RNAs, previously regarded as non-functional. Methodologically, the miRNA story suggests new ways of characterizing biological research that should prove helpful to philosophers of science who seek to develop more pluralistic, pragmatic models of scientific inquiry. miRNA research displays iterative movements between multiple modes of investigation that include not only the proposal and testing of hypotheses but also exploratory, technology-oriented and question-driven modes of research. As an exemplary story of scientific discovery and development, the miRNA case illustrates transitions from genetics to genomics and systems biology, and it shows how diverse configurations of research practice are related to major scientific advances. (shrink)