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ArticleTitle Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology. A History of the Molecular Revolution. Trans. by M. Cobb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 528 pp., $45.00, £36.95, €40.50 Hardback, ISBN:
9780674281363 Article Sub-Title
Article CopyRight Springer Nature B.V.
(This will be the copyright line in the final PDF) Journal Name Journal of the History of Biology
Corresponding Author Family Name Tanghe
Particle
Given Name Koen B.
Suffix Division
Organization University of Gent
Address Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium Phone
Fax
Email koenbernard.tanghe@ugent.be
URL ORCID
Schedule
Received Revised Accepted Footnote Information
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Journal : SmallExtended 10739 Article No : 9615 Pages : 4 MS Code : 9615 Dispatch : 5-9-2020
Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of the History of Biology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09615-4
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BOOK REVIEW
Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology. A History
of the Molecular Revolution. Trans. by M. Cobb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 528 pp., $45.00,
£36.95, €40.50 Hardback, ISBN: 9780674281363
Koen B. Tanghe1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Historians sometimes distinguish the prehistory of a science from its history, although they do not always use the speciic term prehistory. For example, Guntau (1978, p. 280) believed that, as late as the eighteenth century, geology was still in its “prehistory.” A similar historiographical dividing line was proposed for geolo- gy’s sister science biology: Salomon-Bayet (1981, p. 46) argued that its history only started “from the moment that the term ‘biology’ was coined (1802).” Likewise, Fry (2016) considers the irst experimental identiication of DNA as the genetic mol- ecule (1944) as the event that separates the history of molecular biology from its long prehistory.
In The Black Box of Biology (2020), the thoroughly revised and expanded version of his lauded book A History of Molecular Biology (1998), Michel Morange not only uses the same periodisation (prehistory/history) but also the term, stating that grants from the Rockefeller Foundation were more important for “the prehistory of molecular biology” than “for its subsequent progress” (p. 83). That progress began in the mid-1940s, he suggests, when public funding for molecular biology increased rapidly through national institutes, like the Medical Research Council in Britain.
Obviously, this important change in funding is compatible with considering 1944 as the starting point of molecular biology or, at least, an important year in its early history. In the latter case, the dividing line between prehistory and history can be situated in 1938, the year when the newly emerging ield was irst clearly identiied. In his annual report for that year to the Rockefeller Foundation, direc- tor Warren Weaver referred, under the heading “MOLECULAR BIOLOGY,” to a “relatively new ield, which may be called molecular biology, in which delicate modern techniques are being used to investigate ever more minute details of cer- tain life processes” (quoted in Weaver 1970, p. 582). A few years before, Weaver had recommended to the trustees of the Foundation that “the science program of the
* Koen B. Tanghe
koenbernard.tanghe@ugent.be
1 University of Gent, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium 1
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foundation be shifted from its previous preoccupation with the physical sciences, to an interest in stimulating and aiding the application, to basic biological problems, of the techniques, experimental procedures, and methods of analysis so efectively developed in the physical sciences” (ibid.).
Unfortunately, this important dichotomy between the prehistory and the history of molecular biology is not relected in the broad, four-part structure of Morange’s book. Part one, called the birth of molecular biology, largely deals with its early his- tory. It does not start in 1938 or 1944, though, but in 1941, when George Beadle and Edward Tatum coined the one gene-one enzyme idea. Chapter 1 (“The Roots of the New Science”) is dedicated to the intellectual prehistory of molecular biology and sketches the history of two sciences that contributed to its birth: biochemistry and genetics. Strangely, Morange discusses the history of transmission genetics but not the prehistory of molecular genetics. The scientist who irst isolated nuclein (i.e., nucleic acid and associated proteins), Johann Friedrich Miescher, is only mentioned in a footnote. He also does not sketch the history of the other disciplines that con- tributed to the formation of molecular biology: microbiology, crystallography, and physical chemistry.
In his introduction, Morange points out that, strictly speaking, “molecular biol- ogy is not a new discipline but rather a new way of looking at organisms as reser- voirs and transmitters of information” (p. 2). He also speaks of the moleculariza- tion of biology and, of course, of the molecular revolution. This leads us to another important question: in what way or ways was the molecular revolution a scientiic revolution? A book that, according to its subtitle, charts the “history of the molec- ular revolution” probably should deal with this question in some detail. Unfortu- nately, that is not really the case.
In a brief passage in the introduction, Morange identiies the term revolution with
“rapid development.” He speaks, in this respect, of a “fundamental question”: has there been “a molecular revolution, or instead a slow evolution of biology toward the study of biological phenomena at the molecular level” (p. 6)? He answers this by making a distinction between three time frames and histories: the history of reduc- tion (longest time frame), of biological disciplines (medium time frame), and of events (shortest time frame). What seems to be a revolution (i.e., a fast development) at one level may be revealed as mere evolution “when history is seen on a longer scale” (p. 7).
I ind this unconvincing: a fast and important change in science (e.g., the intro- duction and use of the telescope in astronomy) remains revolutionary, even if we look at it from a longer-term perspective. Also, Morange does not address the impor- tant question of whether the molecular revolution was a Kuhnian revolution (i.e., a revolution, characterized by an important conceptual rupture or epistemic “Gestalt- shift”). Mayr (2004, p. 164), for example, thought it was not: “The rise of molecu- lar biology was revolutionary, but it was not a Kuhnian revolution.” Kay (2000), by contrast, argued that the decade of the 1950s was “a watershed period” because rep- resentations of life shifted from “purely material and energetic to the informational”
(p. xvi). She also noted a “gestalt switch to information thinking in biology” (p. xv) that was “even more fundamental than the subsequent (1953) paradigm shift from protein to DNA” (ibid.).
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Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology. A History of the…
Morange implicitly refers to this shift in chapter 10 (“The Role of Physics”).
He points out that the concept of information has become indispensable for describing the discipline of molecular biology, but that it played no role in its early development. That is, of course, correct, and it implies that the molecu- lar revolution did indeed encompass a revolutionary epistemic Gestalt-shift, although it was not named after it: the shift from the “purely material and ener- getic” conception of the gene to the “informational” conception was a revolu- tion within a (molecular) revolution. Alternatively, we also might speak of the molecular-informational revolution. In any case, it is this information revolution that separates the irst or prima facie discovery of DNA by Oswald Avery and his colleagues (Avery et al. 1944) from its in-depth discovery as a carrier of genetic information and a code or cipher in 1953 (Watson and Crick 1953a, b). In other words, it separates the “that”-aspect of the discovery from the “what”-aspect (see Kuhn 1977, pp. 170–171).
This in-depth or “what”-discovery of DNA is discussed in the irst chapter (“The Discovery of the Double Helix”) of part 2 (“The Development of Molecular Biol- ogy”), which explores the Golden Age of molecular biology. Like part 1, it follows the same chapter organization of A History of Molecular Biology. The diferences between both editions are small, but nevertheless signiicant. For example, Morange now points out that, after building their irst, erroneous model of DNA, Watson and Crick “were not allowed to continue working on the structure of DNA because all the experimental data were produced by King’s College in London” (p. 108) and that Crick (not Crick and Watson) tried to show that George Gamow’s proposal for a genetic code was wrong after receiving a second letter from him (he ignored Gamow’s irst letter, something that was not mentioned in A History of Molecular Biology).
Part 3 (“The Expansion of Molecular Biology”) deals with the subsequent “nor- mal science” expansion of the new science. It discusses topics like the emergence of genetic engineering (chapter 16) and the discovery of oncogenes (chapter 18).
Two chapters have been deleted in the new edition: “A New Molecular Biology”
(chapter 18) and “Molecular Biology in the Life Science” (chapter 21). The topic of this last chapter is now treated in the last part of The Black Box of Biology: part 4 (“Beyond Molecular Biology?’). This long, new part addresses the interesting ques- tion of whether the explanatory framework of molecular biology still applies today.
Interactions with other biological disciplines (such as developmental biology and evolutionary biology), the discovery of new phenomena (like apoptosis or apop- totic mechanisms and epigenetic modiications), and the emergence of new disci- plines (like systems biology) have not replaced but rather supplemented it (i.e., that framework).
Whereas these four parts follow the chronological order of events (from the birth of molecular biology in 1941 to the modern age), the individual chapters are more thematic. Examples (apart from the ones already mentioned) are the role of the phage group in the early history of molecular biology (part 1, chapter 4), the role of the French school in the Golden Age (part 2, chapter 14), the invention of a technique for amplifying DNA, the polymerase chain reaction (part 3, chapter 19), and the central place of RNA (part 4, chapter 25). This thematic approach has the
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advantage of making each chapter within each part independent, but it has the disad- vantage of not following the chronological order of events.
There is yet a second way in which The Black Box of Biology combines two dif- ferent approaches or goals. Its blurb rightly proclaims that it is breathtaking in its scope. This is the felicitous result of Morange’s second goal: “to write a history that is as complete as possible,” including “biographical sketches of some of the scien- tists who played major roles in the birth of molecular biology” (p. 5). His irst goal, though, was “to write a book that could be read by the general public,” instead of writing another history of science book that requires the reader to understand fully its subject matter before reading the irst word. These two goals are diicult to com- bine. Morange himself admits that “there is a bit” in his book of the kind of book that he did not want to write (ibid.). His appendix admirably summarizes the key results of molecular biology, but it is not very helpful in digesting the accumulation of concepts one may not be familiar with. For this and the aforementioned reasons, The Black Box of Biology is probably not “the new standard for the history of the ongoing molecular revolution,” advertised in the blurb, but it deinitely is a clear improvement on the irst edition. That is, it is an important contribution to the big history of the molecular revolution and absolutely required reading for serious stu- dents of the huge impact it has had on biology.
References
Avery, O.T., C.M. MacLeod, and M. McCarty. 1944. Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types. Induction of Transformation by a Desoxyribonu- cleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III. Journal of Experimental Medicine 79:
137–158.
Fry, M. 2016. Landmark Experiments in Molecular Biology. London: Academic Press.
Guntau, M. 1978. The Emergence of Geology as a Scientiic Discipline. History of Science 16: 280–290.
Kay, L.E. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kuhn, T.S. 1977. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Mayr, E. 2004. What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Morange, M. 1998. A History of Molecular Biology. Trans. by M. Cobb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press.
Salomon-Bayet, C. 1981. 1802 – “Biologie” et “médicine”. In Epistemological and Social Problems of the Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century, ed. H.N Jahnke and M. Otte, 35–54. Dordrecht: D.
Reidel Publishing Company.
Watson, J.D., and F.H.C. Crick. 1953a. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 171 (4356):
737–738.
Watson, J.D., and F.H.C. Crick. 1953b. Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribo-Nucleic Acid. Nature 171 (4361): 964–967.
Weaver, W. 1970. Molecular Biology: Origins of the Term. Science 170 (3958): 581–582.
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