Journal of the History of Biology最新文献

In 1975, a meeting on the potential hazards of recently invented recombinant DNA techniques was held at the Asilomar Conference Center in California. This meeting gave rise to a global debate over the safety and regulation of recombinant DNA (rDNA). In this paper, I use the historical development of recombinant DNA regulation in the Greater Boston Area-now home to the densest cluster of the biotechnology industry in the world-to provide a different interpretation of the legacies of Asilomar. While most accounts of Asilomar have considered its brief and dramatic impact on molecular biology on a national scale, an equally meaningful and overlooked impact is to be found in the development of regulations around recombinant DNA at the local level. Rather than hindering research, these events enabled the operations of the modern commercial biotechnology industry, which was founded on the promise of recombinant DNA. This approach highlights a different legacy of Asilomar, one which did not end with expert consensus that recombinant DNA was safe. Instead, attending to the material, infrastructural aspects of working with recombinant DNA in commercial settings reveals a wide range of communities involved in determining the social impacts of Asilomar-communities asking a broader set of questions about recombinant DNA than those originally posed in 1975.

Throughout the Victorian era, the metaphor "living fossil" repeatedly crisscrossed social and scientific domains. The term existed in popular culture before and after Darwin's Origin. Most notably, it also operated as two distinct scientific concepts, one introduced by Darwin and another in cultural evolutionists' depiction of human living fossils. Serving in different ways, living fossils were typically aberrant, persistent and unchanging examples that contradicted an expectation of ongoing change and associated progress. We explore the development and relationships of living fossil applications, focusing principally on Darwin's concept. In Origin, Darwin deployed living fossils as exceptions that prove the rule of his principles of natural selection and divergence. He structured a case for the causal adequacy of these principles to explain living fossils' persistence, invariance, and taxonomic positions in gaps between other groups. As other natural historians began discussing living fossils and labeling new ones, Darwin's concept endured, but was subject to perceivable variation; associations with natural selection or divergence varied greatly and attributes of his living fossil examples were sometimes ignored. Cultural evolutionists adopted a view that human societies developed over time in a unilinear succession of stages. In this view primitive groups, their implements, languages, and cultures, stopped evolving at different points in the past and persisted unchanged into the present. While Darwin's concept and this anthropological concept were connected associatively to the evolution of languages and to themes of spatial isolation, prolonged stasis and disruption of expected progress, they inherited significantly different theoretical backgrounds and commitments.

The internationalization of the 1975 International Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA molecules has received little attention, and in particular, the European impact on, and response to, the Asilomar Conference have remained largely unexplored in the historiography to date. This article highlights the role of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) as a key actor in recombinant DNA research and the issuing of guidelines for recombinant DNA technology on both sides of the Atlantic. It also investigates the legacy of the Asilomar Conference in shaping EMBO's role as a science policy advisor for molecular biology in Europe. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, the article is divided into three sections. The first section explores EMBO's role as a scientific advisory body in the development and guidance of recombinant DNA research in both the US and Western Europe. The second section investigates the impact of the Asilomar Conference on the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) project, reconstructing the scientific and political rationale behind the early construction of a high-risk containment facility in Heidelberg (soon obsolete due to the international relaxation of the guidelines). The third and final section analyzes how, between 1975 and 2004, EMBO reframed the Asilomar legacy as a model for its aspirations to serve as an advisory group for European science policy in molecular biology.

In 1971, Paul Berg asked Francis Crick about his views on a controversial proposed experiment involving recombinant DNA; to Berg's surprise, Crick had no comment to make. This article first describes the multiple reasons why Crick did not respond to Berg, including psychological factors that affected Crick at the time, the limits of his unstated reflexively positivist approach to social issues, and his reluctance to pursue social or political issues when challenged. Crick's lack of involvement in discussions about recombinant DNA, including in the Asilomar process, is then used to explore two other notable absences from Asilomar: the immunologist Niels Jerne, who was invited to be on the organizing committee but was not involved for reasons that are unclear; and molecular biologist and biological weapons campaigner Matthew Meselson, whose presence would have added a layer of understanding to the discussions, particularly regarding the threat of bioweapons. These enigmatic absences raise questions about the representativeness of Asilomar and suggest future investigations as to how the legacy of Asilomar was shaped both by those who were present-and by those who were not.

This paper delves into the historical development of recombinant DNA technology, examining the pivotal controversies surrounding public health and commercialization that emerged with the prospect of gene cloning in the 1970s. The analysis will focus on the recombinant DNA experiments planned, conducted, and aborted by Janet Mertz and John Morrow, two graduate students at Paul Berg's Laboratory at Stanford University. Their experiments, as I show, served as catalysts for both fear and excitement within the biomedical research community and beyond. This paper begins by reconstructing in some respects Mertz's and Morrow's investigative pathways, their contributions to technical developments in gene cloning, and their youthful perspectives on genetic engineering. While Mertz's initial experimental plan led to the establishment of the Asilomar I Conference in 1973, Morrow's subsequent cloning experiment, in collaboration with Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, played a crucial role in shifting scientific and public sentiments around recombinant DNA, intensifying the tension between safety concerns and commercial aspirations before, during, and especially after the more famous Asilomar II Conference of 1975. The latter part of this paper briefly examines the commercial fate of early gene cloning within the context of the complex interplay between scientific advancements, societal and public health concerns, and proprietary interests that culminated in Genentech's cloning of the artificial insulin gene. This paper concludes by discussing how concerns about responsible research practices and biosafety regulation were by the late 1970s increasingly overshadowed by critiques concerning the impact of regulations and academic patenting on scientific competition and laboratory culture.

This article explores the early biogeographical debates that shaped the beginning of limnology, focusing on the differences of opinion concerning the origins of pelagic fauna between two pioneering scientists: Pietro Pavesi and François-Alphonse Forel. The study examines how Pavesi's hypothesis of a marine origin for pelagic fauna contrasts with Forel's theory of passive distribution, situating their arguments within a broader Darwinian framework. The first part of the paper provides a historical overview of Italian limnology, highlighting Pavesi's contributions and interpreting Forel's writings to underscore the significance of discovering pelagic fauna in conceptualizing lakes as microcosms. The second part compares Pavesi's and Forel's hypotheses, emphasizing their impact on the scientific understanding of freshwater ecosystems. The importance of this discovery, in both historical and scientific contexts, lies in recognizing the presence of plankton in lakes as a crucial element for the mature formulation of ecological concepts, such as the ecosystem.

Agnes Arber (1879-1960) was a British plant morphologist, historian of botany, and philosopher of biology. Though now largely forgotten, her work offers valuable insights into morphological as well as philosophical issues. This paper focuses on Arber's work on teleology in plants. After providing a brief overview of her life and distinct style of work, two notions of teleology are presented, which become apparent in Arber's morphological and philosophical work. The first notion, labeled final teleology, is based on Aristotle's final cause and deals with adaptation-based explanations in biology. The second is labeled formal teleology. It is grounded in the Aristotelian formal cause and deals with the inherent directiveness of developing structures and the actualization of potentialities in organisms and their parts. Whereas Arber showed a reserved and skeptical attitude towards final teleology, she was very sympathetic to formal teleology, building her general morphological framework on it. Two examples from Arber's work are then given, which illustrate how formal teleology informed her theorizing: the partial-shoot theory of the leaf, and parallelism in evolution as a counter-proposal to natural selection. Finally, Arber's teleological interpretation of plant morphology is historically contextualized and connected to recent research developments in evolutionary biology and plant morphology.

This paper explores the control of visiting "foreign scientists" at the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) after it was established in the Galápagos Islands in 1959. Scholarly accounts of the creation of the Galápagos National Park and of the field station have emphasized their place in an international "land grab," as leading scientists and conservationists sought to control nature in places around the world that seemed less "civilized" to European thinkers. The actual administrative labor in the early years at this scientific field station, however, in practice struggled to control people widely taken to represent "civilization" in its highest form-European and American scientists. At the research station, European and American (but not Ecuadorian) scientists were the focus of a delicate choreography of discipline and acquiescence, as scientists were courted and refused, welcomed and limited, chastised and supported. Meanwhile CDRS fund-raising appeals promised that the station would control island residents, fishing crews, and invasive species. Such appeals did not mention controlling elite field scientists. Existing historiography has stressed how Western scientists were privileged actors in non-Western nature reserves and parks, their privileges coming at the expense of local communities. But scientists too faced new (quietly implemented) constraints as post-war conservation programs developed, and achieving their compliance with these new rules involved a process I call here "civilizing" elites.

This article revisits the question of Alfred Russel Wallace's relationship to eugenics and explores the basis of Wallace's consistent rejection of attempts to label him a eugenicist. Whereas some scholars have identified an 'ambiguity' or 'tension' between Wallace's hereditarianism and his libertarianism and maintained - despite Wallace's statements to the contrary - that he was, in some senses, a eugenicist, this article argues that Wallace's oft-repeated claims he was not a eugenicist are fully justified. By exploring Wallace's relationship with Francis Galton using a hitherto neglected correspondence between the two concerning the establishment of a proposed laboratory, and Wallace's criticism of non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms in the writings of William Bateson and others, this article situates Wallace's opposition to eugenics in his broader ultra-Darwinian agenda. The article concludes by arguing that it is misleading to characterise Wallace as a eugenicist, and that doing so tends to obscure and confuse our understanding of his thought.