M A X - P L A N C K - I N S T I T U T F Ü R W I S S E N S C H A F T S G E S C H I C H T E M ax Pl anc k Ins t i tut e for the His tory of Sc i enc e 2 0 0 6 P R E P R I N T 3 1 0 W o r k s h o p H i s t o r y and Ep i s t e m o logy of M o lecu la r B i o logy and Beyond : P r ob le m s and Pe r spec t i ves Collecting and Experimenting: The Moral Economies of Biological Research, 1960s-1980s. Bruno J. Strasser I. Introduction Experimentation is often singled out as the most distinctive feature of modern science. Our very idea of modern science, that we trace back to the Scientific Revolution, gives a central place to this particular way of producing knowledge. The current epistemic, social and cultural authority of science rests largely on the possibility of experimentation in the laboratory. The history of the sciences over the last four centuries reminds us that experimentation has only been one out of many ways in which scientific knowledge has been produced. However, by most accounts, experimentation has progressively come to dominate all the others, in most fields of science, from high energy physics to molecular biology. In the life sciences, the rise of experimentalism has been cast against the natural history tradition, leading to its progressive demise. In this paper, I would like to question this big picture by drawing attention to the role played by natural history practices in the rise of the experimental life sciences during the 20th century and its current importance for laboratory science. By natural history, I refer to the different practices of collecting, describing, comparing and naming natural objects, practices usually associated, not with the laboratory, but with the wonder cabinet, the botanical garden or the zoological museum.1 I will argue that collections have played, and still play, an essential role for the production of experimental knowledge.2 This paper focuses on one of the most widely used types of collections in contemporary biomedical sciences: molecular sequence databases. It traces their development from the first protein sequence collections, published as a book-format “atlas” in 1965, to their incorporation as modern computerized databases accessible online. Even though this transformation was closely interwoven with the computer revolution, its greatest challenge was not technical, but social. Indeed, as I will argue, a number of tensions between the collecting and the experimental enterprises resulted from a clash of what E.P. Thompson has called “moral economies”. Conflicts over the collection of data, scientific credit, authorship, and the intellectual value of collections reveal some of the essential features of the moral economies of contemporary life sciences. II. The rise of experimental biology Until recently, there was an overwhelming agreement in the literature on the history of biology that natural history had progressively declined from the early 19th century to give way to the experimental approach in the study of life. William Coleman’s classic textbook, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, reminds us that those who promoted the term “biology” in 1802, Gottfried Treviranus and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, agreed that “natural history” did not have its place in 1 FARBER 2000; GHISELIN et LEVITON 2000; JARDINE et al. 1996. 2 For a similar point, see DE CHADAREVIAN 1998. 105 Bruno J. Strasser the new science and they were “hoping to reorient the interests and investigations of all who studied life”.3 The increasing emphasis on the study of function made physiology one of the key disciplines of the 19th century. The study of form, that was so central in the natural history tradition, continued in the 19th century, but became subservient to the understanding of function, such as individual development, metabolism or disease. Coleman thus concludes his book in the following terms: “In its name – experiment – was set in motion a campaign to revolutionize the goals and methods of biology”.4 Garland Allen’s textbook, Life Sciences in the Twentieth Century, picks up the story where Coleman had left it and adopts a similar perspective: “It was the twentieth century that saw the fanning out of the experimental method in all areas of biology”,5 and not just in physiology as in the previous century. Opposition to natural history was, once again, a driving force behind these changes. In the early 20th century, it was not so much natural history, in the sense of the description of whole organisms, than morphology, the description of their inner structure that was the target of the “new biology”. Allen’s narrative is thus cast as a “revolt form morphology”, in the study of development as well as heredity. More recent work has questioned the sharp break that Allen located around 1900, and shown that natural history tradition, if not anymore the core of biology, still played a role for its development at the turn of the century.6 Lynn K. Nyhart, for example, has claimed that natural history was declining relatively and growing absolutely around 1900, due to the general expansion of biology’s territory.7 For Keith Benson, “Natural history remained alive and well, primarily within museums”,8 however. Coleman and Allen’s narratives have structured much of the subsequent scholarship.9 In particular, almost all studies of natural history have focused nearly exclusively on the period from the 17th to the 19th century.10 When the 20th century is considered at all, natural history practices are studied in the context of ecology, some areas of evolutionary studies, and obviously systematic, but always far from the laboratory. Thus, in the big picture of 20th century biology, the rise of experimentation is cast against natural history and, by the mid-20th century, has become independent of natural history. III. The “molecular revolution” Nowhere is this narrative more pervasive than in the historiography of molecular biology. One of the most profound transformations in the 20th century life sciences, was the process that led to the understanding of life in terms of the structure and function of molecules. The “molecular revolution” supposedly illustrates the triumph of experimentation in the biomedical sciences. 3 COLEMAN [1971], p. 2. For precedents, see MCLAUGHLIN 2002. 4 COLEMAN [1971], p. 166. Coleman’s picture has been refined by a number of authors, and the boundaries between his categories of form, function and transformation have been questioned. 5 ALLEN 1978 , p. xvi. 6 RAINGER et al. 1988. 7 NYHART 1996, p. 442. 8 BENSON 1988, p. 77. 9 For example, BOWLER et MORUS 2005, chapter 7. 10 For example, JARDINE et al. 1996. 106 Collecting and Experimenting: The Moral Economies of Biological Research, 1960s-1980s. This transformation has generally been identified with the rise of a particular discipline, “molecular biology”, even though it is better understood as a larger process in which “molecular biology” is only an episode.11 Just as Robert Boyle or Francis Bacon at the time of the Scientific Revolution claimed that they were in the process of making a revolution, a number of the proponents of “molecular biology” insisted on the radical break that their science represented with the past. Several of them were trained in physics or chemistry and positioned themselves against “traditional biology”, by which they meant nothing else than natural history. They often described biologists disdainfully as naturalists who were merely collecting observations, and providing unnecessarily complex explanations who would end up in large monographs, such as atlases or obscure essays of Naturphilosophie. The molecular biologists, on the other hand, self- fashioned their scientific personae along the lines of the experimental physicist. In 1969 for example, the Swiss physicist-turned-molecular biologists Eduard Kellenberger, commented that Max Delbrück, also a former physicist, had demonstrated “that biology could be studied in the same precise, logical and quantitative way as physics”.12 Forty years later, Kellenberger claimed that the head of the biology department at his home university warned him he “could not get a PhD in biology, because as a physicist, [he] did not know the names of all the different plants and animals”.13 Statements of this sort, expressing contempt for “traditional biology”, qua natural history, were so pervasive that a number of biologists, such as the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson at Harvard, fought back to defend their professional status in what he perceived as a “molecular war”.14 It shouldn’t be necessary to insist on how much the characterization of “traditional biology” by the molecular biologists was a gross misrepresentation of the practices of biology in the middle of the 20th century, and should rather be understood as an element of the molecular biologists’ discipline building strategies and struggles to create a divide between them, the Moderns, and the others, the Ancients.15 Knowing the pivotal role that experimentation has played for the rise of molecular biology, practically and rhetorically, and the expansion of molecular approaches to most areas of biological research, one might expect natural history practices to have vanished completely from contemporary research. Or at least, that they would be confined to some areas of ecology and evolutionary biology, far from the laboratory. Looking closer at the research practices carried out in almost all biomedical research laboratories around the world reveals a very different picture. Natural history is not dead, it is thriving. Today, paradoxically, the production of biomedical knowledge rests on a “way of knowing”, to borrow John Pickstone’s notion,16 that seems closer to the practices of natural history, than to the experimental tradition that should have been distinctive of the new approaches to biomedical research.