The Rise of Molecular Biology: Roots in Protein Research and the Problematic Relationship to Biochemistry

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Dr. Creager, a trained biochemist, is entering a postdoctoral training and research program at the History of Science Department of Harvard University. Working with Professor Everett Mendelsohn, she is investigating two questions relating to the emergence of molecular biology in this century. First, how did the preexisting program of research on proteins contribute to the ascension of molecular biology and how was that program changed by it? Physiologists and biochemists appropriated experimental methodology from the physical sciences before molecular biologists exploited this approach to answer fundamental questions in genetics. Dr. Creager is examining the development of this physico-chemical approach at the Physical Chemistry Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in the first decades of this century. Second, she is asking is the concept of the molecular biological revolution of the life sciences a suitable or accurate expression of the nature of scientific change in biology in this century. She is studying the relationship of molecular biology to the older field of biochemistry in order to assess whether molecular biology introduced a novel methodology or approach. Her investigations of whether developments in the life sciences in this century have been continuous or discontinuous with previous traditions should provide a basis for assessing the nature of scientific change in modern biology.