Scientific Origins of Modern Cell Biology: A History

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a project to finish writing and editing the first history of the origins of modern cell biology. It was forged from cytology, microscopic anatomy, biochemistry, and biophysics in the 1940s. New tools and techniques enabled researchers to discover previously unknown interior structures of cells and to identify how these structures worked. Cell biology, further propelled by advances in genetics that require physiologic interpretation, continues to explain how the cell works in health and disease. An understanding of this field is thus vital to biology and medicine. This is a traditional history, a narrative about how the science emerged in large part from a single pre-World War II laboratory that studied cancer and spawned researchers who combined the electron microscope, centrifuge, and biochemical assays to explore cells. These scientists founded a premier society and journal and trained others who then founded laboratories around the world. The history begins with a survey of the roots of the new science, continues with detailed descriptions of pioneering research by Albert Claude, Keith Porter, and George Palade, and is followed by sections written by twenty-two of their collaborators and students. The focus is on the science, novel methods, and scientists. The story continuously integrates the thinking behind the experiments with insights into the personal nature of scientific inquiry, the value of changing perspectives, and processes of basic medical research. Background research has been underway for more than six years, locating unorganized, uncatalogued, and physically scattered materials; primary sources include letters and manuscripts from a range of archival and personal collections, audio and video interviews, and original scientific publications. Now a substantial amount of uninterrupted time is needed to write introductions and bridging sections to essays by the contributors to give focus and context to the whole, to edit the extensive drafts into a readable story, and to produce a fully documented book manuscript. The intended audience is medical researchers, educators, lay readers, students, scholars, and thousands of biophysicists, biochemists, and biologists.