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"Chadarevian, Soraya de"
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The Making of an Entrepreneurial Science: Biotechnology in Britain, 1975–1995
Monoclonal antibodies played a key role in the development of the biotechnology industry of the 1980s and 1990s. Investments in the sector and commercial returns have rivaled those of recombinant DNA technologies. Although the monoclonal antibody technology was first developed in Britain, the first patents were taken out by American scientists. During the first Thatcher government in Britain, blame for the missed opportunity fell on the scientists involved as well as on the National Research and Development Corporation, which had been put in place after World War II to avoid a repeat of the penicillin story, when patent rights were not sought. Instead of apportioning the blame, this essay suggests that despite past experiences and despite the new channels that were in place, Britain was not in a “patent culture” in the 1970s. It traces the long and painful process that made a commercial attitude among publicly funded British research scientists and in a civil service institution like the Medical Research Council both possible and desirable. In this process the meaning of the term “public science” also changed dramatically.
Journal Article
Whose Turn? Chromosome Research and the Study of the Human Genome
A common account sees the human genome sequencing project of the 1990s as a \"natural outgrowth\" of the deciphering of the double helical structure of DNA in the 1950s. The essay aims to complicate this neat narrative by putting the spotlight on the field of human chromosome research that flourished at the same time as molecular biology. It suggests that we need to consider both endeavors – the human cytogeneticists who collected samples and looked down the microscope and the molecular biologists who probed the molecular mechanisms of gene function – to understand the rise of the human genome sequencing project and the current genomic practices. In particular, it proposes that what has often been described as the \"molecularization\" of cytogenetics could equally well be viewed as the turn of molecular biologists to human and medical genetics – a field long occupied by cytogeneticists. These considerations also have implications for the archives that are constructed for future historians and policy makers.
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Laboratory science versus country-house experiments. The controversy between Julius Sachs and Charles Darwin
In 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants, a heavy volume of nearly six hundred pages in which he presented the results of many years of experiments conducted with his son Francis on the reaction of plants to the influence of light and gravity. His results contradicted the observations and explanations of the same phenomena offered by the German plant physiologist Julius Sachs in his influential Lehrbuch der Botanik (1868, English translation 1875). Darwin wished rather to ‘convert him than any other half-dozen botanies put together’. Sachs, however, regarded Darwin's work with contempt. Taking up the topic in his Vorlesungen über Pflanzenphysiologie in 1882 and taking issue especially with Darwin's experiments on the movement of root radicles in reaction to gravity, he remarked sharply: In such experiments with roots not only is great precaution necessary, but also the experience of years and extensive knowledge of vegetable physiology, to avoid falling into errors, as did Charles Darwin and his son Francis, who, on the basis of experiments which were unskilfully made and improperly explained, came to the conclusion, as wonderful as it was sensational, that the growing point of the root, like the brain of an animal, dominates the various movements in the root.
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The selfish gene at 30: the origin and career of a book and its title
The 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins's The selfish gene coincides with the opening for historical scholarship of the production files of the book's first edition at the archives of Oxford University Press. Using the information collected in the files, the essay reconstructs the Press history of the book, the author's and his enthusiastic editor's pre-publication expectations, and the early reception and subsequent career of the book, which made an impact on the scientific debate on behaviour and evolution as well as on the popular market. It also reflects on the changing notions of popularization and the place of The selfish gene in those debates.
Journal Article
Chromosome Photography and the Human Karyotype
In 1956, Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan published a paper in which they suggested that the number of human chromosomes was 46 and not 48. The story of the recount has been the subject of numerous studies and debates. In this essay I propose to revisit the 1956 paper and the questions surrounding it by considering the chromosome images it contained. Paying attention to the images, including especially the photomicrograph that has come to represent the new chromosome count, offers the opportunity to study the history of an iconic image of genetics. In the course of this history the image moved from proving the quality of Tjio and Levan’s preparations to becoming an object of contention, proof of authorship, example to emulate, manipulable object, recognizable icon, and historical object in its own right. More generally, the essay highlights the role of visual techniques and materials in shaping knowledge and staking claims in human heredity in the mid-twentieth century. The history of postwar cytogenetics has long been overshadowed by dominant accounts of molecular approaches in biology that developed rapidly at the same time. Yet the recognition that, well into the 1970s, chromosome pictures were the most recognizable images of genetics points to the need for new approaches to the historiography.
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Secuencias, conformación, información: bioquímicos y biólogos moleculares en los años cincuenta
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Journal Article