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Life, DNA and the model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2011

ROBERT BUD*
Affiliation:
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD, UK. Email: robert.bud@sciencemuseum.org.uk.

Abstract

This paper argues that the 1953 double-helix solution to the problem of DNA structure was understood, at the time, as a blow within a fiercely fought dispute over the material nature of life. The paper examines the debates, between those for whom life was a purely material phenomenon and religious people for whom it had a spiritual significance, that were waged from the aftermath of the First World War to the 1960s. It looks at the developing arguments of early promoters of molecular biology, including J.D. Bernal, his pupil Max Perutz and his pupil Francis Crick, on the one side, and of the so-called ‘Inkling’ cluster of writers including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other. This debate was conducted through polemical works, journalism, and science fiction and through the Festival of Britain and can be followed through the commentary of Jacob Bronowski. The paper concludes with the model of the double helix now at the Science Museum, which can be considered an archaeological relic of a battle in a war which is still being fought.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science and the Trustees of the Science Museum 2011 

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References

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28 On the Christian humanists see Oser, Lee, The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History, New York: University of Missouri, 2007Google Scholar. For a critical review of this book which explores Oser's concept of religious humanism see Kenny, Anthony, ‘Too good to last’, Essays in Criticism (2009) 59, pp. 9198Google Scholar. Interestingly, while Oser does not deal with C.S. Lewis in detail, Kenny suggests that he might have been a more appropriate case study than Tolkien. For the relation of Coleridge to religion see Barth, J. Robert, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987Google Scholar.

29 Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth, London: HarperCollins, 2003Google Scholar.

30 Amazon reports that sales of The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien have exceeded 150 million copies worldwide, and the films based on the book are among the most expensive and most successful ever made. The seven Narnia books of C.S. Lewis have sold 85 million copies, according to the BBC.

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40 Haldane, J.B.S., ‘“Auld Hornie”, F.R.S.’, Modern Quarterly (1946) NS 1, pp. 3240Google Scholar.

41 Conekin, Becky, The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003Google Scholar. On the designs see Jackson, Leslie, From Atoms to Patterns: Crystal Structure Designs from the Festival of Britain, Shepton Beauchamp: Richard Dennis, 2008Google Scholar. Perhaps the very last gathering representing this community was the centenary memorial meeting for J.B.S. Haldane, held at the Science Museum 10–11 April 1992. Attendees included Professor Patricia Clarke and Haldane's sister Naomi Mitchison.

42 Conekin, op. cit. (41), p. 227; and see Sir Gibbs, Phillip, The New Elizabethans, London: Hutchinson, 1953Google Scholar. Also see Hewison, Robert, Culture and Consensus, London: Methuen, 1995, pp. 6667Google Scholar.

43 See ‘Peter Ibbetson’, published to accompany an exhibition held at Little Gallery, London, 4–30 April 1949. Blake was, of course, also a hero for Bronowski, who had written a biography, William Blake: A Man without a Mask, London: Secker & Warburg, 1944.

44 Max Perutz, ‘Molecular aspects of living processes’, WORK 25/23, National Archives UK.

45 Haldane appeared at the Socratic Society and Lewis at the British Interplanetary Society. C.S. Lewis also engaged in debate with Arthur C. Clarke in an Oxford pub in 1944, an encounter described by Spufford, Francis, The Backroom Boys, London: Faber, 2003, p. 9Google Scholar. See also Miller, Ryder W. (ed.), From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Letters between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis, New York: I Books, 2005Google Scholar.

46 See the Sunday Times (London), 27 May 1956, 3 June 1956, 10 June 1956. Famously the last of these articles emphasizing the continuing potential of new chemical sources of happiness and the potential replacement of alcohol prompted the board of the Distillers company to look seriously at the potential of Thalidomide.

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48 For Francis Crick the standard reference is Olby, Robert, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets, Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009Google Scholar. Olby emphasizes Crick's dislike of the institutional strength of the Church.

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51 Olby, op. cit. (48), p. 194.

52 Crick, Living Matter, broadcast on the BBC World Service, 15 November 1960, PP/CR1/H2/39 Special Collection, Wellcome Library. I am grateful to the Wellcome Library for permission to quote this passage.

53 Crick, Francis, Of Molecules and Men, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004Google Scholar; first published 1966. For the correspondence with Waddington see Crick to Waddington, PP/CR1/I2/6/5, see online http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/B/L/T/.

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56 Snow, C.P., The Two Cultures, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993Google Scholar; first published 1964, p. 11.

57 Snow, op. cit. (56), p. 74.

58 The manuscript copy is to be found in the Crick papers at the Wellcome Foundation, PP/CR1/9/20.

59 This was broadcast on 16 November 1962 and published in The Nation two years later. See Bronowski, Jacob, ‘The abacus and the rose, a dialogue after Galileo’, The Nation, 4 January 1964Google Scholar. This essay is treated in a piece published on the Web by Timothy Sandefur, at http://sandefur.typepad.com/freespace/2009/05/the-two-cultures-and-the-abacus-and-the-rose.html, consulted July 2009. There Sandefur suggests that the character of the host was based on C.P. Snow and that of Harping on F.R. Leavis. His piece agrees with my own assessment that Potts is clearly based on Crick.

60 Snow to Bronowski, 10 December 1962, folder 15, box 70, MS coll 173, Bronowski papers, University of Toronto Library.

61 Compare Crick's formulation in his Living Matter broadcast in 1960 quoted above almost in the same terms.

62 I am grateful to Jon Agar for this insight.

63 I am grateful to Professor Deborah Cameron for the possible association of Harping with some aspects of D.H. Lawrence's philosophy. It may also be mentioned that Lawrence was also a favourite writer of Leavis himself.

64 See Hare, William (Lord Ennismore), ‘Beauty: a problem and an attitude to life’, Experiment (November 1928) 1, pp. 510Google Scholar; (February 1929) 2, pp. 2–6. In Hare's description of his ‘aesthetic’ approach to beauty as empirical and psychological, and in contrast to the ‘practical-sensuous, the moral, the religious, and the scientific attitudes’, one may look fruitfully for roots of Bronowski's own attitudes.

65 Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, tr. John Maccabe, New York: Harper, 1905, p. 338. For an insight into Haeckel's aesthetics I am grateful for the opportunity to have heard a paper by Bernhard Kleeberg, ‘Evolutionary monism and aesthetics’, presented at the The Monist Century: 1845–1945 colloquium at Queens University Belfast, 2–3 October 2009. I am grateful to Professor Kleeberg for permission to cite his article. Also see Kleeberg, Bernhard, ‘God-Nature progressing: natural theology in German monism’, Science in Context (2007) 20, pp. 537569Google Scholar. On the influence of Haeckel on art nouveau see Greenhalgh, Paul (ed.), Art Nouveau, London: V&A, 2000Google Scholar.

66 Haeckel, op. cit. (65), p. 343. We may reflect on why the immigrant Polish Jew still with a foreign accent but with a very wide and cosmopolitan knowledge may have decided not to cite Haeckel's German work in a broadcast less than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War.

67 In his book The Double Helix, op. cit. (1), Watson described Maurice Wilkins's encounter with the model. The encounter of Rosalind Franklin memorably portrayed in the BBC dramatization does not seem to have happened. Watson recounts how Wilkins told her about the proposed structure which she then checked against her data.

68 See the account by Anthony Barrington-Brown himself, ‘How I came to take their photograph’, at http://www.thednastore.com/dnastuff/picture1.html, accessed 19 October 2008. See also de Chadarevian, Soraya, ‘The making of an icon’, Science (11 April 2003) 300(3617), pp. 255257Google Scholar.

69 The most detailed and authoritative account of the building and rebuilding of the model has been provided by de Chadarevian, Soraya, ‘Relics, replicas and commemorations’, Endeavour (2003) 27, pp. 7579Google Scholar.

70 The model was, for instance, included in the museum's list of ten seminal objects, released for the 2009 centenary.

71 For the comparison with the Mona Lisa and a reconstructed Greek pot see Kemp, Martin, ‘The Mona Lisa of modern science’, Nature (January 2003) 421, pp. 416420Google Scholar. The process of reconstruction is recounted by its progenitor Farooq Hussain on his website, http://www.farooqhussain.org/projects/doublehelixmodel/document_view, consulted 1 December 2008.

72 Chadarevian, op. cit. (69), p. 78.

73 Kemp, op. cit. (71), p. 416.

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75 See Kay, Lily, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar. It was even after the horrors of the Holocaust that Pauling suggested that anybody found to have the inherited sickle cell anaemia trait should be tattooed. Also see Abir-Am, Pnina, ‘Molecular biology in the context of British, French and American cultures’, International Social Science Journal (2001) 53, pp. 187–99Google Scholar. Abir-Am's portrait of post-war France provides a parallel with the geographically claustrophobic but politically polarized nature of British intellectual life in which the double helix was formulated. However, the politics of existentialism created a rather different set of concerns. See also Strasser, Bruno, ‘Institutionalizing molecular biology in post-war Europe: a comparative study’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological Sciences (2002) 33, pp. 515546CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 See Igor Polianski, ‘Between Hegel and Haeckel: monism and dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union and East Germany’, presented at The Monist Century, 1845–1945. Cited with permission.

77 See Deichmann, Ute, Flüchten, Mitmachen, Vergessen: Chemiker und Biochemiker in der NS-Zeit, Weinheim: Wiley, 2001Google Scholar.

78 Fangerau, Hainer, ‘From Mephistopheles to Isaiah: Jacques Loeb, technical biology and war’, Social Studies of Science (2009) 29, pp. 229256Google Scholar, see particularly 235–236. I am grateful to Professor Fangerau for bringing this article to my attention. On the influence of Loeb's ideas in the United States see Pauly, Philip J., Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987Google Scholar. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to discuss the issues in this article with Professor Pauly at the 2007 meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology shortly before his untimely death. It is to him I owe the realization of the difference between the US and British expressions of tension between science and religion.

79 Miller, S.L., ‘A production of amino acids under possible primitive earth conditions’, Science (15 May 1953) 117(3046), pp. 528529Google Scholar. It is interesting to note that one of the three references in this article was to work by Bernal.

80 Fry, Iris, ‘The origins of research into the origins of life’, Endeavour (2006) 30, pp. 2428Google Scholar; and idem, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

81 Of the 7,853 papers published in Science between 1945 and 1954, Miller's paper was the fifth most highly cited up to October 2009 as measured by ISI's ‘World of Knowledge’. The links between the work of Muller, Oparin and Haldane and Watson and Crick are ably described by Lazeano, Antonio, ‘What is life? A brief historical overview’, Chemistry and Biodiversity (2008) 5, pp. 115Google Scholar.

82 Evans, John H., Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002Google Scholar.

83 Rosenfeld, Albert, The Second Genesis: The Coming Control of Life, Englewood Cliffs: Vintage Books, 1969Google Scholar.

84 See Paul, Diane, ‘Genetic engineering and eugenics: the uses of history’, Pittsburgh Workshop in the History and Philosophy of Biology, Pittsburgh, PA; 217 March 2002Google Scholar, published at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000852/00/Chapter_1.pdf, accessed 27 January 2009; Peters, Ted, Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom, London: Routledge, 1996Google Scholar.

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86 See Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, London: Bantam Press, 2006Google Scholar. See also Bunting, Madeleine, ‘Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins’, The Guardian, 27 March 2006Google Scholar.

87 de Chadarevian, Soraya, ‘Of worms and programmes: Caenorhabditis elegans and the study of development’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (1998) 29, pp. 81105Google Scholar.

88 Andrew Balmer and Paul Martin, ‘Synthetic biology: social and ethical challenges’, an independent review commissioned by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), May 2008.

89 Is this a clump of cells or a living being with a soul?’, The Independent, 26 March 2008Google Scholar.