Gene Action: A Historical Account (review)

For the last eight decades, gene action has been one of the central questions in genetics. It spans the classical, molecular, and genomic eras, and so could be a useful transect along which to examine the ideas, methods, and social relations of genetics. In the genome age, gene action has new meaning and huge medical significance. Yet this subject has received scant attention from historians—the geneticist and historian Elof Carlson being the only real exception. A literate, thoughtful guide to its history would make fascinating and important reading.

Alas, this is not that book. "Gene action"—as scientists have used it for decades—implies the physiology of genes. Its history is an anodyne to the heroic textbook account that leads from Mendel inexorably to Morgan, to Beadle and Tatum, to Watson and Crick, to Jacob and Monod. This history features periods (such as the 1920s and 1930s) and individuals (Alfred Kühn, Richard Goldschmidt, Barbara McClintock) that the canonical account skims over. Further, it suggests new interpretations of the work of some of the heroes: Beadle and Tatum's one-gene/one-enzyme hypothesis, for example, as the last hurrah of classical genetics, rather than the curtain-raiser for molecular biology; the operon model of the gene, perhaps, rather than the double helix, as the opening of the golden age of molecular genetics. Most important, gene action connects the history of genetics with modern-day genomics and proteomics, which are quintessentially sciences of the action and interaction of genes and proteins. It is thus intimately connected to cancer genetics, immunology, pharmacogenomics, and other areas of intense contemporary interest.

Rather than a history of gene action, however, Maas (an emeritus professor of microbiology at NYU Medical School) presents a type specimen of the standard history of genetics. He begins with Mendel, who probably did not even believe in genes as physical particles; moves through Morgan, who did not care whether they were real or not; and skates on through the genetic code, which is not about gene action at all. An afterthought chapter is made to do the work of connecting this history to the present day, and reads like a list of research areas that developed after a scientist retired and shut down his or her laboratory. Maas's reliance on secondary sources (and few, at that) leads to the propagation of common errors and myths, and he divides the crucial part of the history into periods (1953-61 and 1955-65) that overlap by more than fifty percent, rendering them historiographically useless.

This book does provide a few gems. Amid the usual genetic pantheon Maas slips in lesser gods, such as Fritz Lipmann, Norman Horowitz, and Bernard Davis—all of whom Maas worked with at one time, and all of whom deserve further historical attention. He does do justice to Beadle and Tatum, and in fact plants their famous hypothesis at the end of classical genetics. He suggests lines of future historical research—someone ought, for example, to take a long look at Neurospora research. And he offers the occasional checkable little-known fact. For example, "amber" mutations, a puzzling type of genetic change first seen in bacteriophage by R. H. Epstein, were so named for the mother of one of Epstein's students; I have long wondered where "amber" came from. Maas does not tell us about "ochre."

The book is amateurish in both senses. Maas loves science and is proud of, yet not arrogant about, his role in it. But he makes the nonprofessional's mistake of thinking that history is simply the least controversial account of what happened.