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1: The Setting, 1946
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 1 The Setting, 1946 Do thou but choose, oh Noble Sirs, For 'tis as sure as Fate Thy deeds done ofthis day Shall light thee down Time's pathways ofthefuture, To Fame or Infamy Do thou but choose. -Herbert Evans, bioscientist at the University of California, regarding the future ofthe biological sciences, from the vantage point of 1946 The San Francisco Bay Area, with its own history of scientific successes and its emerging presence at the edge ofa technological revolution, had established itself by the end of World War II as a preeminent research center. Here, some critical discoveries had occurred, particularly in wartime production industries-radar, microwave, communication, electrical engineering, and computation. Seemingly every day throughout the war someone announced a stunning development: the Varian brothers invented a radar system; Berkeley physicists split atoms and released millions of electron volts of energy; Charles Litton gave up glassware manufacturing to build vacuum tubes; Bill Hewlett and David Packard invented a series of gadgets that produced controllable and accurate electronic signals. And because of the actions of Bay Area scientists and engineers, an infrastructure took shape, with the federal government, business, and higher education each occupying one leg of an increasingly intricate and powerful relationship. Extending the network still further, as the Bay Area grew as a research center, so too did the needs of the region, only to be fulfilled with the arrival of more scientists, machinists, managers, technicians, and engineers.1 Yet, despite irrepressible enthusiasm for anything scientific and technical , the Bay Area was a virtual backwater in the biological sciences. 2 Chapter 1 To be sure, the Bay Area had its share of private biological firms: among others, Stayner, Lederle, and Abbott Laboratories in the East Bay, and divisions of Cutter Labs, Sharpe & Dohme, and DuPont in and around San Francisco. Caught in a great rush to duplicate the wartime antibiotic successes-such as the sulfas, penicillin, and streptomycinthese local companies focused entirely on production ofpharmaceutical agents, competitive pricing, and efficient distribution processes, but typically neglected research. Companies like Stayner Laboratories sent soil microbiologists to every corner of the world to sift through samples of dirt for the next "miracle mold," Cutter Labs chemists tried to modify fermentation processes to increase polio vaccine yields, Lederle Labs grew and sold biological cultures, Abbott Labs provided simple screening services to test the potency of biological agents, and larger pharmaceutical companies continued to extract hormones from pig and cow cadavers rather than search for substances safe for human use. One divisional laboratory manager, noticing the general trend toward production and away from research, complained that everywhere he looked he saw "enormous sums of money invested in chemical production" while "chemical effectiveness was rarely understood."2 More curious than the general ineffectiveness of the local biological industry, the biological sciences at the three major universities in the Bay Area-University of California, Berkeley; the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco; and Stanford University-languished with feeble experimental output and unexceptional student enrollments. Certainly each campus had isolated successes. During the 1920s and 1930s, the UC Medical Center worked closely with the San Joaquin Valley's canning industry to help prevent botulism outbreaks, UC Berkeley biochemists identified and isolated a number of vitamins in pure form, and Stanford biologists "did more for U.S. fisheries than any other educational institution in the United States." However, to anyone other than the most provincial, the productivity of biological scientists in the Bay Area by the end of the war can only be measured as a collective disappointment.3 Bioscientists in the Bay Area, then, probably interpreted the scientific successes during the war much like everyone else, with the same jumble of ambivalent feelings: joy and relief, doubt and fear, a sense that perhaps science could one day go too far. But for them, the growing importance of scientific research and development promised, if not dramatic experimental results, every reasonable expectation to push their programs in the immediate future. Experimental biologists at all three Bay Area universities, saddled with a history of remarkable scientific achievement to which they contributed very little, understood they now had before them new opportunities. [44.223.40.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:23 GMT) The Setting, 1946... 3 Three universities in the postwar era: Each molded by World War II, each destined to become leading academic institutions, each determined to play a leading role in the biological sciences. Of the three, only UC Berkeley was recognized internationally...