Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (review)

This book focuses on a key institution, the Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, as a lens through which to explore the emergence of molecular biology. The narrative does not provide a wide-angle view of this process, nor is it a traditional institutional history. Soraya de Chadarevian uses a variety of historical methods, including less-conventional approaches such as the analysis of material artifacts, to examine three major themes: the rise of wartime biophysics, and its postwar role in building the field of molecular biology; the complex sociopolitical processes leading to the LMB's establishment and its promotion in the 1950s and 1960s, including the role of the double helix; and the scientific milieu created at the LMB in the 1960s and 1970s in response to broader governmental and social agendas for science. The strength of the book lies in its emphasis on the local contingencies that contributed to the making of molecular biology, and the LMB in particular.

It is indisputable that molecular biology came to be one of the most prominent scientific fields of the twentieth century, and the LMB played a major role in this process. Of course the LMB was where the structure of DNA was described in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick. De Chadarevian avoids merely retelling these familiar stories by investigating events at a metalevel: discovery stories are not accepted at face value, but are probed as politically and socially powerful devices that contributed to the successful building of the LMB and its research programs. Nor does she simply take a position in the long-standing debates over the validity of the field's founder stories, but instead explores discourse devices and agendas emerging from wartime science, such as the idea of a "physics of life," and their power in constructing this new disciplinary field in the postwar period.

The book's strongest sections emphasize the key roles of Max Perutz and John Kendrew's studies of protein structure and Fred Sanger's sequencing work, which are argued to have laid the foundations for the LMB's research culture. (De Chadarevian thus deprivileges the double helix.) The most intriguing chapter, particularly for those who are not historians of molecular biology, explores three-dimensional physical models used to communicate science to the public. De Chadarevian's investigation of these neglected historical materials is a microcosm of her overall approach of focusing on the broader political and public context within which the LMB was established, and how its scientists contributed to the public construction of the institution's preeminence.

The selectivity of the book, both in its focus solely on the LMB and in its attention to certain scientists (and neglect of others), may well frustrate readers seeking an updated, broader perspective on the growth of molecular biology. Many chapters stand alone, making them valuable for teaching courses on the history of molecular biology, the origins of "big science," or scientific representation, but this style of presentation also renders the narrative discontinuous. The book does not supply as much scientific detail about the research programs as might be expected, although other historians have provided some of this background (notably Robert Olby in The Path to the Double Helix, 1974). More concrete details about the varied research programs at the LMB in comparison to those elsewhere would have strengthened the account and allowed a more thorough assessment of the self-conscious formation of this institution, and in turn the discipline, inasmuch as "molecular biology . . . was produced as much in the laboratory as in the political and the public arena" (p. 1).