Proteins, Enzymes, Genes: The Interplay of Chemistry and Biology (review)

Joseph S. Fruton. Proteins, Enzymes, Genes: The Interplay of Chemistry and Biology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xii + 783 pp. Ill. $45.00.

The historians of the chemical sciences are a very feisty lot. Their reviews of each other's work are tough and outspoken. "By failing to recognise that the 'colonisation' of biology by technique was not merely technical but philosophical, Abir-Am fails to recognise the incompatibility of the Needham . . . programme with the (Rockefeller) Foundation's policy," said one in 1984. ¹ "Why would anyone wish to revive Olby's book at a time when studies of molecular biology in a social, institutional policy and cultural vacuum are no longer viable?" wrote another in 1995. ² Joseph Fruton himself is not at all backward in this area: "There is much valuable information in Kohler's book, and also evidence of his penchant for facile generalization, which makes for easy reading but also lapses from sound historical scholarship," he writes (pp. 436-37).

The current issues in the field are mainly historiographic. According to Pnina Abir-Am, present discourse should focus on the central place occupied by the social and political aspects of science, which have in the past been marginalized, trivialized, or suppressed by what she calls empiricist thinking. Empiricist historiography, she feels, has systematically omitted the social interaction and power relations that are required to make sense of scientific action. ³ The "new" historiography deals with such topics as the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation with its selective funding for approved programs, the "colonization" of biology by physics, and the rise of the institutions and journals that contributed to the new field of molecular biology.

Fruton is clearly one of the empiricists who is under attack, and he gives as good as he gets. In fact, he has more or less reviewed his own book in his essay "Approaches to the History of the Biochemical Sciences." ⁴ History, he feels, should be based on informed and critical examination of what scientists chose to write--in professional journals, books, and public lectures, as well as laboratory notebooks. He simply lays aside the problems of current historiography (although he certainly knows what they are and who is discussing them, for they are all to be found in his footnotes and the occasional snide aside). He emphasizes continuity in the interplay of chemistry and biology--the title of his book is itself a programmatic claim that this interplay stretches back into the nineteenth century--from Thierchemie-Schmierchemie to the chemical basis of heredity. As he moves from the early to the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth, his account becomes steadily richer and more complex and detailed, until at length he is speaking from personal knowledge as a primary source rather than a historian.

It is quite safe to say that no one now working understands as much as Fruton about what scientists chose to write. One of his interesting insights is that aesthetic intuition tends to recognize symmetry, simplicity, and universality, often blanketing over what a later generation of investigators may come to see as partial, complex, and specific. He finds the simple to be fun, and perhaps heuristically fruitful too, but the complex emerges as the winner:

The first formulations of the genetic code during the 1950s were further examples of the hypnotic power of numerology, like the periodicity hypotheses of protein structure from Albrecht Kossel to Max Bergmann and Carl Niemann. If these noted protein chemists extrapolated imaginatively from their analytical data, George Gamow used only two numbers (4 and 20) to devise arrangements of the four known nucleotides of DNA . . . and chose the twenty most frequently found amino acids. Gamow . . . an engaging and bibulous playing-card juggler . . . devised a scheme, illustrated by means of playing cards, that involved sets of three adjacent nucleotides per amino acid...