Molecularizing Biology and Medicine: New Practices and Alliances, 1910s-1970s (review)

Soraya de Chadarevian and Harmke Kamminga, eds. Molecularizing Biology and Medicine: New Practices and Alliances, 1910s-1970s. Studies in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. xvii + 304 pp. Ill. $65.00 (90-5702-293-1).

This is an excellent collection of papers, most of which were presented at what must have been a tightly focused conference held in Cambridge in 1994. Papers subsequently added to the collection have further strengthened its coherence. The integration of the different contributions is, in part, the result of the attempt by all authors to articulate the overarching theme of "molecularization." While this term refers in general to the tendency to subject biological and clinical problems to a molecular analysis, it is actually a surrogate for a larger and richer series of themes that run through this book. Not only are we offered a description of the network of connections and influences that link the clinic, the laboratory, and industry, but we are also offered a critical analysis of the reduction strategies of biomedical research in the twentieth century.

While the transatlantic range of the studies is as impressive as the detail with the topics are treated, the period chosen--1910-70--allows us to appreciate the watershed that World War II represents. As Jordan Goodman, Olga Amsterdamska, Angela Creager, and Harmke Kamminga show in detail, the articulation of biology and medicine prior to the war consisted largely of reducing clinical and biological problems to problems of chemistry and physics. It is true that the reduction was not always one-way. As Amsterdamska points out in her study of Van Slyke and the relationship between chemistry and the clinic, reduction entailed a form of interaction such that "the chemical theoretical representation itself became autonomous, structuring classifications, ideas of disease, and the course of further research" (p. 61, italics in original).

The postwar era witnessed a shift in the orientation of the reduction, from chemistry and physics to biology. Furthermore, as Soraya de Chadarevian, Creager, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, and Ilana Löwy show, the new focus on biological molecules, be it in the large cooperative clinical trials organized by the NCI or in the production of plasma fractionates by Edwin Cohn and his industrial associates, required forms of organization and interactions between biology and medicine not generally encountered in the prewar period. We thus learn that while the roots of molecularization certainly lay in the prewar period, the large-scale nature of the postwar biomedical enterprise has certainly accelerated and transformed beyond all recognition the initial tendencies.

Once again, the reductions were not always as successful as their promoters portrayed them, and the role of clinical data and clinical work is often underestimated. In the chapter on hemoglobin, for example, de Chadarevian redresses this imbalance by showing just how important the knowledge of the functional variants of hemoglobin--knowledge available only in clinical form--was to the laboratory elucidation of its structure. Histories of the discovery of the molecular structure of hemoglobin rarely point out that the natural (clinical) history of normal and abnormal hemoglobin contributed crucial bits of information to Perutz and his team, or, as Chadarevian puts it, that "being able to relate clinical symptoms to atomic structure, Perutz gained decisive clues on the normal mechanics of the molecule" (p. 187).

Handsomely illustrated and accompanied by the usual critical apparatus, this volume represents a fine selection of work in the history of contemporary biomedicine and a useful introduction to the problems of that enterprise.

Peter Keating
University of Quebec at Montreal

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