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Tree diagrams are the prevailing form of visualization in biological classification and phylogenetics. Already during the time of the so-called Systematist Wars from the mid-1960s until the 1980s most journal articles and textbooks published by systematists contained tree diagrams. Although this episode of systematics is well studied by historians and philosophers of biology, most analyses prioritize scientific theories over practices and tend to emphasize conflicting theoretical assumptions. In this article, I offer an alternative perspective by viewing the conflict through the lens of representational practices with a case study on tree diagrams that were used by numerical taxonomists (phenograms) and cladists (cladograms). I argue that the current state of molecular phylogenetics should not be interpreted as the result of a competition of views within systematics. Instead, molecular phylogenetics arose independently of systematics and elements of cladistics and phenetics were integrated into the framework of molecular phylogenetics, facilitated by the compatibility of phenetic and cladistic practices with the quantitative approach of molecular phylogenetics. My study suggests that this episode of scientific change is more complex than common narratives of battles and winners or conflicts and compromises. Today, cladograms are still used and interpreted as specific types of molecular phylogenetic trees. While phenograms and cladograms represented different forms of knowledge during the time of the Systematist Wars, today they are both used to represent evolutionary relationships. This indicates that diagrams are versatile elements of scientific practice that can change their meaning, depending on the context of use within theoretical frameworks., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

In 1869, Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered a new substance in the nucleus of living cells. The substance, which he called nuclein, is now known as DNA, yet both Miescher's name and his theoretical ideas about nuclein are all but forgotten. This paper traces the trajectory of Miescher's reception in the historiography of genetics. To his critics, Miescher was a "contaminator," whose preparations were impure. Modern historians portrayed him as a "confuser," whose misunderstandings delayed the development of molecular biology. Each of these portrayals reflects the disciplinary context in which Miescher's work was evaluated. Using archival sources to unearth Miescher's unpublished speculations-including an analogy between the hereditary material and language, and a speculation that a series of asymmetric carbon atoms could account for hereditary variation-this paper clarifies the ways in which the past was judged through the lens of contemporary concerns. It also shows how organization, structure, function, and information were already being considered when nuclein was first discovered nearly 150 years ago.

A common account sees the human genome sequencing project of the 1990s as a "natural outgrowth" of the deciphering of the double helical structure of DNA in the 1950s. The essay aims to complicate this neat narrative by putting the spotlight on the field of human chromosome research that flourished at the same time as molecular biology. It suggests that we need to consider both endeavors - the human cytogeneticists who collected samples and looked down the microscope and the molecular biologists who probed the molecular mechanisms of gene function - to understand the rise of the human genome sequencing project and the current genomic practices. In particular, it proposes that what has often been described as the "molecularization" of cytogenetics could equally well be viewed as the turn of molecular biologists to human and medical genetics - a field long occupied by cytogeneticists. These considerations also have implications for the archives that are constructed for future historians and policy makers.

The Bermuda Principles for DNA sequence data sharing are an enduring legacy of the Human Genome Project (HGP). They were adopted by the HGP at a strategy meeting in Bermuda in February of 1996 and implemented in formal policies by early 1998, mandating daily release of HGP-funded DNA sequences into the public domain. The idea of daily sharing, we argue, emanated directly from strategies for large, goal-directed molecular biology projects first tested within the "community" of C. elegans researchers, and were introduced and defended for the HGP by the nematode biologists John Sulston and Robert Waterston. In the C. elegans community, and subsequently in the HGP, daily sharing served the pragmatic goals of quality control and project coordination. Yet in the HGP human genome, we also argue, the Bermuda Principles addressed concerns about gene patents impeding scientific advancement, and were aspirational and flexible in implementation and justification. They endured as an archetype for how rapid data sharing could be realized and rationalized, and permitted adaptation to the needs of various scientific communities. Yet in addition to the support of Sulston and Waterston, their adoption also depended on the clout of administrators at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the UK nonprofit charity the Wellcome Trust, which together funded 90% of the HGP human sequencing effort. The other nations wishing to remain in the HGP consortium had to accommodate to the Bermuda Principles, requiring exceptions from incompatible existing or pending data access policies for publicly funded research in Germany, Japan, and France. We begin this story in 1963, with the biologist Sydney Brenner's proposal for a nematode research program at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge. We continue through 2003, with the completion of the HGP human reference genome, and conclude with observations about policy and the historiography of molecular biology.

The Dutch microbiologist/biochemist Albert Jan Kluyver (1888-1956) was an early proponent of the idea of biochemical unity, and how that concept might be demonstrated through the careful study of microbial life. The fundamental relatedness of living systems is an obvious correlate of the theory of evolution, and modern attempts to construct phylogenetic schemes support this relatedness through comparison of genomes. The approach of Kluyver and his scientific descendants predated the tools of modern molecular biology by decades. Kluyver himself is poorly recognized today, yet his influence at the time was profound. Through lens of today however, it has been argued that the focus by Kluyver and others to create taxonomic and phylogenetic schemes using morphology and biochemistry distorted and hindered progress of the discipline of microbiology, because of a perception that the older approaches focused too much on a reductionist worldview. This essay argues that in contrast the careful characterization of fundamental microbial metabolism and physiology by Kluyver made many of the advances of the latter part of the twentieth century possible, by offering a framework which in many respects anticipated our current view of phylogeny, and by directly and indirectly training a generation of scientists who became leaders in the explosive growth of biotechnology.

This article shows how Lamarckism was essential in the birth of the French school of molecular biology. We argue that the concept of inheritance of acquired characters positively shaped debates surrounding bacteriophagy and lysogeny in the Pasteurian tradition during the interwar period. During this period the typical Lamarckian account of heredity treated it as the continuation of protoplasmic physiology in daughter cells. Félix d'Hérelle applied this conception to argue that there was only one species of bacteriophage and Jules Bordet applied it to develop an account of bacteriophagy as a transmissible form of autolysis and to analyze the new phenomenon of lysogeny. In a long-standing controversy with Bordet, Eugène Wollman deployed a more morphological understanding of the inheritance of acquired characters, yielding a particulate, but still Lamarckian, account of lysogeny. We then turn to André Lwoff who, with several colleagues, completed Wollman's research program from 1949 to 1953. We examine how he gradually set aside the Lamarckian background, finally removing inheritance of acquired characters from the resulting account of bacteriophagy and lysogeny. In the conclusion, we emphasize the complex dual role of Lamarckism as it moved from an assumed explanatory framework to a challenge that the nascent molecular biology had to overcome.

This article explores the problem of the foundation of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), by reconstructing a broader institutional framework, which includes other international actors--EURATOM, UNESCO and the International Laboratory of Genetics and Biophysics (ILGB) in Naples--and a relevant, but still neglected figure, the Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso (1913-1983). The article considers the tension between centralized and federal models of organization in the field of life sciences not just as an EMBO internal controversy, but rather as a structural issue of European scientific cooperation in fundamental biology in the early 1960s. Along with EMBO, the article analyzes in particular the EURATOM Biology Division Program and the constitution of UNESCO International Cell Research Organization (ICRO). Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, as founder of ILGB and scientific consultant of EURATOM and UNESCO, played a crucial role in the complex negotiation which ultimately led to the foundation of EMBO. A synchronic treatment of ILGB, EURATOM, UNESCO-ICRO and EMBO opens a window on the early 1960s institutional configuration of molecular biology in Europe, showing how it basically incorporated the "Cold Spring Harbor" decentralized model rather than reproducing the "CERN" centralized model.

Causal complexities involved in biological phenomena often generate ambiguous experimental results that may create epistemic niches for new approaches and interpretations. The exploration for new approaches may foment momentum of larger epistemological shifts, and thereby introduce the possibilities of adopting new technologies. This paper describes British molecular biologist Robin Holliday's cell aging research from 1963 to the 1980s that transformed from simple hypothesis testing to working on various alternative and integrative approaches designed to deal with complex data. In the 1960s, hoping to use biochemical investigations of cells to settle a debate about whether DNA mutations or protein errors caused aging, Holliday carried out a series of experiments with fruit flies, fungi, and human fibroblast cells. The results seemed to demonstrate that cytoplasmic protein errors caused cell aging. However, other scientists obtained contradictory results and raised issues about potential flaws in Holliday's experiments. In the 1970s, working as the director of the Genetics Division of the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, United Kingdom, Holliday relied on available talents of his associates, including computational expertise, to explore alternative hypotheses and approaches. By the early 1980s, they had worked out an epigenetic explanation and had established integrative, evolutionary models of cell aging that incorporated both DNA mutations and protein errors as critical factors. By delineating Holliday's research path from simply testing hypotheses to integrating multiple factors involved in aging, this paper offers an account of the difficulties in targeting molecular cause in cell aging around the 1970s, whose failures nevertheless opened up an epistemic niche for integration.

The use of molecules and reactions as evidence, markers and/or traits for evolutionary processes has a history more than a century long. Molecules have been used in studies of intra-specific variation and studies of similarity among species that do not necessarily result in the analysis of phylogenetic relations. Promoters of the use of molecular data have sustained the need for quantification as the main argument to make use of them. Moreover, quantification has allowed intensive statistical analysis, as a condition and a product of increasing automation. All of these analyses are subject to the methodological anxiety characteristic of a community in search of objectivity (Suárez-Díaz and Anaya-Munoz, Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 39:451–458, 2008). It is in this context that scientists compared and evaluated protein and nucleic acid sequence data with other types of molecular data – including immunological, electrophoretic and hybridization data. This paper argues that by looking at longterm historical processes, such as the use of molecular evidence in evolutionary biology, we gain valuable insights into the history of science. In that sense, it accompanies a growing concern among historians for big-pictures of science that incorporate the fruitful historical research on local cases of the last decades.

The importance of viruses as model organisms is well-established in molecular biology and Max Delbrück's phage group set standards in the DNA phage field. In this paper, I argue that RNA phages, discovered in the 1960s, were also instrumental in the making of molecular biology. As part of experimental systems, RNA phages stood for messenger RNA (mRNA), genes and genome. RNA was thought to mediate information transfers between DNA and proteins. Furthermore, RNA was more manageable at the bench than DNA due to the availability of specific RNases, enzymes used as chemical tools to analyse RNA. Finally, RNA phages provided scientists with a pure source of mRNA to investigate the genetic code, genes and even a genome sequence. This paper focuses on Walter Fiers' laboratory at Ghent University (Belgium) and their work on the RNA phage MS2. When setting up his Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Fiers planned a comprehensive study of the virus with a strong emphasis on the issue of structure. In his lab, RNA sequencing, now a little-known technique, evolved gradually from a means to solve the genetic code, to a tool for completing the first genome sequence. Thus, I follow the research pathway of Fiers and his 'RNA phage lab' with their evolving experimental system from 1960 to the late 1970s. This study illuminates two decisive shifts in post-war biology: the emergence of molecular biology as a discipline in the 1960s in Europe and of genomics in the 1990s.

During the 1960s, Howard M. Temin (1934-1994), dared to advocate a "heretical" hypothesis that appeared to be at variance with the central dogma of molecular biology, understood by many to imply that information transfer in nature occurred only from DNA to RNA. Temin's provirus hypothesis offered a simple explanation of both virus replication and viral-induced cancer and stated that Rous sarcoma virus, an RNA virus, is replicated via a DNA intermediate. Popular accounts of this scientific episode, written after the discovery of an RNA-directed DNA polymerase in 1970, tend to describe the reaction to his proposition as ardent opposition. Typically these accounts use a [Symbol: see text]molecular biology' standpoint emphasizing the central dogma's part in its rejection. In this article, however, this episode will be examined from a joint perspective of virology and experimental cancer research. From this perspective it is clear that Temin's work was well within the epistemological and methodological boundaries of virology and cancer research. Still, scientists did have reasons to doubt the provirus hypothesis, but these do not seem to be good enough to either justify an account that portrays Temin as a renegade or his ideas as heretical.

During the early 1960s, Morris Goodman used a variety of immunological tests to demonstrate the very close genetic relationships among humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Molecular anthropologists often point to this early research as a critical step in establishing their new specialty. Based on his molecular results, Goodman challenged the widely accepted taxonomic classification that separated humans from chimpanzees and gorillas in two separate families. His claim that chimpanzees and gorillas should join humans in family Hominidae sparked a well-known conflict with George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and other prominent evolutionary biologists. Less well known, but equally significant, were a series of disagreements between Goodman and other prominent molecular evolutionists concerning both methodological and theoretical issues. These included qualitative versus quantitative data, the role of natural selection, rates of evolution, and the reality of molecular clocks. These controversies continued throughout Goodman's career, even as he moved from immunological techniques to protein and DNA sequence analysis. This episode highlights the diversity of methods used by molecular evolutionists and the conflicting conclusions drawn from the data that these methods generated.

Fred Sanger, the inventor of the first protein, RNA and DNA sequencing methods, has traditionally been seen as a technical scientist, engaged in laboratory bench work and not interested at all in intellectual debates in biology. In his autobiography and commentaries by fellow researchers, he is portrayed as having a trajectory exclusively dependent on technological progress. The scarce historical scholarship on Sanger partially challenges these accounts by highlighting the importance of professional contacts, institutional and disciplinary moves in his career, spanning from 1940 to 1983. This paper will complement such literature by focusing, for the first time, on the transition of Sanger's sequencing strategies from degrading to copying the target molecule, which occurred in the late 1960s as he was shifting from protein and RNA to DNA sequencing, shortly after his move from the Department of Biochemistry to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both based in Cambridge (U.K.). Through a reinterpretation of Sanger's papers and retrospective accounts and a pioneering investigation of his laboratory notebooks, I will claim that sequencing shifted from the working procedures of organic chemistry to those of the emergent molecular biology. I will also argue that sequencing deserves a history in its own right as a practice and not as a technique subordinated to the development of molecular biology or genomics. My proposed history of sequencing leads to a reappraisal of current STS debates on bioinformatics, biotechnology and biomedicine.

The object of this paper is two-fold: first, to show that contrary to what seem to have become a widely accepted view among historians of biology, the famous 1953 first Nature paper of Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was widely cited--as compared to the average paper of the time--on a continuous basis from the very year of its publication and over the period 1953-1970 and that the citations came from a wide array of scientific journals. A systematic analysis of the bibliometric data thus shows that Watson's and Crick's paper did in fact have immediate and long term impact if we define "impact" in terms of comparative citations with other papers of the time. In this precise sense it did not fall into "relative oblivion" in the scientific community. The second aim of this paper is to show, using the case of the reception of the Watson-Crick and Jacob-Monod papers as concrete examples, how large scale bibliometric data can be used in a sophisticated manner to provide information about the dynamic of the scientific field as a whole instead of limiting the analysis to a few major actors and generalizing the result to the whole community without further ado.

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern laboratory practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies.

In Landscapes and Labscapes Robert Kohler emphasized the separation between laboratory and field cultures and the creation of new "hybrid" or mixed practices as field sciences matured in the early twentieth century. This article explores related changes in laboratory practices, especially novel designs for the analysis of organism-environment relations in the mid-twentieth century. American ecologist Victor Shelford argued in 1929 that technological improvements and indoor climate control should be applied to ecological laboratories, but his recommendations were too ambitious for the time. In the postwar period Frits W. Went, plant physiologist at the California Institute of Technology, created a new high-tech laboratory, dubbed a "phytotron", in the hope that it would transform plant sciences by allowing for unprecedented control of environmental variables. Went's aspirations, the research conducted in his laboratory, and its impact in initiating an international movement, are considered. Went's laboratory can be seen as a "hybrid culture" evolving in the laboratory, complementing and intersecting with some of the field practices that Kohler describes. It was also a countercultural movement against the reductionist trends of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s. By considering the history of the laboratory in relation to field sciences, we can explore how new funding sources and cross-disciplinary relations affected the development of field sciences, especially in the postwar period.

In the advertising discourse of human genetic database projects, of genetic ancestry tracing companies, and in popular books on anthropological genetics, what I refer to as the anthropological gene and genome appear as documents of human history, by far surpassing the written record and oral history in scope and accuracy as archives of our past. How did macromolecules become "documents of human evolutionary history"? Historically, molecular anthropology, a term introduced by Emile Zuckerkandl in 1962 to characterize the study of primate phylogeny and human evolution on the molecular level, asserted its claim to the privilege of interpretation regarding hominoid, hominid, and human phylogeny and evolution vis-à-vis other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, physical anthropology, and paleoanthropology. This process will be discussed on the basis of three key conferences on primate classification and evolution that brought together exponents of the respective fields and that were held in approximately ten-years intervals between the early 1960s and the 1980s. I show how the anthropological gene and genome gained their status as the most fundamental, clean, and direct records of historical information, and how the prioritizing of these epistemic objects was part of a complex involving the objectivity of numbers, logic, and mathematics, the objectivity of machines and instruments, and the objectivity seen to reside in the epistemic objects themselves.

Muriel Whedale, a distinguished graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, was a member of William Bateson's school of genetics at Cambridge University from 1903. Her investigation of flower color inheritance in snapdragons (Antirrhinum), a topic of particular interest to botanists, contributed to establishing Mendelism as a powerful new tool in studying heredity. Her understanding of the genetics of pigment formation led her to do cutting-edge work in biochemistry, culminating in the publication of her landmark work, The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants (1916). In 1915, she joined Frederick Gowland Hopkin's Department of Biochemistry as assistant and in 1926 became one of the first women to be appointed university lecturer. In 1919 she married the biochemist Huia Onslow, with whom she collaborated until his death in 1922. This paper examines Whedale's work in genetics and especially focuses on the early linkage of Mendelian methodology with new techniques in biochemistry that eventually led to the founding of biochemical genetics. It highlights significant issues in the early history of women in genetics, including the critical role of mentors, funding opportunities, and career strategies.

Developing models of biological mechanisms, such as those involved in respiration in cells, often requires collaborative effort drawing upon techniques developed and information generated in different disciplines. Biochemists in the early decades of the 20th century uncovered all but the most elusive chemical operations involved in cellular respiration, but were unable to align the reaction pathways with particular structures in the cell. During the period 1940-1965 cell biology was emerging as a new discipline and made distinctive contributions to understanding the role of the mitochondrion and its component parts in cellular respiration. In particular, by developing techniques for localizing enzymes or enzyme systems in specific cellular components, cell biologists provided crucial information about the organized structures in which the biochemical reactions occurred. Although the idea that biochemical operations are intimately related to and depend on cell structures was at odds with the then-dominant emphasis on systems of soluble enzymes in biochemistry, a reconceptualization of energetic processes in the 1960s and 1970s made it clear why cell structure was critical to the biochemical account. This paper examines how numerous excursions between biochemistry and cell biology contributed a new understanding of the mechanism of cellular respiration.

A political discourse of peace marked the distribution and use of radioisotopes in biomedical research and in medical diagnosis and therapy in the post-World War II period. This occurred during the era of expansion and strengthening of the United States' influence on the promotion of sciences and technologies in Europe as a collaborative effort, initially encouraged by the policies and budgetary distribution of the Marshall Plan. This article follows the importation of radioisotopes by two Spanish research groups, one in experimental endocrinology and one in molecular biology. For both groups foreign funds were instrumental in the early establishment of their laboratories. The combination of funding and access to previously scarce radioisotopes helped position these groups at the forefront of research in Spain.

Biologists and historians often present natural histoy and molecular biology as distinct, perhaps conflicting, fields in biological research. Such accounts, although supported by abundant evidence, overlook important areas of overlap between these areas. Focusing upon examples drawn particularly from systematics and molecular evolution, I argue that naturalists and molecular biologists often share questions, methods, and forms of explanation. Acknowledging these interdisciplinary efforts provides a more balanced account of the development of biology during the post-World War II era.