Scepticism about the centrality of technology transfer in the Rockefeller Foundation programme in molecular biology.

Abstract

Perhaps it is the very sensitivity of our own careers, institutional plans and disciplinary manoeuvres to governmental policy, the attitudes of political or scientific sponsors and foundation strategies, that has made contemporary historians look for evidence of similar processes in earlier phases of science? Just because academic research and training are so evidently being restructured at the moment, so we are led to explore how earlier generations coped with these strains, how the 'successful' ones exploited the opportunities, and what attitudes and priorities consigned the 'failures' to oblivion. This theme of creative, entrepreneurial response to shifting circumstances by scientists and social historians of science is explicit in Robert Kohler's recent history of biochemistry as a discipline, even though some reviewers have found its emphasis on the business aspects of academic life to the exclusion of any of the technicalities of biochemistry decidedly odd.2 It was Kohler's earlier work on the Rockefeller Foundation,3 building on studies by Rosenberg and Kevles, that inspired the recent set of conflicting articles on the relations between Rockefeller Foundation policy and the origins of molecular biology. Pnina Abir-Am's recent article in Social Studies of Science4 is an important addition to this literature, of specific interest to historians of molecular biology, and of general relevance to students of the discipline form itself, and of the history of science policy-making. In its wealth of detail it certainly sets high standards in the use of archival evidence to support generalizations about Foundation activity and its intended or unintended effects on science. It also illustrates clearly the different kinds of social control that may operate in research and in agencies concerned with science, and how this control is exercised through research technology. Weaver, as a Foundation official, could intervene in the market for scientific skills, changing their value by making funds available for new equipment. That policy choice, in itself, allowed him to retain some autonomy in relation to those who sought to control him. Technical facility with new apparatus allowed some physical scientists to control access to new problems in experimental biology. Research technology may itself mediate and embody power relations; it is not just machinery or glassware. Kohler and others had mentioned something of that before, but much greater detail is now available.5