The definition of molecular biology and the definition of policy: the role of the Rockefeller Foundation's policy for molecular biology.

Abstract

Pnina Abir-Am's recent paper challenges views which have attributed to the Rockefeller Foundation's policy a direct impact upon the rise of molecular biology, and suggests that the policy had inherent limitations for revolutionizing biology. She has performed a valuable service in this analysis of the role of policy in that she reveals much previously unpublished data concerning the decision-making surrounding Foundation support for 'experimental biology' in the 1930s. Much of her analysis concerning the 'colonization' of biology by physical techniques and physicists is of value, but her interpretation fails in claiming that such colonization was merely technical or social, that it did not involve genuine interest by physicists in biological problems, and in what appears to be its claim that the policy of technology transfer to biology was too narrow a conceptual basis for a true 'molecular biology'-promoting policy, which would have 'recoupled physical power with the knowledge of basic biological problems'. In contrast, I would claim that the 'colonization' of biology was also philosophical and conceptual, defining the problems which were addressed as much as providing new techniques for pre-existing problems; that the physical scientists Abir-Am chose as test cases were willing to think about biological problems (while re-defining them as physicochemical ones); and that the technology transfer policy was quite adequate as a basis for the molecular biology which did develop. Abir-Am's analysis of the policy decisions concerning Needham's and Waddington's research also fails in its claim that their programme was the genuine molecular biology, and therefore should have been supported by the Foundation. Such an analysis fails to recognize that a central feature of molecular biology, in all the 'schools' of true heuristic significance to its later development, was its reductionism , and that the Needham-Waddington programme would not have developed into molecular biology in its mature form, not only because of its non-reductionist philosophical foundations (which Abir-Am admits), but also because of its focus on problems of a different nature to those