Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology. A History of the Molecular Revolution . Trans. by M. Cobb (Cambridge, MA: Harv
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Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology. A History of the Molecular Revolution. Trans. by M. Cobb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 528 pp., $45.00, £36.95, €40.50 Hardback, ISBN: 9780674281363 Koen B. Tanghe1 Published online: 15 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Historians sometimes distinguish the prehistory of a science from its history, although they do not always use the specific term prehistory. For example, Guntau (1978, p. 280) believed that, as late as the eighteenth century, geology was still in its “prehistory.” A few years later, Salomon-Bayet (1981, p. 46) proposed a similar historiographical dividing line for geology’s sister science biology: its history only started “from the moment that the term ‘biology’ was coined (1802).” Likewise, Fry (2016) considers the first experimental identification of DNA as the genetic molecule (1944) as the event that separates the history of molecular biology from its long prehistory. In The Black Box of Biology (2020), the thoroughly revised and expanded version of his lauded book A History of Molecular Biology (1998), Michel Morange not only uses the same periodisation (prehistory/history) but also the term prehistory, stating that grants from the Rockefeller Foundation were more important for “the prehistory of molecular biology” than “for its subsequent progress” (p. 83). That progress began in the mid-1940s, he suggests, when public funding for molecular biology increased rapidly through national institutes, like the Medical Research Council in Britain. Obviously, this important change in funding is compatible with considering 1944 as the starting point of molecular biology or, at least, an important year in its early history. In the latter case, the dividing line between prehistory and history can be situated in 1938, the year when the newly emerging field was first clearly identified. In his annual report for that year to the Rockefeller Foundation, director Warren Weaver referred, under the heading “MOLECULAR BIOLOGY,” to a “relatively new field, which may be called molecular biology, in which delicate modern techniques are being used to investigate ever more minute details of certain life processes” (quoted in Weaver 1970, p. 582). A few years before, Weaver * Koen B. Tanghe [email protected] 1
Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
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had recommended to the trustees of the Foundation that “the science program of the foundation be shifted from its previous preoccupation with the physical sciences, to an interest in stimulating and aiding the application, to basic biological problems, of the techniques, experimental procedures, and methods of analysis so effectively developed in the physical sciences” (ibid.). Unfortunately, this important dichotomy between the prehistory and the history of molecular biology is not reflected in the broad, four-part structure of Morange’s book. Part one, called the birth of molecular biology, largely deals with its early history. It do
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