I just gave my 20th century biology lecture yesterday–not much to report except that I argued that a productive way to approach the subject is to figure out how biology emerges as something independent of medicine, physiology, and chemistry. I look to the emergence of a full-throttled biochemistry (a chemistry specific to life) situated around 1900: enzymes, understanding proteins, biochemical pathways, and all that. This merges with the more physiological\/evolutionary genetics with DNA in the new field of molecular biology mid-century.<\/p>\n
But, after a bit of scraping, my best guide to all this turned out to be a mightily interesting 1992 book (collecting four 1990 lectures) by Frederic Holmes called (of all titles): “Between Biology and Medicine: The Formation of Intermediary Metabolism”. It sounds very arcane, but turned out to be riveting, because it deals pretty head-on with some of the questions I’ve been thinking about here. Basically, Holmes wrote (an absurdly detailed) two-volume book on Hans Krebs, trying to tease out the origins of intermediary metabolism in the 1930s, and, as so-often happens, he had the trap-door open beneath him as he found that intermediary metabolism has “predecessors” in the first half of the 1800s.<\/p>\n
Now, Holmes is rightly suspicious about this “predecessors” question, and ends up tackling some very deep issues about how to write history. I have a lecture coming up tomorrow on R&D (another very bloggable topic), so I’m going to leave this here, but I’m going to come back to this in the next few posts.<\/p>\n
Also, Jenny’s long-awaited online debate thing is due to go forward on the 23rd–stay tuned! (seriously)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just gave my 20th century biology lecture yesterday–not much to report except that I argued that a productive way to approach the subject is to figure out how biology emerges as something independent of medicine, physiology, and chemistry. I look to the emergence of a full-throttled biochemistry (a chemistry specific to life) situated around<\/p>\n