some remarks on the mechanism of myth construction

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How Scientists View Their Heroes: Some Remarks on the Mechanism of Myth Construction Author(s): Pnina G. Abir-Am Source: Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 281-315Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330821Accessed: 12-08-2015 19:57 UTC

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Essay Review: How Scientists View Their Heroes: Some Remarks on the Mechanism of Myth Construction

PNINA G. ABIR-AM

Institut d'Histoire et de Sociopolitique des Sciences Universite de Montreal Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3J7

Scientists generally do not like to read what outsiders have to say about science, or so allege the authors of Laboratory Life, the first anthropologically minded attempt to observe science as it is actually practiced.' When a suitable opportunity arises, scientists prefer to write about their science themselves. The compilation of anniversary or memorial volumes dedicated to publicizing the career of successful scientists offers just such an opportunity. It combines the official noble goal of paying tribute to either influential living colleagues or the notable dead with the less explicit interest of circulating a certified conception of science. The latter interest becomes especially acute when one school's conception of science, and its associated authority and intellectual property rights, is contested by competing schools.

The prescription followed by the participants in these rites is to describe their most significant piece of research, while emphasizing their real or apparent link to the volume's hero. The latter's more intimate associates may act as editors, gently guiding the authors to converge in producing a proper image of their hero. Interspersed recollections of a personal, often gossipy nature support the contributors' "bold" revelations that scientists too are after all human, not entirely perfect, and thus have made their share of errors.

Like all rituals reported by "native" participants, anniversary or memorial volumes dedicated to scientists display profound contradictions for the careful reader. Indeed, the true social function of these volume-rites is to reaffurm the underlying principles of social order in science, and not to reflect the disorders and conflicts of scientists'

1. B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage Publications, 1979). See also the oblique preface to this volume by J. Salk, founder of the Salk Institute, where the authors conducted their observations of science as it actually is. Another author-observer of laboratory life, June Goodfield (An Inmgined World: A Story of Scientific Discovery [New York: Harper & Row, 19811), has been fired since the publica- tion of her book, which apparently displeased scientists in power.

Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 15, no. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 281-315. 0022-5010/82/0152/0281 $03.50. Copyright ? 1982 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A.



PNINA G. ABIR-AM

everyday life.2 This affirmation is usually enacted by a systematic display of public consensus around key metaphors such as "discovery," "discipline," or specific concepts,3 while circulating an authoritative view of a scientist-hero. It is the authentic life story of the scientist- hero that enables people, especially novice scientists (upon whom the reproduction of the enterprise of science so obviously depends), to identify with and accept an ideal view of the otherwise abstract and obscure workings of the social system of science.4

Jacques Monod's memorial volume, Origins of Molecular Biology: A 7Wibute to Jacques Monod, edited by Andre Lwoff and Agnes Ullmann (New York: Academic Press, 1979), is the most recent and the most interesting in a series of anniversary volumes, a genre that has gained in popularity among molecular biologists ever since the mid-l 960s.5 Although obviously designed for practicing and would-be scientists, these anniversary volumes are not without interest for historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science. The main reason for this interest is not the customary historical claims, composed by those

2. This interpretation is based on V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1967), and his Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971). Turner's analysis is based on classic anthropological material, but I feel that his analysis is equally relevant to modern scientific material and its ritualistic dimensions, as demonstrated in part below.

3. See for example the recent volume by P. R. Srinivasan, J. S. Fruton, and J. T. Edsall, eds., 7he Origins of Modern Biochemistry: A Retrospect on Proteins (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1979); also my essay review in the British Journal for the History of Science (in press), which analyzes the way the discipline of biochemistry is built around empirical elaborations of the concept of "proteins."

4. The social structure of science as described by sociologists, for example J. R. Cole and S. Cole, Social Stratification in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), and H. Zuckerman, Scientific Elite (New York: Free Press, 1977), regardless of its accuracy, is simply not comprehended by practicing scientists. They tend to have their own view of science, informed primarily by an ethos that projects a highly idealized perception of scientific careers.

5. For example, J. Cairns, G. S. Stent, and J. D. Watson, eds., Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1966), dedicated to Max Delbruck's 60th anniversary; A. Rich and N. Davidson, eds., Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology (San Francisco: Freeman, 1968), dedicated to Linus Pauling's 65th anniversary; J. Monod and E. Borek, eds., Of Microbes and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), dedicated "to Andre Lwoff's for the fiftieth anniversary of his immersion in biology." (Born in 1902, Lwoff began his biological research in 1921.)

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Essay Review: How Scientists View Their Heroes

presiding over these events, usually tightly packaged in the title. Nor is it the raw material provided by anecdotes, personal information, or even insights into the scientists' "subculture," which such volumes often provide in sharp contrast to the mostly dry, technical, and impersonal style of scientific publications. These are all important sources admittedly (especially when not taken at face value) for forming an analytic understanding of science as a social and cultural system.6 However, this essay will claim that the real importance of collective public representations of science by scientists lies not so much in their content but in their systematic omissions. I shall focus in this essay on uncovering these major omissions and shall suggest some of the mechanisms via which they are functional in the construction, validation, and circulation of myths in the history of science.7 This will be done while

6. For a naive use of the raw material provided by anniversary volumes see N. Mullins, "The Development of a Scientific Specialty: The Phage Group and the Origins of Molecular Biology," Minerva, 10 (1972), 51-82. Muffins' sociological model is based on taking at face value the claims made by Cairns, Stent, and Watson in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology.

7. The following are particularly illuminating analyses of the systematic distortion of scientific events in scientists' accounts of past scientific events: D. Outram, "Scientific Biography and the Case of Georges Cuvier: With a Critical Bibliography," Hist. Sci, 13 (1976), 101-137; idem, "The Language of Natural Power: The 'Eloges' of Georges Cuvier and the Public Language of 19th Century Science," Hist. ScL, 16 (1978), 153-178. G. Swain,Le sujet de la folie: Naissance de la psychiatrie (Toulouse: Privat, 1977); F. J. Suloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979). However, the theoretical dimensions of myth construction in the history of science have hardly been explored. Thus, although Outram, Swain, and Suloway have demonstrated convincingly the existence of systematic distortion in the historical records of Cuvier, Pinel, and Freud respectively, and have used the terms "myth" or "legend" to classify them as a genre, they did not concern themselves with the question of why these "myths" were accepted and why they "worked" (beyond the implicit conspiratorial view of rising schools' deliberately abusing history in order to consolidate their claims to power). Outram alone indicated that the constructed "myths" worked because they accommodated the professional ideology of scientists-turned-historians.

For philosophical-historical discussions of the relationship between "myth" and science see C. Moraz*, 'Les mythes, les sciences et l'invention sociale," Annales, Economies, Socie'ts, Civilisations, 30 (1975), 953-974; Y. Elkana, "The Myth of Simplicity," Proceedings of the Einstein Centennial Symposium (Jerusalem: Israeli Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1979).

The use of the concept of myth in this paper diverges from its previous uses as a mode of thought contrasting science along the irrational/rational or primitive/ modern dichotomy - for example in R. Horton and R. Finnegan, eds.,Modes of Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). Rather, I build here on the concept

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examining the evidence contained in this specific volume on Monod - which, incidentally, is much more frank about its hero than such volumes usually are. I shall discuss in particular four myths, arguing that they create and control a differential distribution of knowledge on the real operation of science as a sociopolitical system. In doing so, they sustain both the social order within science and the position of science in society at large.

Thus, I shall analyze the construction by the contributors of the scientist-hero, stripped down to his scientific garb while his many other

of myth as a cultural resource structuring perceptions of reality so that a particular kind of social order is perpetuated. This concept was developed by C. Levi-Strauss; see especially his Pens&e sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962) and the response to his ideas by various students of myth in E. N. Hayes and T. Hayes, eds., Claude Levi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1979). Another developer was Roland Barthes; see especially his Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980; original French ed. publ. 1957).

In adapting this concept of myth to scientists' accounts of science, I suggest that "myths" are a crucial device in constructing and crystallizing an ideal perception of science from the raw material of its cognitive and sociopolitical reality. That ideal perception, projected as real and authentic, deflects the critical attention of scientists from prevailing distributions of power, at the same time creating the gratifying illusion of sharing in a glorious enterprise. The net outcome of producing, validating, and circulating "myths" is the preservation of a particular social order in science as well as the preservation of a particular relationship between science's practitioners and society at large. This is accomplished by creating a differential distribution of knowledge on the inner workings of science as a social system, especially among new recruits whose conformity to the system is secured precisely by preventing them from "knowing what is going on." By the time some of those recruits, upon whom the reproduction of science as a social system so obviously depends, discover the discrepancy between reality and its mythical representation, it is usually too late to escape. By then their investments, spiritual and material, make the prospect of "liberation" highly unlikely, though sometimes this disenchantment finds expression in public criticism of science. One of the recent, interesting examples is Erwin's Chargaff's Heraclitean Fire: Sketches of a Life before Nature (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1978); this is a magnifient lamentation of a former true believer who lost his blind faith in science as a noble vocation and became a malcontent critic; see my analysis of Chargaff's unique autobiography in "From Biochemistry to Molecular Biology: DNA the Acculturated Journey of the Critic of Science Erwin Chargaff," Hist. Phil. Life Sci, 2 (1980), 3-60.

1 use "myth" (rather than simply myth) in order to stress that this concept is only partially analogous to myth as deployed in anthropology and that the theoretical dimensions of its deployment as a fruitful concept in an anthropological account of science as a social system remains to be fully explored.

It must be emphasized that various approaches to the social construction of

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nonscientific interests (artistic, social, political) are carefully relegated to the background. This attempt to project an image of the hero wholly absorbed by the vocation of science is not only a "mere" description, but serves at the same time as an implicit and authoritative prescription for scientist-readers to accept and conforrn to the supposed artistic, social, or political neutrality of science.

I continue by exploring the myth of egalitarianism in science by highlighting the relationship of the scientist-hero with students and women scientists. These two populations are among the most powerless "peers" in the supposedly egalitarian system of science. The students' lesser knowledge and dual intellectual-emotional dependence on the scientist-hero are all too often converted into lesser power and the so-called privilege of admiring and consolidating the hero's ventures. Similarly, the women scientists' lack of a socially and culturally vali- dated role in a system that has been historically molded on the cultural specificities and social values of men is often converted into a "privilege"

scientific knowledge are among the most relevant sources for a future understanding of the role of "myth" in science and in the history of science. Latour and Woolgar, in Laboratory Life, point to a possible fruitful direction, although there is no historical dimension in their work. Of dual sociological-historical relevance are two recent volumes: B. Barnes and S. Shapin, eds., Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Cultures (London: Sage Publications, 1979), and R. Wallis, ed., On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, Sociological Review Monograph no. 27 (1979). Both demonstrate the interplay of social and cognitive factors in the process of constructing knowledge as "scientific" and as a "mere" record of an outside reality. See also the pioneering Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; original German ed. publ. 1935). For philosophical-historical discussions of the perspective of "social construction of scientific knowledge" see also E. Mendelsohn, "The Political Anatomy of Controversy in the Sciences." (Hastings Institute Studies, in press); "The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge," in E. Mendelsoh, P. Weingart, and R. Whitley, eds., 7he Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of the Sciences, (Boston: D. Reidel PubI. Co., 1977), 1, 3-26; Y. Elkana, "Introduction: Culture, Cultural System and Science," in R. S. Cohen et al., eds., Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publ. Co., 1976), 99-107; idem, "The Distinctiveness and Universality of Science: Reflections on the Work of Professor Robin Horton," Minerva, 15 (1977), 155-173. See also the work of theoretical anthropologists such as E. Gellner, especially his "Concepts and Society," in B. R. Wilson, ed., Rationality (London: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 1849; M. Douglas, Natural Symbols (London: Penguin Books, 1970); C. Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in his Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); idem, Negara: The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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to be tolerated. Women scientists frequently are denied a fair opportunity to convert their knowledge into positions of power within science in the way that men customarily do.8

Next, I investigate the myth of the scientist-hero's making his discoveries as a result of personal genius, while trivializing the critical role of social institutions in properly constraining but also channeling the creative energy of the scientist-hero in specific directions. I counter- act this myth by pointing out the many facets of the Pasteur Institute as a social setting, without which the emergence of Monod as a synthesizer of bacterial physiology, genetics, and biochemistry cannot be comprehended.

I look also at the myth of science as being independent from a social and political context by highlighting the intimate links between the science policy adopted by the French govemment, and others, in the post-World War II period and the rise of disciplines like molecular biology and heroes like Monod. And I close by examining the historiographic import of Monod's memorial volume as a recent addition to a thriving genre of scientists' own accounts of the history of molecular biology in a deliberate attempt to deploy historical claims in present struggles over the proper definition of this prestigious discipline.

UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPTS TO ISOLATE THE SCIENTIST FROM THE HUMAN BEING

The thirty-two contributors to Monod's memorial volume started their enterprise from an excellent vantage point. They possessed what constitutes a necessary (though, as it turns out, not sufficient) condition for fine writing, namely a very good subject. Jacques Lucien Monod (1910-1976), who by the time of his death was the best-known scientist in France and a world leader of the prestigious science of molecular biology, had an unusually rich personality, life, and career. His many accomplishments in a variety of domains (art, philosophy, sport, administration, political and social activism), combined with his flair for public and media appearances, transformed him into a cultural

8. On the conversion of knowledge or symbolic capital into power in science see P. Bourdieu, "The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions for the Progress of Reason," Soc. Sci Info., 14 (1974), 1947. On the knowledge and power of women scientists see M. W. Rossiter, "Fair Enough?" Isis, 72 (1981), 99-103; Women, Science and Society (special issue), Signs, 4, no. 1 (1978); and my review of Goodfield,An Imagined World, in Isis (forthcoming).

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hero even as he emerged as a scientist-hero. It is therefore all the more surprising that the scientific community only postmortem established him as an official hero through this rite of a historical tribute.

Indeed, Monod's death utterance, "Je cherche A comprendre," seems to have better befitted the rites for scientific heroes than his controversial conduct while alive. Monod achieving fame as writer, philosopher, and administrator was seen as breaking a scientist's taboo, by publicly demonstrating science's affinity for other social spheres of action and especially science's ideological appeal. A major question arises: Who was Monod, and why did his philosophy and public posture so agitate some of his fellow scientists?

An outstanding contributor to the rising science of molecular biology (structural and regulatory genes, repressor, operator, operon, promoter, messenger-RNA, allostery - all are terms coined by Monod, who had a special flair for new terminology), Monod rose to scientific eminence in the 1950s with a series of discoveries on the cellular control of enzymatic expression. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, his research program culminated in a new framework of molecular communication and control between proteins, RNA, and DNA. The concepts and theories developed by Monod and his many collaborators replaced many tenets of classical biochemistry and classical genetics and were decisive in the consolidation of molecular biology as a novel, distinct, and integrative science.9

The Nobel Prize in 1965, a chair at the College de France in 1967, literary fame resulting from the public appeal of his philosophically minded and polemical attempt to derive ethical principles from the conceptual progress of molecular biology, Chance and Necessity in 1970, and the directorship of the venerated Pasteur Institute in 1971 - these were the most visible landmarks in Monod's rise from a potential to an actual cultural hero. Indeed, as we learn from the contributors to his memorial volume, Monod conducted himself as a hero (a "Renais- sance Prince," or a "Superman, straight out of Hollywood Central

9. J. Monod, "De l'adaptation enzymatique aux transitions allosteriques," Les Prix Nobel en 1965 (Stockholm: Norstedt & Soner, 1966), also published as "From Enzymatic Adaptation to Allosteric Transitions," Science, 154 (1966), 475483; B. Fantini, "Jacques Monod, 1910-1976,' Scientia, 110 (1976), 907- 912; A. Lwoff, "Jacques Lucien Monod, 1910-1976," Biog. Mem. F.R.S., 23 (1977), 384-412; A. Lwoff and A. Ullmann, eds., Selected Papers in Molecular Biology, by Jacques Monod (New York: Acadeniic Press, 1978). See also the review of this last volume by M. R. Pollock in Nature, 278 (1979), 788-789.

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Casting: handsome, tough, courageous, artistic, brilliant ... that fabulous combination of Darwin and Prince Charming," as one of the more metaphoric authors, Gunther Stent, put it) long before his late- blooming but very successful career provided public acclaim.

From his early days as a fighter and commander of the French Resistance in Nazi - occupied France to his later involvement in a variety of political affairs on the stormy agenda of post-World War II France,'0 Monod had never been an ivory-tower scientist, but rather always remained the engage intellectual in the best French tradition of a politically involved cultural elite. Besides science and politics, Monod had a profound interest and ability in art (especially music and writing), in sport (rock climbing and sailing), in public administration (as director of the Pasteur Institute he was responsible for administra- tive and fmancial reforms), and in public appearances on radio and television.

Hence it is all the more surprising that the distinguished contributors to the memorial volume, all (with the exception of Monod's technician and secretary) renowned scientists, including four Nobel Prize winners, thought it both possible and desirable to attempt to draw a portrait of Monod the scientist in isolation from his other many pursuits. These were evidently presumed irrelevant to his accomplishments in science. Such an approach betrays the attempt to accommodate a complex and multidimensional subject within the confines of a scientific ethos to which the authors subscribe and that they wish to convey to outsiders. Their hero's own defiance of this ethos makes their task even more difficult.

The memorial volume must be evaluated in terms of its objective of portraying a man and his time, or in the words of one contributor, "to depict by means of successive patches (as an impressionistic painting) a man through the epoch he lived in, and this epoch through the man" (p. 117). To be sure, the numerous references to "La Belle Epoque" of the early 1950s testify indirectly to the perception of the harder times to come. Yet the focus remains on the nostalgic aspects of what science might have been in its last days as a small-scale enterprise, with

10. Examples of his involvement include the Lysenko affair; "Choisir," a movement that fought for the legalization of abortion; and various activities in helping people to escape totalitarian regimes all over the world. See also the contributions of Agnes Ullmann, whom Monod smuggled out of Communist Hungary, and of Monod's secretary, Madelaine Brunerie, in the memorial volume.

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no discussion at all of what it became a generation later by the time the volume was conceived in the late 1970s.11

The first patch in this collective attempt to provide an impressionistic portrait of Monod is a reprinted obituary that was originally commis- sioned by the Royal Society from Monod's long-time colleague, onetime mentor, and cowinner of the Nobel Prize in 1965, Andre Lwoff.12 In this official portrait, first published in 1977, Lwoff provides a survey of Monod's scientific contributions and career: from his days in the 1930s as a malcontent and marginal zoologist at the Sorbonne; to a stint as a more innovative bacterial physiologist in the 1940s at the Pasteur Institute; to his development as a synthesizer of microbiology, biochemistry, and genetics in the 1950s; to his evolution into a theo- retician and leader of molecular biology in the 1960s; and fimally to his pinnacle of power as the controversial director of the Pasteur Institute in the 1970s.

Besides being a source of overly compressed information on Monod's unusual personal background,13 Lwoff's contribution is uniquely important because it covers the early and more obscure phases of Monod's career in the 1930s and early 1940s. Using Monod's own statements, Lwoff suggests that four scientists had special influence on the young Monod: Georges Teissier, a zoologist who pioneered experimental population genetics and was Monod's mentor in the 1930s, credited with leaving him a legacy for quantitative thinking; Lwoff, a comparative physiologist and microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute and Monod's mentor in the 1940s, whose legacy to Monod was a lasting interest in the field of microbiology; Boris Ephrussi, a

11. On the profound changes in science in the 1960s see J. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); for a critique of life science in the 1960s and 1970s see Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire.

12. Lwoff, "Jacques Lucien Monod"; it is unfortunate that Monod's bibliography was omitted (from Lwoff's original memoir) in this volume.

13. Monod's paternal family was French-Huguenot and returned to France from Geneva after the French Revolution when their civil rights were restored; his maternal family was Scottish-American. Monod was fully bilingual in English and French. He was Parisian by birth and academic education but Proven9al by schooling and temperament. His ancestors were mainly doctors, pastors, and lawyers, yet his father was a painter, a free thinker, and a positivist. A great deal of personal information on Monod, which is omitted in Lwoff's "official" memoir may be found in H. F. Judson, 77ze Eight Days of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in BIology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), chap. 7 and 10.

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geneticist who made seminal contributions to physiological genetics in the 1930s while at the Institut de Biologie Physico-chimique, sponsor of Monod during a one-year research tour in T. H. Morgan's department at Caltech in 1936 and credited with endowing Monod with an interest in physiological genetics; and finally, Louis Rapkine, a biochemist at the Institut de Biologie Physico-chimique and influential friend, credited with impressing young Monod with the central importance of molecular and chemical explanations of life phenomena.14

Lwoff refrains from evaluating the relative importance of these various legacies, all attributed to scientists outside the official academic establishment, during Monod's long gestation period when he was formulating his own synthetic approach or during his subsequent emergence as a leader of molecular biology. Nevertheless, Lwoff provides important information regarding Monod's early exposure to a crucial combination of scientific trends, which in the 1930s existed separate and isolated in various research institutes while remaining peripheral to the academic tradition. Yet the question of what kept Monod 'in waiting" for more than a decade, deliberately on the periphery of an academic science he refused to conform to (he never became a "classical" biologist), is a question that even Lwoff fails to address.

Of special interest is Lwoff's suggestion that Monod, the molecular biologist, suppressed his origins in classical biology. Monod studied with

14. For an example of Teissier's (1900-) approach in the 1930s, when he influenced young Monod, see G. Teissier, "La description mathematique des faits biologiques," Revue de me'taphysique et de morale (1936), 55-87; on Teissier's career see C. Limoges, "A Second Glance at Evolutionary Biology in France," in E. Mayr and W. B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 322-328. On Lwoff see Monod and Borek, Of Microbes and Life. On Ephrussi (1901-) and Rapkine (1904-1948) see the fellowship files at the Rockefeller Archive Center (Hillcrest, Pocantico Hills, North Tarrytown, N.Y. 10591). See also the obituary of Louis Rapkine by R. Wurmser in Bulletin de societe de chimie biologique, 30 (1948), 716-720; and Judson, The Eight Days of Creation, chap. 7, which includes an interview with Ephrussi and mentions that Teissier was Monod's brother-in-law; this information is omitted from Monod's memorial volume, as is Monod's fascination with the paradox of living beings as violating the laws of nature (that is, of physics), a major concern in the 1930s. See for example A. C. Leeman, "La physico-chimie peut-elle integralement expliquer des phenomenes biologique?" Scientia (1937), 31-37, 93-100. Monod's fascination with the paradox of living being is mentioned in Monod's "autobiography," Contemporary Scientists and Technologists (Milan: Mondadori, 1975), II, 258- 262.

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the eminent classical biologists Maurice Caullery, zoologist and cytol- ogist at the Laboratoire d'Evolution des Ntres Organisees in Paris, and Edouard Chatton, protistologist at the University of Strasbourg. Although Lwoff refrains from commenting on Monod's selective and oblique choice of scientiflc ancestors, one is tempted to suggest that the playing down of his origins in classical biology at a time when he was busily involved in establishing molecular biology as a major break with the past, is another illustration of the "Kuhn phenomenon." Revolutions, molecular or otherwise, by necessity and not by chance (to play on Mond's favorite metaphor of molecular evolution), have a distorting impact on historiography.

Lwoff attributes Monod's mnany scientific accomplishments to a combination of personal characteristics (for example, his capacity to concentrate on one fundamental problem depsite the lure of many peripheral discoveries); his sharp logic and experimental ingenuity; and his equally important talent for coordinating the efforts of many scientists in his research group, as well as his ability to synthesize findings from many domains. He stresses the importance of Monod's capacity to attract outstanding collaborators who were able to complement his own approach. He singles out Melvin Cohn in the early 1950s and Franqois Jacob in the late 1950s from many overshadowed collaborators whose precise role in promoting Monod's research program also remains to be assessed.

Cohn and Jacob themselves provide profoundly different stories about Monod. Frangois Jacob was the third cowinner of the Nobel Prize with Lwoff and Monod in 1965 and author of La logique du vivant, a conceptual history of genetics and its input into molecular biology.15 His contribution focuses on describing his and Monod's now famous "grand collaboration" in the period 1957 to 1962, a collaboration that culminated in the first theory of cellular regulation and had a crucial impact on the consolidation of molecular biology.

Jacob provides a fascinating account of the convergence of his own research on lysogeny with Monod's research on enzymatic "induction" into the beautiful synthesis of the first model of cellular regulation. Besides conveying the conceptual and methodological facets of the grand collaboration, Jacob discusses the controversial personality of

15. F. Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973; original French ed. publ. 1970). See also the illuminating essay review of this book by F. L. Holmes, Studies in the History of Biology, 1 (1977), 209-218.

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Monod along the psychoanalytically naive dichotomy of a good guy and a bad guy residing in one person. On the one hand, there was "a very warm and generous man of great charm; a man interested in people as well as in ideas, constantly available to his friends"; and on the other hand there was the man who was "incredibly dogmatic, self-confident, and domineering; a person unceasingly in quest of admiration and publicity." Fortunately for Jacob, we learn that most of the time during their collaboration the good guy was on display. Though Jacob, like Lwoff, refrains from interpreting Monod's controversial conduct (which in any case he limits to his observations of Monod the scientist), he provides crucial insights into the interplay of personality and scientific style that was so unique to Monod.

A different emphasis on Monod is given by his other major collaborator, Melvin Cohn, who also remained a lifelong close friend. Cohn stresses Monod's fascination as an intellect and a versatile human being. An American immunologist who graduated from Harvard in 1947 and is now with the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Cohn spent six years (1948-1954) as Monod's collaborator while mastering the art of collecting fellowships, as another author put it. He played a crucial role, attested to by other contributors, in Monod's early successes in demonstrating the de novo synthesis of enzymes. Describing and graphically illustrating the lore and subculture of Lwoff's and Monod's tiny labs at that time, which made them very agreeable places for research, Cohn focused on Monod, the widely cultivated French intellectual whose refined taste for elegance and cutting logic accounted for his artistic and philosophic approaches to science.

Of special interest to the reader is Cohn's emphasis on Monod's sense for the theater of the absurd (whose promulgator, Eugene lonesco, was making his debut in Paris at that time), a cultural resource he employed in his science when pursuing with great determination and insight the least logical options of his research program first. Cohn also stresses Monod's predilection for a Popperian philosophy of science, but refrains from exploring the possibly local philosophical sources of Monod's search for rational certainty in logical schemes and experiments designed to refute rather than corroborate hypotheses. This is rather unfortunate, since Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery (Monod wrote the preface to the French edition in 1973) came into vogue in the 1960s, a little late to influence Monod's "crucial experiments" in the 1950s.'6 Furthermore, Cohn attributes Monod's success

16. Monod's foreword to Popper's famous book, which appeared in French

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to the fact that his physiological theories were reducible to an exact chemical approach. Yet his examples of the varied French cultural resources that Monod deployed in creating his own scientific style provide more important clues to a future understanding of Monod and the "French" origins of molecular biology, than would his invoking the ever-explanatory reductionist approach as the key to success in biology. 7

Further insights into the delicate balance between the light and shadow of Monod's complex personality are provided by Martin Pol- lock, retired former chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh and a frequent author of historiographic essays on biology.'8 Pollock confirms the evidence on Monod's greatness

as Logique de la dkcouverte scientifique (Paris: Payot, 1973), dates from 1973 although the English version published in 1959 acquired fame in the 1960s. In 1974 Monod participated with Popper in a symposium on scientific creativity; most of the participating scientists were Nobel Prize winners. See H. A. Krebs and J. A. Shelley, eds., The Ceative Process in Science and Medicine (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1974). A. Danchin, another contributor to this volume, testifies to Monod's interest in Popper during their acquaintance in the period 1973 to 1976. It is plausible that Monod, like other scientific leaders, looked to Popper's philosophy of science, especially when his own philosophical book, Chance and Necessity, came under attack - among other things, because of its assumption of objectivity in science. This later interest was "reconstructed" and superimposed on an earlier period in Monod's life, as a scientific influence befitting the prescrip- tive dimensions of Popper's philosophy of science.

Yet another contributor, Nobel Prize winner Salvador Luria, who visited Monod's lab in the 1950s, mentioned that Monod was an existential philosopher. lndeed, the dominant philosophy in France in the 1950s was Sartre's existen- tialism. Another cultural key figure espousing this philosophy, Albert Camus, was a personal friend of Monod. See J. D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Rather than exploring the possible resonance of Monod's sense of the "absurd" in science (mentioned by Cohn) and his close links with the existential-philosophic elite in the historical context of the 1940s and 1950s, the contributor-scientists are content to invoke a belated Popperian philosophy as the only possible philosophical influence behind Monod's scientific style.

17. For a recent evaluation of the role of reductionism in the biological sciences see K. F. Schaffner, "Reduction, Reductionism, Values, and Progress in the Biomedical Sciences," in R. G. Colodny, ed., Logic, Laws and Life (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), pp. 141-1 71.

18. M. R. Pollock, "The Changing Concept of Organism in Microbiology," Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol., 19 (1969), 273-305; idem, "Back to Pangenesis," in Monod and Borek, Of Microbes and Life, pp. 75-87; idem, "From Pangens to Polynucleotides: The Evolution of Ideas on the Mechanism of Biological Replica- tion," Perspect. Biol. Med., 19 (1976), 455-472.

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as a scientist but also sustains with excellent stories his personal experience with Monod's insensitive conduct toward those he perceived as less than brilliant. Pollock attests to the repressive impact of flashy geniuses like Monod on more reserved scientists who were inhibited from thinking or acting independently in his dominating presence and who were often beguiled by his excessive confidence into misleading tracks. Pollock's observations are independently corroborated by other collaborators and students of Monod, who had a hard time pursuing their own intuitions when those intuitions clashed with Monod's. Pollock also illustrates the price of success, suggesting that Monod became estranged from former, less successful, or as he put it "scien- tifically irrelevant," colleagues.

Pollock's, Jacob's, and Lwoff's brief but incisive comments on Monod's controversial personality are highlighted by his appointment as director of the Pasteur Institute in 1971, for this position put him in power over his former colleagues. Their perceptions are complemented by the North American molecular biologist Roger Stanier, who first visited the Pasteur Institute in the 1950s. Stanier, together with his wife, the French-born former collaborator of Monod, Germaine Cohen- Bazire, joined the institute in 1971, just in time to get a close-up view of Monod's ascent and conduct as director.

Stanier makes an effort to account for Monod's apparently auto- cratic conduct as director, a conduct that he and other contributors deem unbefitting a scientist. Yet he fails to explain why Monod's overt exercise of power, demanded structurally by his position, was so resented by scientists who seemed to tolerate his formerly covert exercises (described in abundance in the memorial volume) in constantly dominating his scientific "equal." Possibly Stanier's American bias in valuing well-disguised power is responsible for his profound efforts to cope with Monod's preference in making legitimate power visible. Indeed, Stanier offers the interesting suggestion that Monod's controversial conduct was a product of many unresolved conflicts in his personality, conflicts allegedly produced by Monod's strongly Calvinist ethos in the context of a predominantly French Catholic culture.'9

19. Stanier's emphasis on Monod's Calvinist background as an important source of his aspirations and behavior is well placed. Unfortunately, the social and cultural context that produced Monod the scientist is almost entirely neglected by all the contributors. Monod used to refer to himself as a "puritan in science." (See his autobiographical essay in Contemporary Scientists and Technologists, p. 258). Note that he also had a brother, Victor, who was a professor at the Faculty of

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Stanier's important perception is not augmented, however, because he limits his empirical evidence to one episode, refrains from exploring Monod's actual religious practices and beliefs (as a member of a cultural elite, a onetime Communist, born a Calvinist, married to a Jew in a Catholic country, Monod became an atheist), and avoids dealing with the possible connections between Monod's allegedly influential religious background and his late antireligious polemic as evidenced in Chance and Necessity. Neither does Stanier see connections between Monod's ferocious antivitalism and molecular evolutionism and his religious background. These philosophical positions of Monod might have been in their turn related to his scientific contributions; for example, Monod opted for a selective versus an instructive theory of protein allostery.

Stanier feels that religion, whatever its impact and substance, can influence one's psychological makeup but not one's science. Similarly, Stanier's emphasis on Monod's background in the grand bourgeoisie may also account for his gentile paternalism toward his scientific associates. In its turn, Monod's paternalism might have been closely related to the accumulation of authority and scientific credit on his behalf. The latter problem still troubles Monod's collaborators, but they all fall short of solving it, since they assume a priori that other spheres of life such as social structure and religious or ethnic background are entirely irrelevant to one's accomplishments in science. In Monod's case, it is very plausible that his status as a member of a minority, perhaps in conjunction with the Calvinist ethos, could have

Protestant Theology in Strasbourg; see Victor Monod, La devalorisation de l'homme (Strasbourg: Alcan, 1936). The social style of the French Protestant grand bourgeoisie is also evident in Monod's gentile paternalism toward his associates, as well as in some of his hobbies such as mountain climbing. "We find again here this bourgeois promoting of the mountains, this old Alpine myth (since it dates back to the nineteenth century) which Gide rightly associated with Helvetico-Protestant morality and which has always functioned as a hybrid compound of the cult of nature and of puritanism (regeneration through clean air, moral ideas at the sight of mountaintops, summit-climbing as civic virtue, etc.)" in Barthes, Mythologies, p. 74. Although several contributors mention Monod's passion for mountain climbing, none seem to have been aware that it might have been a component of his unique cultural background in the grand bourgeoisie of Geneva. His paternal ancestors had lived in Geneva since late in the seventeenth century, when the Huguenots were driven out of France. Early in the nineteenth century, after their civil rights were restored, many Huguenots, including Monod's great-grandfather, returned to France.

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been a source of repressed political ambitions, for he obviously aspired to leadership.20

Other accounts of discoveries by Monod's collaborators, interspersed with personal recollections of an admiring nature, are provided by a group of mostly veteran Pasteuriens who benefited from Monod's intellectual stimulation and patronage. The particular importance of these contributors (among whom Elie Wollman, a long-time colleague and vice president of the Pasteur Institute, is notably mising)21 lies in their insights into the Pasteur Institute as a research setting markedly different from the rigid, hierarchical, and conservative university system. The prevailing conflict and different subcultures of the Pasteuriens and the Sorbonnards, together with these authors' recollections of Monod's contempt for the latter, illuminate the contradictions of the institutional ecology that produced Monod, as well as his later attempts to reform both the Pasteur and the Sorbonne. Apparently never a true Pasteurien, and always ambivalent in his sense of belonging to social groups as the result of a really unique social background, Monod was one of the very few scientists to combine these antag- onistic establishments in his career - and apparently the only one to attempt to reform both. Since 1962, when he accepted the biochemistry chair at the Sorbonne (apparently unable to resist the prospect of becoming the crowned emperior of French biochemistry),22 Monod combined a university appointment with the directorship of the cellular

20. By tradition members of the French Protestant grand bourgeoisie gravi- tated toward certain professions such as law, religion, medicine, and banking, while avoiding direct involvement in politics. Such a tradition proved repressive for someone who, like Monod, aspired to leadership. These aspirations, evidenced by his passion for conducting, were amply illustrated by his behavior as a Resist- ance fighter, a politically involved scientist, and a top science administrator. As his influential friend Louis Rapkine remarked, Monod was interested in conducting because it put him in control of people. This was one of the arguments with which Rapkine apparently convinced a long-hesitating Monod to become a scientist rather than a musician. Accepting science as a profession might also have resonated with Monod's father's positivism. Monod's philosophy retained a decisive positivist streak despite his many radical ideas. It is evident that Monod's sociocultural background will prove decisive for a future understanding of Monod the hero-scientist.

21. For Wollman's historical recollections see E. L. Wollman, "Bacterial Conjugation," in Cairns, Stent, and Watson, Phage and Molecular Biology, pp. 216-225; also in ludson, The Eight Days of OCeation, chap. 7.

22. Correspondence of Monod with Melvin Cohn, mentioned in Judson, The Eight Days of Creation.

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biochemistry laboratory at the Pasteur Institute, which he had held since 1953.

An even larger contingent of foreign scientists, mostly American - including crucial collaborators and/or competitors Arthur Pardee of the PaJaMa experiment,23 Jeffries Wyman of the Monod-Wyman-Changeux allostery-symmetry theory,' Daniel Koshland of the alternative Koshland-Nemethy-Filmer instructive model of protein structure and function,25 and Nobel Prize winners Francis Crick and Salvador Luria - provide additional glimpses of Monod the original scientist, fascinating intellectual, master of style, cultivated esthete, expert sailor, adven- turous human being, existential philosopher, human rights champion. Yet it is slightly disappointing to find out that Crick, who with Monod ranked as the top theoreticians of molecular biology, prefaces his contribution with vague memories of discussion the two of them held about Chance and Necessity and devotes most of his recollections to Monod's accomplishments in sailing.

THE SCIENTIST-HERO AND HIS MOST DEPENDENT PEERS

Monod's role as teacher and research supervisor in the French tradition of the enlightened patron is recalled in interesting contributions by his former students, all of whom discuss, though much too briefly, the turning point in teacher-student relationships that occurred in 1968. It seems that Monod's style of patronage, despite its pleasantries and concern for the welfare of his intellectual dependents, was rendered obsolete when its perpetuation of an antiquarian mode of dominance became transparent.

Feeling that he was no longer much needed in the new atmosphere of "contestation," Monod sought and accepted the still powerful

23. A. B. Pardee, F. Jacob, and J. Monod, "The Genetic Control and Cyto- plasmic Expression of 'Inducibility' in the Synthesis of Beta-Galactosidase by Escherichia coli," J. Molecular Biol., 1, 165-167; see also K. Schaffner, "Logic of Discovery and Justification in Regulatory Genetics," Stud. Hist. and Phil. Sci., 4 (1974), 349-385, which provides a philosophical analysis of this classic experiment.

24. J. Monod, J. Wyman, and J-P. Changeux, "On the Nature of Allosteric Transitions: A Plausible Model," J. Molecular Biol., 12, 88-118; on J. Wyman see also J. T. Edsall, "Jeffries Wyman for His 75th Birthday," J. Molecular Biol., 108 (1976), 269-270; Judson, The Eight Days of Creation, chap. 10.

25. See Antoine Danchin, "Conjectures and Refutations," in the memorial volume, 243-246.

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directorship of the Pasteur Institute. This meant in essence a gradual abandonment of his scientific practice, something that unnecessarily puzzles his scientific colleagues. Most of these scientists fail to notice that for Monod, science - like anything else in his many areas of expertise - involved mastering and dominating. They invoke his sense of duty, ostensibly Puritan, in accounting for his decision to accept the directorship of the institute, overlooking the possibility that Monod, quite legitimately despite his current status as a scientist-hero, might have had other goals in life beyond conforming to a scientific ethos and being a "mere" scientist. One wonders what Monod's apologists would think of Newton's becoming Master of the Mint.

Another interesting group of contributors is the women scientists, who make their debut in Monod's memorial volume beyond the zero representation level or tokenist threshold that characterize previous anniversary volumes.' Annamaria Torriani, an Italian-born microbiologist, now at M.I.T., and wife of the late biochemist and human rights activist Luigi Gorini," recalls her collaboration with Monod in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Monod's small group was an integral part of Lwoff's bacterial physiology unit. She emphasizes Monod's informality, courtesy, and philosophic musings, his self- awareness of being different ("they [the Americans] are the expert, I am a self-made man"), his way of impressing - almost seducing - intellectually. However, she also contextualizes her work with Monod (on the mechanism of enzyme induction in bacteria) in the social and cultural ambience of the mixed contingent of French and foreign scientists who came to work with Lwoff and Monod at the Pasteur Institute. Thus, she emphasizes the "institution" of the intellectual lunch at which all scientists gathered to discuss politics, art, music; as well as the language and cultural barriers faced by the foreign scientists (to whom Lwoff spoke only French and Monod spoke only English). She stresses the input of experience, intelligence, knowledge, and friendship brought by a constant contingent of temporary visitors, mostly Americans.

Though Torriani attributes a great deal of the excitement of laboratory life to Monod's personality and scientific resourcefulness, she also

26. See the list of contributors in Cairns, Stent, and Watson, Phage and Molecular Biology; Rich and Davidson, Structural Chemistry; and Monod and Borek, Of Microbes and Life.

27. See J. Beckwith and D. Fraenkel, "Luigi Gorini, 1903-1976," Biog. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. (U.S.), 52 (1981), 203-221.

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recalls the more mundane fact, otherwise unnoticed by all but Monod's technician, that the smooth operation of the lab depended not only on the stream of great ideas and crucial experiments that flew through Monod's fertile mind (often into the performing hands of his various collaborators), but also on the availability of stable and skilled technical personnel, some of them provincial women who also endowed the lab with the emotional comfort of a family atmosphere.

Germaine Stanier, who collaborated with Monod in the early 1950s when his group was very small, joined the Pasteur Institute with her husband Roger in 1971, after almost twenty years at the University of California in Berkeley. At that time Monod having become director, was available only for incidental nonscientifilc small talk. It is under- standable that she recalls with nostalgia the gai savoir that had per- meated Monod's lab twenty years earlier. She stresses Monod's interest in mathematically beautiful biological laws and provides one of the best aphorisms for which Monod was renowned, recalling his answer to an editor concemed about an overly theoretical paper: "If you publish this as it stands, I promise that my next paper will contain only facts." Of equal interest is Stanier's stress on Monod's engaging in scientific education through monthly club reunions, which proved especially beneficial for younger scientists, and his concern with cultivating the literary taste of his collaborators.

Agnes Ullmann, ingeniously smuggled out of Communist Hungary by Monod, recalls his efforts to secure freedom for her and her husband. However, she also recalls their lack of success in isolating the repressor molecule predicted by Monod. She retrospectively admits that, to some extent, this resulted from the fact that she did not dare to defy his confidence that the repressor was RNA (it turned out to be a protein).28 Indirectly, she suggests that Monod's position as director of Pasteur estranged him not only from science but also from scientists, a lone- liness alleviated by Monod's faithful new Airedale, Vicky, a dog who like her master was exceptional: she was the only dog allowed to visit the Pasteur laboratories.

These three accomplished women scientists provide a much more sensitive picture of the human interaction among the various figures in Monod's lab than many of the men scientists, who habitually noticed results rather than people. Nevertheless, the women could have elab- orated further on their possibly specific experience as women in the

28. See Judson, The Eight Days of aeation, chap. 10, for the story of the repressor.

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"family-oriented" lab of Lwoff and Monod,29 or on how their experience as women scientists in France compared with other countries where they had worked (such as Italy, Hungary, or the United States). We learn that Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex (1949) was discussed over the intellectual lunches of Monod and Lwoff's groups, as befitted an item central to the cultural agenda in France at that time; none of Monod's opinions are recalled, however.30

A former student of Monod who was sensitized ideologically by the 1968 events, Marie-Helene Buc, is more specific on Monod's attitude to women in science. She asked in 1962 to become a graduate student in his laboratory shortly after having had a baby. Even though Monod's lab could boast more women than most other labs at that time, as partially evidenced by the seven women contributors to his memorial volume, Buc recalls his opinion being against women having a scientific career. As always, his logic was compelling: women, because of the "necessary investments" outside science, namely family obligations, might not possess free minds, something he saw as essential to doing worthwhile research. Monod was frank enough to discuss the issue openly. Once convinced of Buc's determination to solve her family problems in her own way, he accepted her into the lab, where she enjoyed the same pleasant patemalism as her male colleagues (including husband Henri Buc). Perhaps it was not a matter of chance that Buc, more than any other student of Monod, having faced his paternalism in a double dose - both as a student or intellectual dependent and as a

29. Besides the assistant technical staff, composed mostly of older women who acted as "grandaunts," the wife of the chef-de-service, Marguerite Lwoff, assisted her husband and provided a maternal atmosphere for those coming to work with her "patron"-husband.

30. France is known for its scientific couples -- for example, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute; Rene and Sabine Wurmser, and Louis and Sarah Rapkine at the lnstitut de Biologie Physico-chimnique; Eugen and Elisabeth Wonlman, and Andre and Marguerite Lwoff at the Pasteur Institute. Exactly what kind of role model these women scientists working under the legitimizing aura of their scientist-husbands could fill must still be assessed; it also remains an open question whether women scientists fared better in France than in England or the United States before the era of affirmative action. Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (New York: Norton, 1975), suggests that they did. Apparently the couple-oriented French culture and its lack of a strong tradition of male exclusive social clubs tolerated women in science to a greater extent than its Anglo-Saxon counterparts. It should also be recalled that Monod's wife, Odette Bruhl, was a woman with an independent career as curator of the Musee Guimet.

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woman - provides us with the compelling evidence: "I know better than you what is good for you." This was an angry Monod's statement after Buc disagreed with him in public and epitomized the kind of relationship that would not become unacceptable until after the revolt of 1968. Incidentally, Monod's public image with regard to the 1968 events is profoundly antiestablishment; we find him crossing barricades to be on the students' side, escorting wounded students away from the police, and pleading with the Sorbonne faculty for a mild reaction to the rebels.3' Apparently it was in science only that he insisted on being "in charge."

Indeed, students Maxime Schwartz and David Perrin talk about Monod the "maltre" and "ses el'ves," emphasizing the respect and affection conveyed by the French word "maltre." In view of the ample testimony that Monod was a real boon as a mentor, always ready, willing, and able to solve the intellectual and personal problems of his associates and students, whom he would address as "mes enfants"; and the fact that they all subscribed to the ethos of a scientific laboratory as the embodiment of collegial and egalitarian relationships; one can easily see why so many contributors never noticed that Monod managed his lab as if it were a grand bourgeois household.32

The supreme need for emotional comfort, in an intellectually demanding and competitive enterprise like science, may also explain why many scientists felt it was more pleasant to have a caring French maitre rather than an impersonal American boss. The combination of respect and affection for the master has always been an excellent recipe for social stability or perpetuation of the prevailing forms of dominance. Indeed, forms of dominance, while possibly flexible and "allosteric," nevertheless remain under the control of cultural expression. One can only hope that the social sciences will fmd their own Monod to discover the third secret of life - the mode of cultural control of social order, in which disguised dominance is only one mechanism.

31. See various contributions in the memorial volume; also Judson, The Eight Days of Creation, chaps. 7 and 10.

32. For the social psychology of researchers in molecular biology see A. Marcovich, "Essai sur la creativite du chercheurs dans la biologie moleculaire" (Doctoral diss. Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1976); also Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. See also Monod's reference to his student Changeux as possibly committing "patricide" (p. 208). The dynamics of social psychology of scientists, together with the cultural hegemony of grand bourgeois manners, seems to account for the family atmosphere and happiness prevailing in Monod's laboratory.

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THE SPECIAL QUALITY OF THE PASTEUR INSTITUTE

So far I have examined the bearing of Monod's memorial volume on the public representation of two scientifilc "myths." The first pertained to the fashioning of Monod, the versatile human being, into a "mere" scientist. While several contributors alluded to Monod's many other endeavors, the very fact that they were mentioned only in passing led to a disproportionate emphasis on science. The converging message amounts to a distorted picture of reality in which the centrality of science for the hero is assumed rather than substantiated. The resulting "4myth" is convincing because it is based on authenticity, yet not all that is authentic is included in constructing the "myth." This kind of "myth" functions primarily for recruiting purposes, by conveying the idea that even great and heroic figures find science their main medium of expression.

The second "myth" pertained to the invisibility of the unequal power relationships between figures of authority in science, such as our hero, and science's vulnerable populations of students and women. This "myth" functions as an important device for sustaining a particular kind of social order - paternalism - in science. It further obscures the contradictions between the reality of everyday life in science and its ethos as an egalitarian enterprise, concerned with knowledge and not with power. Indeed, the understanding that discourses (scientific included) articulate both knowledge and power is rather new.33 Equally new is the realization that women in science experience a different career pattern than men, and that this difference derives from women's disadvantage in access to power, not from their lesser knowledge.34 Even though Monod's lab accepted more women scientists than most others, they owed their position primarily to the hero's cultural value of grand bourgeois gentile paternalism. While gentile paternalism has obvious emotional and intellectual advantages and is certainly more appealing than nongentile paternalism or even businesslike patronage,

33. For the conceptualization of discourse as articulating both knowledge and power see M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980; original French ed. publ. 1976); see also P. Bourdieu, "La representation politique: elements pour une theorie du champ politique," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 36 (1981), 3-22; J-M. Levy-Leblond and A. Jaubert, (Auto)critique de la science (Paris: Seull, 1975); Bourdieu, "Specificity of the Scientific Field."

34. See Rossiter, "Fair Enough?" and Levy-Leblond and Jaubert, (Auto)critique de la science, chap. 8.

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the relationship between the social order in the hero's lab and the accretion of disproportionate scientific credit on his behalf remains equivocal and is not clarified by the contributors to the memorial volume.35

Now I turn to examine two additional "myths" pertaining to the construction of science as being neutral with regard to its institutional and political contexts. In this section, I shall look at the trivialization of the institutional setting that produced the scientist-hero, through harmless anecdotes about the Pasteur Institute. Several contributors are troubled by the distribution of credit in molecular biology and emphasize their own role in Monod's many joint discoveries. Never- theless, in coming to explain Monod's position as world leader of molecular biology, they all find his numerous personal talents to be the only possible explanation for his steady accumulation of prestige and authority.

In the end, Monod is credited with possessing a French Cartesian logic; analogical reasoning within the physical sciences (Monod is presumed to have analogized a bacterial population to an ideal gas); experimental ingenuity (though it turns out his experiments were mostly performed by others); a knack for generalization (where other less theoretically minded scientists saw the results of an experiment as particular, Monod always sought the universal); a capacity for synthesizing findings, both his own and those of close or remote associates from different fields (while other scientists preferred to stay loyal to one discipline); a taste for elegant and stylish papers (whfle other scientists were content to report, as one author put it, the contents of their notebooks); and more elusive gifts such as imagination, intuition, and common sense.

Although true talent is as important in making scientific discoveries as in making significant contributions in other fields, this impressive battery of personal talents is not completely satisfying as an explanation for Monod's creativity and impact. The comforting assertion that "the right problem was posed at the right time in the right environ- ment," as Lwoff insists (on p. 22 of the memorial volume), simplifies the issue.

The profound legacy of the Pasteur Institute for Monod, and by implication for molecular biology, is only indirectly suggested by the

35. For the mechanisms of converting symbolic capital into positions of power in science see Bourdieu, "Specificity of the Scientific Field."

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the contributors.36 All of the authors, both French and foreign, who spent time at the Pasteur Institute emphasize that it provided an extremely pleasant setting and was conducive to producing good work. Their clues, however, indicate that the legacy of the institute resulted from many facets of its operation.

First, the Pasteur was one of the best repositories in the world for microbiological expertise. This expertise ranged from an excellent collection of strains, to stable and highly skilled technical personnel, to a research tradition that attracted talented researchers. It was this tradition, which proud and loyal Pasteuriens called "esprit" (para- phrasing Emile Duclaux's Pasteur: Une histoire d'un esprit, 1904), that seemed to elevate them to a position of advantage on the otherwise competitive scientific market.37 As one Pasteurien put it, this advantage saved them from having to engage in the "rat race" and partly explains the pleasant and inspiring atmosphere that so struck visiting scientists from North America.

Second, the Pasteur Institute was fimancially independent, having started as a public endowment following Pasteur's success in curing rabies.38 This independence enabled it to escape the bureaucratizing, centralizing, and conservative effects of government administration. The negative impact of the heavily bureaucratized system on innovation in the French universities, especially in new fields, is well known.39 One can understand why,after Monod's obscure decade at the Sorbonne

36. See especially the comments of the following contributors: Franqois Gros, Gerard Buttin, David Perrin, Martin Pollock, Melvin Cohn, Annamaria Torriani, and Germaine Cohen-Bazire; none, however, indicated whether the pleasant atmosphere they encountered in Lwoff's and Monod's laboratories characterized the Pasteur Institute as a whole, or whether it derived from the personalities of the two men.

37. Wollman to Judson, in Judson, The Eight Days of Creation, chap. 7, p. 350; also David Perrin in the memorial volume, pp. 133-136.

38. E. Duclaux, Pasteur: Une Histoire d'un Esprit (Paris: 1904); A. Lwoff in the memorial volume, 17-19; Judson, The Eight Days of Creation, chap. 7; A. Delaunay, L'Institut Pasteur des Origines a Aujourd'hui (Paris: Editions France Empire, 1973).

39. See J. Ben-David, "The Rise and Decline of France as a Scientific Center," Minerva, 8 (1970), 160-179; T. N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); C. Limoges, "Cuvierism, the French Academic System and the Delayed Reception of Darwinism in France," paper presented at M.l.T.'s colloquium on "Science, Technology and Society," March 1979; Limoges, "A Second Glance."

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culminating in his dissertation, the examiners concluded in 1941 that "what Monod is doing does not interest the Sorbonne" (p. 5 of the memorial volume). Monod was capable of expressing his unique genius only upon finding a proper research context at the Pasteur Institute. With Lwoff's encouragement Monod explored the implications of his dissertation, which already included the basic problems and observations that were to become the basis of his unique contribution to molecular biology. The esprit of the Pasteuriens, as an alternative subculture to the supreme academic prestige of the Sorbonnards, was extremely important in luring and sustaining the loyalty of a self- conscious and nonconformist genius like Monod.

A third aspect of the Pasteur Institute's uniqueness was an internal organization that enabled, even encouraged, research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Unlike the university, which structured its rigid order around scientific disciplines (bodies of knowledge which also constituted claims to institutional power),40 research institutes in general favored transdisciplinary collaboration and syntheses.41 Thus, at the Pasteur Institute, as long as the research revolved around bacterial phenomenology, it could legitimately encompass a variety of disciplinary resources, such as biochemistry, genetics, cellular physiology, immunology, virology.

This legacy is most evident in the circumstances of the "grand collaboration" between Jacob, Monod, and their associates (nicely illustrated in the memorial-volume selections by Jacob, Pardee, Perrin, and Gros), when they used a variety of disciplinary resources to devise the first theoretical explanation of cellular regulation. It was not a matter of chance that this model, of unique importance in the launching of molecular biology, was conceived and worked out at the Pasteur Institute. For it was not only Monod's perseverance in sticking to one problem that ensured his success; of equal importance was an

40. There is no literature specifically on this interpretation, but see Bourdieu, "Specificity of the Scientific Field," for some indicative approaches; also the course "Dynamique des disciplines scientifiques," given by C. Limoges and L. Pyenson at the Universite de Montreal for doctoral students: also P. Abir-Am, "Restructuring the Knowledge-Power Relations between Physics and Biology in the 1930s: The Roles of the Theoretical Biology Club and the Rockefeller Foundation," paper delivered at the lnternational Conference on the Recasting of Science between the Two World Wars, Florence-Rome, June 23-July 3, 1980, to appear in the Proceedings of that conference.

41. See for example R. Dubos, The Professor, the Institute and DNA (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1976).

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institutional context that both endowed and constrained him to problems of bacterial phenomenology, while legitimizing the transcending of traditional disciplinary approaches. This transcendence was necessary in order to achieve the multimethodological and multidisciplinary synthesis embodied in molecular biology.

In accounting for the particular height of Monod's ambitions, goals, and achievements, one cannot overlook the ever-present inspiration of the original director of the Pasteur Institute, Louis Pasteur. No doubt, Pasteur's career as an eminent scientist, cultural hero, and shrewd politician in both science and in society at large42 was a powerful role model for Monod. One need not draw here the many parallels between the careers of Pasteur and Monod - or recall Monod and Cohn devel- oping their friendship in endless discussions over the illuminated grave of Pasteur, across his death mask, and in the company of garish mosaics depicting Pasteur's great discoveries - in order to realize that Monod's assiduous search for the secret of life, abundantly recalled in the memorial volume,43 was inspired by the heroic career of Pasteur.

It is also interesting to recall his elder brother's describing young Monod's long hesitation in deciding upon a career as a musician or as a scientist in terms of a family dilemma - whether their talented boy was going to be a new Beethoven or a new Pasteur." Apparently, Monod, under the influence of Louis Rapkine, opted to be a new Pasteur. Indeed, he wished to succeed precisely where the great Maitre failed, namely in discovering the secret of life. As Monod remarked, acknowl- edging Pasteur's crucial legacy, bacteria, being a fundamental form of life, were best suited to reveal the secrets of life.45

SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT IN THE POST WW2 ERA

Other important facets of science that are notably missing from the memorial volume pertain to the profound transformation in the scale

42. See J. Farley and G. L. Geison, "Science, Politics and Spontaneous Generation in 19th Century France: The Pasteur-Pouchet Debate," Bull. Hist. Med., 48 (1974), 161-198.

43. See references by Lwoff (p. 14), Jolit (p. 31), Gros (p. 118), Kepes (p. 155), and Ullmann (p. 167). Judson, The Eight Days of Creation, chap. 10, which describes Monod's discovery of allostery on the basis of interviews between 1970 and 1975, is entitled "I have discovered the second secret of life."

44. Interview with Ephrussi, Judson, nTe Eight Days of Creation, p. 357. 45. J. Monod, "Du microbe a 1'homme," in Monod and Borek, Of Microbes

and Life, p. 3.

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and structure of the scientifilc enterprise after World War II. Until that time science had been a relatively small enterprise and could have qualified, with few exceptions, as a vocation pursued by a tiny elite.46 The explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 and the launching of the first Sputnik in 1957 (more precisely, governmental but also scientific responses to these scientific-technological events) created the conditions for science to become a large-scale operation with many practitioners.

This exponential growth of science, busily documented by students of scientometrics,47 had profound implications for the social organization of science. Science became an object to be managed and held accountable, because of its huge scale and cost. Though these changes in science's social and political standing paralleled the successful phase of Monod's career, as well as the rise of molecular biology, the authors of the memorial volume do not seem to perceive any connection between science's becoming a large-scale and rapidly growing manage- able enterprise and the successful trajectory of Monod, the transdisciplinary synthesizer, and of sophisticated technology-dependent molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lwoff alone draws attention to the fact that Monod's long-time technician was paid by a government agency for the funding and coordination of research established at the end of the war, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The permanent availability and loyalty of this technician and of other skilled supporting personnel, as several contributors point out, was absolutely essential to Monod's work, both in its initial modest phase and in the later management of his rapidly growing research group. Lwoff also mentions the crucial role of visiting scientists, who were able to stay at the Pasteur Institute on a variety of government fellowships, all instituted

46. For collections of personal reminiscences about science in the interwar period see D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds., 7he Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-60 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). W. M. Elsasser, Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age (Bristol: Hulger, 1978), pp. 161-189, deals with Parisian research institutes and scientists.

47. D. de SoLla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); J-J. Salomon, "Science Policy Studies and the Develop- ment of Science Policy," in 1. Spiegel-Rossing and D. de Solla Price, eds., Science, Technology and Society: A Cross Disciplinary Perspective (London: Sage Publica- tions, 1977), pp. 43-70; see also Scientometrics, a new journal that made its debut in 1979; and A. M. Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968).

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after World War II, the most important, no doubt, were those of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), established in 1945.48

Though many foreign scientists were attracted to the Pasteur Insti- tute by the reputation of Lwoff in bacterial and comparative physiology (this being particularly true of American biochemists wishing to move after the war to the newly fashionable field of microbiology),49 most of these visitors ended up promoting Monod's research program. Lwoff, while always available to advise, was more aloof and tended not to involve transitory outsiders in his own research. Monod, on the other hand, always had plenty of suggestions for others. Since he was more senior than most of the visitors, the net outcome of this interaction was that, slowly but surely, a permanent freely available stream of minds and labor flowed into Monod's own research program.

It was of course to Monod's credit that he was able to capitalize on these resources and at the same time maintain happiness among his many collaborators. However, this dexterity helps to explain his high visibility in the scientific community as well as the excellent productivity of his lab, both important factors in his accumulation of scientific credit. Since the greater part of Monod's output was collaborative, including all his major discoveries, the institutional opportunity provided by his position at the Pasteur is all the more important.

Once again, Lwoff alone (he too became involved in scientific administration in 1969) seems to have noticed that Monod's leadership, combined with a gently patemalistic management of the intellectual (and often private) lives of his numerous dependents, might have resulted in a disproportionate credit accretion on his behalf. It may not

48. At the same time one must remember that private foundations such as the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim continued to support scientific exchanges in the postwar era. For example, Monod received support for traveling within the United States, as well as a four-year research grant, from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1954 (Pasteur Institute Files, Rockefeller Archive Center). This support came at a crucial time for Monod, because he had just become Chef de Laboratoire (Cellular Biochemistry) at the Pasteur and could better direct the flow of resources that he obtained from America. This long-term support was essential for Monod and helped him to pursue his research progranm on a larger scale.

49. 1 wish to thank Seymour S. Cohen of the department of pharmacological sciences at SUNY in Stony Brook for stressing this point to me; Professor Cohen was the first American scientist to visit the Pasteui Institute (as a Guggenheim fellow) after World War II, in 1947. See Cohen's contribution, "Are/were mito- chondria and chloroplasts microorganisms?", to Andre Lwoff's anniversary volume, Monod and Borek, Of Microbes and Man, pp. 129-149.

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be so accidental that in all the cases of visiting competitors (contributors Pollock, Luria, and Pardee come easily to mind) it was always Monod that triumphed. All except Pollock convey the impression that this was simply because of Monod's superior ability.

In a similar way, contributors who mention Monod's involvement in institutional reforms at many research establishments, including the Sorbonne, the Centre de Royaumont pour une Science de L'Homme, the European Molecular Biological Organization (EMBO), the Salk Institute, and last but not least the Pasteur Institute, seem unsure whether these activities belong to his portrait as a scientist. Similarly, we hear nothing of the social and political context of science, even though Monod was active in the Lysenko, Medvedev, and other affairs involving science and politics. One would like to hear more on intemal French affairs such as the dismissal of Frederic Joliot-Curie from the directorship of the French Atomic Energy commission in what was regarded as a tragedy of science. (Incidentally, one of Monod's students and a contributor to the memorial volume is David Perrin, son of Francis Perrin, who replaced Joliot-Curie.50) In France the holy alliance of science and politics has never been kept secret. One can only conclude that omitting the political and other aspects of Monod's life is not just a simple matter of preference or lack of space, as coeditor Lwoff puts it. Rather, this omission is constitutive of another "myth," namely the public representation of science as an all-absorbing, everlasting, and apolitical vocation. In contrast to this public image of science, the hero's real life contained a good many political and other interests, but now the custodians of his public image cannot find space for those other interests.

This concern with adjusting the hero's real life to an idealized image of the scientist may also explain why the earlier part of Monod's life (for example, his first decade as an undecided scientist, wasting an entire year in 1936 at the world center of classical genetics51) is excluded from the volume, which is topheavy with the later success stories. Similarly, Monod's efforts to demonstrate science's links to other cultural and political endeavors were bound to create resentment among scientists.

Thus, it is perhaps not surprising to find so little in this memorial volume on Monod's fame-bringing book, Chance and Necessity, which

50. See S. R. Weart, Scientists in Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1979).

51. Interview with Ephrussiin Judson, Te Eight Days of Creation, p.357.

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corroded public belief in the social and political neutrality of science by exposing the ideological potential of a science like molecular biology."2 Scientists' reluctance to acknowledge this point, not their entirely legitimate disagreements with this or that philosophical idea of Monod, resulted in all but three contributors' ignoring his philosophical ideas and refraining from exploring why the book acquired popularity and aroused such a controversy.S3 We learn, however, from other sources that Lwoff simply hated the book.4' The reader would have much appreciated knowing why something in science so exciting for the lay public is virtually ignored by leading scientists.

No indication is given, therefore, of the extent to which Monod might have understood the profoundly ideological role of science in society (beyond its discredited position as the edge of a rational social order, or its role as a source of technological benefits of the kind he encountered in the industrial wing of the Pasteur Institute). This is especially true since his close links to nonscientist-intellectuals, for example his close friendship with Albert Camus, are not explored. Nonetheless, Monod demonstrated in many ways that science is not unrelated to other social spheres.

SOME CONCLUDING HISTORIOGRAPHIC REMARKS

We have seen so far four different aspects of myth construction in the collective representation by scientists of a scientist-hero: (1) the construction of the hero Monod as a mere scientist, whose other interests are presented as occasional digressions from his all-absorbing

52. See E. J. Yoxen, "The Social Impact of Molecular Biology" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1978; idem, "Life as a Productive Force: Capitalising upon Research in Molecular Biology," in L. Levidow and R. M. Young, eds., Science, Technology and the Labour Process, Marxist Studies, 1 (London: CSE Books, 1980), pp. 66-122.

53. See for example R. Monro, "Monod on Biophilosophy," New Scientist (9 December 1971), 112-114; idem, "Molecular Theology," Cambridge Rev. (20 October 1972), 20-24; J. Oppenheimer, "Life and Necessity and Chance and Man," Quart. Rev. Biol., 47 (1972), 63-67; A. R. Peacocke, "Chance and Necessity in the Life-Game," Trends Biochem Sci. (May 1977), N-99-100; G. S. Stent, "Molecular Biology and Metaphysics," in his Paradoxes of Progress (San Francisco: Freeman, 1978), pp. 115-1 29. For a survey of philosophical responses to Monod's joint attack on the three sacred cows of the French intellectual establishment (metaphysical vitalism, dialectical materialism, and catholicism) see Yoxen, "The Social Impact of Molecular Biology."

54. Judson, TheEightDaysof Creation, p.593.

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science; (2) the construction of the hero's position as a leader in science as a derivative of his talents only, while obscuring the power relationship between the hero and his peers, especially the vulnerable groups of students and women; (3) the construction of the hero's career as only being related to his making discoveries, while neglecting the crucial role of scientific institutions in constraining and shaping the conceptual world of the hero-scientist; (4) the construction of the hero's career as being unrelated to the social and political standing of science and scientists, and especially to their relationship with the government.

It must be remembered that practising scientists cannot be expected to have an outsider's critical perspective. Although the natives' view- point may be valid in their own framework as an exclusive explanation of their world order, it has a different explanatory status than that of the outsideranthropologist. Thus scientists' accounts of science also have a distinct but limited value for understanding science as a unique social, political, and cultural system. The very capacity to practice science depends on belief in a world-view that only an outsider-analyst can afford to detect as being constructed of mythical components.55

It is thus befitting to conclude this paper by pointing out the historiographic value of this volume-rite in tracing the origins of molecular biology. As its title indicates - Origins of Molecular Biology: A Tribute to Jacques Monod - it is a dual attempt to present a publicly certified image of a hero-scientist, while making a historical claim with regard to the origins of molecular biology. In view of the fact that scientists' belief system about science is constrained by a particular world-view and ethos, one is not surprised that the commemorative volume lacks a historical perspective on the scientific change that impacted the research program of the hero and his school.

At no point is it made clear when, why, and how Monod's initial research in classical bacterial physiology became molecular biology. Lwoff, the only contributor to survey the entire span of Monod's career from 1931 to 1976, suggests that the transition occurred between 1948 and 1963. Several other contributors, however, refer to work in the early 1950s as "not yet" molecular biology. The only other contributor to make an effort to provide a historical survey of the discovery he

55. See Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; C. Geertz, "'From the Native's Point of View': On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in J. L. Dolgin, D. S. Kemnitzer, and D. M. Schneider, eds., Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 480492; Barthes,Mythologies.

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shared (Fran9ois Gros on messenger-RNA) testifies that most of the work on RNA was done outside the research traditions that later renamed themselves "molecular biology"; even Monod was rather slow to grasp the implications of RNA.

Besides the timing of the scientific change involved in the rise of molecular biology, the memorial volume also highights the problematic relationships between molecular biology and classical biochemistry, classical genetics, comparative physiology, evolution, and DNA research. Speaking of molecular biology as reflected in Monod's research program, one contributor suggests the importance for Monod of classical biochemistry; another suggests evolution; a third notices the initial lack of physical chemistry, even though Monod's allostery model would eventually engage the attention of physical chemists; and Lwoff stresses Monod's background in comparative physiology. Monod's own public statements emphasized the role of classical genetics in conjunction with a physicochemical approach to biology.56

These disparate views nevertheless provide important clues for a future historical account of molecular biology and of Monod's specific legacy. They also illuminate the profound difference between Monod's school of molecular biology and two other schools that pioneered the phenomenon of scientists' making historical claims already in the 1960s on behalf of their school as the origin of a prestigious new science. These schools were the American phage genetics school, which found a spokesman in Gunther Stent57 and which started the genre of public expression by scientists of their personal sense of historical importance;58 and the British school of X-ray protein crystallography,

56. See Monod's contribution, entitled "On Chance and Necessity," in F. J. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems (London: Macmillan, 19 74), pp. 35 7 -3 76.

57. G. S. Stent, "That Was the Molecular Biology That Was," Science, 160 (1968), 390-395; idem, "Waiting for the Paradox," in Cairns, Stent, and Watson, Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, pp. 3-8. This volume is believed to have been engineered by Stent; see Streisinger's contribution, which refers to Stent as rewriting the various contributions. For an evaluation of Stent's historical claims see R. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix (London: Macnillan, 1974), chap. 15; T. H. Jukes, "Members of the Club" (book review of Judson, The Eight Days of Creation), Nature, 281 (1979), 505-506.

58. For an insightful interpretation see R. C. Lewontin, "Essay Review" (of Cairns, Stent, and Watson, Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology), J. Hist. Biol., I (1 968), 155-161.

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which found its early spokesman in John Kendrew and a later one in Max Perutz.59

The contrast in defining the content and origins of molecular biology provided by Monod's memorial volume is all the more important since historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science who have written on molecular biology seem to have accepted rather uncritically the evidence provided by scientist-spokesmen on behalf of their respective schools, especially the partition of molecular biology's origins between the school of phage genetics and that of X-ray protein crystallography.60 We learn that unlike these two schools, which professed an innocence of classical biochemistry even to the degree of antagonism in the case of the antireductionist standing of Delbruck, the celebrated hero of the phage group,61 Monod's school, though limited to descriptive and tactical biochemistry (using it as a tool in tackling problems of cellular physiology), proceeded to make its first major discovery of the de novo synthesis of enzymes simply because it addressed the problem of protein metabolism as outlined in classical biochemistry.

A similar tactical relationship can be detected in Monod's deployment of classical genetics. Unlike the school of X-ray protein crystallography, which knew nothing of genetics, or the phage group, which was entirely overwhelmed by the prospects of classical genetics in uncovering quantum physics-like paradoxes or "new laws of nature" and eventually succeeding in making the phage an object of classical genetics, Monod's school ingeniously used classical genetics as a tool to clarify problems of cellular physiology. How practitioners of these

59. J. C. Kendrew, "How Molecular Biology Started?" (review of Cairns, Stent, and Watson, Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology), Sci. Amer., 216 (1967), 141-143; idem, "Some Remarks on the Origins of Molecular Biology," Biochem. Soc. Symp., 30 (1970), 5-10; M. F. Perutz, "Origins of Molecular Biology," New Scientist, 31 (January 1980), 326-329. Yet another structurally minded school in molecular biology, with historical claims of its own, is the school of structural chemistry in the United States stemming from Linus Pauling: L. Pauling, "Fifty Years of Progress in Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biol- ogy," Daedalus, 99 (1970), 988-1014; Rich and Davidson, Structural Chemistry.

60. See Olby, The Path to the Double Helix, chaps. 15 and 16. 61. See Cairns, Stent, and Watson,Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology;

Delbruck's "leadership," much celebrated in this volume, apparently pertained to his many students at Caltech, not to his pre-1945 collaborators S. E. Luria, A. D. Hershey, and T. F. Anderson, who each had a specific orientation of his own and did not share the antireductionist stand of Delbruck, as is evidenced in their contributions; see also Olby, The Path to the Double Helix, chap. 16.

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three different research traditions can all claim themselves as originators of molecular biology remains an open question for the future.

Another area of divergence between Monod's school and the others that laid claim to originating molecular biology pertains to the import of classical biology and evolution. Neither the X-ray crystallographic school, which was composed of chemists and physicists, nor the phage genetics school, which was dominated by physical scientists, could bring resources of classical biology or evolution to bear on molecular biology. Monod's legacy in these two areas is evident in his philosophy of molecular evolutionism and also in his opting for a selective, rather than instructive, theory of allostery.62

It is equally important to note that there is hardly any mention of DNA in the commemorative volume. This occurrence, together with the fact that DNA was marginal as well in the endeavors of the other schools of molecular biology,63 suggests that the history of molecular biology and that of DNA should not be conflated. DNA assumed a central and logical position in the edifice of molecular biology, eventually becomingits graphical representation,64 only after the elucidation of the genetic code in the early 1 960s. This logical connection resulted, however, in a confusion of the largely separate historical records of DNA and molecular biology.

The fact that history does not always proceed according to the prescriptions of logic is already known to historians. Even philosophers of science may someday realize that logical reconstruction is a nice exercise, despite its lack of historical meaning.65 Indeed, to those who may insist on conflating the history of DNA with that of molecular

62. See Henri Buc, "Mother Nature and the Design of a Regulatory Enzyme," pp. 213-220 in the memorial volume.

63. X-ray crystallography focused on proteins; the other major contender as originator of molecular biology, the school of phage genetics, focused on classical genetics analysis of phage. See also Kendrew, "How Molecular Biology Started?" and "Some Remarks"; Stent, "The Molecular Biology That Was"; Olby, The Path to the Double Helix, chap. 16.

64. See for example the cover of Nature, 248 (1974), celebrating the twenty- first anniversary of the double helix, as "Molecular Biology Comes of Age"; also the poster of the conference "Biochemical and Molecular Origins of Embryology", Ischia-Naples, July 1978.

65. For a classic statement of logical reconstruction of the history of science see 1. Lakatos, "History of Science and its Rational Reconstruction," Boston Studies in Phd. of Sci., 8 (1971), 91-136; see also 1. B. Cohen, "History and the Philosopher of Science," in F. Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 308-360.

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biology, one can only remind them that the pioneer of the DNA renais- sance, Erwin Chargaff, is a staunch critic and opponent of molecular biology.66 Indeed, Chargaff has pointed out that molecular biologists belatedly appropriated DNA from cell chemists.

One is tempted to conjecture whether it was the second secret of life (molecular control and communication by allosteric proteins) discovered by Monod and his school in the late 1950s, rather than the first secret of life (molecular replication of DNA via complementary base-pairing) discovered by Watson and Crick in the early 1950s, that launched molecular biology. Now, more than ever, molecular biologists need Monod to remind them that science is also a theater of the absurd, and that the "second" secret of life may have preceded the "first" in creating molecular biology.

In concluding these historiographic remarks, I feel that the greatest tribute to Jacques Monod derives from the fact that he managed to prevent his life from being used as the axis of a scientific mythology. In spite of the efforts of many contributors to his memorial volume, the reader remains convinced that there is more to Monod and to molecular biology than the unidimensional search for the secret of life.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to John T. Edsall, Joy Harvey, and Camille Limoges for their helpful comments, and to Seymour S. Cohen and Annamaria Torriani for sharing personal recollections of their time at the Pasteur Institute.

66. See Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire; also P. Abir-Am, "From Biochemistry to Molecular Biology: DNA and the Acculturated Journey of the Critic of Science Erwin Chargaff," Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 2 (1980), 3-60.

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some remarks on the mechanism of myth construction

Documents

conflicts of scientists

schools conception of

jstor terms

jstor archive

utcyour use

canada h3c 3j7 scientists

terms conditions of

memorial volumes