After Darwin, experimental biology sought to unravel organisms. By the early twentieth century, organisms were broadly conceived as the product of their heredity and their environment. Much historical work has explored the scientific attack on the genotype, particularly through the new science of genetics. This article explores the tandem efforts to assert experimental control over the environment in which plants grew and developed. The case described here concerns the creation of the first phytotron at Caltech by botanist and plant physiologist (...) Frits Went. Opening in 1949, the phytotron was a plant laboratory that, across a series of rooms and chambers, kept genes constant while regulating and maintaining defined ranges of known environments. This article details the context in which the phytotron emerged, how the phytotron gained its sobriquet, and how it served to cement the “environment” as a category of biological knowledge. Describing the institutional context of Caltech, its interdisciplinary culture, and its encouragement of adopting technology into biological science, I argue that the phytotron and the commensurate category of the “environment” were the product of the familiar movement to integrate the physical and biological sciences. In addition, however, the creation of the phytotron was also a broader story of plant physiologists establishing a definition of the “environment” in both physical and technological terms. (shrink)

Radiobiology assesses the biological hazards of exposure to radioactive substances and nuclear radiation. This article explores the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China by examining the overlapping of radium research and biophysics, from roughly the 1920s Nationalist period to the 1960s Communist period; from the foreign purchase of radium by the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board during the Republican era, to the institutional establishment of radiobiology as a subset of biophysics in the People’s Republic. Western historiography of radiobiology highlights the (...) connection between the military development of nuclear weapons and the civilian use of radiation in biology, as well as the international export of radioisotopes and nuclear reactors. Considering the exclusion of China from Western atomic diplomacy, I argue that the study of the Chinese history of bomb-making and radiobiology is necessary not just to fill an existing knowledge gap, but more importantly to elucidate the influence of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and Cold War atomic politics on Chinese life-science enterprises. Through examining the formational history of the radiobiology program in China, I hope to shed light on the implications of the atomic age for Chinese biology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Radiobiology assesses the biological hazards of exposure to radioactive substances and nuclear radiation. This article explores the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China by examining the overlapping of radium research and biophysics, from roughly the 1920s Nationalist period to the 1960s Communist period; from the foreign purchase of radium by the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board during the Republican era, to the institutional establishment of radiobiology as a subset of biophysics in the People’s Republic. Western historiography of radiobiology highlights the (...) connection between the military development of nuclear weapons and the civilian use of radiation in biology, as well as the international export of radioisotopes and nuclear reactors. Considering the exclusion of China from Western atomic diplomacy, I argue that the study of the Chinese history of bomb-making and radiobiology is necessary not just to fill an existing knowledge gap, but more importantly to elucidate the influence of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and Cold War atomic politics on Chinese life-science enterprises. Through examining the formational history of the radiobiology program in China, I hope to shed light on the implications of the atomic age for Chinese biology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern laboratory (...) practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War looks ever more like a slice of history rather than a contemporary reality. During those same twenty years, scholarship on science, technology, and the state during the Cold War era has expanded dramatically. Building on major studies of physics in the American context—often couched in terms of “big science”—recent work has broached scientific efforts in other domains as well, scrutinizing Cold War scholarship in increasingly international and comparative (...) frameworks. The essays in this Focus section take stock of current thinking about science and the Cold War, revisiting the question of how best to understand tangled (and sometimes surprising) relationships between government patronage and the world of ideas. (shrink)

Narratives surrounding ionizing radiation have often minimized radioactivity’s impact on the health of human and non-human animals and the natural environment. Many Cold War research policies, practices, and interpretations drove nuclear technology forward by institutionally obscuring empirical evidence of radiation’s disproportionate and low-dose harm—a legacy we still confront. Women, children, and pregnancy development are particularly sensitive to exposure from radioactivity, suffering more damage per dose than adult males, even down to small doses, making low doses a cornerstone of concern. Evidence (...) of compounding generational damage could indicate increased sensitivity through heritable impact. This essay examines the existing empirical evidence demonstrating these sensitivities, and how research institutions and regulatory authorities have devalued them, willingly sacrificing health in the service of maintaining and expanding nuclear technology. Radiation’s disproportionate impacts should now be the research and policy focus, as society is poised to make crucial and long-lasting decisions regarding climate change mitigation and future energy sources. (shrink)

After WWII, global concerns about the uses of nuclear energy and radiation sources in agriculture, medicine, and industry brought about calls for radiation protection. At the beginning of the 1960s radiation protection involved the identification and measurement of all sources of radiation to which a population was exposed, and the evaluation and assessment of populations in terms of the biological hazard their exposure posed. Mexico was not an exception to this international trend. This paper goes back to the origins of (...) the first studies on the effects of radiation and on radioprotective compounds in the Genetics and Radiobiology Program of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy founded in 1960, at a time when the effects of radiation on living beings and radiation protection demanded the attention of highly localized groups of scientists and the creation of international as well as national institutions, and its connection to dosimetry and radiation protection until the 1990s. This historical reconstruction examines the circulation of knowledge, scientists, and their material and cognitive resources, to show that radiobiology, with dosimetry and radiation protection as cases in point, not only were carried out with high international standards in parallel with international agencies, but also reflected local material needs, including the standardization of new experimental techniques. (shrink)

The recent historiography of molecular biology features key technologies, instruments and materials, which offer a different view of the field and its turning points than preceding intellectual and institutional histories. Radioisotopes, in this vein, became essential tools in postwar life science research, including molecular biology, and are here analyzed through their use in experiments on bacteriophage. Isotopes were especially well suited for studying the dynamics of chemical transformation over time, through metabolic pathways or life cycles. Scientists labeled phage with phosphorus-32 (...) in order to trace the transfer of genetic material between parent and progeny in virus reproduction. Initial studies of this type did not resolve the mechanism of generational transfer but unexpectedly gave rise to a new style of molecular radiobiology based on the inactivation of phage by the radioactive decay of incorporated phosphorus-32. These ‘suicide experiments’, a preoccupation of phage researchers in the mid-1950s, reveal how molecular biologists interacted with the traditions and practices of radiation geneticists as well as those of biochemists as they were seeking to demarcate a new field. The routine use of radiolabels to visualize nucleic acids emerged as an enduring feature of molecular biological experimentation. (shrink)