ABSTRACT
On August 15th, 1932 Niels Bohr gave the Opening Address of the International Congress on Light Therapy held in Copenhagen. Bohr's title was "Light and Life" and his purpose was to draw attention to the epistemological implications for the life sciences of the fundamental changes that the quantum theory had brought to the conception of natural law. According to Bohr, these developments had created also an entirely new background for viewing the problems of biology, especially as concerns "our views on the position of living organisms in the realm of natural science". The author gives his view that Delbrück played a crucial role in the rise of molecular biology, not unlike that which Bohr, whom Delbrück had obviously chosen as a role model, had played in the development of atomic theory. It was through Delbrück that Bohr's epistemology became the intellectual infrastructure of molecular biology.
