The Molecular Transformation of Twentieth-Century Biology

The molecular transformation of biology in the twentieth century, can be seen as an ongoing historical process of ‘progressive colonization’ by the so-called exact sciences (i.e., chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering, or rather combinations of their leading sub-disciplines, such as organic chemistry or atomic physics). ¹ It has undergone three distinct phases of transdisciplinary stabilization, resulting in the hegemony of post-World War I biochemistry, post-World War II molecular biology, and post-Cold War biotechnology. The transdisciplinary configuration of each phase, though invariably originating in the pre-war periods, was drastically reinforced by the international settlements that reconfigured the world order in 1918, 1945, and 1989, and which concluded World War I, World War II and the Cold War, respectively. ² Moreover, those ever changing international spaces enabled and constrained distinct patterns of ‘transnational objectivity’ or scientific outcomes that transcended the control of national research traditions while invariably entailing new transdisciplinary concepts, most notably the double helix, the messenger-RNA, the operon, the genetic code, aliostery. ³