Essay review
Life stories

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The books

Let us begin with a brief survey of the two volumes. Soraya de Chadarevian has chosen to tell the story of the Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems, installed by the British Medical Research Council at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in 1947, and originally run by Max Perutz and John Kendrew under the auspices of Lawrence Bragg. The Unit changed its name in 1957 to become the MRC Unit for Molecular Biology, giving rise to the Laboratory of

Objects and machines

Both de Chadarevian’s and Creager’s books belong to a genre of studies that pays considerable attention to the conundrums of the practice of research. In that sense they parallel recent studies of molecular biology by Evelyn Fox Keller, or by the late regretted Larry Holmes and Lily Kay.1 Both pursue detailed analyses of the processes (material and symbolic) through which knowledge—generated locally and contextually—is made general. They have translated

Models

“Model” is actually one common word in these two studies of molecular biology. Models, their origins, their role in the making of knowledge are taken to be pivotal in any attempt at understanding the contemporary biological sciences.3

Molecular politics

A third set of issues, revolving around the political making of molecular biology, finally occupies a prominent place in these two stories. The problem of the “origins” of molecular biology is no longer meant to find out who made which discovery, or what were the intellectual and social boundaries of the new field in the 1960s when it was on its way to becoming a huge institutional success. Both books discuss the making of molecular biology by following local actors and the ways in which their

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    Biomedical platforms: Realigning the normal and the pathological in late twentieth-century medicine

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    The century of the gene

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  • J-P. Gaudillière

    Inventer la biomédecine: La France, l’Amérique et la production des savoirs du vivant

    (2002)
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