8 - Technique, Task Definition, and the Transition from Genetics to Molecular Genetics: Aspects of the Work on Protein Synthesis in the Laboratories of J. Monod and P. Zamecnik

Summary

In biology proteins are uniquely important. They are not to be classed with polysaccharides, for example, which by comparison play a very minor role. Their nearest rivals are the nucleic acids … The main function of proteins is to act as enzymes.

… In the protein molecule Nature has devised a unique instrument in which an underlying simplicity is used to express great subtlety and versatility; it is impossible to see molecular biology in proper perspective until this peculiar combination of virtues has been clearly grasped

(Crick 1958).

INTRODUCTION

This epigraph, from Francis Crick's seminal article “On Protein Synthesis,” can serve as a reminder that it is important to distinguish between molecular genetics and molecular biology. Scientists have often used the terms “molecular biology” and “molecular genetics” interchangeably, thus confounding the two. As Zallen (1996) has pointed out, however, this usage has always been problematic. I maintain that the failure to distinguish between molecular genetics and molecular biology bears on an important historiographic issue: the nature of scientific disciplines. On the account I advocate, it is important to counteract the confusion between the two because molecular genetics is clearly a discipline, whereas molecular biology is not.

On my rather traditional account, disciplines are organized and institutionalized bodies of research focused around a core group of questions. Molecular biology, taken widely, is extremely well organized and institutionalized; nonetheless, on my account it is not a discipline because it does not center on a focal group of questions.