COOPERATIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE GROWTH OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AT THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, 1928--1953

During the 1930s and 1940s biology in America underwent major changes in intellectual focus and in the organization of research. One of the most prominent outcomes of these changes was the emergence of the new discipline of molecular biology: a cooperative physico-chemical biology unaffiliated with medical research, focusing primarily on areas related to studies of the gene. During those two decades, the new biology under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation's molecular biology program, was transformed into "big science," a multi-team research enterprise centered around expensive and sophisticated technology. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a primary recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation's grants under the new program, epitomized these new trends in biology, becoming by the early 1950s a world-center of molecular biology.; This thesis traces the growth of molecular biology at Caltech since the establishment in 1928 of the biology division at the institute under geneticist Thomas H. Morgan. Caltech's rise to prominence in the life sciences is described primarily through the evolution of the scientific programs under the leadership of four of the principal founders of molecular biology: Morgan, George Beadle, Max Delbruck, and Linus Pauling. Exemplars of the Institute's cooperative ideal, these powerful scientific managers, through their intellectual agendas and access to resources, developed remarkably influential research schools.; The dissertation recounts the shift to physico-chemical genetics under Morgan, the development of Beadle's program in biochemical genetics in Neurospora and Delbruck's researches in phage genetics. These studies were complemented by Pauling's investigations of protein structure, and by his work on antibodies. Within the paradigm of the protein view of life, the study of proteins, genes, viruses, and antibodies formed a structural unity. Special attention has been given to the Rockefeller Foundation, which furnished not only the financial means, but also the general guidelines and institutional resources that shaped the course of molecular biology.