How World War II set the stage for molecular biology in Britain
The emergence and eventual blooming of molecular biology in Britain has its roots firmly entwined in the World War II scientific effort. There, scientists had been key to Allied victory. Radar transformed air defence forever, and helped win the Battle of Britain. Penicillin, first discovered in 1928 but only produced in bulk during the 1940s, saved countless thousands of lives. The horror of the atomic bomb, which carried the mark of British nuclear physicists, finally concluded the war.
As Britain emerged from the smouldering wreckage of that great conflict, it had to re-assess its position on the world stage. The Treasury was close to bankruptcy. Britain had to face up to its economic reliance on the United States. The British Empire contracted quickly and permanently. The beginning of the Cold War signalled new threats and a new brand of global politics.
Despite these challenges, the flame of science and technology flickered on. British scientists were popular and productive and the government hoped they would ignite the national recovery. The 1946 Barlow Report on “Scientific Manpower” made this clear. It recommended that Universities should double their output of science graduates. At the same time public spending on scientific research and development went into orbit. From 1945 to 1962 the total spend went from £6.5 million to £150 million (a ten-fold increase in real terms). It rose by an average of 13% every year and kept going until the oil crisis and the weakening pound forced a reassessment in the early 1970s.
Scientists had money to burn. Biologists hadn’t played a huge part in the war effort, but they certainly weren’t going to miss out on the postwar party.
To do this an increasing number of biologists aligned themselves with British physicists, who ruled the roost. At the same time many physicists turned their attention to biological problems. Soon the cross-disciplinary science of biophysics, which existed as a much more fringe activity before the War, cemented its place in British science. Biophysicists wanted to know how the cell’s components work by describing and visualising their structure at the atomic and molecular scale.
Biophysicists co-opted ideas and equipment used for radar and precision artillery during World War II. To crunch their complex data they used the earliest computers, developed for wartime cryptography. They also used the new knowledge of radiation sources from the atomic bomb project to probe cells and molecules in new and ingenious ways. In Britain’s rush to become a nuclear power, the biophysicists provided extra justification for spending on nuclear research. The biophysicists consciously redeployed the apparatus of physics from the program of destruction to the program of life.
Most biophysics research was fundamental rather than applied, but the example of penicillin was a vivid reminder that huge pay-offs could materialise at any time. In these ways biophysics capitalised on the wartime advances in physics but fitted their agenda to the needs of peacetime.
As British biophysics grew it fed directly into the new science of molecular biology. Looking back, we’d probably describe many of the postwar biophysicists as molecular biologists. Even Watson and Cricks’ solution to the structure of DNA, now seen as a key discovery of molecular biology, took place in a biophysics laboratory and relied heavily on Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins’ biophysical data from Kings College London. Watson and Crick fused the British biophysicists’ structuralist expertise with the early American molecular biologists’ efforts to understand biological processes in terms of information processing (see earlier post here).
By the late 1950’s the agenda for modern biology had started to shift. There was an increased emphasis on understanding the universal phenomena of life. Genetics, which wasn’t on the early biophysicists’ agenda, was becoming understood in molecular terms. Biophysics became less fashionable and less powerful as a distinct discipline. Gradually biophysicists started to call themselves molecular biologists.
In 1962 the Queen formally opened Cambridge’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology (usually known as the ‘LMB’). The LMB was the first institution in the world explicitly dedicated to molecular biology and has been a world leader in the field ever since. In the same year key figures from the LMB, Max Perutz and John Kendrew, won Nobel Prizes. Molecular biology lodged itself into the public consciousness. The molecular biologists who had chosen British wartime physicists as their founding fathers no longer had to rely on the prestige and apparatus of physics. They had created a new and powerful science of their own. They haven’t looked back since.
Originally published at moleculartinkering.wordpress.com on October 14, 2014.
