Thesis ID: CBB001567250

Assembling Life: Models, the Cell, and the Reformations of Biological Science, 1920--1960 (cited 2010)

unapi

The subjects of this thesis are the fundamental, bioelectrical expressions of life from the interwar period into the 1950s. It is a history of models of the cellular life, and the things, materials and practices surrounding them. This living cell, modelled or not, indeed is largely absent from the narratives we tell of twentieth century biology. The big pictures we have revolve around even smaller entities: genes, molecules, and enzymes. But the cell was still there, this thesis shows. And its presence, this thesis argues, must affect the stories of life science we tell. The historical material covered here thus deliberately encompasses a range of fairly obscure forays into the nature of bio-electricity ⿿ from exercise physiology to colloid science to medical physics ⿿ as well as such well-known advances as the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the neuron. For, the central aim of this thesis is to show that not only was this living cell central to shaping biological science in the twentieth century, we can uncover it at very mundane and unexpected places. Science, this thesis shows, knew the elusive cell mainly through other and mundane things ⿿ as models. These models were assembled from a fabric that was not living, organic and natural, but fabricated, processed, made-up and hence, known, controlled and transparent: things ranging from soap-films to electrical circuits to calculation machines. It follows that this science of life was not in fact life science but something still broader which belongs to histories far beyond that of biological specialities, model-organisms, academic research and disciplines, or indeed, that of the progressive molecularization of life. Cellular life took shape ⿿ mediated via models ⿿ within broad-scale technological and scientific projects that coalesced around the macroscopic materialities that defined this modern, industrial age.

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Description Defense date not indicated; cited by UMI in 2010. Cited in ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing. Proquest Document ID: 899759168.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567250/

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Authors & Contributors
Sloan, Phillip R.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg
Carlos Ramírez
Hall, Kersten T.
Zimmer, Karl Günter
Yi, Doogab
Concepts
Molecular biology
Biology
Cellular biology
Genes
Biophysics
Biochemistry
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Europe
Institutions
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
Institut Pasteur, Paris
University of Chicago
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission
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