Reading Response QuestionsWeek 10, Precepts April 14-16, 1998
Email: creager@phoenix.princeton.edu or manfredl@princeton.edu
Reminder: You may use these content-based questions as a springboard for your e-mail reading response, which should, however, focus on more general issues than the specific items detailed here. The response you send in to your preceptor each week should address all of the required readings (especially the primary source readings, which will be the focus for precept discussion); the text may include questions as well as analysis.
Note for Week 10: I am not including questions for The Double Helix; it is not difficult reading and should provide for lively discussion in precept. I include questions for the excerpt in the Allen book on Soviet genetics, Lysenkoism, and the neo-Darwinian Synthesis (part of the selections for week 7 in the reader). This selection and the chapter from Allen's book on molecular biology (the last of this week's readings) provide useful orientation to the other pieces, so I provide questions for those readings first. There are four short primary source readings, consider them in the framework of Lysenkoism, genetics, and molecular biology Allen offers. The other two secondary source readings, one on Lysenkoism and one on biochemical genetics, pick up on scientific and ideological issues related to World War II and the Cold War.
Week 10
Allen, "Mendelism and the Study of Natural Populations"
p. 129 (selection begins on bottom right of page) Why were Russian biologists particularly open to Mendelian genetics as practiced in studies of Drosophila?
pp. 130-133 Skim until right-hand side of 133.
pp. 136-139 How did the work of Haldane, Fisher, and Wright help to redeem natural selection and also to settle the long-standing disputes between Mendelians and biometricians?Allen, "The Origin and Development of Molecular Biology"
p. 187 In what countries was the development of new discipline of molecular biology most evident? When did molecular biology arise? How was this concentration different from the geographical emergence of biology in the 19th century? How did the outcome of World War II contribute (economically as well as intellectually) to the emergence of molecular biology?
p. 190 From what three approaches did molecular biology coalesce? (This is a schematic and oversimplified but useful division.)
p. 192 When and what were the first proteins whose structures were determined using x-ray crystallography? Where was the center of x-ray crystallographic work of proteins? What individuals were working on the x-ray crystallographic determination of the structure of nucleic acids?
pp. 194-197 Why were quantum physicists interested in the 'problem' of life? How did Delbrück come into contact with biological problems? How did he redefine them? (You will read the piece by Delbrück that Allen is summarizing on p. 196 of his book.) How did Schrödinger account for the mystery of heredity? What property of living systems did he fix on? Why would physicists have desired to move into biology at the end of World War II?
p. 198 What was the significance of Archibald Garrod's work on the "inborn errors of metabolism"?
p. 200 How did the members of Morgan's group imagine that genes acted? Why didn't they test their ideas in this area?
p. 202 What did Beadle and Ephrussi set out to investigate? What did they find? What was the significance of this work for Beadle? Why was Neurospora so well-suited to studying mutants biochemically?
p. 204 What theory did they advance based on the co-segregation of the genetic mutations and the metabolic blocks? Allen's presentation of a 'romantic' phase of the informational approach is based on reminiscenses by Gunther Stent, and is not terribly important historically.
p. 206 What organism did Delbrück promote for studying replication? Notice the importance attached to these various 'systems' for biology. Who founded the phage group? Why were viruses experimentally important to molecular biology, in Allen's view? How did the disdain which Delbrück and his followers held for biochemists slow their research down?
p. 208 What was the significance of Avery, MacLeod and McCarty's experiment? How did the Hershey-Chase experiment follow up their tentative conclusion? (With the adoption of radioisotopic methods, the phage workers finally capitulated and began using biochemistry.)
pp. 212-221 Why were Watson and Crick interested in the structure of DNA? What was their contribution in this area? How did their model suggest answers to genetic questions about expression and transmission of traits? What is the 'central dogma' (Crick's term c. 1957)?Stent, ""Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox" (1968)
p. 3 What, according to Stent, was the impact of Schrödinger's little book What Is Life??
p. 4-5 What did physicists coming into biology hope to discover? What findings and events caused viruses to be viewed as promising biological models of life?
p. 6-7 What annual meeting and course served as a training site for proto-molecular biologists? What kinds of new tools contributed to the productivity of virus research? Did these new phage biologists fulfill Schrödinger's quest for special laws of physics?Delbrück, "A Physicist Looks at Biology" (1949)
p. 3 What does Delbrück point to as the differences between physics and biology (at mid-century)?
p. 10 What is 'wrong' with evolution as the unifying theory of biology? What does he think characterizes the successful theories of biology?
p. 12-13 To a physicist, what are the key problems in biology?
p. 14-15 What promise does Delbrück see in bacterial viruses as experimental material? How does Delbrück think that the problem of genetic continuity will be best investigated?
p. 16-17 What intellectual uncertainties confront the physicist entering biology? To what in biology does Delbrück compare the physicist's atoms or the chemist's molecules?
p. 20-21 Why does Delbrück argue that physico-chemical reductionism for biological processes was doomed to failure in the late 19th century? Does he think that biology could now (i.e. 1949) be reduced to quantum physics? What moral does he draw from his 'parable' of spontaneous generation?
p. 22 Why do physicists of the 1940s find biology alluring, in Delbrück's view? Why does he not have faith that biochemists will solve the secrets of life?Bernal, "The Role of Science in the U.S.S.R." (first published in 1939)
p. 93-92 What are the three key differences between Soviet science and British and American science? How is Soviet science organized and why?
p. 94 What does Bernal find attractive about the place of science in Soviet society and culture?Haldane, "Freedom in Soviet Science" (first published in 1940)
p. 103 What are the common perceptions of science in Russia, according to Haldane?
p. 104-105 How does Haldane rate their genetics? In terms of the emphasis on agriculturally important plants and domesticated animals, there are connections with Stuart McCook's comments on the importance of applied ecology to the development of ecology overall.
p. 106-107 How does Haldane account for the Lysenko affair? Does he think that Lysenko's policies have hampered scientific freedom in the U.S.S.R.?Levins & Lewontin, "The Problem of Lysenkoism"
p. 163 What do Levins and Lewontin find unsatisfactory about the standard accounts of the Lysenko affair? How do they feel it's been misunderstood even by avowed communists?
p. 166-167 What did Lysenkoism mean in scientific terms?
p. 168-169 What why genetics seen as anti-evolutionary? Why was the subordination of developmental questions troubling to Lysenkoists? The authors' statement that "'determine' is siply an evasion of what really happens in development" should remind you of the debate between geneticists and embryologists over the meaning of heredity. What is a dialectical materialist's "model for the process of heredity"?
pp. 170-173 How did the conditions for agricultural production in the U.S. make Lysenkoist solutions tenable (and American methods untenable)?
p. 176-177 What was the scientific status of Lamarckianism in the early 20th century? Why wasn't Weismann's critique fatal (to Lamarckianism)?
p. 180-181 What distinction do the authors draw between the "minimal theoretical structure" of genetics and the ideological superstructure laid over genetics? How did eugenics work to reveal the simple-mindedness and ideological bias of genetics to Lysenkoists?
p. 182-183 How did historical and class differences between Lysenkoists and geneticists bear on their scientific struggles?
p. 184-185 How did the high literacy and interest in science in the Soviet Union further politicize the debates about genetics? (While American scientists always lament the scientific illiteracy of the public, they rarely think about the ramifications of having a citizenry which considers itself informed enough to enter into scientific debate.)
p. 186-187 How did Lysenkoism change over the 1940s? What kind of ideological blinders were Western geneticists wearing?
p. 188-189 What factors contributed to the decline of Lysenkoism?
p. 190-191 How did Soviet agricultural production vary over the Lysenkoist experiment?
