Biochemistry

BIOCHEMISTRY

BIOCHEMISTRY, the chemical investigation and explanation of biological processes. American biochemistry acquired its institutional base as a result of the medical reform movement during the Progressive Era and was characterized until World War II by its emphasis on applied research and close association with medicine. American biochemists have been involved in the testing of foods and drugs, the development of diagnostic tests and medical treatments, and the production of consumer goods ranging from synthetic fibers and biological detergents to vitamin supplements and the contraceptive pill. Since the 1970s, biochemists have been actively engaged in biotechnological enterprises.

Biochemistry's antecedents lie in nineteenth-century Europe, where the rise of organic chemistry and experimental physiology generated much investigation into the chemical constituents of living organisms and the chemical changes associated with physiological functions. The many American scientists who trained in European laboratories imported these practices into the United States, where research in animal chemistry, agricultural chemistry, medical chemistry, and physiological chemistry gained a firm foothold in agricultural research stations, hospitals, colleges, and universities.

In the early 1900s, investigators in Europe and America sought to unite the diverse fields dealing with the chemistry of life under name of "biochemistry" or "biological chemistry" (then the preferred term in the United States). Among the first journals expressing this aim was the Journal of Biological Chemistry, founded in the United States in 1905. The American Society of Biological Chemists was constituted in 1906. In the same decade, many American medical schools, newly under university control, began to teach biochemistry as part of a nationwide reorganization of preclinical education. By 1920, most American medical schools had established departments of biochemistry where research had a predominantly clinical orientation.

Early American biochemists led in the development of new analytical methods for determining chemicals in the body that were used to diagnose specific diseases and monitor physiological states. Otto Folin at Harvard, Donald D. Van Slyke at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital in New York, and Stanley Benedict at Cornell acquired international renown. The widespread use of techniques they developed led simultaneously to redefinitions and reclassifications of diseases in chemical terms.

A second prominent stream of American biochemistry, that of nutritional investigation, built on established strengths in agricultural research, especially at experimental stations in Connecticut and Wisconsin. Recognition of the importance for health of vitamins stimulated much American research into the distribution of vitamins in foods, their chemical properties, and their role in metabolism. Diseases identified as resulting from vitamin deficiencies in the diet, such as rickets, scurvy, and pellagra, were cured and prevented by specific dietary changes. Commercially produced vitamin preparations and vitamin-fortified foods were widely promoted among the public from the 1920s and became an important source of profit for the American food and pharmaceutical industries.

In the 1930s, some American centers began to develop biochemistry as a broad, fundamental biological science, after the model of leading German, English, and Scandinavian schools. A similar vision was promoted by Warren Weaver, who, as manager of its Natural Sciences Division, turned the Rockefeller Foundation into the major international funding body for basic research in bio-chemistry and biophysics. In this decade, the biochemistry department at Columbia University in New York, headed by Hans T. Clarke, became the largest and most influential American school of basic biochemical research.

Clarke gave place in his department to an exceptionally high number of biochemists who had escaped national socialist regimes in Europe and who brought their distinctive research styles with them. Among them was Rudolf Schoenheimer, who, at Columbia, was responsible for a milestone in twentieth-century biochemistry: he introduced the use of isotopes as labels that allow biochemists to follow in detail how, and at what rate, specific molecules undergo change in metabolic reactions. His re-search with David Rittenberg and Sarah Ratner not only heralded the use of what has since become an indispensable tool in the life sciences but showed that all cell constituents are in constant flux: molecules are continuously being broken down and rebuilt from the foods organismsingest.

During World War II, biochemists participated in the war effort in major ways. For example, American biochemists were involved in the large-scale production of penicillin, other antibacterial drugs, and blood fractionation products for use in transfusion. These war-related projects involved complex translations between basic and applied research, managed through close collaborations between scientists, government, and industry. The blood fractionation project, organized by Edwin Cohn of the physical chemistry department at Harvard, was one of the wartime successes that stimulated a massive expansion of public funding for basic biochemical research in postwar America.

One manifestation of this new focus was the foundation of institutes dedicated to basic biochemistry, the first being the Enzyme Institute at the University of Wisconsin, opened in 1950. By the 1960s, fundamental biochemical research was firmly entrenched institutionally, and American biochemists were making ever more inter-nationally renowned contributions to all areas of bio-chemistry. Indicative of this trend is the rapid increase in Nobel laureates among American biochemists.

Between 1901 and 1950, only three Nobel Prizes were awarded for American biochemical research: the 1946 chemistry prize awarded to James B. Sumner, John H. Northrop, and Wendell M. Stanley for work on enzymes and virus proteins; and two prizes in physiology or medicine (shared with others abroad), awarded to Edward A. Doisy in 1943 for work on vitamin K, and to Carl F. Cori and Gerty Radnitz Cori in 1947 for work on glycogen metabolism. (Gerty Cori was the third woman, and the first woman biochemist, to win a Nobel Prize.) In the second half of the twentieth century, by contrast, approximately forty Nobel Prizes were awarded for American research with a biochemical dimension, to some seventy American laureates.

In this later period, biochemistry became increasingly intertwined with molecular biology and cell biology, partly through the development of new chemical, physical, and morphological techniques used in all three fields and through much traffic of biochemists across the boundaries between them. For biochemistry, these new developments made it possible to locate particular biochemical reactions in specific structures of the cell. Moreover, its institutional strength and practical flexibility enabled bio-chemistry to withstand challenges to its status as a fundamental science of life when these were issued in the 1950s and 1960s by molecular biologists seeking autonomy for their own science. In practice, there has been continuous overlap, and in 1987 the American Society of Biological Chemists renamed itself the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Apple, Rima D. Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Bud, Robert. The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

De Chadarevian, Soraya, and Harmke Kamminga, eds. Molecularizing Biology and Medicine: New Practices and Alliances, 1910s–1970s. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998.

Kohler, Robert E. From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Harmke Kamminga

See also Chemistry ; Medical Research ; Microbiology ; Molecular Biology ; Nutrition and Vitamins .