Biology: Beginnings of Bioengineering

BIOLOGY: BEGINNINGS OF BIOENGINEERING

Background

Scientific interest in bioengineering preceded the late-twentieth-century interest in biotechnology that is centered on genetics and on the possibility of altering the genetic makeup of cells and organisms. The early history of bioengineering in the United States is associated with Jacques Loeb. Born in Germany in 1859, Loeb immigrated to the United States in 1891, where he taught biology at the Universities of Chicago and California and from 1910 until his death in 1924 at the Rockefeller Institute.

Loeb and Parthenogenesis

Parthenogenesis is the process whereby an egg is induced to develop into an organism without having been fertilized. Both Loeb and Thomas Hunt Morgan, the most prominent American geneticist, had experimented with sea urchin eggs. Morgan had induced them to segment by immersing them in a solution of inorganic salts, although they failed to produce larvae. Loeb, using a variation of the same procedure, was able to raise larvae, a result he announced in 1899. The news caused a sensation, and Loeb was a finalist for the first Nobel Prize in physiology, awarded in 1901. American newspapers played up the story and throughout the first decade of the twentieth century painted Loeb as a new Dr. Frankenstein, a man who boasted of the ability to control life and reproduction. In a 1902 interview Loeb asserted that he "wanted to take life in my hands and play with it." He wanted to handle life in the laboratory "as I would any other chemical reaction—to start it, stop it, vary it, study it under every condition, to direct it at my will!"

Creating Life

Ancient and medieval thinkers, misinterpreting the appearance of living creatures from microscopic eggs or larvae, believed that life could generate itself spontaneously. Then in a famous series of experiments in the 1870s, Louis Pasteur demonstrated that fermentation would not take place in an atmosphere that was free of all microorganisms, putting an end to the long debate over spontaneous generation but also stimulating scientists to speculate about the origins of life. Loeb believed that life could be engineered, and the notion of creating life in a test tube originated in an interview given by Loeb in 1899. Because of his experiments Loeb asserted, "we have drawn a great step nearer to the chemical theory of life and may already see ahead of us the day when a scientist, experimenting with chemicals in a test tube, may see them unite and form a substance which shall live and move and reproduce itself."

Loeb's Legacy

Loeb influenced several important American scientists, in particular the behavioral psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, who believed that behavior could be predicted and controlled without reference either to instincts or to the structure of the brain. Watson wanted to control behavior and believed its explanation or interpretation was irrelevant to that objective, much as Loeb was uninterested in biological theory. (Loeb was an evolutionist but always stressed that he was most interested in future evolution, something that could be brought about by the active intervention of biologists in the processes of life.) Gregory Pincus, who developed the birth control pill, was also under the spell of Loeb's mystique when in the 1920s and 1930s he experimented on artificial parthenogenesis in mammals and even claimed to have produced it in rabbits. "Loeb," Pincus said, "stopped too soon." In this light, in vitro fertilization, wherein mammalian—including human—eggs are fertilized artificially in a test tube, can be seen as a logical extension of Loeb's view of artificially engineered reproductive processes.

Source:

Philip L. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Idea in Biology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).