Biological Sciences. The biological sciences encompass a wide range of objects and problems—from cells to whales, from eating to evolution. The degree to which these studies have been perceived as a cohesive science, or even as a federation of sciences, has varied greatly over time. Americans participated significantly in the shaping of many biological sciences from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Some areas of biology were among the first regions of science in which Americans became world leaders. Knowledge imported and developed by American biologists had substantial impact, both through its application in medical and agricultural technologies and through its influence on ways that Americans thought about themselves and their relations with the natural world.
Colonial and Antebellum Eras.
Prior to 1800, no coherent conception of “biological science” existed in either England or its North American colonies. If we set aside modern categories, however, we can find relevant knowledge and discussion among both physicians and a loosely defined group of collectors and writers known as naturalists. Colonial physicians, for the most part, sought to absorb the theories about the human body and its ills that were prominent in European medical circles—particularly at the University of Edinburgh, where leading American doctors such as Benjamin
Rush completed their education. The real biological novelties of North America were its plants and animals. Early European travelers reported on the organisms of the New World, and in the early 1700s European naturalists such as Mark Catesby and Peter Kalm traversed the Eastern Seaboard and described uniquely American organisms according to the new standards of scientific taxonomy. Colonials such as the Pennsylvania nurseryman John
Bartram collected plants and seeds for the growing network of botanists and plant enthusiasts in Europe.
After the
Revolutionary War, natural history significantly enhanced American
nationalism. Government explorers, beginning with the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, collected plants as part of their efforts to reinforce U.S. claims of sovereignty over western territories; at the same time, they sought to assess the agricultural potential of these areas and to determine the abundance of animal species that could be exploited for profit. Eastern naturalists showcased distinctively American plants and animals to heighten national self‐consciousness and to demonstrate that Americans could participate in the cosmopolitan world of science. Charles Willson Peale's museum, established on the second floor of Philadelphia's Independence Hall in 1802, linked a mounted bald eagle and the skeleton of the “American mastodon,” excavated and reconstructed by Peale, with his paintings of George
Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and other national heroes.
By the mid–nineteenth century, U.S. naturalists controlled the study of the organisms of North America. Beginning in the late 1830s, the Harvard botanist Asa
Gray coordinated efforts to describe and classify the continent's plants. The zoologist Louis
Agassiz, who emigrated from Switzerland to teach at Harvard in 1846, sought to do the same with animals but was supplanted after about 1860 by a network of collectors led by the
Smithsonian Institution's Spencer Baird (1823–1887). After the
Civil War, a network of scientists associated with the Smithsonian's National Museum, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, and the Department of Agriculture sought to manage the organisms of North America. Although too late to save the passenger pigeon, which became extinct in 1914, they preserved the bison. They also introduced a vast number of new species and varieties into American
agriculture but experienced mixed success in keeping out insects and weeds.
American naturalists thought about the implications of their science for religion and ethics. A number of scientists delivering the prestigious Lowell Lectures in Boston in the mid–nineteenth century, for example, emphasized the existence and wisdom of the Creator and the prevalence of progressive change. These commonplaces took a new turn with the publication of Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species in 1859 and with the new prominence of materialistic ideas among such British scientific intellectuals as Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). American scientists soon agreed that evolution was a fact, but few saw it as random or amorally competitive. Some, such as Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) and Lester
Ward, argued explicitly for the “neo‐Lamarckian” view of evolution as the progressive emergence of intelligence in the living world. Most American biologists had a looser expectation—that some progressive, or “orthogenetic,” force guided life in certain directions, most notably toward humanity and Anglo‐American civilization. This evolutionary message was conveyed to mass audiences in the decades around 1900 through museums, world's fairs, and the new secondary‐school subject of biology. Protestant fundamentalists responded by pressing for laws restricting the teaching of evolution. The resulting 1925
Scopes trial in Tennessee publicized the tensions between fundamentalist Christians and scientists but had relatively little impact on the teaching of biology; science educators may have eliminated the word “evolution” from their texts, but they continued to teach the principles of progressive development.
Civil War to World War II.
The emergence of research universities after 1870 produced a significant increase in the number of trained biological scientists and reinforced the idea that the biological sciences formed a single major scientific unit. The new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore established the first academic biology department in 1876, and similar programs arose during the next two decades at the University of Pennsylvania, Clark University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. In 1883, biological scientists took the lead in creating the American Society of Naturalists. One of the first American organizations limited to professional scientific specialists, it had become by the 1890s a federation of yet more specialized societies created by, among others, morphologists, anatomists, physiologists, and psychologists. The most important center for academic biology was the Marine Biological Laboratory established in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1888. Directed by Charles Otis Whitman (1842–1910), this scientific summer colony became a locus for both basic biological research and for the informal interactions of a vibrant scientific community.
The first generation of academic biologists focused primarily on the study of cells and embryonic development. They hoped to gain a unified understanding of metabolism, development, reproduction, heredity, and evolution. Among the notable discoveries of this period were Jacques Loeb's 1899 demonstration of artificial parthenogenesis, and Edmund Beecher Wilson and Nettie Stevens's recognition in 1904 that chromosomes play a major role in determining sex. The most important American advance in biology, however, came from a project begun at Columbia University by Thomas Hunt
Morgan in 1910 to map the locations of genes on chromosomes, using the fruit fly (
Drosophila). By the 1920s a confederation of zoologists, botanists, and agricultural researchers were developing genetics as both a fundamental science and as the basis for improving such crops as corn.
These academic developments were paralleled by activities in America's rapidly modernizing medical schools. In the 1880s and 1890s, Harvard and Johns Hopkins made laboratory research integral to their medical programs. The Hopkins anatomist Franklin P. Mall fostered the work of Florence Sabin (1871–1953), Herbert Evans (1882–1971), and George Corner (1889–1981) on human embryology, sex hormones, and reproduction. The new science of bacteriology developed at both medical schools and research centers such as the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later Rockefeller University) in New York. Influential medical scientists such as the Johns Hopkins pathologist William Welch (1850–1934) and the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon (1871–1945) fended off the attacks of anti‐vivisectionists by publicizing the laboratory origins of new therapies against infectious diseases, most notably
diphtheria.
In the early twentieth century, some leading biologists extended their interest in improving human life to include “race betterment,” or
eugenics. The most prominent of these, Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944), established the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 to collect data on human heredity and to demonstrate what he believed to be the ill effects of miscegenation, the inferiority of recent immigrant groups, and the value of laws to sterilize the “unfit.” By the end of the 1930s, however, declining
immigration, advances in genetics, the expansion of the
social sciences, and the rise of Nazism had discredited the eugenics movement and the more general ambition to explain human social phenomena in biological terms. Biologists turned instead to
birth control and family planning, population policy, and circumscribed problems in medical genetics. In their place, social scientists and psychiatrists came to the fore as interpreters of “human nature.”
Post–World War II Developments.
The scientific boom triggered by
World War II proved less important for biology than for a number of other disciplines. Biological scientists did important war work, most notably in the development of antibiotics and in the prevention of
malaria and other tropical diseases through insect control. But the war did not lead to “big science” in biology and it did not give biologists the public visibility that the physicists acquired through their role in the development of the atomic bomb. Nevertheless, postwar federal funding for the biological sciences came from the
Atomic Energy Commission (which supported major initiatives in genetics and ecology), the
National Institutes of Health (whose support for biomedical research grew dramatically beginning around 1957), the Department of Agriculture, and the
National Science Foundation. Private organizations, ranging from the Rockefeller Foundation to the March of Dimes, which raised money for
poliomyelitis research, also provided significant funding. In the long run, this pattern of gradual growth and diversified patronage proved advantageous for biologists.
The development of molecular biology, spurred by the determination of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953 by the American James D.
Watson and the Englishman Francis Crick, was the most important early postwar event in the biological sciences. The antipolio vaccines developed by Jonas
Salk and Albert Sabin (1906–1993) seemed the culmination of biomedical researchers' efforts to eliminate the major infectious diseases in the United States. The oral contraceptive, based on a drug synthesized by the chemist Carl Djerassi (1923–) in 1951, and on the research of the endocrinologist Gregory Pincus (1903–1967) and others in the 1950s, was marketed in 1960 by the G.D. Searle Company. It was the most visible of the many important drugs introduced by an alliance of biologists, chemists, and corporations. Plant geneticists responded to concerns about overpopulation and famine by developing more productive varieties of tropical crops, thereby making possible the so‐called green revolution.
Biologists also played important roles in assessing the problems resulting from scientific‐industrial developments. In the 1950s, the biochemist Linus
Pauling and geneticist Hermann J. Muller (1890–1967) participated prominently in scientific‐political campaigns against fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing. Rachel
Carson's
Silent Spring (1962) indicted the indiscriminate use of pesticides. The microbiologist René Dubos (1901–1982) emerged as the philosopher of the environmental movement. Within this activist context, biologists became sufficiently confident to make evolution an explicit part of the secondary‐school curricula they developed in the 1960s.
Late twentieth‐century changes in the biological sciences were so rapid and substantial that a brief sketch must suffice. Numbers tell an important story: while the annual production of Ph.D.s in the
physical sciences remained about the same in 1995 as in 1970, recruitment of biological scientists increased by two‐thirds during that period. Much of this growth occurred in molecular biology. The development of recombinant‐DNA technology in the mid‐1970s led, after an initial controversy about safety, to the creation of a major new science‐based
biotechnology industry. Geneticists working through the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health obtained funding in 1990 for a fifteen‐year “big science” project to map the human genome. A looser network of scientists introduced a series of technologies, ranging from amniocentesis to in vitro fertilization, that transformed the possibilities for human reproduction. The emergence of
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in the 1980s stimulated research in immunology and cell biology while simultaneously ending the widespread belief that the battle against infectious diseases had been won.
During this same period, issues involving organisms and their evolution once again became prominent. In the 1970s, the new discipline of sociobiology, led by the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson, challenged the primacy of social scientists as interpreters of human behavior. Wilson also addressed the problem of declining global biodiversity. The argument that dinosaurs were warm‐blooded social animals, and the claim that they had been wiped out by a meteorite, increased public attention to evolutionary history. In 1987, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld science educators' claim that evolution, but not creationism, should be taught in public schools.
By the 1990s, biology had replaced physics as the most important and visible of the natural sciences in America. Through their activities in
medicine and agriculture, biologists were transforming the conditions of people's lives; through their investigations into genetics, ecology, and evolutionary history, they were redefining the meaning of life.
See also
Agricultural Experiment Stations;
Antinuclear Protest Movements;
Bioethics;
Chemical Industry;
Education: Rise of the University;
Environmentalism;
Evolution, Theory of;
Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture;
Fundamentalist Movement;
Genetics and Genetic Engineering;
Human Genome Project;
Medical Education;
Psychology; World's Fairs and Expositions.
Bibliography
Charles E. Rosenberg , No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, 1976.
Horace Freeland Judson , The Eighth Day of Creation, 1979.
Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson, and Jane Meienschein, eds., The American Development of Biology, 1988.
Donna J. Haraway , Primate Visions, 1989.
Jane Maienschein , Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880–1915, 1991.
Gregg Mitman , The State of Nature, 1992.
Lily E. Kay , The Molecular Vision of Life, 1993.
Robert E. Kohler , Lords of the Fly, 1994.
Adele E. Clarke , Disciplining Reproduction, 1998.
Toby A. Appel , Shaping Biology, 2000.
Philip J. Pauly , Biologists and the Promise of American Life, 2000.
Philip J. Pauly
