Books

 

 

Heredity Produced. At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870.

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Heredity Produced - Cover.

edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the biological makeup of an organism was ascribed to an individual instance of "generation" - involving conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, lactation, and even astral influences and maternal mood - rather than the biological transmission of traits and characteristics. Discussions of heredity and inheritance took place largely in the legal and political sphere. In Heredity Produced, scholars from a broad range of disciplines explore the development of the concept of heredity from the early modern period to the era of Darwin and Mendel.
The contributors examine the evolution of the concept in disparate cultural realms - including law, medicine, and natural history - and show that it did not coalesce into a more general understanding of heredity until the mid-nineteenth century. They consider inheritance and kinship in a legal context; the classification of certain diseases as hereditary; the study of botany; animal and plant breeding and hybridization for desirable characteristics; theories of generation and evolution; andanthropology and its study of physical differences among humans, particularly skin color. The editors argue that only when people, animals, and plants became more mobile - and were seperated from their natural habitats through exploration, colonialism, and other causes - could scientists distinguish between inherited and environmentally induced traits and develop a coherent theory of heredity.

The essays assembled in this volume reflect both the problems discussed and the results obtained during the first phase of a long-term, collaborative research project carried out carried out at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) since 2001 under the heading of ‘A Cultural History of Heredity.’ The project aims to study the juridical, medical, cultural, technical, and scientific practices and procedures, in which knowledge of heredity became materially entrenched in different ways and by which it unfolded its often unprecedented effects over a period of several centuries. In its longue durée and transdisciplinary character, such a project is vitally dependent upon the collaboration of experts from a broad range of disciplines, covering cultural history in its various sub-domains of science, technology, medicine, economy, law, anthropology, and the arts.
Two workshops devoted to the management and reflection of hereditary phenomena from the late seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century were conducted to bring together such experts, and the present volume has been devised on the basis of deliberations conducted during these workshops. We decided to assemble a selection of workshop contributions and additionally invited papers to systematically cover those aspects that came to be fore-grounded in our discussions. In particular, they concern aspects of marriage regulation, property transmission, and kinship models in the legal context; the transmission of diseases as conceptualized in medicine; the roles played by natural history, breeding and hybridization in narrowing down the recurrence of characters; the impact of systems of generation and theories of evolution; and the way in which the incipient discourse on man, anthropology, relied on and shaped the perception of transgenerational phenomena. (Excerpt from the Preface)

Complete citation:
Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.), Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture. 1500-1870, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

 

 

Vererbung. Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts.

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Vererbung - Cover

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille

This is a book about the genesis and historical evolution of a biological concept, the concept of heredity. Scientifically, heredity is the subject of a whole array of disciplines, most notably genetics. Yet we want this book to be more than, and different from a history of the scientific discipline of genetics. A number of excellent books on this subject already exist, all of them written by geneticists who approached the history of their discipline in a sophisticated, far from naïve manner. The book The Logic of Life, in which molecular biologist and noble price recipient François Jacob set out to establish the „stages (étapes)“ that the knowledge of heredity and reproduction went through from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, will probably remain an unsurpassed example of this genre. Inspired by the French school of historical epistemology, Jacob did not consider these stages as stations on „the royal road of ideas, retracing the confident march of progress towards what now appears to be a solution.“ Yet even Jacob’s „history of heredity“ (thus the subtitle of his book) unmistakably possesses its vanishing point in a concept, which was provided by modern molecular genetics: the concept of a genetic programme. Starting from this notion, Jacob analyzes not only life itself, but also the history of its conceptualization as a succession of structures of ever higher, or rather, ever more deeply differentiated structures, as a „series of organizations fitted into one another like nests of boxes or Russian dolls“: visible structures, organs, cells, chromosomes, genes, and molecules, to name only the most important ones. (Excerpt from the Preface)

Complete citation:
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Staffan Müller-Wille: Vererbung. Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2009.

 

 

Das Gen im Zeitalter der Postgenomik. Eine wissenschaftshistorische Bestandsaufnahme.

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Das Gen im Zeitalter der Postgenomic - Cover.

Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Seine Position als zentrales organisierendes Thema der Biologie des 20. Jahrhunderts verdankt ‚das Gen’ weniger endgültigen wissenschaftlichen Befunden als vielmehr der Tatsache, daß der ihm entsprechende Forschungsgegenstand, sein ‚epistemisches Objekt’ also, sich Zug um Zug instrumentell vermittelter, experimenteller Handhabung erschloß.

Mit der Komplettierung der Sequenzen ganzer Genome, insbesondere des Humangenoms, ist die Genetik – als Wissenschaft ein Kind des 20. Jahrhunderts – erneut an den Rand eines grundlegenden Denkwandels getreten. Vielfach werden Stimmen laut, die den Genbegriff zu Gunsten systemischer Perspektiven in Frage stellen oder gar ganz aufgeben wollen. Auf der anderen Seite treten überwunden geglaubte Denkfiguren wie die Vererbung erworbener Eigenschaften oder die Einteilung des Menschen nach ‚Rassen’ wieder in das Blickfeld wissenschaftlicher und medizinischer Debatten. Um den Gegenwartshorizont des Genetischen angesichts dieser verwirrenden Situation abzustecken, ist eine historische Standortbestimmung angebracht. Es besteht kaum ein Zweifel daran, dass ‚das Gen’ das zentrale organisierende Thema der Biologie des 20. Jahrhunderts war. Ein Blick auf die Geschichte der Genetik und Molekularbiologie zeigt jedoch, dass es nie eine allseits akzeptierte Definition des Gens gegeben hat. Vielmehr befand sich der Begriff, und dies ist keineswegs untypisch für historisch einflußreiche wissenschaftliche Begriffe, immer im Fluß.

"Was am 'Jahrhundert des Gens' faszniert, ist seine ungeheure Dynamik, und sie scheint sich im Zeitalter der Postgenomik ungebrochen fortzusetzen. Gerade dies sollte uns jedoch veranlasen - vor allem angesichts der historischen Erfahrungen, die mit der Umsetzung eugenischer Programme im vergangenen Jahrhundert gemacht wurden -, allen Arten von Heilsversprechen skeptisch gegenüberzustehen, ohne deshalb die tatsächliche Leistungsfähigkeit der modernen Genomforschung naiv zu unterschätzen."

Complete citation:
Staffan Müller-Wille, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Das Gen im Zeitalter der Postgenomik. Eine wissenschaftshistorische Bestandsaufnahme, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009.