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I never like to misquote anyone.

It had something to do with self-defeating revelations. I
ol

said like most revelations what I am about to say is simply

a restatement of what we already know and probably have

said so many times we've forgotten it. Going over my old

correspondence is really a traumatic experience. It looks

into, you know, very half-remembered material I've

totally forgotten, wouldn't have believed if I'd been told

about it and that sort of thing. Well, to get to the point,

what's this paper all about? what can it be used for as a

case study? We talked last time we were all together about

a check list of the use norms of the Mertonian characteriza-

tions of science — and so on and I very much

wanted that. My only question was, is this a particularly

good instance to go into it or for the historigraphic reasons

it may not be.

and problems that we've gone into before, and I think needs

to be done as well as can be done,,we'1l see. But there's

one theme that we can use this for in an exemplary way, not

just the discovery of recombination but the ®Bhole arena of

molecular genetics of which it was an important input, and

that is the Kuhnian doctrine, that is, to what extent

can you even think about a scientific revolution having

happened? Has there really been one in biology? Does the

common phrase "the revolution in biological science" really
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connote what Kuhn was trying to say and in my view does not.
I don't see any sudden change of paradigm operating in this
field at all. And yet you could another such talk
about another revolution in science having taken place,
And I think working with perion models
you can do better than I in trying to outline the level of
discourse I am referring to here. I think this is an ideal
setting for that kind of discussion and for which all of
the preliminary detailed remarks and the personal history
and intellectual history and so forth are all highly
relevant. And so this was my revelation that this is really
what we've been groping for and talk about discontinuity in
?
the microscopic sense of an eyesighted discovery captures
only a very small part of that. To what extent has there
really been discontinuity in the entire development of the
Ir has beeen

field? and in some ways, very substantial, but I don't think

it follows the Kuhnian paradigm at all.
What would it be?
I am not sure I totally understand that at all.

One way of saying what I think I heard is that the paper
tiveet could provide the exemplar of scientific development
bearing

appears on the question of the varieties of revolutions in

science. Because I think if we make it, it doesn't fit the

pattern period. I don't mean to downgrade that. There are
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now a Spake of such papers in various fields and this
might be mistakenly perceived as just another one. There
are some in economics, and psgehology. If they haven't come
We Cen Sugply Tra
across your desk-- | The exemplifications are not of
the same kind, that's precisely my point, but that if it
treated ax Plas wee

7 a
were an-efiect, the papers ig the Kuhnian conception, adequate

or not, it will be placed in that class of papers.

I understand what you're saying. I don't think we want to

be confused with pro Kuhn * aut Kuhworiticisms.

Now we could spend the rest of our time together here by
Harriet and I telling you about the conference at Berkeley
where you were present on the list but wisely stayed away.
Then someone is looking after you,
But now having said that I am now going to apparently report
the opposite, that is, in valuable and unexpected ways that
had nothing to do or almost nothing to do with the central
purpose of the Conference on Quantification and the History
eof Science. David Edge, it turned out, wrongly emphasizids
when he took the floor to present his paper, that he was
really a radio astronomer and not a mere historian or heaven
He sucat Hat
forbid a mere sociologist. Thought what they're trying to
do is history and sociology. Indeed that their effort is

concerned with an historical sociology of science and technology.

Now I have to take about five minutes or so to give wu the
context in order for me to draw implications for us.

Before that paper was presented, David Edge, Roy McLeod,

Arnold Thackeray, Bernie Barber and I had lunch - a business
lunch. Edge, and he really was on edge, and McLeod
were very concerned because they had heard that the 4S Council
a few days ago, just before the conference, decided that it

was a reasonable possibility that the 4 S could establish a
journal within a year and a half or two. They were distressed
and they distorted that into our having made the decision,

I let them talk and so on and finally informed them that

Their Jouvral orca Sides)

Sutne

the decision had been Ande to look into a journal,| which is

pretty shaky ground financially as is, and which has been

taken over by the Sage publications as a proprietary pubhcahor
Well the upshot was that I set them straight,

that the Council had decided to look into it, but that they

were now being asked what they could do for us. What interest

they had in becoming our official journal? There was a lot

Gud Exprecsious
of jockeying on their part,of no interest. They were opposed

A
in principle to organizations of scientists. They felt individuals
ought to trust one another and that there ought to be no
organizations and that consequently the organization known
as the 4 S should allow its members to become subscribers and

everything else remain unchanged. The internal contradictions

don't have to be spelled out. They're so manifest that they're
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hard to take in. Well that didn't get very far after they
projecs ual
were informed that there were sué@h things known as hoenex
societies that had been going on for sometime. That each one
tended to have its own publications and that by "its own"
meant a structural relationship. Namely that the society took
responsibility and control of the choice of editors and so on
and that this was for them to.consider. It's very simple.
What they want is for us to declare them the official journal
so that it comes with the dues,
so they pick up some overlap between the membership let's
say, 250 new members. Their current subscription is 800
including institutional.
But they're not going to get.rich on it because Sage is the
Qwrer.
Well, this is - if they try to get rich Sage is going to

drop them.
That's exactly it.

Well, I mean it's not a case of getting rich, it's vital
Surbsoneery

for Hew to et More, Well, I give you all this context quickly

And Edge, whom I was meeting for the first time, is quite an

impressive looking character, 6 feet two, three, straight kind

of Engk sh type, with all the kind of eloquence, under-

cutting, nasty, all of the stereotype come to life, which
surprised me because Harriet and I had kept in touch with his work
and liked some of it
fand so on and had gotten the impression he was removed from

all this. He gave me a key there, when he was talking, he
said two things; I have to tell you I'm going to be speaking
very bluntly after my paper this afternoon and I hope I do
not offend you. And I said, have no idea what you're going
to be saying but obviously you can't offend me because I
cant imagine your being offensive.” And that took him aback

a4
for a moment and then he said forgive me if I don't eat very

much,”“no he said, I won't be eating very much because when

I give a paper and particularly this one, I get a nervous
stomach.” That was all the information I wanted

and then he immediately resonated to the memory of

Konrad Lorenz, who was one of a small group (about a dozen
other#s) who used to meet 2 or 3 times a year somewhere in
Europe. andre’ Cournand, Paul Weiss, you know Hu Crowd .

And when Konrad had to xx give a presentation or just talk

to us, he would be five or ten minutes late invariably and
invariably for the same announced reason: I had to go out of
doors and vomit and vomit and vomit before I could get ready
to talk. And so in a quick diagnosis I decided £5 my adversary
had delivered himself into my hands for physiological and
psychological reasons. And indeed) his was the first paper

and he plunged into it. He said now let's bring it all out

into the open, there's a great power structure going on in

Alwug, &
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Gr Pkem

the sociology of science, they are of the entrenched enliqhtenment
Gud Mure are -tre roimmauncs Teh

types and/so on. So all of these six, seven, eight years ch

backbiting was brought out in&k the open. There was obviously

a decision chouwt this. Edge had
aetticaret INtaking

been testquatedt to meke the manifesto. And he proceeded to

itemize the new vision which their crowd represented.

And the new vision was one, to use general

sociological theory, nothing trivial. Indeed, he wants to be

emphatic, as a radio astronomer, that they're going to use

general sociological theory of the mainstream variety,

such as Durkheim, and Mannheim and Howard Becker,

And the ethno-methodology tradition.

“N
Well, Howard Becker and the ethno-methodologyists ~~
a

That's item one. I won't go through the list I'll give you

a precise of it which I'll write up when I get home. But another

item was that all this emphasis on quantification was nonsense,

still very dubious. A whole set of internal contradictions since
CN gel Grlbert)

later Qictir claimed that there was very important

quantitative work. But that there are certain maw books now

that give new visions of how knowledge operates, and so on,

a book by David Bicor which will appear in a week or two or

three, cailed Knowledge and Social Imagery, which he happened

to have the only copy of, and so on, the whole set of items

all Be against the orthodoxies of enlightenment, and tokenism

in science, rationalism in science, no error in science, the

the
straight, stereotyped fable that has been going/arounds.
After it was over, the meetings were all overscheduled by
papers to a very short time so I knew I knew I had no time
to speak of but I obviously had to rise just to pinpoint the
Matter. And the essence of what I said was welcome aboard.
And I went down point after point after point. Mannheim,
well, that's when I came in. My first three papers on the
sociology of knowledge were on Mannheim, so if they were
discovering reflexivity, they discovered that what you say
about others applies to yourself and they don't care if this
seems to raise the question of undercutting their own views
because they have also discovered or postulated that social
causation of ideas does not mean the untruth of those ideas,
just And it was literally beyond belief
because the 30 year delay being announced as the new revelation
or the new manifesto. So the wre welcome aboard was a matter
of histencerd fac and as compared - it would be interesting
him
to have/give an account of that same episode, being taped
jSpyt as this is but without any prior notice that he would
be doing that because I hadmiee intended to Keeo 6 \enr
but the tape of what transpired gives you a whole set of self-
exemplifying data of perceptions, misperceptions and so on.
But the essential point that I want to indicate that in the
course of showing that the sociologists also think that nothing
matters except aggregated data and so they're all encouraging

Edge
to (HZ - what year calldclumps) they're number crunchers

and they're clumpers and the Mertonian wing which of course
HZ

includes the Pricean Suebti. Variety, are number crunchers

and clumpers. And he said, for example, here is a study which
will appear 400n which is focused on Darwin and
Pasteur but focused on just two scientists, this is
unthinkable for the sociologists of science of the Guauh rah ve
variety. But when my fue came and I came to that part of the
litany, I said, David, I just want to announce, you've managed
to discover that there is something called a case study with

two people, we've gone you a bit better, we have only one
person and that is really what I was really leading up to.

That is to say in the cognitive flow of where this field is now,
the Kuhn vs. Merton is entering a new phase. They're already
making noises that Kuhn turns out to be not all that constructive
you'll notice that, the new phase is obviously going to move
toward the social construction of reality Quid a

linkage with the ethnomethodologists and that was being announced

of .
The best indicator/that - in the coffee break I went forward
to him - on I left out the most important thing in my diagnosis

about the nervous stomach - as I was talking he started to

turn white. His head dropped, and for a half hour after I

finished my three minutes, he was beaten, a man who was very

ill.

Geus feorqot tal he also responded to you Bob. As you can guess
ct

Josh, Bob's manner was very amused and jocular. He’ responded

with a tight, nasty defensive approach and he was obviously
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10
dying on his feet.

Well at any rate he was literally, physically crushed, I was
Startled by this because it was so remote from the presence
that I initially saw and then this series of consecutive
episodes. So that I went to great pains sm in the interval
not to make new Points but to elaborate the two
or three minutes I had. And the group, ten or twelve or
fourteen were listeningx in. The pity was,xkak several said
that it wasn't on tape, that it was the only interesting
part of the whole conference. But I won't go into details
on the give and take bit and I took the initiative at the

en

end of the day, I went.to him and it was something of a
reconciliation. We had met just that one day so we had gone
a complete cycle. Because I was so relaxed then he began to

become slightly relaxed,

I think it's also true that your relaxation had emerged because

you had been dreading this confrontation now for ten years.

Yes, you see this is the biggest surprise. I had a catharsis
yesterday which took care of the last 8 years. Because I had
been pent up,not writing any rejoinder for 8 years. So those
two or three minutes of getting it all out on the record and

those two or three minutes in which I could respond and see

what the nature of the problem is and the whole thing exemplifying
the styles of sociological thought, the polarization, the mis-

perception, the selective reading and so on, so my next substantial
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11

address now which I will have to give in November will be

ul - 5 ¢

toward a Historical Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and I

now have the frame. It won't be a rejoinder at all but it

will be an analysis which will have the intent at least of

supplanting this stereotype. At one point one of the

youngsters, Woolgqar or Gilbert think, they all look like children
around 19 or 20 I could

ordinarily, if they weren't of the English variety, find them

very appealing. But they have acquired the academic nonmanners

of the English academician which is so frequent there. And

one of them said, "Well you couldn't have known all this," -

which David Edge had just said. "We can never put any of this

inpint. How could you have known what our postulates were

and our assumptions?" I said, well you see, for the last 30

years or’so, several of us engaged in something called "explica-

tion ag texte" which we spend all of our time eu,

There is such a thing, and so on -- So this was a major event

for them.

So it is not just a catharsis. In its small way it is a
representative moment and thus gives something of a context

for what you were suggesting.

I can certainly see that. If I say I was putting my foot on

it, that's probably mixing the metahfpors.
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12

So that it's all the more- there is all the more reason for
us to think of the case study as having a structure, a purpose,

a location and so on,
I completely agree with the way you formulated it though.

And I will be able to I think, without stretching too much,
and without going to other subjects related to the normative

structure

Have there been any other critical examinations of whether

biology has scientific revolutions?
Let me when I get back, pull out everything I have

You must have a lot of stuff and as far as-- my first response
is I've seen many times the observation that Kuhn's work may
not apply to biology but it may also be true of geology and

- or empirical sciences in general.

There are, I would guess, 8, 10, 12 papers which
have the question: does the Kuhnian model apply to this
seeming case of revolution. IT haven't studied those papers
but they divide equally or unequally - some say yes and some
say no. Now the grounds on which they are saying yes and no
what they draw implications with, I can't quote on this.

But that was what I was saying earlier. So evr obviously one

of the things to do if we decide On Hus and that's the
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13

merit for us. The merit of your proposal because

Well you can ask the same question from aslightly different
perspective. I have trouble trying to identify in all
moclsn (7) biology, any event that conforms to that model.
I can think of three things that might have been regarded as
the most nearly revolutionary in the paradigmatic sense.

One of them is mechanism. But that parallel tradition has
coexisted in biological thinking controversy

about can biology be reduced? It may never terminate.

As a matter of fact Josh, you may remember my. saying that |

 

did the GhaprRa on af the alteration between mechanism
a § Sout + Gather Dynamics

and vitalism Ut Ovo Kurs . I mean I couldn't have

been less informed. You don’t know about this?

You can imagine, not imagine, I'm telling you that I did 300
pages Sui FUSS one summer. what I did was

>
read as fast as I could every.damn history of biology and so on
and it's very thin and so - but the point I want to make in
regard to your last statement- if, let's just say that the
notion of mechanism or the notion of vitalism were to represent
a revolution or a change in any interesting way, then it's a

recurrent revolutionary change.
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14

Bob, this brings us back to Gerry Holton's themanme Gu aly ss
QLiguiahr benveeu Lo}
cid te A mechanism and vitalism, Gt Cui Aue Ame,
ho He +

(postions) tiret scientists takecon issues.
’

 

At any rate so you were saying that's one poss ble Paradigm chau
Yes I do think it qualifies, it's not that there are rapid
oscillations. I think that the conflict is a continuing
one. Its terms have evolved. They don't mean anything at
any point as they Meant at any previous point. Even,as far

really
as I can see there are/no major discontinuities even in that
statement although they have evolved Euler
Well tis discovery was important but

He may have offended certain people's religious convictions

but I don't think you can regard that as having brougat abovt

a paradigm Chaucer
Vecom biurahedr wm
Was that a case as formally similar to A bacteria?
Yes, but the question at every time was

understandable within the framework of the previous paradigms.
And that's your criteria,
That's been my criteria.

That's Tom's from the beginning.
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15

I find it very difficult to find revolutions in biology using

that criteria.

Incidentally, you know Marty Klein's paper on Einstein's views
on scientific revolutions - I'll get a copy to you -

but as I ask these questions I feel very guilty so say naught.
Why the hell didn't I, knowing its possible relevance to our
subject-- but that's very germane to what you have

just put on the record.

Well, the third point I was going to raise was spontaneous

generation and its refutation. There again, as important as
was
was the demonstration it/ still in a language one could under-

stand, the fundamental
there are
and so / revolutionary changes in biology but they're not

‘in the Kuhnian sense

But they were experienced as revolutionary because of their

consequences not because of their origins.

That's correct.

I pleaded that case I'll now have to
go back to it because you were putting it in a totally New
context and so you're bringing it alive again. It was dead

and you're bringing it back to life. I'm sure that there's
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16

au ff
nothing in my supercritical account of quotes alternations,

meaning dominance and so on, But now in terms of these
conceptual schemes if the historical count were accurate
of ostutlahons free of dominance then that

leads to the notion of the dominant paradigm as distinct

from the single paradigm and so on.

And all that stuff, I don't mean my account of it but if I
go back to my account of it, it will have some special

meaning.

But Kuhn was not talking about the competition between

and during coexisting paradigms-

No, that's still something else, but he does talk about it
now in 1975, he has had to, in the effort to provide a kind
of phenomenology of the way science looks and that's still

another thing. That's not the one

The one case that comes closest is Mendel's.
. ' 2

Because the evidence is that Others dhaut waders rd
There is a certain prehistory of it but I don't think that
disqualifies the idea of {+ lb aug revolt Cuaiy
Could I ask this question? You review these historical cases

They sere trrwelifiouau,*
duck sce Whither , It's in a sense looking at them
retrospectively, since you know, as it were, their fate

and you also have a sense they're well within the boundaries of

anything you might want to call science even if you don't define
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17

those boundaries very closely. But the central criterion you

were using, and it's Kuhnian, does it fit within the framework,

the essential framework, if it does not it will be unintelligible,

it will be incommensurable, there can be no communication
Copeep how ; ;

Obeur Hat and this new conception has to make its way

into ahkostile environment. But it's more than hostile,

it's an uncomprehending environment

But then when you look beyond the boundaries of science,

wherever you want to place those boundaries. This Yall s ele

prabiem ©{ demarccamen — 14a Giussnst
Lex Lakatos Popper ow tecrtemsense what is science,
what is pseudo science, and one or two of the papers of

Lertecr tos
ImresS 4Stuclenk who are living off the leeutexs!

that
ideas I alluded to / yesterday. The same criterion

seemgto operate, that is the scientist says ~ I don't know

what the parapsychologist ‘9 Cue AdkuUsS

No, Bob, I think they understand the question. The question

is comprehensible but the evidence is not.

Well let's say a few words on the scientist's handling of

astrology.in the middle of the 20th century.

Well astrology comes closer because there isn’t even an effort
to adduce the kind of evidence which
Now: what is there in the case that is
att ; within
be scientific ef along has been granted to be /. the scientific

even though I don't understand what you said

that differentiates para psy chitoan, from astrology.
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18

Well So it has a social
function. That's the only objective criterion I can offer you.
Looking at-it as an historian not imposing my own prejudice

or wisdom on it.

You don't think there could be cognitiveattributes of this
unintelligibility that nevertheless make it of a piece with
what you are accepting as the doctrine of

It's urftelligible but still I can give you a formal analysis
of its character. It involves something that looks like

experimentation. It invoMilgs something that looks like

acceptable modes of inference.

Where is the unintelligibility?

I don't see it as being a much bigger jump than the notion

that determines the for example.

Well where would you come out on the two kinds of unintelligibility?

Thatts where the scientific character is never questioned.

Heisenberg

Well, in the case of #& there-was, looked at retros-
pectively, manifest profit in scientists learning that language
and beginning to incorporate it into his language and it
shattered a lot of illusions about the precision of mechanism.
Mechanism hadn't been defined and so forth. But it also

made predici#tions about the outcome of experiments which

remain part of the continued tradition: If you ask +.what is
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19

there that is still the same between pre and post

Cersecrbevg ct, physics, the fundamental concept of what

constitutes an experiment validation and so forth

What keeps it within the scientific tradition when it is
temporarily regarded as outside your own conceptual frame-
work ina radical, very radical way. That's what I meant
by
Well you might have to do experiments of a very unusual

would have
kind. People for a long time/regarded transcripts of dreams
as being totally inappropriate kind of evidence but
not for reasons that are consistent within the
scientific framework. There's no fundamental postulate about

science, the nature of validation and so on that denies any

aspect of experience as being inappropriate to it. So
Of course I realize

Well that's different than using -——————— dreams as
experimental data though. That's the way in which dreams are
interpreted, the manner in which fears are purportedly demon-
strated. The clinically retrospective judgement
is a literary and not a scientific treatment. They're connected
with that so there are two elements there. That is you have
a novel kind of experimental material for examination, a thing

I think

which/you know, if you've followed psychology and all the sciences

we're going to accept, I don't think there is any fundamental
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20

objection to using such reports, but the way they're analyzed

is the issue.

Relating to what you're saying, thinking of this as case of
the operating cognitive norms as to what qualifies and what
doesn't and so it's the now traditional problem of demarcation
between science and nonscience and pseudo science. Fo p per

, aAemarccedD mm
Gud tbtokatss have made, a central question
and it's apparent to me, that's their big contribution. The notim
Sty HUES TEENON coey has been around forever
and it's been more of a sort of indispensable focusing on an
idea that's been around and consequently getting some develop-
ment of it. But the demarcation issue as part of the problematics
has taken a traditional question in all the history of thought.
What qualifies as acceptable knowledge in a given culture,
and then once you have institutionalized science, what qualifies.
But it just may be by returning it to the notion of the norms
that operate out there, not the norms imposed by the philosopher
of science who says, "I can tell you the difference,"but put

in the operation of (HZ - the working principle)

Where do we fit history and social science the
bulk of it, into this general discussion of

what goes on there is amenable
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21

part of analysis, that as a natural scientist, I think
we've agreed is the norm for validation and in that sense is

history any different from astrology?

Well that's the case then. I think it could be argued that
history, in the sense of being concerned with interpreting
unique events and patterns or/series of events, sequences,
groups of events differs from astrology only in the sense of
the normative attitude of organized Skephasm It’s up to

me, the scholar, to ~ not to press my case alone but to try

to get the kind of evidence that will etuxd Up t Tht HesT

That's begging the question a little, Bob. How is that
?

skepticism manifest Why would you reject an

astrological explanation of a piece of historical fact

No what I meant was that a sophisticated historian will tell
you when he will relinguish the belief that the Battle of
Hastings occurred in 1066. He will tell you that when such
and such documents turn up, that's all I'm saying. He is
prepared, and not only he will tell you, but in the way he
goes about his business he's continually asking what happened

here, is there any way of my finding out?

I have a thought about that, the method of history is choose

fundamental changes in the physical and the natural sciences.
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22

Telies
In fact it relys. on the established patterns of explanation

of those sciences. That's the fundamental bedrock of what

sx cenm4e (2
is then a discipline in a plausible structure. That is

A

it would be very dangerous for historians to attempt to
envelope novel science in the course of reconstructing
historical explanation. I think it offers the mechanism of
the character of that skepticism as long as it doesn't claim

too much that is outside of the commonly accepted traditions

of how the real world actually runs.

Can you invent an example or an historical explanation or
interpretation, that if ipso facto be ruled out as having

gone beyond the frame that you've just outlined?

Well, contrast history and science fiction. And the style

of science fiction which is somewhat self-consciously called
I think the fact that no historian has

ever done this to my knowledge, you don't have messengers

going faster than the speed of light.

;
And now the data that constitutes by the historians response
to historical fiction and then there are border line cases

where they say this is no more than historical fiction, that

is, reconstruction of thoughts that are not recorded anywhere.
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23

Reconstruction of conversations that have no documentary basis,
that you move over beyond the pale, and it's not your normative
constraint, and it's not only methodological. There can be

a lot of methodological conflict. That's not what's at stake.
This is beyond the pale. You've broken the norm by introducing
notions of factual events, a kind of factual reconstruction

without the evidence.

Well, I must say historians have to do that all the time.
I mean it is impossible to get a complete documentation when
there's no way to test by any kind d post
some things are plausible
All the assertions need to be laid on the line,/you have to
put them down and if you're very pedantic
I mean I have no in
recounting my own biography.
But that's why what is considered illegitimate is a very
Covering Hats ; docs men PIL .
narrow area aecsournting which las ho, because you just can't

make it up out of whole cloth.

{k we Gl ee ise geal if we looked at available reviews of
either what purports to be history and is critically appraised
as being little more than historical fiction or periodically,
historical fiction that is reviewed as presenting such dis-
tortions even though it's announced fiction, that it threatens

the underpinnings of history. Or the third version now of
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24

the Gore Vidal type of history. If you look at the responses
to that, the behavior of historians, you get some of these

elements of what they're -

(2 fucyctopicdea Bvittoeen)

Look at that piece on biography. Remember the contempt that
was expressed for the Irving Stone kind of reconstruction,

And Catherine Drinker Bowen ~ she's on the edge,

Indeed she is. But now what we need is the analysis of those
protocols again. This incidentally is something I must get

on the record to remind me to send it to you when I get it.

One of the youngsters, I have to qualify Har , they all look

like babes in the wood, one of the young English sociologists

of science at the Berkeley conference, is named G. Nigel Gilbert.
And he has a paper in press that sounds like analysis of

accounts by scientists of their discoveries, what we've been
are

talking about, and they Haxe apparently at least taking a

step in that direction. So then I asked them to send me a

preprint. The minute he does I'll see that it gets to you.

And that's bound to be germane whether it's good, bad, or

indifferent.

Well, I can understand the historian's anxieties about too many
liberties. What the best historian can do is still so

flimsy in terms of the possibility of proving every assertion
and every implication that's there, that the whole edifice

will collapse and there will be generated skepticism of any
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25

effort in the field. And there is a concerted effort
to minimize the extent of that kind of invention.
And there are certain norms, especially about things you
put in quotation marksx that in order to maintain some vestige
of objectivity, there are certain rules of presentation that
the use of quotes seems to violate. Now I don't see the
problem as long as it's made manifestly clear that
those quotes are inventions. But that's still a symbolic
rendition of - you know if something is in quotes you

that it
really had better know xkak was actually said. It's a norm
that has its value. I mean see the difficulties that will

arise if there are anx ambiguities about the meaning

of an expression.

You said earlier, or I thought you said, that historians would
be taking as implicit models what they think of as science.
transforming it into what they re)

that it approximates as close as possible

No, I didn't mean that, I meant that the historian's view of

the nature of physical reality must not conflict with what the
physicist, chemist, and biologist say it is. With the
methodological point.

They're trying to aim for it to pattern themselves after
Scientists

They'd better not invent new science.

it
I see, I didn't understand/the first time.
JL

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26

Never
The historian ,invokes a dragon, or a unicorn even.

It's really

the genuine romantics. These people
are historically speaking the British sociologists of
as they're acquiring this self image in the course of their
Now the code words are enlightenment

and Pedkeniandétoken, gradualistic types of sociologists -
Mechanistic

Mechanistic, vs. us self-declared romantics. So that how
romantic can you be&, is what Josh is saying - the romantic
historian or romantic sociologist. Thiy shay vision of the

way in which nature works.

Will David Edge now start reflecting on the basic-

parapsychological
Well, it takes paxasikxakagxeak processes out there as givens

not as something which should be in an
investigation but as the nature of psychological reality.

would
Well, I think that wHka# be a very good test case. I can't

think of any historian who would be willing to even hint at
a parapsychological interpretation of some historical event.
He might think that the question of belief in parapsychology

is another issue altogether but-

science
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27

How romantic can you be is what Josh is saying.

The romantic historian or romantic sociologist, with regard
te your vision of the way in which nature works. Will David
Edge now start reflecting on the basic - well it takes
Pparapsychological processes as givens not

wot as something that should be inves nqeted

but as the nature of psychological reality.

Well I think that would be a very good test case. I can't
think of any historian who would be will/t5 even hint at

a parapsychological interpretation of some historical
event. The question of belief in parapsychology is another
issue altogether. So since he'd be taking on a much larger

job within that framework and I don't think historians

Now suppose we were to (JL - Do you know of any exceptions?)
No. I think that's a very strong criterion and some of the
same observers, let's not call them femanhncs who
would say, "Look at the baseless akkixudesxang prejudices and
attitudes of the allegedly reasonable scientist who will not
even look at the evidence for parapsychology, who will not
admit it into the family of sAcknces, whereas I, the observer
have an open mind, and I will not accept such a prejudiced
notion, wxxkxmak would not use parapsychological interpretations
of historical events." Now, when you said earlier that

that
scientists--/historians do in fact, according to their own

covenants, must accept the world of nature as science has

portrayed it. Now we're back to the question, how consistent
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28
is that? Which science?

Well sure, if you look at the efforts in psychological biography
for a long time psychoanalyzing in history was held in bad
odor and still is by historians, as being inadmissable, non-

scientific, nonhistorical, improper evidence.
Also criticized by many psychoanalysts as well -

You see the question I was raising - which world of nature?
One answer is that it's not all that different when you

get beyond the very deep level and particularly metaphysical.

I think they will have their own individual prejudices. They
May adopt schools of thought, not necessarily consensual. But
I suggest that historians will be doubly sensitive about getting
into that realm and will do so only out of sheer ignorance or
the
as a calculated risk, whether or not the totality of scientex¢
Com muni decided to adopt it and then it's very
jitteriness
self-conscious. But it's the /gxngaxnaxs with which those
things are approached=that £ is the point I'm trying to make,
a norm that's
not thatks it's/always followed. I think that many historians
are sufficiently ignorant about genetics for example that they
1st
will have made Lysenk wows types of attributions about the

influence of some earlier envi@ynment on the hereditary in the

ancestfry of one of their subjects-
Or excessively strong genetic interpretations.

Exactly. But I put that down to sheer ignorance.
JL

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29

Yes, at the very least they'd be cautious in doing so and
it wasn't

feel that/their job to try to try to measure the state of

scientific belief on their data. That they have a hard

enough job reconstructing from very fragmentary evidence

any

fevolution
Could we go back to rnevwetetton now, once more?

Without need to recapitulate it all, one general formulation
is, what are the varieties of scientific revolutions

and what does this case illumine with regard to the character
of radical cognitive change in a branch of science or a

field of science? And what are the models in terms of which
one could examine this and which of those seem to work out.
Now, is there anything else that is so to say the core of

the paper? Is that the paper?

many things. The paper is a case study looking

for

The Kuhnian issues and the Mertonian ones, there are the
questions of the institutional arrangements as they influence
the development of the work. I don't know whether Harriet

We talked About
has brought you up to date on this but, the role of the
Arey ond Nave special training programs in
keeping going a cadre of college students who were training
during the war if college without which I might
have preempted Henry Kissinger who managed to get drafted out
of canal into the Array os, so that's what sort of brought that

to the surface, because he's had a parallel individual
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30

history He got in the army and I was in the

Navy and that made all the difference in our outcome.

By the way I checked, Josh, in that volume, and it does look
as though it was entirely possible for him to have been
drafted and then to have been identified for the Army program.
There were numerous ways people could get into it and that

was at least one of them.

Well the Navy was strictly voluntary

But there's another point about that particular decision and
that is that Columbia had a contract with the Navy not with

the Army and one way of ensuring the continuity of my education
at Columbia was the Naval route. Now whether I knew that at
the time I enlisted or whether it could have been known, I

don't know. I think that was pure luck that the Navy was at Glombia

Well that turns out not to have been a Matter of luck because

the requirements that the v12 Program imposed on the universities
were so much more attractive than the Army program that good
universities would have found the Navy program

much more acceptable thas Wr Grr pny one. For Craue le,

The V12 program permitted students to spend their first two

years acquiring a liberal arts training.

it
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31

It was much less structured than the ASTP was. The ASTP

- the curriculum was specified by the Army

thinking about institutional
arrangements, I'm trying to think of properties or characteristics
of those arrangements that may have been perceived and taken
into account in preferring one to another, just as/scientist
might say I prefer to be funded by ONR rather than
some of the competing sources of funds. Because the ONR
gives me much more scope. So here, the university administrator

the

might say, we prefer/Vl2 program. And the point on the
institutional arrangements is to xaekakea +real the
fortuitous, historically fortuitous elements so that they
become institutional constraints or facilitators or channelers
of what it is we're really examining. That's what the

re mg
subset OF 1s6ves we, deal with.

One raises the question, if you had gone elsewhere would
you have gone on to graduate work? By implication you're

Saying this made it more likely.

Facilitation has been the key word throughout this discussion

Bob.

That's a Mertonian theme which is not one which our, friends Who deo
Case stuchies
{address themselves to but which I think should be explicated.

Because otherwise I think it looks as if there were so many

chance occurrences, you can't explain anything.
JL

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32

Well, I don't recall that there was much more
I think both of us will be doing some analysis of other
Materials we got down in ‘the checklist of themes.
much
I don't think this is the place to go/into the question of
Maturity and disconmovity ‘nN Scence
On the other hand the intellectual history will have + be
tthe
an account that brings in disconhnuty as well as,practicalay details
an bactenal
the. sexuality. Make of it what you will but I have a little
trouble generalizing about that at this point. On the other
hand the issues about macrocontinuity, that is the Kuhnian
kind of thing, I think very naturally

to this area. That is not to say that we both quite understand

what we are going to say about it, but

Josh, I don't think we've gotten awfully clear on the issue of

who it was and why there was resistance to your work,

Well I've emphasized that in my dictation. Liuet. was

the significant holdout. lLwore made a fuss at the symposium,
which was quieted quite Promptly and I thought-one of the things

I did dictate might not be too difficult to get some documentation

on - diffusion and acceptance.

But in neither case, just so I understand it in the Kuhnian
framework, was the resistance because they were committed to
bacteria not having sexual reproduction, It really had to do

with a whole series of other--
JL

33

No, they both had a specific counter proposal which came out
of Lwe tts own experience in bacterial physiology
There was general reluctance, not to discount

a long established tradition, I don't think many of them
thought much about weakened experimental foundations were

sexuality not giving up lightly.
The fact that I came from Tatum's lab made me slightly more
credible but-- the fact is that it took a year or two before
people even wanted the cultures, they took what I said at
face value in terms of experimental observation, Delbrvck
was just fanatically pig-headed about the kind of analysis
that was being made and it showed in his own work on recombination
and phage. He didn't want to believe it when he was doing it
himself - in that particular context, And he does think in a
very different style. Kinetics, kinetics is the mswuk only way
he understands anything. If you describe the rate at which a
process occurs and fit a methematical model to it, then you
understand it, otherwise not. So this is part of his rejection
of chemistry, of material physics as opposed to biophysics or
mathematical physics and so on. And he just flatly said - until
the genetics has been worked out, demonstrated by such and such

I see no reason to believe it or even take an interest in it.
RKM

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34

Let's discourse for a time on the differences in style between

you and Delbruck.

Well he was someone who believed in deep mathematical models.

He was on the tack © @ Parallel » complementarity in biology.
thing that was in
The onlyfeally interesting/fact a revolutionary finding

that had to postulate something as dramatically different as in?

determinancy in the biological sphere. His approach to it was

one that lay very great emphasis on mathematical theory and

very little on chemical observation and analysis.

When did he

concQirde that he understood something

ts | Cas use that expression. When he was able to literally Gbhlenr

onte A equations?

I think so.

When he could write an equation that described

the fake 6) tu process, variations and

variables,

How do you experience that?

Well I accept that as a formal definition that at the point

where I know all the things that I know how to learn by

should be able to do what he's describing.

But I'm willing to settle -

You understand him in the sense that you've been using the term

understand,

Well,

Side,

I think so.

I don't have his facility on the mathematical
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35

But it's part of it. If I can't actually copy his equations

or criticize them, he may be able to assert nonsense and I
”

‘

will not be able to realize it. Not Just but
Ne ete

nonsense, so my criterion of understanding is that I can tell

the difference between sense and nonsense. And I mean more

than just solving a complex equation. It goes beyond that -

the degree of abstractness

Not any old equation. How would you visualize -
How well do you understand parhcle physics, Bob?
Not at all.

OK. I'm not in a very different situation.

Well, that's a strong statement.

You mean it's that distant.

Yes.

And it's not a matter of ksazyxu technique?

No, not at all, It's further than that. He wanted something
that went beyond present visions of particle physics as

explanations of biology.
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JL

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36

Remember that piece he did at the beginning of the Festschrift (PAtomp)
that was reprinted from the Connecticut Academy, that speaks
of deep paradoxes* But that must mean then Josh that sxek
other people who are after all associated with his school,
Hershey didnt Follow thet line.

such as aaah, His work has a different style and is much

closer to yours--~-

Hershey

Indeed, there's no difference between Hiesh and mine.
We're talking now about his philosophical position and how
he operated on personal belief--

(De) brocie) Hershey
But what did he say about Hx Heesk's work? That's what I'm--
Well, as long as Hershey was willing to cowtow to him in the
administration of the church and that's a
little different from his feeling thoroughly sympathetic
with the details of the way it was done, In fact it was
Hershey and not Delbruck who did the labeling experiments
with Delbruck would never in his life
have done that experiment and in fact never did in his life.
What Delbruck did at a time that our conceptions of bacterial
phage were generally very very vague was to use that
mathematical and then some notions of particles
- in this case not deeply paradoxical ones at all ~ and very
successfully used the Connecticut approach to understand them
as particles better.But then when it came to their detailed
interaction, when you had to give them a life of their own

and deal with each phage particle Omanismically then
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37

was fine and He went much
further than I ever did in the level of abstraction in his models
and it was inflexibility in trying to push them in their abstract
form everywhere and he was disinterested in anything else, I think
that disinterest was in a way not as hostile as many people may

have believed but since it had

Isn't there a tendency of most - not only physicists, high powered
Physicists to have something approaching contempt for what they're

not interested in?

I recognize that breed, And they may be the people who Be feel

that they're the closest to the secrets of matter and

could compete very well as a theoretician
in every other way and had none of those hangups.
The @% phage school and but that article by

Fleming on the four physcists does rather well

Do we have on the record any statement about your style‘tthat's
at all comparable to whatyou've been saying about this. I think it
would be very helpful. Just try to characterize it.

Would you hesitate to talk about your W&H own style?

I don't have as well defined a style. I'm much more eclectic.

That's what I want to hear. So either you give it to us to use or

you get it in but I think it's too important to omit.
JL

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38

What gives you a sense of deep understanding when you...
I don't really have it.

What gives you a sense of accomplishment?

Well I think I did give you a piece of paper that I had written
about twenty years ago aboutx the style of discovery

that if I had a set of resources I'd be looking to see what could
be done with then, efficacy being paramount and I really just
become interested in the phenomenon and decide by God I want to
find out how this particular thing works. Sometimes

S
start out with a methodological imight -
And how a thing works is answered in what terms?

Well, reproducing it, no it goes beyond that, it means building

a model but usually not a mathematical model but rather a mechanistic
one, A clock has a gear in it and there's something else there and
the general features of clocks, that they have got some way to tell
the time and so, I don't want to make it too complete, I try to
generalize from some essence of what I see there. But it's basically
a pretty mechanistic sort of approach. And then I sort of flagellate
myself xmxkaxmexakz to go ahead and 1st try to deal with this in

terms of a mathematical problem, try to pull those techniques in

but they don't come that naturally.

And conversely, when do you have a sense of problem, when do sam
you have a sense there's somethingthere to look into, what would

be some of the episodes -
JL

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39
When do you invent a problem or come upon a problem?

Well I think there is a disparity between the resources we have
have
and the ignorance we /that ought to be cleared up. And then

there are other efficacy judgements about #eexn wipmek the importance

of this, that or the other

Could you just list a series of such Ceisedeg where You made Jvag ements
Identify that this is worth looking into. This is not only worth

looking into,this is what I am going to look into, so that there

is at least a fighting chance of characterizing it. Now wmmk we're

back to the enumeration problem, sm

Well, ok. Let's go back to '45, DNA does something interesting

to bacteria, the Avery paper, plainly touching upon something

of vast importance in biology but vague, not clearly formulated,

not a sharp, logical confrontation. That's gem another element.

I would say that sort of semantic logical rather sxakn than mathematical
analysis would be my forte there. John Platt talked
about in his paper and then this kind of matching up of resources vs.

aims. What can we do about this? And in that case there was -

well one thing we can do, we have +s Organism which maybe Avery
really
doesn't/understand or know very well . It's got a beautiful
Neveesporq
clear cut genetics. Anything we do in os is automatically

accepted as relevant to the genetics of higher oranisms
able to understand it very well. Why don't we substitute

a bacte num. for a pneumococcus in Avery's equation and see

what would happen
The other point about the r we can/selective
Because
methods, @EXEGEXKEE/we have these biochemical makkats mutants, we
can control the environment that they're put into. We can decide
whether or not it will grow or not grow. So it has a Manipulability
- experimental control which is greater than that in the other
circumstance a cleaner experiment. You can confront a
lot of r with a lot of DNA and make a qualitative
Prediction about what might happen, what the sensitivity of our
t
assay is and be able to set boundaries ai/what it is we are
able to detect. Well, that thread you'll find yesterday and
40 years ago. Of knowing the power of your method and being able
to say in advance what its sensitivity is and what it’s able to
pick up. Then you do some experiments and you sort of see what
either
happens and they may suggest/more methodological improvements
or you May get a positive ams#x answer that puts you on the trail
of doing something interesting or you run into some blind alleys
that make you go back and say ok this part didn't work, what other
permutations of the issue as Originally presented have presented
themselves during the over this question? So while
worrying about how to put DNA I was
certainly thinking consciously or unconsciously other manipulations
any
that might be possible or/other methods that might be applied. So
up comes the idea of crossing in bacteria and then there's a
branchover to Sexve (ity - Is it so or isn't it so.
In trying to lay the base for it, it's never been clearly tested so
let's think some more about how/de that experiment and then think

through another experimental Gesign with the same sensitivity,

consideration, how do you assay for the result that you're trying

can
to look for, what method wkxix developy
41

you
to look for, what method can/develop that will answer the issue

when you've already gota material appreciation that you've
got enough resources to really go ahead and do something significant.
There's a finite margin Th@n you go back to
the lab and you fiddle for awhile and that's about the essence

of that particular process. For another 10 or 15 years after

that I was avalanched by data of various kinds. I just kept
discovering one mechanism after another while using these tools
and then sharpening the tools at the same time.

a very powerful apparatus for exploring territory that had been
inaccessible so it's a little hard there to dissect the different
strands of decision about what to go into. Well the next major

et

league, we'll talk about a minor one first--one“the things that
Bernie Davis and I hod a multiple on was the penicillin method
for the isolation of bacterial mutants and that was based upon
a very superficial sort of impression about how penicillin worked,
lyse
if it would make bacterial tame if they were growing and we'd
been looking for methods by which we could remove cells able to
grow and the paradox, we had to find the cells that couldn't grow
in a given medium, It was easy to find the cells that could grow
against the background of those that couldn't, but let's invert
that and we'd be able to get our mutants much more readily. But
we'd do the opposite of selecting for prototodes out of the
somewhere about penicillin themselves
only under conditions of growth and sure enough it works out that

way that the nongrowing mutants remain dormant in a synthetic

medium that doesn't let them grow, but if you plunk penicillin in
42

the ones that grow are the ones that are killed so the ones that
were
axB asleep are the ones that stay alive and that's selective method.
And that's been worth a few hundred million dollars in the
fermentation industry but its origin was the permutation of
terms and the notion of how do you go about ime systematic
selection and at the methodological level. It wasn't such a
crucial problem that needed to be solved at that time

and though. by thinking of myself as a

vm \ 4

bacteriam, how does the world look to mej? I used that analogy
with Harriet, that's that organismic insight. It's almost a
mechanistic one. If I think I'm a clock I can figure out how
+S
m@ turn my wheels around. You can see ways in which you can

encounter information about your environment and transform that

to some useful output which then becomes a method. This became

then another issue when a man called discovered

lyses
that the ceewe of bacteria with of Fleming’s first
antibiotic, first enzyme, could be prevented by putting

the bacteria into high concentrated media called

10% sucrose solution. To do that, that would prevent them from
ast. What happens there is xkak the lyses are

cell walls of the bacteria and in an
ordinarly medium they'll just explode. But if you have a very
highly concentrated medium the water is kept from diffusing into
the cells and they're able to stay alive. So this was literally
a Saturday afternoon experiment and I just asked myself, is it

possible that penicillin liyees through some similar method. It would
RKM

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43

be easy to test by seeing whether when you add sucrose to prevent
the cells from lgéing you get protoplasts,

work just like that and then thinking about that we had some
implications for the mechanism of action and so on. About how

it worked as an antibiotic it would have to be an agent that
specifically interferes with the synthesis of bacterial cell walls.
Therefore/the cells aren't growing. You don't need to synthesize
them at all nothing mch remains static
but if the cells are growing and the walls are not being made

to keep up with it they'll burst unless you protect them from
bursting samme by using a sucrose. So that that has become
moderately important. There is a field of research on ‘jm spheroplasts
- didn't like my calling them protoplasts that

comes from that. It was a major insight to have that antibiotic

work but what do you learn about style from that recitation?

Well, what I will have learned about it, I'll learn after I go

over that marvelous recitation.

All right but then let me Go to a major league because I think that
the first major departure that I can recall-- I took a sabbatical

in '57, even before that around '53, '54, '55, I began worrying
about,- now that we've developed this enormous methodology for
dealing with the genetics of bacterial cells, what about other
unicellular organisms like cells in tissue culture?

Culture methods just beginning to be developed and Koch among others

are starting to learn how to find appropriate media for them and
44

so I do another permutation and in this case strictly speculative,
ing

I've no intention of working on it myself, but try/to develop a

new field of gs cell genetics. There again some erudition,

going back in the literature and finding a lot of things that

could fairly readily be done and never been tried out. There

were even some hints that cell fusion might occur spontaneously.

That there is sex ins cells an an analog of sex in

would
bacteria, At several symposia, I / just make speeches about it's

time to start 5s cell genetics. And that you're not going
to learn - a phrase that loved to quote from me more
than anything else - is that if you want to learn about embryology

you must eventually study an embryo. And you can't do it for

all of the time on bacteria and on yeast which provided the/models.

at that point. But I was saying let's think of, let's work on

embryos as if they were bacteria rather than rely solely on
information about bacteria developing verified models

without 5 cells. Well in fact in those early papers

I pointed out the effect, among a list of things, that virus infection
played some role in inducing cell fusion. It was not singled out,

I didn't do any experiments of my Own on it, but within the next

few years, of course, Frissy started going on trying to do

some genetics ons cells, and he said

and Henry Harris showed in fact you could use a particular virus

very effectively as a way of inducing fusion in such cells. And that's

become a major discipline of its own. In a way it's pure
HZ

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45

because these were strictly speculative ideas without going into
a Major investment in in trying to do those experiments.
You may ask why and the why was that I had so much

investment in bacteria that it didn't seem to be
efficient to throw that away and go into a new field but it

was efficient for me to simply point out those opportunities

and let others--

You were persuaded that what you were going to do with bacteria
Jw. ; ; . ;
was just/interesting and just as important if one were to

gauge it from the standpoint of the development of biology.

Yes, I thought molecular genetics were going to be
solved with bacteria and I was struggling to try to get away ina
the
sense from that entrancement by/sexuality into what that original
question was abouteethe function of DNA. And in fact when I moved
; ts ; oe
to Stanford it was in order am put aside the omanismic genetics
€
of @me coli and gm try to get into the chemical study of DNA transfer.
That was already '59. Wisconsin was not that congenial an
environment for molecular genetics. Arthur Kronberg was moving here.
the
It seemed like wm@ ideal place’ to get next to. And certainly from
the point of view of those kinds of resources, it was, in order
to pursue that kind of work. I have infinitely more competition
in that arena Seidwedieeese today than I would in any arena that
I went into in ‘sane, the things that I'm interested in.

so I can't say it's been anything
RKM

46

like of outcome. But I continue to plug away
there and I think it was not an unwise choice to make that
particular shift. Then about s cell genetics, in '57
I took a Fulbright, about the only sabbatical I've ever had ?t
guess and took about 4 months in Australia, I wanted to learn
about virus recombination with Burnett, Burnett had published
some confusing articles about influenza virus recombination
and I knew he knew nothing about genetic analysis and I thought
if I could use the same general approach that I had worked out
in the on the phenomenon that he had discovered
that influenza virus also showed
recombination, we'd be able to make some headway. But when I
got there I found he was no longer working on this, that he
had started to work on the mechanism of antibody formation and
so I worked with
in his lab at that time and is now his successor as director of
Institute, in looking at s cells
do immune cells produce one antibody or more than one antibody,
looking at it from a genetical perspective and in the framework
of a selective theory of antibody formation. So that's the only

work B8£ I've ever done with My own hands on s cells-

You keep coming back to the theme of what we've agreed to call by
the code word, erudition, |Ne~e comes a hme whn everything you've
done reaches a certain point and then you go searching mr the
literature. Would it be worthwhile to focus on that as part of

your style for a moment? To ask whether we can identify anything
JL

RKM

JL

RKM

JL

HZ

JL

47

in that activity that's all distinctive? Have we said everything
by saying that you do a bibliographic search like everyone else?

Do you do it in the same way as others?

No, not everybody else does it, in fact almost nobody else does it,

so -
OK. That's what I mean by differentiating.
Well, I don't know how to rationalize that-
Well then describe it.

No I was going to make a hypothesis. I've been wondering why
this almost neurotic insistence on looking for the antecedents of
where I'm at at this point. And it has something to do with the
fact that my education was ina library. I use the phrase on
this account, that the library was my university throughout grade
school, junior highk school, to a large extent high school and
then in college tt got all mixed up with what I was
actually going to learn from others. But it was my main route

of learning in such a systematic fashion, that it's a tool for me
in which I have long self-indoctrination. | was very

different from most of the students I run into these days.

And you were after all indoctrinated into it at a time when you

weren't in a hurry.

I had nothing else to do. I mean it was the major route of learning.

I was just very deeply impressed by how much there was to learn and
HZ

JL

48

I would get more- There's still a certain dilemme in terms of
how I spend my time. Should I read more about something else,
about some new subject. Or to what extent does that fact detract
from sone epee New external discovery. My own edification

has been one of the imperatives and I've had the luxury of being

able to do it from enough payoff on the other things I do.

There was one line that Josh and I were developing one of the
days you were in Berkeley which I think is worthwhile to reintroduce
which

here since I think it would be congenial to Bob, ‘mk is that

since his work was done when he was so very young- (end of second

side) he never had te do throvah the period ef uncertainty tn his
career. Hed arrived just about the ame he Started.

beginning of 3rd side:
Well I was going to make the opposite comment. This is something
that just occurred to me now, although it's a followup on what
Harriet was just quoting. I leap-frog right across the conventional
career structure. I was only formally enrolled as a graduate
student after I had completed my thesis work. And jumped right

\ climbing
through all the patterns of striving for recognition and abiesrR
up the ladder and so on. Once I had published a paper like that

out
I could have sat/thuyememmx the rest of my life and the fact is that
I would have still had a position and all the rest of it. Though
it would have been unsatisfying in other ways. But a very large
part of the social pressures with respect to many norms of behavior
of productivity and all the rest of it were not operative as external
already

events. Some of us internalize \ and we/azx know how complex

that was, how driven one can be just by that, maybe even more so.
RKM

HZ

RKM

49

But they never had that strong an external reality. Nobody said-
you've got to do this, you've got to do that, or something very
desirable of an external kind won't happen. And to a certain
degree that's been true all of my life. Just during the period
when there would have been the most socialization with respect

—_

; Ing Mm ; L
to discipling wont time, work effectively, if yom don't get that

—_

3 Wouldnt
out in such and such a time weu worntt wget your assistant

professorship.and so forth, I never had to experience that.

I hazard a guess that that's more frequent than one would suppose.
That some, not your extreme example, which makes it all the more
interesting and so clear, but in a way I was fumbling toward

that with regard to Tom Kuhn. If you looked at his publication
pattern, it's the slowest, most long delayed you can imagine.

3

which has to do with his own --
But you don't know how he feels about it.

No, that's what I'm saying, but it's what one would want to know

and I don't know if he'll talk about it. But I'm looking at the

external side of what you were describing, and I'd say, from

the record as far as I know it, there was very little external

pressure on Tom because he was sending out signals, not equivalent
his associates,

to your paper, which was decisive, that/his mentors could have

confidence in. And they relaxed the requirements, and they didn't

ys

Say, get it out, Tom.” As far as I can guess, all that
information I would want to get, corresponding to wat we're getting

here from you. But my conception there is, that in certain
JL

HZ

JL

50

university environments, despite the generic pressure imposed
benevolently by the senior people upon their youngsters: you
need to validate my judgement, you need to confirm it, the
outside world needs to know that you exist - all the rest of
it, that if we had good comparative data, top youngsters in
top universities, are not subject to that in the same way as
the other combinations~-the average ones who need to put out

to have any mapas chance of making +hevt Way .

Well the appreciation of can take the place of
other objective output to some degree. I've ha@ some of my own

students where that was the case certainly, but only so far.

And for so long. And I think it may be that the tolerance level

had been

would have been briefer in biology than it womldbe for Tom Kuhn.

Well in a way, Kuhn's Sanctuary was his teaching rather than his
research role. He could have remained for a very long time in
that teaching function, a position which supported his self-esteem
and so on in many other ways, at least to a considerable degree.
and
He undoubtedly was encouraged/ky the probability of moving in the
direction of research outlet was facilitated - to go back
to our previous discussion ~ by some of the external incentives.
They weren't negative pressures as much as positive ones. The
Guggenheim and the Center thing and so on, because I'm sure that
he perceived that it was not for his teaching that he was going to
those

be given/Hxs carrots even if they were being offered on the promise

rather than the performance. Well, you're raising what is inherently
RKM

JL

51

a statistical question. I think there would be some interest in
pursuing that. To put it a little differently, it has a certain
bearing on the kinds of issues that you're raising in your article
on ageing and so forth, on age parameters as they appear on

scientific careers--

Of course, intersecting that institutional context, organizational
context and the whole debate on publish or perish not only in

the popular arena doesn't formulate the interesting questions,

For which subset is it the case for which it is publish or perish®
How can you then find the occasions where it is certainly not
publish that is involved but it is ability which can take a

variety of forms.

Yes, but the forms are rare. €x You have to work three

times as hard in other ways to make up for publication which we

all know to our distress wouid turn that evaluation around.

A few lousy papers go a long way. Well, I think this Qurshon of
probably be gone

age and so on is something/not to ga@/into in this article but I

think for the book there are some interesting angles there,

Let me say a few more things though about a (fé¢Seareh style and

we're talking about problem choice as well as/going into them.

The next big jump in my research interests - there were gist digressions

like starting in the department of medical genetics, “to

medical teaching, sort of working within the discipline as an

institution, trying to broaden a it and get for it the recognition

and the impact I thought it deserved and so forth, which was
HZ

Ju

Ha

JL

52

incidentally quite important about my coming to Stanford.

almost by accident had the opportunity to start that in Wisconsin
in connection with the medical school, it would not have been

a particularly attractive opportunity here. I don't think the
medical school would have recruited me to be the kind of geneticist
I was until 1955. might have thought about

microbiology--
But they would have recruited a biochemist like Korn berg ?

Yes - you krmw need a biochemist to teach biochemistry to medical
students. If you have a geneticist teaching medical students, it's
going to have some bearing on the definition of the discipline.

I conceivably might have been thought of by

his
as a candidate for/xka department. But I guess I would have been
me
a pretty marginal biochemist. But medicine seemed to/m@ the
arena in which there would @® most likely be ‘seme applications.

And you know enough of the rest of my background to know that molechar
ology Was not suddenly invented in the mid 50s but it was coming
home again. Wisconsin was not the most attractive place to be

medical

trying to do it. It's a good second-~rate/ school but it was still

better than your strict agriculturaé school.
What do you mean by second rate?

Tt's a unanimous judgement shared undoubtedly by the people who
are there too. It caters to the requirements of the state of
Wisconsin. It has rather strict residency requirements

and so forth.
53

So the chance to come to a kK place like Stanford wee with this
tremendous vigor It was pretty obvious
even then that Stanford was going to become a major university.
Tt was just on the verge of turning that way. It was quite
irresistable, But again that's not a research interest. Although
it starts draining off time and energy in thinking about a lot
of extra-scientific issues. The next big jump research-wise though
was @robiology. And there, there was part of this very
broad range of concern and interest and you know the fundamental
questions of the origin of 1ie, is there life on other planets
but not focused on a very operational outcome but of course
Sovmte turned that over over night. So here was the
research tool-
here now we have a research tool we didn't have before. There
are things we can do with it that open up new opportunities for
the understanding of some very fundamental questions. The question
of - is there life on other ymdea planets is no longer a theoretical
speculation, You don't need much erudition, or I had whatever
was necessary long since to know that that was an unresolved issue
by terrestrial observation,that it could become an operational
question. An@ that pragmatic note is an element of style. Things
become really interesting when you can kweeeeez can do something
about it being quite bold and saying what that thing is.

im
It isn't the theoretical Heemak/probability of the idea but the
possibility of a cangdblits experiment @ that one can do, which is

the main criterion. If something has not been
54

are
proven to be false yoy/still femme entitled to think about it as

if mm it might be trueg. It it doesn't violate -jm laws of physics
and chemistry and so on. So that was also tied into a political
perspective which Holdame reinforced when I got to see him.
I don't know if I've told you any of this story or not. But anyhow
I have gm it written down somdp lace else for another novel.

But this was near the end of my stay in Melbourne, that Sputnik
arrived. I think it was the 6th of October 1957. We saw it in
Melbourne essentially the day it was launched. It had a southern
nemist}pere lighting trajector and sure enough there it was. I

must have seen it on the second or third revolution and the whole
world thought about it as you very well remember in very different
ways. But I was already thinking about it as maybe there was
something we could do about it to enlarge the scope of biology.

But not with any serious intention of getting into it myself, just
- isn't this interesting now, maybe my grandchildren will have

the opportunity to see this materialize sort of thing. I'd arranged
to return home via India at Hal dame’s invitation - he said stop
over and see us in Calcutta and did so. That turned cut to be

the date of a lunar eclipse and I by these calendars
it was also the anniversary of the October revolution although

it was ™ early November and we were speculating - the Russians

are going to pull another one now - they'll use the occasion to

light up a big red star on the moon that wéll be visible xs forever.
56

Very seriously, somewhat metaphorically but the Haldane ApCculathon

was made seriously - you know - taunting me with that the

communist system really does pay off in the long run, The

mobilization of effort and so on and they're really showing

your friends, the Americans, You may recall he had only recently

emigrated from England with the statement that he chose no longer

to live in an American colony. So we stayed up late that night

to see if it would really happen but we also did some back of the

envelope kind of calculations on what would be required to make

a spot that might be visible from the earth and we concluded that

a large hydrogen bomb explosion might just barely makes And look-

ing carefully with a large telescope you might just manage to see

it in that fashion and we didn't seriously think they would do

that with all the other implications. We sort of shrugged our

shoulders and started w@ discussing some further implications of it

but what was in that discussion was that the whole enterprise

was going to become a political demonstration not a scientific effort.
to decide

And that's why I became sufficiently anxious/to jump into it

myself, I just didn't think many of my fellow scientists were going

to be quick enough to appreciate ~emdme the significance of this

event and that that particua?r thing needed to be forestalled.

That there needed to be an impetus to that program to keep it

from becoming merely a political demonstration, particularly if

you want to do things like introduce a lot of radioactivity on

to the moon or contaminate the moon with bugs and other things

utility
that might carelessly destroy their scientific/ - apart from

diverting them, might irrevocably destroy them. So that's how
RKM

HZ

57

I started a campaign sm on how to get the National Academy organized
Rapti into worrying about hme planetary quarantine and to
setting up a scientific program for the exploration of space and
so forth. This was before NASA itself was in fact wm organized
and so there was enough response to that so that NASA dia get to
be organized and they've been organized ever since
and gradually got pulled into doing something constructive
they would challenge me - they would say - look you've been an
effective critic and it's been very helpful but don't you want
to do something positive in this direction? When I came out
decided to

to STanford I somewhat reluctantly/set up an engineering lab

mz -- Does that tell you about style?

Yes it does. So obvious on the surface is first your kx recurrent
pattern of becoming interested for whatever reason, in the area

of phenomena or events or potentialities but then XE ripening very
swiftly once you encounter a tool, a possibility of doing something
about it. For looking into it empirically, looking into it in

Neurospom
a developmental way. So your sputnik and teicemqcomme are functional

equivalents.

But is that a really accurate portrayal of the sequence? Because
I had the impression from Josh that it sometimes happened that
he really didn't have a pattern of interest but that when he Saw
that there was a procedure available - yom then searched for a

problem to attach it to.
JL

HZ

RKM

JL

58

Yes but then when an issue materializes, I guess I have to say
that's right, I @a&tér@me can organize @a very Efleche effort
and in a pretty short time make things happen. I tried to pick

out the things where that was possible.

And I underscore that, Bob, because at least in our field, there's
a prevailing view that there's something intellectually unrespectable

about being interested in procedures for themselves and I think

it would be worthwhile to ~ emphasize ttus.

Well if you could just dictate a list sometime as swiftly as it
comes to mind - of what's called - whatever your favorite term

is - the tools -

When you get back to NY why don't you get this part of the tape

transcribed?

Well I think that kind of eclectic, pragmatic ‘essmstoeg translation
oscillating back and forth is highly opportunistic.

And it's driven by external events to a very large degree, but I
don't blush about that. That's how I find the most efficient

and resources available yeeeiercseeetkx at a given time. I
don't have any great ideology about what the problems are

I think each generation tee discovers new ones

and that my own role is to work on those things where I can make

that
an impact. { am atways aude, there's an efficiency criterion.
RKM

wu

RKM

JL

59

Why should I muddle around with the stuff that everyone else

is doing? I remember telling me that when I
first started on molecrlar biology. He said - Josh why don't
you get out of molecular bidogy now - you've already made your

impact on it, you'll be one among many and you're wasting your
time relatively there. Newexnawe Nobody

well I never quite did that but

I just want this on the record - whatever else - whenever else -
I want a crack at the style of scientific work
has done - I want to find out what can be formulated in
a more general way about what is generically recognized as an
interesting question. What are the varieties, ways in which
different kinds of scientific output come xnto bexmg or the
variety of ways in which the same kind - you look at outcomes -
and I suspect that the Fone Mo ltay would be the purely descriptive
sort of thing that turn out in biographies of scientists

how “Lonurn ou Pasteur or m&heamt others go about their work

The criteria are not often articulated.

That's what I mean by having a crack at it. That is so intimately

connected with the--

Well it's become somewhat self-conscious Bob. That is I spent some
time trying to discover what my style was - I showed you my note

on that ~ and at this point I actually use that methodology as a
part of my own pattern of discovery about what to do-

It's coming to a head right now. I've been rather concerned about
60

the directions my own lab ought to take for a variety of reasons.
And some of the organizational activity you heard about is connected
with it and for the moment - just among ourselves - my plan now
is to gradually retire from the kind of molecular genetics I've
been doing in favor of ‘Sran Cohen, Tf he comes into the

he
department, can provide that kind of intellectual leadership,
I could really be more efficient by occasionally advising him
than I can by trying to maintain my own program in that area.
And vice versa, one of the main reasons I wanted to stay in that
game over the past 6 or 8 years has not been that I felt
that I could make a distinctive contribution within it but when

I started in DNA splicing I was the only one who really thought

much of the idea but I wanted to have the test bed on which to

—~ @)
examine the evel istic methodology of science in connection
with the descendents of the “Dendral Project and without having

a working laboratory in which we're basing these kinds of issues

every day I didn't feel we could offer enough input that
(?)

research in heuristics of scientific advance and putting

it on the computer that's the other side of the applied

social science we've been talking about. About how to get

science better done. Getting Stan into the dept solved many problems
simultaneously that way, but he can do a better job than I can in
terms of the very vital program in that area, He's cooperative and
interested in computers as well but he's not nearly as distracted

as I am in about 16 other things and a very bright person and he'll

do a better job.
61

So I'm sort of pondering what can I still do in that arena that

follows the stipulations that I just indicated and what can I

do that many others can't afford to do for one reason or another

and so on, And partly as part of the retrospections we talked

about here, partly a theme I've returned to briefly about once

every 10 years is I think we're going to look for the Missing

links in terrestrial life and they've got to be there some place.

All the organisms we know now have DNA, RNA, 20 amino acids

fully developed, the genetic code in full blossom and they must

have of stages in their evolution and the

prevailing doctrine and there's no evidence to the contrary is that
seem to be by the further evolution

of life but can we find some living fossils of an earlier stage

working

of evolutionary development and we're Sipe for more

efficient methods by which that notion could be attacked so here

you see (selective mechanism - HZ) = that's right, some selective

procedures or some thought about what habitats they Might still

be in, so this is kind of bringing Mars back to earth if you like.

And you can see its connection with that tradition. But there the

emphasis you see is on the problem not on the method, I don't have

a method now and I probably won't go into it seriously without

having some insight into some new approach to getting after @m it

- but for instance - about 15 years ago I had the idea that maybe

there were missing links that had only RNA and not DNA and I started

setting up experiments to see if there was a way of finding organisms

that had only RNA. And one thing that had occurred to me was to
HZ

JL

RKM

JL

62

use flotation methods that's ide method to
Capture organisms with an unusually high density.mI didn't
actually get to do that. I had three or four other approaches
which didn't pan out, that was not a high priority kind of
issue in any way at all so Ididn't follow it up. But I have
Norton _

some reinforcement from the fact that Maxkxn Zinder had a
rather similar thought and used a Systematic methodology in

fact to discover RNA phages. He was the first to find that

there were Phages that veese had RNA and not DNA
Ore phages Wt lhe small category of living fossils or not?

No, because they're not free living you see they can only multiply
within other cells. They Saar presumably are eddeys of ke

the complete = cycle DNA RNA protein. And other RNA viruses

have been known for a long time so it's just the fact that these
were bacterie phage RNA that could be isolated by selective
methodology oriented to what you were looking for. We don't really
know where they come from but one is permitted to assume that and
you can't go any further. The only conditions under which they

‘

prolpferate are as parasites in a largef organism.

Well whether you find yourself focusing on a problem first or on
a method, procedure or tool how would you describe, fairly concretely,

your attitude of mind when you consider - what can I do-

Opportunism is more important than the focus on method or problem.
The method provides the Opportunity and so the opportunism can go

to work immediately. Here teh opportunity is the fact that it is
RKM

HZ

RKM

63

an unpopular problem. It's a bold one and it has many of the
at hod

attributes ut- sexuality in bacteria/. It really makes better
sense in terms of the overall evolutionary continuity of life
on earth if such organisms can still be around but merely because
nobody has noticed them so far, there's a prevailing assumption,
keeaete a myth of hopelessness about it but nobody's really looked
and there are still a lot of oxanisms in the existing
catalogue that have never been assayed for what's in them. Ana

variant
there are w“axxaux questions related to it. Why does every organism
have just the same 20 amino acids. Why didn't one innovate a little
bit and substitute amino acid x for existing amino acid y? Well
there are some feeble arguments at this point and I am not very
much convinced by them. So opportunity in this case J gece

of
consists Sm separating the myth from the verified and science 9g i§

full of such things but g these are some of the more important

questions-

Incidentally before I forget I think you should write Roger Hahn.

Did he send you a set of the papers that worms already were put tejeticy

foc€ediuss
Un Hee A ? Get the supplementary papers, particularly the one
by wetl

by @W White (I forget his name) and Dan Sullivan.

It's White, Sullivan and Barboni.

that
It's Barboni, White, Sullivan. And read kakk in terms of their

problem, the relationship between the theorists, what they call
the phenomenologists, and what they call the experimenters in

physics. And they have developed a very nice simple procedure for
JL

RKM

JL

64

trying to gauge the degree of interaction between these types in

the course of develoourg a specially | but as I was listening to you
this afternoon it was reverberating. A second thing to look for,

I don't know, I'll send you the more exact reference or location of
one of the papers I scanned, I don't think it's in te original
volume, but it's one of the other papers, raises many questions,

It may be the Edge paper for that matter - about the notion of
resistance in science - that it's a conceptually for the most part -
resistance - as Bernie Barber identified it - is a conceptual
misconstruction-that what's seen as resistance or simply alternative
perceptions and conceptions = at any rate, it's a useful wm thing

to have sow them raise that question, corresponding to reexamining

one's own -

Has anyone pointed out that you are under obligation to resist?

That even if you are persuaded by an argument that you ought to

put on the role of not believing it?

Yes, that's organized skepticism. Except you put it in a form
that you might be able to - in fact we can use - that's what we
should do - when we get into really hot water in this effort to
formulate the norms in this national survey - in forms that will
avoid responses in ideological terms which are meaningless and
in irrelevant terms, To find something that's cuts close to the

bone of every day attitudes and such,

I had thought Hus ioja little bit different organized skepticisn.

vg n
I thought that a te skeptical attitude was inclucated and that ese thong,
RKM

JL

HZ
gL
HZ
RKM

JL

Rig

65
e
was reinforchent for being nasty and hostile,

No, for doubting, systematic doubt-

I'm talking about the posture of doubt. One should apply this

to oneself. One knows that it's very difficult to do that and
after a while you become persuaded by your own arguments
and therefore you should expose it to others.,who don't have

those attached commitments and are able to adopt that posture
without as much internal conflict, and have ended that position
that they may in fact teamwme preferswm-- But why do people write
about Mirsky the way they do and pan him, every commentator about

the Mirsky-Avery relationship makes a demon out of him anda fool.
Did Avery perceive him as a demon? I should think not.

It's very hard to say. Avery never expressed himself.

But in the papers he is very careful to give the Mirsky line its due.
Is that the way they perceived him back then - perceived Mirsky.

Well I guess my perception is a little different from others because
Io was imbued with this imperative of skepticism somewhat more deeply
than some of my colleagues and I agreed with Mirsky longer than most.
In fact I sometimes articulated very similar positions. So I'm

not a fair test on that point.

No, I didn't mean you, I meant the attacks on Mirsky - when do they
‘

occur! Are they retrospective attacks.
JL

RKM

JL

AKM

JL

66
Mostly retrospective.
So it's a it's an interpretation.

Exactly. But all the as careful to avoid that
as I mm would like. Only the fact that he was Wrong @SXkBKaAXXUXKE
is totally irrelevant. tt seemed a little irritating at a point
when everybody wanted to believe that the philosopher's stone had
in fact been crystallized, this person was raising what + still
are Mac Me Car ey i)
to my view/a factually correct criticisms. And Martin Zinger and
said yes I guess we have to agree, number is
and that is a very large number. That's the scope of
how many molecules of impurity you could sneak into a preparation
that was 99.999% pure and they would there's
no way we can make this stuff any purer. And then Mirsky and
I would pop up mm - yes we understand that but that -901% could
still have that information we're talking about and we need some
other evidence. And they 8" would come back week operationally-
what do you want us to do about it that would settle it? And spore
they were in a little bit of a dilemma because we were not able to

Sugqest Ovwse! experiments on it.

Did you assume that the critic should be in a position to propose

the needed experiment, to show its feasibility or withhold

No. But it would have been better if one could I think, The
critic who really criticizes and doesn't make more constructive
suggestions is being a little bit irresponsible, at least after

Cutie
the x=ttenmth time or so
RKM

JL

HZ

JL

67
So that's a normative evaluation whether it's shared or not.

Well things hadn't really quite gotten to that point. The DNA
could be was See one of the problems
is ;
wax that pneumococcus assay is very crude and therefore for quantitative
Measurements of the amount of the magic material were rather poor.
I would have been content if they could have shown that

reached an in terms of the specific
activity of your material, that further purifications dedicated to
removing the last traces of protein no longer even changed the
relevant activity. And I didn't feel that ther methods of
assay were good enough to be able to make that statement.
There were other fussy experiments about mixing things together
and removing the protein again, which were more or less dedicated
to the same thing. You could add miscellaneous protein to the
System, remove it again, hope that that would remove at least a

portion of the magic protein in question, and then you should have

a lower specific activity.
Does this protein have an attractive quality for its like kind?

It should,you expect one protein to be able to displace another
one that was net an equal part of the molecule. Eventually we had
other approaches. had completely homogeneous DNA populations

as we have today, those questions are far less cogentthan they
were at that time. fractionate that DNA molecule that
was doing something from a different DNA molecule and show that

the DNA was different. I guess in a sense that was first done in
68

our lab. That was the first things we did when I came to Stanford
and did his PhD thesis on it - the fractionation of
DNA, so that different DNA had different genetic activity. And
since the fractionation was oriented to the DNA and not to the
protein, it would have been a remarkable claim that the protein
followed through that step the things we were to the
DNA down to that level of specificity. So that was a constructive
response to that issue that was already 1960, 1961, but
something was still festering, but with all of our confidence about
the role of DNA,we hadn't really gotten our hands on it

issues of resistance have
more to do with the post history of recombination kkan and while
we can possibly touch on it very briefly I don't think we should

enlarge on that at the present time.

Well I do have a bunch of papers to share with you and Harriet

I would like - if you could take an hour over in my office to

just review some similar Chie ak rt la fre)