The Rockefeller Foundation's molecular vision of life and the origins of molecular biology

Abstract

The following paper will briefly present the lines of research of some of the most influential scientists in the nascent field of molecular biology during the 1920s through the 1940s, all recipients of Rockefeller Foundation funding. The Rockefeller Foundation was motivated by the conviction that complex biological processes had to be reduced to a physicochemical level of description in order to be intervened upon and controlled.

These works represent some of the links necessary to establish the conditions for the fundamental problems of life to begin to be thought of in terms of information transmission and not only in structural terms, especially Delbrück's studies. Given the intimate relations between the Rockefeller Foundation and the American military institutions, the discourse of communication sciences, computer technologies, control and espionage, usual in the context of the Second War and subsequent Cold War, was one of the causes that led researchers in biological sciences to visualize genes as carriers and transmitters of information. This new conceptual framework was able to reinterpret earlier experiments in these terms, such as those of Beadle and Stanley, and increasingly led to a reconsideration of the role of DNA in life processes. 

Finally, this new discursive formation on life processes reveals, we believe, some links that can be established between the construction of knowledge and the institutions that produce it.