In August 1945 the atom bomb burst into the world's consciousness with the spec­tacular annihilation first of Hiroshima, then, three days later, of Nagasaki. Ameri­can physicists realized that they had "known sin", as Oppenheimer put it, when they appreciated what their creation signified not just for its Japanese casualties but for humanity as a whole. Motivated by a sense of responsibility and indeed in some cases of remorse, the "atomic scientists" organized a large sector of the American scientific community into a movement to lessen the danger of further nuclear war­fare by promoting international arms control and opposing a military monopoly on nuclear research. [1] The scientists' movement was not greatly successful in these ef­forts and by the end of the 1940s fear of nuclear annihilation merged with fear of Communism to launch the Cold War irretrievably on its way. This story is well known, as is the postwar flux of a number of physical scientists out of atomic re­search and into the life sciences, for reasons ranging from exclusion on grounds of national security to distaste for the new corporate atmosphere in physics that the Manhattan Project had helped engender. 2 A new physics of life must have seemed an attractive alternative to that of death, to the atomic scientists and their sympa­thizers. Something called "biophysics", an interdisciplinary field of life science prominently featuring advanced physical instrumentation, was soon all the rage, both for them and for a general public anxious to compensate for the fearsome Bomb by discovering a biomedical silver lining in the mushroom cloud that men­aced life everywhere. The central purpose of the present essay is to recover histori­cally this science as it was then conceived (a science cognate to no discipline of today), and to show that biophysics boomed in America immediately after the war as the national reaction to the Bomb suddenly placed a new physics of life at the top of the cultural agenda. The essay also sketches the prewar roots of mid-century biophysics, and suggests what ultimately became of the postwar biophysics boom. This boom, or as I will call it, the "Biophysics Bubble" (on the model of investment manias such as the South Sea Bubble of eighteenth-century England),3 deserves to be better appreciated for our comprehension of the origins and configuration of today's life sciences. 

This essay is in part a reappraisal of one of the most heavily studied issues in the history of life science, namely the role of physicists in the foundation of current 'molecular biology'. The standard view holds that after the war a small band of cocky ex-physicists almost singlehandedly overthrew traditional biology and founded that triumphant molecular life science which we know today.4 My goal here is not refutation but a double recontextualization. On the one hand, I argue that there was a large scale cultural force that propelled physics and physicists into biology in the postwar period; i.e. physics was effectively pushed together with life science by an America anxious to make the atom serve life.5 This is in addition to the oft-cited persona] factors moving physicists out of the weapons labs and into a not-necessarily­welcoming biology, aided (as Evelyn Fox Keller has argued) by the higher status accorded by society to the physical sciences in the aftermath of the 'physicists war', and abetted (as PninaAbir-Am especially has emphasized) by years of uncritically generous patronage from Warren Weaver's interwar Rockefeller Foundation pro­gram in the physical and chemical reform of the life sciences.6 On the other hand, I want to show that this global push interacted with a local pull within life science. This pull was located in the marginal but preexistent field already known as "bio­physics" or alternatively "general physiology", whose practitioners took in some of the physicist newcomers and, more eagerly, utilized the new attention and resources showered upon them in efforts to expand and institutionalize their enterprise as a full-fledged academic discipline. All of this is not to deny that the former physicists in early 'molecular biology' may have played what Donald Fleming called a "key role in the process by which unfashionable ambitions were stirred up again" 􀀪 ambitions to explain the secret of life.7 Nor is it to disagree with Fox Keller's argu­ment that physics provided something "of considerably greater import for the suc­cess of molecular biology than any particular skills: namely social authority and social authorization". 8 But neither the enthusiasm and high status of scientists trained in physics, nor their talent and brilliance can adequately explain the extraordinary postwar blossoming of biophysics to which newcomers from physical sciences con­tributed. The standard spotlight on the physicist newcomers has tended implicitly to overstress their role. Figuratively speaking, the point is that even if physicists stormed the citadel of life science (and this would be putting it too strongly), they were urged on by surrounding throngs, and the gates were opened by confederates within. 

This view helps explain why nothing clearly related to physics succeeded to the biological throne, for one needs to look to beyond any physical vanguard to the biological confederates in order to explain subsequent events. Certainly, the flavour of the life science that emerged (when, as Erwin Chargaff put it, "the wheels and gears and the pulleys, the fuel, the lubricants, the templates and so on ... won its shallow victory") was much less like what Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born 1906) had in mind- one of the few physicists who actually traded an established career in that science for one in biology -than what the acolytes of the hyper-mechanistic Jacques Loeb, a found­ing father of American general physiology-cum-biophysics, had been hawking for years.9 The revolution in life science was overdetermined, then, and largely orchestrated by biophysicists who had started work as life scientists before the end of the Second World War, not by intruders from the physical sciences, So, what then does this account of the mid-century Biophysics Bubble mean for the history of 'molecular biology'? This question is complicated because "molecular biology" was a less common synonym for "biophysics" in the postwar period, but it has since come to mean something rather different. Furthermore, as Richard Burian (and Gunther Stent before him) have pointed out, "molecular biology" has come to sig­nify not a single coherent discipline, but that general style of science that seeks biological explanations in terms of molecules. However, the term is sometimes used synonymously with "molecular genetics" - the well-defined discipline treating the molecular basis of biological information, and the central one within 'molecu­lar biology' today, Moreover, the changing connotation of"molecular biology" since the l 960s has been further confused by attempts to legitimate various controversial definitions of that science, as has the historiography of the origins of 'molecular biology', 10 In an effort to avoid anachronistic distortions I will generally employ the mid-century usage, and indicate with inverted commas when employing the present usage of this term That said, I am proposing that some of the fields of knowledge that flourished together as biophysics (and were nearly fixed thus as a discipline) in the immediate postwar period, including molecular genetics, later were recast as 'molecular biology', The Biophysics Bubble set the stage for subse­quent developments not only by giving some physicists an entree to biology but also, more importantly, by laying the technical, intellectual, and institutional foun­dations for later 'molecular biology', as biophysics research programs, departments and personnel were recycled in departments under that more current rubric from the 1960s onward.

The argument will take the following form, In Section 1, I shall illustrate the American cultural push for a new physics of life in the popular media and in the scientific community as a whole, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, I shall also introduce the biophysics that existed up to 1945, In Section 2, I shall show how, at a number of the sites where biophysics grew in the later 1940s, the Bomb played a powerful role in the local discipline-building strategies of life scientists. These vignettes of local politics are archive-based case studies barely detailed enough to bring out the particularities of each institutional situation; they are only meant to serve as examples of the sort of thing presumably found behind the scenes at all or most institutions where biophysics flourished after the war. (No doubt a broader study would make for a richer story about the impact of the cultural reaction to the Bomb on intellectual politics, but there is no reason to think that the half-dozen American sites discussed are a poor basis for generalization. The situa­tion in Britain is probably similar,ll and perhaps in other countries also, but an international comparison lies beyond the present scope,) In Section 3, I shall out­line some of the discipline-building activity in biophysics as it attained the national scale in the middle 1950s, Though a detailed analysis of the ultimate fate of bio­physics also lies beyond the scope of the present work, to conclude I shall offer some thoughts about why these discipline-building activites did not realize their envisaged goals; in particular I suggest the eventual breakup of biophysics may have been linked through a complex ecology or economy of knowledge to the fate of physical chemistry in biochemistry depaitments. Because the story I want to tell treats continuities in authority and gradual change in biological research practices, modulated by politics at many levels, this essay deals not only with scientific poli­tics and publicity but also in some detail with the ideas and experimental opportu­nities constituting biophysics research programs, and thus attempts to link 'internal' and 'external' accounts. 

One last historiographic preliminary is perhaps also jn order. Since I seek a fresh approach to an old story and, as Robert Olby has pointed out, more than enough history has taken as its starting point the 1966 Festschrift for Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born 1906) (a work plainly designed to build a foundational myth for today's 'molecular biology' that gives Delbrück's circle the pride of place it is granted on the standard view), 12 I will refrain from relying much on this source. However great the achievements of a few former physicists in biology (and whether or not they are regarded as heroic), these deeds must be viewed in their larger cultural context for an adequate historical understanding. 

1. BIOPHYSICS AT THE DAWN or THE ATOMIC ERA

(1.a) Popular Perceptions and Scientific Enthusiasms

In the autumn 1945, the mass media in America stunned the public with wrenching stories of destruction and death wrought by the Bomb in Japan, through the power­ful journalism by some of the physicists themselves, by John Richard Hersey (born 1914), and by a number of less memorable writers. Almost instantaneously, despite its monopoly on nuclear technology, America visualized the Bomb as threat, and lurid images of Chicago and New York after atom strikes were splashed about. The "nuclear fear" so ably described in recent work by the historians Spencer Weart and Paul Boyer had already begun.13 The first official reports from the medical and scientific forays into Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the military, describing the wierd and agoniz­ing maladies of bomb survivors, did little to dispel the shock. For insta11ce, "Death by gamma ray" was a Time headline dealing with such reports on how the bombs had killed thousands in Japan, while a popular science outlet was no less graphic with "A-Bomb radiation sickness: Jap victims suffered sickness similar to that seen in patients who get sick fo1Iowing massive doses of X-ray or radium". Amidst de­scriptions of bloody diarrhea, teeth loosened and easily removed by hand, bizarre skin growths, and the menace of monster babies in generations unborn, there were weak bromides, such as the finding that X-ray films attached to the bodies of atomic victims proved these patients were not a radioactive threat to others, and that there would be no demonstrably greater incidence of monstrosities in the first generation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki babies (although according to genetic theory an in­crease should not appear until later generations).14 The medical outlook did not grow rosier after 1947, with the new emphasis on hidden hereditary damage and the concomitant prospect of impending "genetic death" of the whole human race, pro­moted by geneticist H.J. MuHer with the backing of activist atomic scientists.15 

The Bikini bomb tests of July 1946, in which a variety of animals were distrib­uted in ships around a blast area in a Pacific atoll to assess the deadliness of several different modes of atomic attack, received great publicity, The plucky "Pig 3 I l ", found apparently unharmed after somehow escaping a ship near ground zero of the Able (i,e. first) blast, briefly became a household celebrity.16 But mascots and novel swimwear notwithstanding, the results of Bikini included little to be cheerful about. "One result of an all-out atom-bomb war might be to leave a world populated by rats and insects" because of the high radiation resistance of these creatures, a mili­tary scientist at Bikini was reported to have said. 17 The Able bomb, an effort to replicate and assess the medium-altitude Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, helped confirm and fill in gaps in the data gathered in Japan, while the Baker device, set off underwater, gave new grounds for fear when the results were made public. Lzfe magazine's 13-page story, "What science learned from Bikini", released the bad news that Pig 311 had been sterilized by Able, 18 and featured bloody images of the diseased organs from freshly dissected experimental animals. The piece finished with a contribution from [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)], the chief medical officer for the Army at Alamogordo and for the Joint Chiefs at Bikini. 19 Warren informed readers that the Able test confirmed that for all their power, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts produced "only momentary" destruction after which "the radioactive elements pro­duced by fission shot into the air with the speed of a rifle bullet and dissipated by high winds". On the other hand, the intermingling of radioactive elements with seawater in the Baker test produced "a solid wall of contamination" in the huge area that was soaked with "poisonous radioactive spray ... [which] penetrates ever crev­ice". "[W]hat might have happened if Bikini had been a populous harbor with a wind blowing in from the sea", speculated Warren, would inevitably have been death of most of the population by radiation poisoning. In the Reader's digest ver­sion, Warren's speculation on Baker in a harbour was summarized in plain words, leaving fittingly less to the reader's imagination. "If such a bomb were dropped on New York's Battery in a stiff south wind, 2,000,000 people would be killed."211 Apait from the obvious moral that being atom-bombed was a very bad thing, the subtle public lesson of Bikini seems to have been that America dropped the Bomb on Japan as humanely as possible. (This implication was not so muted in the Septem­ber 1945 survey of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also organized by Warren, whose mis­sion - as informally understood by its participants􀈂 was "to prove that there was no radioactivity" in the cities, in response to Japan's charges that the Bomb violated international conventions of war.21) Warren, as we shall see, was finishing with his role as handmaiden to General Groves, the Army's Manhattan Project chieftain. 

All of these mounting atomic menaces to life were counter-balanced not only by somewhat sensationalist claims that the Bomb would bring equally astounding tech­nological and medical spin-offs to humanity virtually overnight,22 but also by  measured efforts from members of the scientific establishment to advertise the at­om's biomedical benefits. In a long piece for Atlantic magazine of January 1946, the MIT physicist Robley Evans (a leading prewar authority on radium hazards) declared that "the sober truth is that fhrough medical advances alone, atomic energy has already saved more lives than were snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki", a thought fhat must have been comforting to people contemplating their role in bring­ing fhe Bomb into existence. Evans justified this claim by explaining how blood cells labelled with radioisotopes had helped in testing fhe whole blood preserva­tives successfully developed during the war, how radioactive iodine was proving useful in treating some thyroid tumors, and how studies of metabolism using radio­isotopes promised to revolutionize physiology and biochemistry. 23 There were nu­merous other articles making the same point with the same three examples (which soon must have come to seem hackneyed): blood studies, fhyroid radiotherapy, and imminent metabolic studies. 24 When would the atom's biomedical panacea be more fully realized? The principle bottleneck, Evans had concluded, is "the problem of personnel". "There is a need for a number of hybrid Ph.D.s who can bridge the gap between physics and the other scientific fields", like biology and medicine, which could make the atom serve constructive ends.25 

Evans's call for a new breed of biomedical scientist with grounding in modern physics was by no means idiosyncratic. There was a series of national radio broad­casts organized by Wan-en Weaver, in which eminent scientists were given a p]at­form to discuss their work and their opinions on policy during the intermission of the popular New York Philharmonic broadcasts on Sunday afternoons. In Decem­ber 1945 the chemist James Franck of fhe Manhattan Project spoke on "Medical benefits of atomic energy", in which he voiced his confidence that the "the con­structive aspect of the Atomic Age" would soon blossom ("provided we keep scien­tific progress from being stifled by considerations of milita,y security").After trotting out the wonders of isotopes in much the same way as Evans, Franck concluded with upbeat assertions that "the new sources of atomic energy offer so many opportuni­ties for advance that we are now facing the dawn of a new era in chemistry and biology".26 [[Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)]]'s 1946 Philharmonic talk, "Atomic energy and medi­cine", recited the same exemplary benefits, and described the field that would de­velop fhem. "In medical schools there is gradually developing a new branch of biophysics. To a great extent, biophysics rests on the development of instruments - for example, X-ray spectrographs, electron microscopes, cyclotrons, and the like .... The applications are so promising that, in my opinion, the main emphasis in preclinical and clinical research will soon be in biophysics."27 Warren had more in mind fhanjust isotopes. So did Francis Schmitt of MIT, introduced by Weaver as a leader in "the very modem field known as molecular biology" (thus illustrating the identity of that field and biophysics at the time). Schmitt made his 1946 talk a showcase for his own group's extensive accomplishments in "biophysical research" on tissue microstructure, by means of electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and polarized light. He concluded with what might be read as a soft reprimand to the Bomb physicists: if as much suppoit were devoted to work on the living cell as had been given the atom, Schmitt said, "the results might prove highly salutary from the human point of view".28 By implication, atomic research was not salutary. But whether biophysics was represented as a spin-off from or as an alternative to the physics of death, the conclusion that the field ought to have a high priority was the same. 

For the scientific community, especially in the United States, 1946 was the annus mirabilis of biophysics. The elite life scientists of New York's Harvey Society launched the year with a lecture by Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born 1906), who introduced his bacteriophages by explaining how remarkable their properties seemed to an 'imaginaiy' atomic physicist studying with Nils Bohr. Delbrück's talk was back-to-back with one by [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)], a description of death by radiation in Nagasaki." In April there was a special symposium, "The philosophy of biophysics", at the American Asso­ciation for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in St Louis.3(> In Novem­ber, the Ninth Washington Conference in Theoretical Physics was devoted to "The physics of living matter", and it brought together some of the most distinguished atomic scientists — not only Nils Bohr, John von Neumann, and young Edward Teller, but also Bomb-makers turned biophysics enthusiasts Dr. Leo Szilárd (born 1898), George Garnow, and Franck — with what must be counted, by virtue of their very invita­tion, as some of leading biophysics practitioners. These latter included the plant virologist Wendell Stanley, the geneticists Milislav Demerec and George Beadle, the ultracentrifugist Jesse Beams (with a foot in both camps, having done uranium separation during the war), Schmitt, and of course Delbrück, who was known to many of the physicists. 31 Though a detailed account of the proceedings seems to be unavailable, there was no doubt much discussion of SchrOdinger's wartime book What is life', then a best-seller among physicists, which drew attention to biologi­cal problems that might prove worthy of their efforts.32 The year was concluded with Nobel prizes in both Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine going to Ameri­cans for biophysical work. Wendell Stanley shared the Chemistry prize for crystal­lizing the gene-like viruses (assumed to be giant enzymes) and thus showing that these key components of living things could be studied by the same methods as other physical substances.33 And H.J. Muller won the life science prize for demon­strating that radiation could cause genetic alterations, thus opening the way to ge­netic engineering- and also to the study of the atom's genetic impact, the politically controversial topic on which Muller expanded in his acceptance speech. 34 Biophys­ics took a long step into the arena of national science policy when, in the early 194 7 budget hearings on appropriations for the newborn Atomic Energy Commission, against the AEC's wishes a portion of the agency's giant budget was earmarked for biomedical research on the grounds that it was unseemly for America to be spend­ing so much on the atom merely, in the words of one Congressman, "to perfect an instrumentality for killing people". 35 

(1.b) Preexistent Biophysics: The State of the Art

On I September 1945, the Manhattan Project physicist Samuel Allison fired the first salvo in the atomic scientists' campaign against military control and secrecy in physics research. Calling Nagasaki a "tragedy" at a meeting with the press, he threat­ened that if physicists were not alJowed freely to communicate and to involve them­selves with the application of their results, they would leave atomic research and devote themselves to studying the colours of butterfly wings.36 However facetious Allison's tone may have seemed to listeners fixated on the atom, he was referring to the fairly well-publicized wartime accomplishment of the biophysicist Thomas F. Anderson, who with the zoologist A. Glenn Richards and the support of RCA labs had used an electron microscope to show that the colours in butterfly wings were caused by optical inte1ference effects from a minute grating-like structure in the organism. 37 Mockery would not have befitted the occasion of his speech, the an­nouncement of the formation of the University of Chicago's Research Institutes, since this institution would include the Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics alongside the Institute of Nuclear Science that Allison had been chosen to head; indeed, as noted below, the physics research in Allison's division was to be heavily subsidized by donors expecting biomedical dividends.38 Biophysics in 1945 was a going concern and one which, as we have already seen, was now expected to be­come the wellspring from which lifesaving benefits of atomic research would emerge. A long I 940 review by John Loofbourow, a member of the biophysics unit at MIT discussed below, provides a convenient analysis of the definition and state of biophysics in the early 1940s. This review notes that some confusion sunounded the meaning of "biophysics" because the term fo1merly applied mainly to the field concerned with the physics of living organisms (such as nerve electrophysiology), while recently it applied more to that concerned with "development and application of new physical methods of experimentation, or with the study of biologic effects of physical agents, than with ... physical principles at work in the living organism".39 Loofbourow suggested that the definition of 'biophysics' ought to be enlarged to include all three areas: the physics of life, the use of physical methods used to study biological systems, and the physical intervention in life processes. Categories of research that Loofbourow singled out as especially interesting and active included: the use of radioactive and heavy isotopes to trace metabolism; X-ray and electron diffraction studies of st1ucture in protein and other complex biological molecules; spectroscopic work both for deciphering structures of complex biological molecules, and for identifying and locating molecules in biological specimens; ultracentrifuge work to purify and to study the structure of biological macromolecules (particu­larly proteins and that most exciting class of"nucleoproteins", the self-replicating viruses); ultraviolet and electron microscopy for studying fine-scale achitecture of living things; tissue culture and micromanometric techniques for cellular physiol­ogy; novel electrophysiological methods; and biomathematics. Though biophysics tended to be defined thus - by its methods rather than its subject matter - the interwar biophysicists charcteristically would work on simple organisms such as viruses, or simplified systems extracted in pure form from higher organisms, such as red blood cell membranes or wool protein. They unquestionably were, in gen­eral, enthusiasts for high-technology instrumentation such as spectroscopes, polarimeters, X-ray diffraction gear, electron microscopes (when they appeared around 1940), and those inventions of the Swedish colloid chemists, electrophore­sis ligs and ultracentrifuges. 

In addition to medical physiology and radiology, and the tradition of nerve and muscle research oliginating from late nineteenth-century electrophysiology in Eng­land and continental Europe, much of American biophysics can be traced back to the field of general physiology founded above all by the iconoclastic Jacques Loeb in the 'teens and 1920s.40 General physiologists had trouble laying claim to a defi­nite niche in the interwar period, squeezed as they were between the neighboming fields of medical physiology and biochemistry, and used 'biophysics' as a synonym for their field when it would help them avoid friction with mainstream physiolo­gists (as when the Loeb protege Selig Hecht was appointed as "biophysicist" at Columbia in 1925).41 In the later 1930s and into the 1940s, Warren Weaver had generously supported general physiologists, whose promotion of biological appli­cations of the methods of physics and chemistry had closely fitted the mission of his Rockefeller Foundation program in "vital processes" .42 At the end of the war the two most highly regarded sites for biophysics were probably the Biology Depart­ment of MIT, where Schmitt had an active program investigating the composition and microstructure of nerve and muscle, and Caltech, where Linus Pauling's Chem­istry Division had a large program in the physical chemist:Iy of proteins, while in the Caltech Biology Division some of the classical geneticists were studying radia­tion effects.43 In addition, biophysics was ensconced in a few medical research in­stitutions, such as the Eldridge Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, headed by Detlev Bronk before he became president of Johns Hopkins in 1949 and then of the Rockefeller Institute in 1953. (Bronk also became president of the National Academy of Sciences in 1950. That a biophysicist should achieve such heights at this moment may represent still another signal of the field's ascendency.) In this sort of medical context experiments on the biological effects of radiation, important in radiology and radiotherapy, tended to rank at least as high as macromolecules on the biophysics research agenda. 

Biophysics was thus an established, albeit variegated and somewhat marginal, scientific field in August 1945, and its rapid growth in the post-Hiroshima America was intimately linked to the Bomb in a variety of ways. Before discussing particu­lar local contexts for the growth of biophysics, however, a few more words on the general postwar environment for science are necessary. Even in 1944 it was ac­knowledged in the highest Washington circles that the U.S. government's success­ful wartime patronage of science ought to be continued into the peace.44 By the end of the war science's stature in America had increased tremendously, not just tbJ.·ough spectacular new armaments like the Bomb, but also through miraculous penicillin and sulfa drugs. Though debate on the proper form of a National Science Founda­tion (NSF) wore on from 1945 to 1950, m,d from 1951 to 1957 the NSF had little money to spend, biomedical researchers did not have to wait until Sputnik for a massive infusion of government funding. To some extent the Office of Naval Re­search (ONR), initially founded to tap civilian scientific talent for atomic research and development within the Navy, played the NSF's part while national science policy was still being developed." Biophysics was a high priority for the ONR, perhaps even a craze, despite the agency's lack of information about the field- at least if this early 1947 plea for help from George Gamow to his biophysicist friend Stanley is any indication: 

There seems to be an epidemic among the physicists, '"'maladia biologica" you may call it.... The Office of Naval Research (in which I am a consultant in physics section) spends, as you may have heard, millions of dollars on pure research .... [My] division became interested in "aperiodic crystals"* [the foot note reads: "* in the sense of Schrodinger's 'What is Life?"'], or in plain lan­guage, genes and viruses. So they want to smend [sic] money on subsidising research in this direction on very broad lines. On the lines of physics and biol­ogy colloboration [sic] of course. The moral: may I and Mr. Mackenzi (in charge of ONR's solid state) come ... to talk to you about the way to spend few hundred thousand dollars? It isn't joke, it is serious !46 

The ONR did give substantial supp01t to biophysicists, for exmnple funding Schmitt's investigations into the molecular structure of nerve protoplasm throughout the  1950s.47 Even more important were the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose massive postwar growth mirrored, in the war against disease,America's burgeoning military research establishment. The NIH budget grew from $3 million in fiscal year 1946, to $8 million in 1947 (the year it assumed remaining wartime medical research contracts), to $26 million in 1948, to $52 million in 1949. Thus in these four years government patronage of biomedical research, through the NIH alone, had swelled from about half of what private philanthropies had been providing to an order of magnitude greater. The political impetus behind making American medi­cine more scientifically and technologically sophisticated was so great that - it was widely acknowledged in the late 1940s - there were not enough qualified researchers to spend the money on. 48 All this money meant that recently invented high-technology instrumentation, particularly the ultracentrifuge, electrophoresis apparatus, and electron microscope that were favourites of biophysicists, could be mass produced and sold. Of course, in this super-enriched environment established biophysicists, along with most other biomedical scientists with any reputation, had little trouble obtaining funding. But even against this background, biophysics seems to stand out as an especially favoured field (and any doubts on this score will hope­fully diminish after consideration of all the activity in biophysics recounted below). The NIH established several of its own biophysics units in Bethesda immediately after the war and, as will be discussed, in 1955 officially established a new Biophysics extramural study section, which soon took over grant review tasks for the ONR's projects in biophysics as well. 

2. THE POSTWAR GROWTH OF BIOPHYSICS PROGRAMS 

(2.a) Manhattan Project People at Chicago's Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics

In the case of the University of Chicago, biophysics was represented as an out­growth of Bomb physics, yet at the same time an antidote to it. At the end of the war the University, the site of strongest resistance to military domination within the Manhattan project, established its Research Institutes with the express goal of ex­ploiting the atom's peacetime uses through unfettered science. The three Institutes - the Institute of Nuclear Studies, the Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics, and the Institute for the Study of Metals - correspond to three of the four divisions (Physics, Health, and Chemistry) in the Manhattan Project's Chicago organization, known as the Met Lab." A typical piece of publicity captures the self-image of the Research Institutes.

The Institutes ... stem from the United States atomic bomb work, then known as the Mahattan Project, which was centered at the University of Chicago during World War IL Reluctant to disband the team of brilliant scientists who pro­duced the first nuclear chain reaction, the University organized its $12-million Institutes three days after the first atomic bomb was dropped. Their purpose: peacetime research in basic physics, chemisliy, and biology for the benefit of all mankind. 50 

The Institute for Radiobiology and Biophysics in the late 1940s was directed by Ray Zirkle, a plant biologist who had headed the radiobiology group in the Met Lab under Kenneth Cole, chief of the biophysics research section of the Met Lab's Health Division. Counting Zirkle, there were five full faculty-level appointments in Bio­physics, including Cole, John E. Rose, who had studied radiation pathology at the Manhattan Project's Oak Ridge facility, and of course former Bomb physicist Dr. Leo Szilárd (born 1898) (who was studying bacterial viruses with a research associate at the Institute, Aaron Novick, a former Bomb radiochemist).51 In addition to the five, there was James Franck, who as emeritus professor of Physical Chemistry was pursuing a second career as experimental biologist in the Institute. There were also affiliated reseachers with medical faculty co-appointments, such as the Met Lab radiation safety doctor Austin Brues; faculty with co-appointments in a life science depart­ment, such as the zoologist Robert D. Boche, who had done uranium toxicity and other radiobiology research for the Manhattan Project in Rochester; faculty with co-appointments in a physical science department, such as the instrument designer Robert Moon, who had worked on radiation detectors at the Manhattan Project's Chicago and Oak Ridge facilities; plus numerous postdoctoral fellows and junior research associates. 52 Many of these people were active in the scientists' movement, and there was an unusually high concentration of former physical scientists who had moved into biology after the war. But even at the Chicago Institute for Radiobi­ology and Biophysics, the majority of staff biophysicists had started doing bio­medical research before they joined the Manhattan Project. 

In a bold experiment in financing big science without government contracts -for it was initially feared that these would perpetuate military domination of re­search the Institutes were to be funded by subscriptions from industrial spon­sors, in exchange for access to the Institute scientists as consultants, and for frequent updates on the new applications of the atom to their fields. To assemble the initial capital for the foundation of the Institutes, the University mounted a massive fund­raising drive whose principal theme was that the basic research at the Institutes would lead to medical breakthroughs; billboard slogans like "Tum atomic power on cancer" communicated the campaign's message with great success. Most of the cancer money was used to build accelerators for the physicists. Thus, in the absence of military patronage, postwar physics had to pursue biomedical rather than weap­ons dollars.53 The Research Institutes did not remain free of government funding for long; indeed it took a 1947 ONR grant of nearly $1 million to build the main accelerator. Though the Metals work had enough industrial utility to maintain healthy subscription figures, in general the industrial sponsorship faded rapidly after the first flush of atomic enthusiasm, and the scientists in Nuclear Studies and also Bio­physics soon had to turn for ongoing support to the same government granting agencies as their colleagues elsewhere. 54 Franck's research on photosynthesis, for instance, was funded by the ONR from 1950.55 

By the early 1950s Cole had left for the NIH, and many of the Radiobiology and Biophysics medical researchers had migrated to the new Argonne Cancer Research Hospital unit, built at the University of Chicago's medical school with AEC fund­ing,56 and to other hospital posts. Doctorate degrees in Biophysics were being granted for research at the Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics under the auspices of the Committee on Biophysics, which included the ranking biology researchers at the Institute and regular members of life science departments. Zirkle and the Anatomy professor William Bloom had a group using microbeams of particles from a cyclo­tron to irradiate selected areas of living cells, studying in particular the mechanism of cell division and the influence of radiation upon it. Franck, with the biochemist Hans Gaffron, ran a group studying electron traffic and chemical kinetics in photo­synthesis, utilizing highly sensitive photometric and spectroscopic apparatus and an oxygen microgauge of Franck's design. Their long-range goal - at least as stated in grant applications - was to understand how plants accumulate solar en­ergy, and then to reproduce that process in a test tube, as "a prerequisite to the success of the still more remote artificial process" which would hopefully make solar power technologically feasible.  Dr. Leo Szilárd (born 1898) and Novick developed the chemostat, a device in which bacterial cultures could be grown indefinitely at a fixed rate and population density, and they were using it to measure the influence of ultraviolet light and "radio-mimetic" chemical mutagens on mutation rates, and also the effects of a class of chemicals that they believed acted as anti-mutagens (which pointed in the direction of anti-radiation drugs). Moon was trying to develop a scanning X-ray microscope and three-dimensional imaging system suitable for clinical use. 57 If the scientific production of the Institute ofRadiobiology and Biophysics seems in ret­rospect offbeat and for the most part unimpressive, perhaps one can attribute this to the relatively large numbers of former physical scientists involved in biology, or to the especially innovative research programs pursued there (as opposed to programs more continuous with prewar biophysics), or to overly strenuous efforts of Institute researchers to achieve beneficent applications; some combination of these factors is probably the best explanation. Gradually the Institute became less of a distinct en­tity and in the 1960s merged into a new academic department of Biophysics and Theoretical Biology, which in turn became an element in a Molecular Biology de­partment during the 1980s. 

(2.b) A Crop of New Academic Departments of Biophysics

Biophysics was institutionalized in many new academic departments of biophysics and interdepartmental doctorate-granting programs immediately after the war, and especially at eminent universities. As with Chicago, there were some personnel who represented a link to the Manhattan Project and other military physics research. But again, most of the key researchers at the new centres for biophysics had been engaged in essentially the same sort of life science before the war, and were able to harness the postwar surge of interest to fortify their local programs. For instance, in 1944 the University of Pittsburgh had hired Max Lauffer, the head physical chemist of Stanley's group at the Rockefeller Institute, to continue his work on the structure of plant viruses in the Physics Department. He became chairman of the new Depart­ment of Biophysics in 1949; by 1955 he had under him two assistant professors, three lecturers, and over a dozen graduate students in his virus-centred department. 58 In 1949 Bronk, as new president of Johns Hopkins, established a Department of Biophysics under the neurophysiologist Haldan Hartline, whom he had brought with him from Penn's Johnson Foundation. By 1956 the Department at Hopkins had about a dozen graduate students, and five faculty at the associate and assistant professor levels (the full professorship belonging to the chair was vacant, Hartline having just moved on). Most of their work was on nerve and muscle, the classic topics of animal physiology, and all but one of the faculty had a biomedical back­ground (assistant professor Claude Rupert, the sole physics doctorate in the group was, significantly, the only faculty member studying bacteriophage and bacteria). 59 At Yale a Department of Biophysics was established around 1950, and by 1955 it had one full and one associate professor, six assistant professors, and again, about a dozen students, plus associated faculty in other departments. Radiation effects and virus structure were specialities, and one of the ringleaders was Ernest Pollard, wartime radar researcher turned virus biophysicist (and scientists' movement par­ticipant).60 Pollard was squeezed out in an internal review of 'substandard' science units headed by an eminent biochemist, and by 1960 the remnants and their supporters were restructuring the Yale group as a Department of Biophysics and Molecular Biology.61 The detailed story of how each of fhese departments arose would be most valuable, but must await further research. Let us tum now to other individual cases of how the Bomb figured in the rise of academic departments of biophysics, begin­ning with the University of Michigan. 

(2.c) Balancing Bikini at Ann Arbor

Robley Williams, who was to become the champion of biophysics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, was an astronomer there before the war. His 1935 Ph.D. at Cornell had dealt with a new way of vacuum-depositing metal for telescope mir­rors, and during the war years Williams worked on a military contract to create coatings for periscope mirrors and other optics. Also at Ann Arbor during the war in the School of Public Health was Ralph Wyckoff, a self-described biophysicist and early experimenter with ultraviolet microscopes in cytology, whose war work in­volved studies on the influenza virus. They came together over an under-utilized electron microscope in the Physics Department. In 1944 Wyckoff and Williams coated some purified influenza virus with metal sprayed at a low angle before ex­amining them in the electron microscope, with the thought that measuring the uncoated 'shadow' behind the virus particles would give a more accurate assess­ment of the particle dimensions. The shadow casting technique not only did that, but also revealed the surface textures in striking fashion, and was received as a spectacular success by established biophysicists and by electron microscopists in the physical sciences. By the end of 1945 Williams and Wyckoff had obtained au­other electron microscope purely for their biological research, Williams had him­self transferred to the more toleraut Physics Department, while Wyckoff left for a permanent job at fhe NIH, as head of the new Section of Molecular Biophysics in fhe Laboratory of Physical Biology (of the Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases Insti­tute). Williams was already such a convert to biophysics that he turned down a good job offer in astronomy because he was happy at Ann Arbor working at "the border­line between Physics and Biology".62 

However, Williams had a rocky start in orgauizing his biophysics unit despite the support of tbe Physics Department: even with recognized accomplishments in biol­ogy it was not simple for a physicist to become a life scientist. He continued to focus his efforts in biological electron microscopy on viruses, those ultimate (and fashionable, with Stanley's 1946 Nobel) "borderline" objects. In 1946 he arrauged a trip to Stauley's home institution, the Rockefeller Institute's Plant and Animal Pafhology facilities in Princeton, to learn techniques in growing aud purifying plant viruses for himself. 63 That same year he obtained a small grant from American Cau­cer Society for "Electron microscopic studies of physical properties and growth phenomena of protein macromolecules" (that is, viruses), and immediately ordered an ultracentrifuge from an instrument maker. 64 He collaborated with bacteriologists at Ann Arbor, aud a virologist at a Michigan public healfh laboratory, imaging with his electron microscope the specimens provided by the biologists. One 1947 collaboration to image chromosomes and perhaps genes themselves, with the bi­ologist William Hovanitz, ended in an acrimonious squabble when Hovanitz identi­fied certain objects as chromosomes that Williams thought were contaminating bacteria. To a colleague, Williams complained that Hovanitz was the kind who thinks the "physicist is to keep the machines running and should leave the job of interpre­tation to the biologist".65 In 1947 he won another small grant, from the Public Health Service (i.e. the NIH), to isolate and study an animal virus, and by early 1948 he was shopping for electrophoresis apparatus.66 As his laboratory became better equipped, and as he was able to staff it with technicians, he was able to attract graduate students. In mid-1947, when the Institute ofRadiobiology and Biophysics was sounding him out about taking a job in Chicago, he felt reluctant to leave Ann Arbor with the groundwork laid, students counting on him, and the future looking bright. In any case, Williams said, he could not leave for at least a year because of concessions from the administration and "assurances (some of them in concrete form) ... that biophysical research was a recognized field ... at this university".67 

Williams designed a biophysics course for graduate students and advanced under­graduates, "T he application of physical measurements to biology", and after show­ing it to the chairman of the Zoology Department he taught it in the 194 7-48 school year.68 As research momentum in his lab and his reputation as an electron microscopist continued to build, his ambition for the 1948-49 academic year became the formal establishment of a program granting bachelors' degrees and doctorates in Biophys­ics. 69 Williams did his best to mollify the biologists by circulating draft course out­lines to them and attending many of their curriculum committee meetings. Despite his presumably honest feeling that he "did not agree with Schmitt that biologists must provide the initiation of ideas in biophysics but feel that physicists have unique, original ideas to contribute", expressed to Cole in the physics-friendly context of Chicago, he presented the humblest possible face at Ann Arbor. To the biologist who chaired the Committee on Teaching in the Division of Biological Sciences, for instance, he wrote: "'it is evident that the essential problems in Biophysics are bio­logical in nature, and only occasionally can one think of them from the purely physical ... point of view." Williams's stated goal was merely to train biologists in a little extra physics; indeed, he was afraid that too much physics at the expense of biology would produce students only suitable for subordinate work as technicians. 70 Although Williams had a good deal of political success, he still met resistance over the Ph.D. program from "residual die-hards" objecting that biophysics would only "water down the curricula of both physics and biology"; "some people here feel we should keep with the Joneses, while others feel we should not get ahead of them", was another complaint.71 But it seems that everyone at Ann Arbor acknowledged that the "Joneses" were investing more heavily in biophysics. 

Eventually Williams triumphed, after winning the favour of the Dean of School of Graduate Studies, Ralpb Sawyer. In May 1948 the Regents of the University of Michigan voted to "create a War Memorial Center to explore the ways and means by which the potentialities of atomic energy may become a beneficent influence on the life of man, to be known as the Phoenix Project of the University of Michi­gan".72 The Phoenix was meant to symbolize new life rising from the radioactive ashes of war. Perhaps this initiative was behind the 194 7 "assurances" which pre­vented Williams's departure (Williams was, after all, one of the few Michigan fac­ulty members actually prepared to do atomic biology, and indeed he was doing it already if electron microscopy counts). Sawyer, who had served as the director of scientific experiments and measurements for the Bikini tests, became chairman of the Phoenix Project Preliminary Planning Committee. One of his early actions in this capacity was to solicit grant applications from Williams, covering experiments using the 31P isotope to follow virus and chromosome replication in plants, to be funded by the Phoenix Project.73 In March 1949, while Williams was in the midst of trying to move his biophysics degree program proposals past all of the relevant deans, department chairmen, and committees, he accepted an invitation to speak together with Sawyer at the grand luncheon initiating the Phoenix fund-raising cam­paign. To the trustees and other honoured guests there, Sawyer must have explained the basic physics research that he hoped would continue at the University of Michi­gan without rigid dependence on military andAEC funding." Williams's luncheon speech on the biological uses of atomic energy made a very positive impression, the president of the Univerity of Michigan assured him in a personal note expressing his gratitude.75 

In the December 1949 Alumni bulletin issue appealing for donations to the Phoe­nix Project, entitled Michigan, the atom and peace, a picture of Wi1liams at his microscope stands opposite the university president's portrait and preface, entitled "Your University has embarked on what I consider the most important undertaking in its history ... ". Spelling out the University of Michigan's contributions to the Manhattan Project, and its plans to build up facilities to continue atomic research, the Bulletin concludes with "Atomic research in the physical and biological sci­ences", a section describing what peacetime benefits might be anticipated. A photo­graph of the sinister Bikini Baker mushroom cloud heads this section, and after one paragraph on high energy physics, the next six deal with the usefulness of isotopes in biology, agriculture, and medicine. A concluding summary of the "Opportunities for atomic research" lists twelve hopes for peacetime atomic applications, of which seven deal with life science. All of these (not only Williams's own worthy experi­ments to test "the genetical effects of radiation on growing plants" and to discover "the reproductive processes of disease-causing viruses", but even the dubious sug­gestion of using "short-lived radioactive materials ... to control weed growth or to help agriculture") appear above the physics applications, including those aimed at understanding fundamental "processes of nuclear disintegration" and atomic struc­ture.76 Thus, as with Chicago's cyclotron appeal, in the absence of military funding, physics had to take second billing to life science, the products of which were obvi­ously much more popular at the time. Biology - that is, biophysics - was being used to justify and to fund the pursuit of nuclear physics. In 1949-50, Williams went on a road campaign for Phoenix, for instance speaking on "Applications of atomic research in the modern world" to alumni at the Michigan Club of Canton, Ohio.77 This institutional situation in which atoms for life was a public relations priority, and Williams's cooperation in posing for the University, bore fruit when early in 1950 the Regents of the University of Michigan voted to establish a Depatt­ment of Biophysics - much to the annoyance of some members of the Biology Department, which had not been consulted.78 Progress toward departmental status continued more slowly after Williams left in the autumn of 1950 to join Stanley's crack team of virus biophysicists in Califon1ia, where he would be able to continue his research program under optimal conditions. 

(2.d) Wendell Stanley's Virus Palace

Of all biological entrepreneurs, Wendell Stanley mastered the currents of the imme­diate postwar era with consummate skill, erecting an unsurpassed biophysical and biochemical edifice at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1940 Stanley, al­ready famous for crystallizing the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) in 1935,79 had vis­ited Berkeley for several weeks as an honorary lecturer, and apparently had formed a friendly relationship with the university's president Robert Sproul. In June 1946 Stanley revisited Berkeley for an honorary degree, and by September Sproul and he had begun serious discussions about joining the faculty there. 80 Negotiations pro­ceeded vigorously for the next few months and in January 1947, on the heels of his Nobel prize, Stanley was offered the job of taking over the biochemistry depart­ments both at Berkeley and at the medical school campus in San Francisco. In addition he was to be made director of a new Virus Laboratory, to be entirely de­voted to his famous "borderline" creatures.81 Stanley did not immediately accept, but continued negotiating for such things as faculty appointments for key virus personnel he wanted to bring with him. He soon determined that he would like a modern new building housing both the Berkeley Biochemistry Department and his Virus Lab, which he hoped would be ready by his arrival in later l 948. Sproul led Stanley to believe that a large appropriation for the new building was merely a formality, and while negotiating did not dissuade Stanley from his na!ve ideas about how quickly a new building might appear on a state campus. 82 The reasons for Sproul's enthusiasm for Stanley are evidently complex. Biochemistry at both Berkeley and the medical school needed new leadership and the biochemists could accept Stanley as one of their own.83 At the same time Stanley's brand of biophysi­cal work on viruses complemented the isotope studies of animal metabolism, and the research on spectroscopy and radiation effects, already taking place in Berkeley's Medical Physics Division in association with Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron lab;84 together, Stanley's virus lab and the Medical Physics group would give Berkeley the ingredients for leadership in all aspects of biophysics. Naturally the Iaureate's name would also bring prestige, and his virus research was fashionable and poten­tially useful for agriculture (California's economic focus). Moreover, Sproul anticipated that Stanley's entrepreneurship would bring a windfall from the foun­dations that had recently funded biophysics so generously, and would presumably redouble their support. Of the famous patron and coiner of "molecular biology" Sproul wrote, obliquely, "either I am very, very wrong or there is no field in which the Rockefeller Foundation could put its funds with more assurance of dividends than the field of virus research, and no man upon whom they could bet more safely to conduct such research successfully than Dr. Wendell M. Stanley".85 Though Weav­er's Rockefeller program would never become a primary source of support, Sproul's assessment of Stanley's way with funding was not far wrong. Sproul was expecting Stanley to bring in enough grants to build his own laboratory. 

In the late 1940s, Stanley often represented his virus research as a wholesome and life-affirming alternative to atomic physics, though never in a way that might alienate physicists. For instance, as honorary Silliman lecturer at Yale in 1947, Stanley began his speech with the obvious reminder that "Science, in the fonn of nuclear energy, has presented a challenge which must be met successfully if this civilisation is to survive", and concluded with the claim that increased efforts in virology were at least as likely as atomic research to "improve the mental and physical well-being of mankind". At a Paris conference in 1946 to commemorate the anniversary of Pasteur's death, Stanley recalled Pasteur's distinction of two main laws governing humanity, the "law of blood and death" and the "law of peace". "As scientists", Stanley concluded, "we should rededicate ourselves to this second law, the law of peace, work, and health", blandly echoing the reaction against weapons research taking place in some sectors of the American physics community.86 In 1955 he was still drawing the contrast between life-affirming biophysics and deadly atomic phys­ics - and more sharply, if anything. "Viruses," Stanley began one presentation, "like nuclear energy, may be represented by a 2-edged sword", one edge good and the other bad. Just as the atom might destroy the world, but also might bring techno­logical benefits, Stanley reasoned, viruses are likewise not simply threats to human well-being. "The viruses undoubtably hold secrets, which ... could easily yield ben­efits to mankind far greater than those from nuclear energy".87 

Stanley used similar logic in some of his efforts to secure funds. In December 1947 Stanley was warned by Warren Weaver that the Rockefeller Foundation was more likely to consider operational funding than a major bricks-and-mortar grant. This news put the Virus Lab plans in financial jeopardy; Sproul urged Stanley either to get half-a-million dollars from another source, such as the Ford Foundation, or to get a $1 million commitment for operating funds and equipment (over ten years) from Weaver, and Sproul would find University funds to cover the building deficit. In January 1948 Stanley promptly approached Weaver for the million: the theoreti­cal and practical opportunities in virus research are probably "the most promising in science today", urged Stanley. "As you know, research with respect to nuclear energy is being financed more than adequately by the government. The virus field has just barely been opened up .... The virus field exemplifies in the highest degree the molecular biology which has received so much attention from your Division."88

The plea to do for virus biophysics what the government was doing for atomic physics might well have worked if Caltech had not already convinced Weaver to make a similar investment in biophysics and biochemistry there; Stanley had to settle for a $100,000 Rockefeller grant to furnish his new lab with equipment. In the end Stanley's primary initial sponsorship for the Virus Lab, a five-year commitment of about $100,000 per year for operating expenses, came from the National Foun­dation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) in response to a conventional appeal, bolstered by a claim to competence in animal virology based on wartime contract work to­wards influenza vaccines, that medical advances - particularly with regard to po­lio, in line with the Foundation's charter - would come from basic research on plant, animal, and bacterial viruses. Stanley also managed to collect a number of smaller grants from the NIH and drug companies, including one from Lederlc for work on a live polio virus vaccine which amounted to over $50,000 per year for operations in the Virus Lab for 1950-56. 89 

In the autumn of 1948, Stanley and his core personnel arrived at Berkeley and set up shop in a section of the Foreslly building, which they would share with agricul­tural scientists until his own continually postponed building finally became a real­ity by the second half of 1952.9° Key Virus Lab staff came with Stanley from the Rockefeller Institute, such as his chiefTMV biochemist, C. A11hur Knight, and the young ultracentrifuge expert Howard Schachman, both of whom were given regu­lar faculty posts in Biochemistry. Williams, who came as chief biophysicist in the Virus Lab in autumn 1950, andArthur Pardee who came to the Virus Lab as a junior biochemist in 1949 after taking a degree with Linus Pauling at Caltech, also re­ceived regular faculty posts in the department. Two other young Ph.D. biochemists got tenure-track junior posts in Biochemistry, splitting efforts and salaries between the Virus Lab and the department proper. A pennanent mid-level research staff po­sition, without academic status, was also funded by the University. In addition to the five full-time faculty positions, counting Stanley's, about half-a-dozen faculty­level research posts in the Virus Lab were created on the 'soft money' of the grants that Stanley had every reason to regard as perennial. Among the notable scientists who occupied these positions in the 1950s were the animal virologist Carlton Schwerdt, and W. Dean Fraser who (like Gunther Stent, given the less senior but permanent research staff post) joined after postdoctoral training in bacteriophage research at Caltech with Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born 1906).91 Eventually Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, who joined as research biochemist in 1952, was switched to an additional regular faculty billet in 1958. While some of the non-tenurable research posts were occupied by physical scientists successfully making the postwar transition to biology via bio­physics, like Fraser and Stent (with doctorates in chemistry and physical chernislly respectively), all of the Virus Lab and Biochemistry faculty positions were occu­pied by degreed biochemists or by those who were already practising life scientists before the war's end. Of these, only Williams had actually switched from an estab­lished research careeer in physical science.92 Thus at Berkeley's Virus Lab too, the main initial beneficiaries of the postwar expansion of academic opportunities in biophysics were established life scientists, not postwar converts from the physical sciences. 

The floor plan of the Biochemistry and Virus Lab (BVL) building, which had grown to five stories in 1950 in an arrangement to house the largely independent Plant Biochemistry Department (not under Stanley's administration) and a cost of $1.5 million, gives a rough indication of resource and effort distribution in Stanley's institutional edifice. The roof held the Virus Lab's greenhouses, while the fourth and fifth stmies housed the Virus Lab; the half-dozen faculty of the conventional Biochemistry Department were on the second floor, separated from Stanley's group by Plant Biochemistry on the third. The ground floor was occupied with teaching facilities.93 Thus judging by floor area, just as by the number of senior and mid­level staff, it seems that Stanley's Virus Lab scientists accounted for two-thirds of the BVL research effort (half, counting the Plant people), or twice the activity of the regular Biochemistry department. By the early I 950s, Berkeley doctorates were being granted both in Biophysics and also, primarily for those with an M.D. degree already, in Medical Physics. The Virus Lab proper, half of its senior staff without any teaching responsibilities, was a research unit emphasizing postdoctoral much more than graduate training; in 1954 there were twenty postdoctoral and staff re­searchers, in addition to the handful salaried by the University.94 

Needless to say, equipment was state-of-the art by the time the BVL building was dedicated in October 1952, the Virus Lab had a mass spectrometer, an auto­matic fraction collector, two ultracentrifuges, an electrophoresis rig, a quartz spec­trophotometer, and two electron microscopes. X-ray diffraction gear, geiger counters, and infrared spectrometers were soon to come. Except for the instruments related to isotopes, all of this apparatus embodied the techniques around which Stanley's pre- 1945 research programs revolved. A new $30,000 electron microscope was added in 1954-55, on the grounds that the latest RCA model's higher accelerating voltage was needed to image stages of virus infection and replication in tissue culture cells.95 That was Williams's project, in addition to the study of virus structure in pure prepa­rations. He and Stanley made a sensation with pictures of po1iovirus, the first ani­mal virus crystallized, in 1953, by Schwerdt and other BVL people." Knight continued his pre-Berkeley work on "the chemistry of mutation", mainly studying differences in the protein composition and nucleic acid of various plant virus strains. Schachman developed improved ultracent1ifugation methods and was using them to analyse the protein components of purified virus. Pardee studied differences in the enzyme activities in normal and virus-infected cells. Fraenkel-Conrat worked on self-assembly and controlled degradation of TMV particles, and on trying to create new mutant strains by substituting chemically reactive amino acids into TMV (a clever idea, given the theory that viruses are naked genes made of protein).97 Fraser, later joined by Stent, carried out a program that Fraser aptly described as "mostly a biochemical one, tempered, however, with Delbrückian [sic] phageology", principally the analysis of protein components of bacteriophage from various strains (after the manner of Knight's TMV project).98 By early 1950s definitions, work in the Virus Lab itself was about half biophysics and half biochemistry (though at the time the distinction between the two was vague), and to a great extent a continua­tion of the research program that had won Stanley his 1946 Nobel Prize. 

The 1952-53 discovery that DNA structure rather than protein carries the ge­netic code, although it did slightly reduce the glamour of structural studies on vi­ruses, seems to have hurt Stanley's enterprise far less than the successful large-scale testing of Salk's killed-virus polio vaccine in 1954. The NFIP and Lederle both cut off Virus Lab funding at that point. Still, the institution ultimately survived as the home of the Molecular Biology Department (chaired by Williams), changing its name conservatively to the Molecular Biology and Virus Lab (from BVL to MBVL) in 1964 when Biochemistry proper moved into a new building.99 In retrospect, Stanley's postwar success cannot be attributed to the biophysical cache of structural virus research alone, but also to the very polyvalence of his virus program: Stanley's plant viruses made him interesting to plant biologists, his animal viruses gave him relevance to medical researchers and foundations, and his chemistry background allowed him to do biochemistry that was taken seriously (though there were indeed strains between his virus lab people and the regular biochemists at Berkeley).'°" Of course, the postwar Stanley was an example of the new breed of science executive which has since become familiar. But although he laboured writing grant proposals, giving speeches, and flying to Washington much more than as a bench scientist, Stanley knew how to choose research personnel and to manage them effectively, 101 so that the volume of research output from his laboratories 􀆹 and the input of research funding to them -remained high. The Vims Lab had originally just dab­bled ln cancer (inasmuch as some tissue culture cell lines were from tumours); but Stanley kept his hand in as an advocate for the relevance of virology, for instance chairing a session on basic virus replication studies at the Second National Cancer Conference in Cincinnati, 1952, The virus-cancer angle became Stanley's salva­tion. In l 955 his old NFIP patron, Hany Weaver, joined the board of directors of the American Cancer Society, a body to which Stanley was increasingly sending grant applications for cancer research designed around tissue culture experiments.102 This ditty (to the tune of "Once in love with Amy"), probably from a BVL Christmas party around 1955, beautifully illustrates the change in direction. 

Fortunately for Stanley's BVL, no cancer vaccine was in the offing. By the Third National Cancer Conference of.lune 1956, held in Detroit, the conclusion of Stanley's talk left no doubt about what a fervent believer in the cancer-virus link he had already become: "recent findings in the virus field indicate more and more that the virus problem and the cancer problem are one and the same. The experimental evi­dence now available is consistent with the idea that viruses are the etiological agents of most, if not all, cancer in man."104 Such confidence seems remarkable given that there was not then, nor for many years to come, one bona fide example of a virally induced human cancer - although Stanley was certainly not alone in his suspi­cions here. At any rate, Stanley managed to justify and continue his research pro­grams by putting the old experimental picture in a new theoretical frame. 

(2.e) Biophysics at UCLA and Other Medical Institutions

In January 1947 [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] was officially named Dean of the new Medical School at the University of California, Los Angeles, and thus assumed the burden of serving as its main institutional architect. 105 Warren was busy for the four years before UCLA's first class of medical students began instruction in 1951, struggling, much like Stanley, to realize an ambitious plan for a scientific paradise, His initial semi-formal agreements with president Sproul evidently stipulated there would be a strong research focus and a department of Biophysics in the new institution, in which Warren himself would be named Professor ( with a salmy of $12,000, 10% less than Sproul offered Stanley).106 Warren soon brought in the physiologist and cancer researcher Wilbur Selle to head the Biophysics Department, but WaITen's first operational unit at the medical school was the core of a nuclear medicine de­partment, established under Manhattan Project medical colleagues. By 1948 this unit was already carrying out research with AEC funding in some Quonset huts loaned to UCLA by some of Warren's Army friends, and rapidly gaining ground on the Medical Physics Department at Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory. 107 Warren's Manhattan experience had clearly taught him to think big when it came to research, and research was a high priority in his administrative brief. Warren used to give a speech before medical audiences on his return from Bikini, in which he called for institutional refo1m of medical schools so as to accommodate the high intensity of research that he hoped would continue into the postwar era, especially research exploring the biophysical benefits of atomic physics.108 Already in mid-1947, while the medical centre was still in the early planning stages, he was working on a pro­posal for an "Expedited program on cancer research" with a $12 million, five-year 

budget (evidently to be obtained from the NIH). [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] envisaged this cancer pro­gram occupying a five-story research wing of the hospital, with 37,500 square feet of laboratory space divided roughly equally between units for physiology, biochem­istry, synthetic chemistry, radiochemistry, and biophysics. Included in the projected equipment list for the wing were four Tiselius 11.gs, three ultracentrifuges, two X­ray diffraction units, and two high quality electron microscopes. 109 Plainly, bio­physics figured especially prominently in Warren's plans for biomedical researcb. 

As is already evident, [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] invoked atomic weapons in several ways in his public advocacy of medical research, and particularly of biophysics: the terrible power of the Bomb demanded research to understand and counter its deadly effects; the atomic research that gave rise to the Bomb provided important opportunities for advances in both fundamental and clinical biomedicine; and one lesson of the Man­hattan Project was that large-scale and well-funded medical research could be tre­mendously productive. Warren seems to have reached an astoundingly large popular audience with his message. In one widely heard nationwide radio broadcast, the NBC National Hour of 16 December 1945 (while high level Big Three talks on atomic policy were occuning in Moscow), Warren shared the limelight with A. H, Compton in a program on the peacetime benefits of the atom - the previous week's show having featured atomic weaponry. Worth reproducing even if just to recapture the heady atmosphere, compared with Weaver's sober science talks it was an atten­tion-grabbing production, full of background drumrolls, crescendos, and sound ef­fects. It began: 

• Announcer:   Our subject for today: 

• Voice 1:   Atomic power as the servant of man!

• Voice 2:   Atomic energy as the saviour of human life!

• Voice 3:   Atomic power in a world at peace! 

After Compton's talk on engineering applications, which had been introduced by a short radio play dramatizing the walnut-sized power supply of future ocean liners, [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] was simi]arly introduced by a medical drama: 

• Woman:   Doctor ... is it.. ... Is it ... cancer? 

• Doctor:   Well, too early to say, yet Certainly looks like a malignant growth.

• Woman:   [BEING BRAVE] I can face it if it is, doctor. But our income isn't big, and radium treatments are so expensive, and -

• Doctor:   We won't use radium, Mrs. Dayton. In fact, we can almost say that radium is old hat Here - I want you to wear this. 

• Woman:   Why, Doctor - this is a - a - why, it's only a bracelet A chain with a metal disc. 

• Doctor:   That's your medicine, Mrs. Dayton. Wear it for two weeks, then come back. 

• Woman:   But Doctor - what is it? Witchcraft? A voodoo charm? 

• Doctor:   [CHUCKLES] No, indeed Mrs. Dayton. You see, in our atomic energy plants, it is now possible to make almost any common element ra­dioactive. We can control the strength and duration of that radioac­tivity. Now I have given you what amounts to a 14-day radium or X-ray treatment.And don't worry about the cost, Mrs. Dayton. That radioactive disc you're wearing􀁗 well, it cost less to make that disc than the price of a good dinner!

So cheap a medicine that it can be given freely before a positive diagnosis! Here was a tough act to follow, but [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] tried with descriptions of how isotopes might indeed cure cancer, help cure polio by tracing the virus's path in the body, and of other "miracles" -provided, tbat is, that we "marshal! our scientific strength for the study of these problems in much the same way we did to make the bomb".110 In the first blush of peace, the atom's promise to save lives was the dominant message. 

Apparently his experience at Bikini, where he had to struggle not only with the overwhelming contamination caused by Baker, but also with the ignorant and "hairy­chested" attitude (in the words of one of his Bikini colleagues) of military person­nel towards invisible radiation hazards, convinced [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] that a dose of fear had to be added to the large ingredient of promise in his sales pitch for more research and education.111 Shortly after WaiTen's appointment as dean, the California Gove1nor, Earl Warren (no relation), gave him a new opportunity to arouse popular support for his biomedical plans -and to rub shoulders with people influential in the state government and University of California Board of Regents -by making him chief of radiation protection on the state board of civil defence. In this capacity Warren travelled vigorously, showing a film of the Bikini bomb tests while talking about the deadly consequences of Baker, and of course calling for medical research in addition to civil defence preparations for atomic war. Between 1947 and the middle 1950s Warren estimated that he showed the film to at least a million Californians, instilling fear with such effectiveness that he later regretted that he might have significantly contributed to the paranoia and hysteria of the Cold War.112 Certainly the atom bomb represented a key resource in Wanen's drive to fulfil his ambitions for the UCLA medical school, and it was also his main tool for promoting biophys­ics. 

There were many obstacles to the realization of [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)]'s dreams for his Bio­physics Department. At the outset Warren worried that it might be difficult to find a place for biophysics in the institutional framework of a medical school, where de­partments were traditionally evaluated by their clinical service contributions, their teaching role, and to a much lesser extent their research. Biophysics was a research field that had no service role other than the improvement of instrumentation, and Warren was determined that biophysicists must not be regarded as mere techni­cians. Since there was no room in the pre-clinical cmTiculurn to give biophysics a place equal to biochemistry, teaching in biophysics was mainly limited to a few doctoral students -at best a marginal category in medical schools.113 Wanen's worries soon began to be borne out when, in the face of cost over-runs during construction which caused building plans to be cut back, the Biophysics Depart­ment was left with only a few rooms after a re-allocation of space to "traditionally essential" departrnents.114 There was also resistance at the level of state politics, where supporters of Berkeley and San Francisco regarded any resources going to UCLA as a theft from the Northern campuses; for example, Warren vividly recalled his frustration at one meeting of the Board of Regents where such opponents re­fused to permit his department to buy an electron microscope on the grounds that Stanley had some at Berkeley - even though Warren had assurances from the NIH that a large grant proposal covering the purchase would be approved!115 

Still, the Biophysics Department soldiered on as best it could. Both masters' and doctorate programs in Biophysics were established, overseen by a committee that included members of the regular science faculty, and several courses were offered (some in the guise of seminar series as a stratagem to "show signs of activity" despite low student enrolments).116 By the mid-1950s there were nine visiting fac­ulty, associates, and instructors in the Department, and five faculty with tenure or tenurable posts. Despite high turnover the roster stayed at that level through the decade. Research spanned a broad spectrum: from novel diagnostic methods with ultrasound, to novel electro-physiological apparatus, to work on cancer and car­cinogenesis in higher animals, to tracer studies on nucleic acid metabolism and ultraviolet microscopy of chromosomes.117 A good deal of this work continued re­search programs begun before and during the war (such as Jean Bath's work on the composition of cell components begun under her mentor, the UCLA plant physi­ologist 0. L. Sponsler). When in 1958 the Depaitment faced an evaluation commit­tee that considered whether to hire a new chairman or to dissolve Biophysics, the then outgoing chairman, Albert Bellamy, argued forcefully that the traditional meth­ods of evaluating depaitmental productivity in the medical school ( one-third teach­ing, one-third service, one-third research) condemned any Ph.D.-granting research department outside the preclinical curriculum. 118 Biophysics weathered this storm, only to face another less than two years later, which resulted in a decision to merge it into a combined Department of Biophysics and Nuclear Medicine. The different character of this more clinically oriented and military-linked department immedi­ately became apparent as the biophysicists bridled at chairman Joseph Ross's poli­cies, such as reviewing and if necessary censoring all manuscripts prior to submission to journals.119 By the late l960s it seemed in retrospect that the relative failure of biophysics at UCLA had been virtually foreordained by the entrenched "policies, convictions, and opinions about the proper functions of a School of Medidne", combined with the same struggle for turf over the emotionally charged '"depart­mental prerogatives' and related 'sacred cows'" of established disciplines, of the sort that biophysics faced in other institutional contexts.120 It should be noted that at UCLA too, none of the faculty was trained originally as an physicist, and apart from [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] none had been associated with the Manhattan Project, though Selle had done some research at Oak Ridge after the war. 

Many other medical schools followed the biophysical trend in the first postwar decade, moving toward instituting a biophysics department where the arts and sci­ence faculty of their home university had not already done so (as at Yale and Hopkins). For instance, at the University of Western Ontario medical school the Department of Biophysics opened in 1947. At the University of Washington medical school, biophysics was bolstered in the physiology department and the name changed to Department of Physiology and Biophysics. At the Medical College of Virginia a program formed in 1948, and a Department of Biophysics in 1953. At Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, a doctoral program in Biophysics was organized around 1950, and in 1955 its consolidation as a department was being pushed on the trus­tees by relevant deans. At Harvard Medical School, a lively interest in developing biophysics could be found with J. L. Oncley in the Biochemistry Department and A. K. Solomon in the Biophysical Laboratory. Never an institution to move ahead precipitiously, in 1956 Harvard could, according to Solomon, "envisage a six-year plan for the development of biophysics within the Medical School and University community. The first year would be devoted to study and planning; the next two years would be spent in developing and implementing the plan." The remaining three years would serve for assessment. 121 In the medical context, institutionaliza­tion of biophysics seems in general to have been driven externally, by the perceived opportunity in and timeliness of the field, rather than by personal links with the Bomb project (as in the unusual case of WaITen). Medical schools less intent on maintaining a high research profile tended to take the economical approach of sim­ply adding radiation biology specialists to the radiology department. 

As noted, the National Institutes of Health moved to build up their intramural biophysics research immediately after the war. The Institute for Arthritis and Meta­bolic Diseases established a Laboratory of Physical Biology under the physiologist Heinz Specht, to which Wyckoff was brought in 1945-46 to set up a section for structural studies of viruses; in 1947 the radiobiologist Frederick Brackett was brought from elsewhere in the NIH to head a new photobiology section within it; and in 1953 a section in physical chemistry of proteins was set up under the Hun­garian refugee Kolomon Laki, Albert Szent-Gyorgi's one-time associate at Szeged. Kenneth Cole, who had left the Radiobiology and Biophysics Institute at Chicago in 1949 for directorship of the Navy's Medical Research Institute, was brought in 1954 to the Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness to run the Laboratory of Biophysics there. In the late 1940s the National Cancer Institute had established a large Laboratory of Radiation Biology which did research not only on the biologi­cal effects of radiation and isotopes but also on physical stlucture of genes and other macromolecules (in this group both the radiobiologist Howard Andrews and the electron microscopist Herbert Kahler had trained in physics, though both began biomedical research at the NIH before the war).122 Thus, as in other medical con­texts (and perhaps even more so), biophysics research grew dramatically at the NIH immediately after the war, not so much from an influx of physics-trained research­ers as from the field's tremendous cmrency. 

(2.f) Caltech's Programs in Biophysics

As Lily Kay has described in impressive detail, Caltech was very well positioned to build its life science program at the end of the war. 123 Linus Pauling's work on the physical chemistry of biological molecules - particularly, during the war years, of immunoglobulins - had made the institution an acknowledged leader in the bio­physical study of molecular structure, however much Pauling may have disliked the term 'biophysics' (Pauling wanted physical chemisl:ly methods brought in to bio­chemistry and not lodged in a competing discipline, as discussed below). In the Biology Division ErnestAnderson was a well-known radiation geneticist, and after the war Henry Borsook's metabolic pathway research was quickly recast to take advantage of isotopes. Caltech moved to exploit the postwar vogue for biophysics maximally: indeed, in Pauling's grandiose $6 million Rockefeller grant proposal for two new buildings full of high-technology life science, biophysics was the "linch­pin" (according to Kay). In this 1945 proposal, Pauling began, unoriginally, by claiming that life science was poised to move ahead in the postwar era as nuclear physics had been twenty years before. After listing many projects that extended his own research on macromolecules and the biochemical genetics work of George Bea­dle - who was to assume the chair of Biology at Caltech in June 1946 - Pauling proposed to bring in new senior researchers to initiate programs in virus studies, gen­eral physiology, and metabolism studies using isotopes, and finally to pursue other efforts in the somewhat reduced area he was prepared to call "biophysics": 

Many of the fields listed above - the use of the electron microscope, the deter­mination of the structure of crystals with x-rays, the use of ultracentrifuge and light-scattering apparatus - might properly be included under the heading of biophysics. Moreover, it is probable that in all of the fields of work included in the program use will be made of radioactive and nonradioactive isotopes, and these studies, involving, in addition to the isotope sources, mass spectrographs and Geiger counters for assays, are clearly physical in nature. There are some other fields of biophysical research which should be ca1Tied out under the pro­posed program. 124 

What Pauling had in mind especially was photosynthesis (Franck's interest) and ultrasound (popular at UCLA). At any rate, this rhetoric in Pauling's proposal is a bow in the direction of biophysics at least for the sake of patronage, an acknowl­edgement which testifies all the more profoundly to biophysics's cultural currency to the degree that Pauling disliked the word and the very notion. This proposal was deemed an overreach, but in the end plenty of grant money was forthcoming from Rockefeller and elsewhere to make Caltech develop in the direction Pauling envis­aged. In 1946 Beadle came from Stanford, and among the first hires from his new partnership with Pauling were Delbrück (at a senior level), who would head up the virus biophysics program, J. G. Kirkwood (also senior, in Chemistry), who studied the physical chemistry of proteins by means of electrophoresis and ultracentrifugation, and a junior faculty member, Normau Horowitz, who would work with Beadle and Anderson on a large research program in the effects of radiation on cells and chro­mosomes, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission. '25 All of this counted as bio­physics, in its broader contemporary definitions. 

Despite some reservations about the term "biophysics", not only did the Caltech team profit handsomely by positioning its research as biophysics, but Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born 1906) himself used the term in a distinct way to capture his own vision of a new biology. In his famous 1949 lecture, "A physicist looks at biology", Delbrück explained that it seemed to him more profitable to approach virus replication in a more formal and mathematical (yet at the same time less complicated) manner than the traditional ways of biochemists, and of most biophysicists, concerned as they were with the messy details of molecular structure. "I believe that it is in this direction" of formal approaches, Delbrück professed, "that physicists will show the greatest zeal and will create a new intellectual approach to biology which would lend meaning to the ill-used term biophysics". '26 Thus Delbrück's objections to "biophysics" had more to do with the trendy term's ovemse, and its frequent use to mean structural re­search dissonant with his own, than with its basic worthlessness. And despite Delbruck's opinion that Stanley's problem was his excessive nnmber of ultracentrifuges, the new Caltech had no shortage of these biophysical gadgets, nor Tiselius gear, nor spectrophotometers (though it was not until the late 1950s, when Caltech hired Schmitt's student Alau Hodge, that electron microscopy really took hold there). Students taking a Ph.D. in the Biology Division at Caltech had the choice of Biophysics as a major field. 127 It seems the trend was irresistible. 

(2.g)  Francis Schmitt's MIT

Nobody in the postwar era championed biophysics more zealously than Francis Schmitt, who had since his airival in 1940 􀆸 and with the help of substantial Rockefeller funding -transformed the moribund and obscure MIT biology de­partment into one of the most prominent on campus, and indeed nationally. And at the end of the war, no American program was in a stronger position to exploit the new experimental technology of life science than Schmitt's. In addition to some sewage engineers and food technologists from before Schmitt's time, his MIT de­partment in 1945 had a core group of six active younger biophysicists on the fac­ulty. Schmitt himself ran a lively group mostly in electron microscopy, having adapted his prewar neurophysiological research program to one largely centring on the micro­structure of nerve. His prot6g6s Richard Bear and David Waugh were respectively experts in X-ray diffraction and ultracentifugation. The electronics specialist Kurt Lion (a former engineer and the only genuine convert from the harder disciplines in the initial group) worked on instrumentation. The cytologist and apprentice elec­tron microscopist H. Stanley Bennett studied cell structure. John Loofbourow stud­ied moleculai· aggregation, particularly in blood clotting, using spectroscopic methods. In 1947-48 Cecil Hall, Schmitt's electron microscopy expert, would also be officially promoted to faculty level, compensating for Bennett's departure (Hall was trained initially as a physicist). The focus at MIT was not viruses, but nerve cell components and large proteins that could be made to assemble spontaneously into higher order structures, particularly myosin (from muscle) and collagen (from con­nective tissue). Indeed during the war Schmitt had kept his research program alive by studying a military use for collagen, the production of sutures and artificial skin by extruding the material. In late 1945 Food Technology split off as a separate department, allowing Schmitt to change the department's name to simply "Biol­ogy" (rather than "Biology and Biological Engineering") for the 1945-46 academic year. 128 There were two electron microscopes already, and in 1946 Schmitt man­aged to buy a new ultracentiifuge and a commercial electrophoresis apparatus. 129 MIT biology was equipped for the future, and with demobilization, enrolment of graduate students and post-docs increased dramatically. By 1947-48 already there were at least 18 postdoctoral fellows in the department. Graduate students had a choice of doctorates in Biophysics or Biochemistry.130 

Schmitt approached Warren Weaver, his faithful patron, for more funds to ex­pand the MIT Biology Department, and in 1947 was granted $250,000 for a six­year period; this was in additon to generous support from MIT itself ($170,000 in the first year, 1947-48).131 By 1949-50, there were four electron microscopes in the Schmitt and Hall labs, and elsewhere in the department four X-ray diffraction units, four ultracentrifuges, four spectrophotometers, and plenty of other expensive equip­ment. That year Schmitt's own outside grants from the NIH, the Office of Naval Research, and private philanthropies, passed the $50,000 per year mark, and for their part the rest of the faculty also played the grant game effectively. 132 Thus under Schmitt, MIT biology was roughly keeping pace with the rival Caltech life sciences under George Beadle.133 From the Commonwealth Fund, in 1951 Schmitt secured on behalf of his department another $175,000 grant (over five years), to help sup­port training of the many medical doctors who became researchers at MIT. 134 And at the end of 1952, when Schmitt's department was moving into the top four stories of the new Dorrance Laboratories building (the bottom floors were to be occupied by Food Technology), the Rockefeller Foundation's largesse was redoubled with a $500,000 outright grant.135 Schmitt's Dorrance establishment was as well equipped and nearly as large as Stanley's BVL. 136 Though Schmitt did not gamer quite as astronomical a quantity of outside funding as George Beadle and Linus Pauling accumulated for Caltech, 137 perhaps at MIT as much or more was actually spent on life science, since Pauling diverted much of these Caltech resources to basic chem­istry research. 138 The strategies Schmitt was using to promote his biophysics pro­gram were obviously effective ones. 

Schmitt often offered biophysics as a wholesome alternative or antidote to nu­clear physics, rather than a fortunate spin-off of it, thus aligning his research pro­gram with traditional humanitarian medical values (much as Stanley did in France, with his "two laws" speech above). Schmitt wrote a talk for the December 1946 meeting of the AAAS in Boston, whose conclusion, in manusclipt form, reads: "If one tenth as much thought, energy, and money were devoted to the structure and properties of the living cell and its constituents [as to the atom], the results in biol­ogy and medicine might prove as spectacular as those of the atfi!nie bomb nuclear physics, and perhaps more salutary from the human viewpoint." This is the strong fonn of the talk he gave on national radio, quoted above, less subtly casting asper­sions on the bomb physicists and their militmy patrons. 139 At the 1946-47 freshman convocation at MIT, Schmit — perhaps taking a cue from [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] — called for a "Manhattan Project against disease" in his pitch for biology as a major. 140 Thus Schmitt's biophysics program constituted a highly visible, if not tmly equal, coun­terweight to the burgeoning military physics research on campus. Of course Schmitt's idea of a "Manhattan Project against disease" would have sounded sweet to the medical research establishment, especially as Schmitt left out the funding of medi­cal schools that would have increased the supply of doctors, that aspect ofTmman's proposed medical reform that the American Medical Association considered anath­ema. The Schmitt lab's wartime collaboration with physicians from Massachusetts General Hospital, and intensive postwar training program for medical doctors re­leased from military service, quickly developed into a warm collaborative relation­ship, and through such links Schmitt was able to make MIT a credible site for medical research to a remarkable degree. In 1947 Schmitt joined the Massachusetts General board of directors, where he founded the scientific oversight committee that would help transform that hospital into a major force in biomedical research.141 By 1949 Schmitt was so well regarded among the doctors that he was asked to hecome dean at Harvard Medical School.'" 

Nonetheless, the biophysics actually practised in Schmitt's department had little immediate utility in a hospital; the emphasis was on basic issues of general physiol­ogy, like nerve conduction and muscle contraction, whose medical relevance was more remote. Very much like Jacques Loeb, Schmitt envisaged a life science that would permit living organisms to be designed and engineered from first principles like other machines. Schmitt's Loebian dream of an exact life science, and the cen­trality of the electron microscope in his program, appears in a rich amalgam with the atom at the conclusion of a 1946 lecture. Schmitt's outline reads: 

Analogy with atom. At close of last century physicists thought of the atom as an indivisible unit. Then came the discovery of electrons, radioactivity, the nu­cJeus, protons, and the other atomic particles. Result is modern atomic age, electronics, etc. May we expect a similar control of living material when we know more about the molecular construction of protoplasm? No one has suffi­cient vision now to predict what may be possible in another 20 years as a result of the widespread and intelligent use of the electron microscope.143 

Schmitt was this time not invoking the atom as a frightening bogey, but as an em­blem of scientific accomplishment (though the Bomb itself is not referred to); bio­physicists, the claim seems to he, will follow in the technological footsteps of the physicists.And the electron microscope-itself a physicist's device, using a beam of atomic particles to 'see' molecules and even atoms - would provide the neces­sary knowledge of how protoplasm was constructed, thus how it might be recon­structed. Again, the atom's purchase on the popular imagination provided a lever for ambitious biophysicists like Schmitt, as an argument for biomedical progress and at the same time as a positive symbol of scientific power. 

In the first postwar years Schmitt's band of half-a-dozen biophysicists domi­nated the MIT Biology depaitment, as old-guard faculty members left service and the food technologists seceded. The department was at its smallest in 1946-47, with only IO teaching faculty. Initially, biochemistry was represented as a biologi­cal subspecialty only by two faculty members, Bernard Gould and Irwin Sizer. In 1952 the administration made a commitment, reflecting the growing stature of bio­chemistry as a field of basic science (as opposed to its traditional status as a service discipline for medicine), to establish Biochemistry as an autonomous division within the Biology department, with a guaranteed operating budget of at least $50,000, a rather small figure compared with that of the department as a whole. When this decision was taken, the arrangement with Schmitt was that Biophysics also would soon become an autonomous division, leaving physiology and general biology un­der a third Biology division.144 In 1952 a new junior appointment in Biochemistry was made, and in the summer of 1953, under the newly recruited head of Biochem­istry John M. Buchanan, this division was officially established with four faculty. Meanwhile, in 1950-5 I Schmitt suffered a blow in the unexpected death of Loolbourow. 1'5 Miles Maxfield, one of Schmitt's recent doctoral students (his MIT thesis was on the proteins in invertebrate nerve protoplasm), was taken on the fac­ulty in 1952 as Loolbourow's replacement. When in early 1953 the administration informed Schmitt that it intended to renege on its commitment to make Biophysics an autonomous division, claiming that the financial situation did not permit adher­ence to the agreed timetable, the tone of KilJian's letter makes it obvious that the decision would be a serious disappointment to Schmitt.146 Schmitt brought his bio­physicists into a fine new building, but he could not get the pem1anent institutional commitment to biophysics that he wanted. Limited at home by the administration's conservatism, Schmitt soon looked beyond the walls of MIT for opportunities to extend his discipline-building efforts. The medical connection would provide Schmitt's vehicle for promoting biophysics on the national scale. 

Tapped by the NIH to set up a new section of Biophysics to distribute extramural research grants (as discussed below), in 1955 Schmitt abdicated as head of the Bi­ology department in favour of an "Institute Professorship" leaving him free from MIT administrative duties. Schmitt withdrew into an institutionally insulated group - effectively a miniature department supported by his own grants 147 - and was able to explore his new idea that gene regulation depends on the spontaneous reag­gregation of proteins and short nucleic acid molecules depending on small changes in the chemical environment of chromosomes (based on an analogy between the banding pattern visible in certain chromosomes and the pattern in collagen fibrils that his Jab was learning to vary at will).148 As in Stanley's case, no sharp change in research program was necessitated by the 1952-53 revelations about DNA struc­ture. But the loss of Schmitt's towering figure was perceived as a critical leadership vacuum, and the MIT administration called together an "Ad Hoc Committee on the Biology Department", consisting of MIT's top officials and a panel of senior biolo­gists and biochemists from several institutions, to evaluate MIT's life sciences. This panel brought to bear on Schmitt's now unsheltered biophysicists, standards which seem fundamentally hostile to the very notion of a biophysics. Cecil Hall's position (then Associate Professor in Biophysics) was particularly jeopardized by the loss of Schmitt's protection. Though any department with five electron microscopes needed somebody with his skill, the Committee agreed, "Cecil Hall appeared in the minds of the committee to be a sort of glorified technician, and they felt he would always be this". The consensus seemed to be that it would be best to "let Hall go to industry and try and attract a biologist familiar with electron microscope techniques". Simi­larly, Lion's work was seen as inappropriately instrument-centred for an academic life science department, leading to the conclusion that he "should be induced to take a job elsewhere as soon as possible". And Waugh, who "appears to be wasting much of his time trying to be a physical chemist", needed to be sent away for sab­batical re-education. '49 The group managed to weather the changes, but Hall's trou­bles impressing mainstream biologists as a real life scientist were common among biophysicists with their primary training in physics. For instance, the biology de­partment at the University of Illinois resisted hiring Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (born 1906) in 1946 on the grounds that he "was not a biologist";150 one also recalls Robley Williams's com­plaint about biologists who feel that the biophysicist is only "to keep the machines running". 151 The Ad Hoc Committee's notion of physics-based biophysicists in par­ticular as intellectually shallow gadgeteers ( or the alternative stigma attached to people like Delbrück and Garnow, casting them as fanciful theorists out of touch with biological material) illustrates, notwithstanding whatever added authority those with a physics background might claim, the formidable resistance former physi­cists were up against in biology when lacking a powerful biologist patron. And the condemnation ofWaugh's -and equally, Schmitt's-approach to structural stud­ies and protein characterization, and to physical chemistry of protein aggregation and self-assembly, indicates a problem of biology-based biophysicists working in these areas: this kind of work on proteins was disputed terrain, and seemed to some to belong in chemistry or biochemistry departments. Solid, defensible disciplinary borders for biophysics were still lacking, despite the newfound populaiity and re­cently rapid growth of the field. 

I have tried to show how at growing points of biophysics in the late 1940s and early 1950s -at MIT, Michigan, Berkeley, Chicago, UCLA, and at least to some extent Caltech -the image of the Bomb was instrumental to those promoting the development of biophysics, in their appeal for popular attention and institutional resources. There is no reason to think that further work on Hopkins, Yale, Pitts­burgh, and elsewhere would not confirm this pattern. The people with the clout to make these biophysics programs grow -Schmitt at MIT, Stanley at Berkeley, Zirkle and Cole at Chicago, [Stafford Leak Warren (born 1896)] at UCLA, Hartline and Bronk at Hopkins, Lauffer at Pittsburgh, Beadle and Pauling at Caltech, Williams at Michigan - were all en­gaged in life science before 1945, and of them only Williams had ever been a prac­ticing physicist (Pollard at Yale may emerge as a real exception). Their research programs on macromolecular structure, radiation effects, and so forth were rejuve­nated after the war, but nonetheless continuous from wartime ( or before) through the 1950s, and beyond. They did bring in some younger people, fairly fresh from graduate training in physical science and eager to move into biology - and often these did indeed become phage men like Stent or Cyrns Levinthal, who was hired as an instructor at Michigan in Williams's last year there and who worked his way up to full professor at MIT by 1957. But for the most part the beneficiaries of the Biophysics Bubble were established life scientists, and indeed I have illustrated some of the serious difficulties faced by newcomers to biology from physics when not protected by established life scientists. The entrepreneurs in a position to do the hiring had been biophysicists for some time, and were now exploiting their field's sudden cache with the media, with physicists, granting agencies, and university administrations. And like the later incarnations of their research programs, many of their staff, and indeed their biophysics institutions ( e.g. the Radiobiology and Bio­physics Institute at Chicago, Stanley's Virus Lab, the Yale Biophysics Department) were recycled in the 1960s in 'Molecular Biology' depaitments, constituting a ma­terial foundation for this contemporary disciplinai·y fom1ation. (These later devel­opments, however, lie beyond the present study's scope, and need further research.) 

The biophysicists at mid-century were keenly aware that they were on the brink of building the kind of broad and stable disciplinary structure that biophysics had previously lacked, and in the mid-1950s there were moves both to secure a dedi­cated source of government funding, and to establish a professional society with its own journal. It is to these efforts at disciplinary engineering on the national scale, and to some conjectures about how best to explain their eventual fate, that I now briefly turn. 

3. BIOPHYSICS ON A NATIONAL SCALE: THE NIH GRANT PROGRAM AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY

In 1950-52, the Korean war period, the NIH budget remained roughly level, and then resumed rapid growth, rising from $71 million in 1953 to $211 million in 1958.152 Thus the Institutes were again entering a period of surplus appropriations when in 1954 Ernest Allen, chief of the NIH Division of Research Grants (DRG), approached Schmitt to ask if he would organize and chair a study section to distrib­ute funds for extramural research in biophysics. Schmitt agreed to do so, on condi­tion that the NIH grant him extraordinarily broad latitude for efforts to direct and organize biophysics as a discipline. The NIH obliged. Biophysics appears to have achieved a renewed currency with the U.S. government at the start of the Eisen­hower era, and it seems very plausible to trace the same sort of connection to Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" campaign as one finds in reinvigorated (and well publicized) research on, for instance, civilian nuclear power. 153 Both of these scien­tific initiatives emblematized the atom as a friend of humanity, symbolically coun­terbalancing the new and even more terrifying hydrogen or "Super-bomb", however feebly. 

To cut a Jong story short, Schmitt managed to employ this NIH platform not only to dispense grants for both NIH and ONR (for NIH, $310,000 in 1955, $1.1 million in 1956, $2 million in 1957, and increasing amounts thereafter),''" but also to or­ganize a series of conferences with those he considered to be biophysics's leaders in order to hammer out a consensus on the proper definition and direction of the field. Schmitt's programs culminated in a month-long showpiece conference featuring the major luminaries of biophysics, the "Study program in biophysical science at Boulder Colorado", in July and August 1958. Intended for dissemination, through its initial publication as proceedings in the Reviews of modern physics and later as a textbook, the "Study program" reached an estimated 10,000 libraries worldwide.155 It is evident from the Boulder program's organization that in 1958, for Schmitt at least, biophysics included the following main areas of research: structure of macro­molecules, biological energetics, physical chemistry and self-assembly of protein aggregates, electron microscopic cytology, nucleic acid and protein synthesis (i.e. molecular genetics), and nerve physiology. "Physiology of the mechanical type" and radiobiology were still biophysics in the broader sense, though not under the narrower rubric "molecular biology", which was now defined as the physical chem­istry of macromolecules "together with the parent science of general physiology" - quite a large subset of what Schmitt counted as biophysics. 156

In the Boulder keynote speech, Schmitt communicated his ecumenical notion of biophysics, and his grand vision of where it was going. It would soon mature as biochemistry's sister science: 

Biophysics, which is rapidly developing to the status of a major branch of thelife sciences, is following the pattern set by biochemistry .... Just as biochemists had to determine first the composition and structural chemistry of the complex biomolecules, so in the early development of the field, biophysicists have to determine first, with the aid of crystallographic and physicochemical methods, the detailed configuration of the molecular chains of which the macromolecules are constructed. It will then be necessary to investigate the forces between the macromolecules .... 157

Schmitt held out the promise that as their techniques and theories about the interac­tion properties of macromolecules became more sophisticated, biophysicists would become able to model, predict, and engineer higher order components of living systems. Such ambitious statements that biophysics would soon mature as a disci­pline comparable in scale to biochemistry were common to biophysics entrepre­neurs at the time; "As biochemistry became a leading science after World War I, so biophysics is emerging as the dominant science following World War II", said Selle in a speech to a medical congress, for example. 158 One can well imagine that such talk set off alarms in biochemical quarters (see below). 

The Boulder conference itself, and publication costs of the textbook emerging from it, were generously underwritten by a special grant given by the NIH for the discretionary use of Schmitt (who came to call it his "programming slush fund"). 159 This unusual financial support, together with the broad powers given Schmitt to use the study section "to organize and sway at a national level" (as biochemists com­plained, but Schmitt's faction denied)"0 -which the NIH administration reinforced several times in the face of opposition to Schmitt from biochemists in the section161 - seemingly confilms a high level decision at the NIH to promote biophysics on a national scale. At any rate, by the time Schmitt stepped down as chairman of the NIH Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry Study Section in December 1958, to be succeeded by his staunch ally in the study section, Williams, it was dispensing millions of dollars each year in government grants. Biophysics had attracted the attention of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and a formal report on biophys­ics requested by the Senate was in preparation, under Schmitt's guidance.162 Bio­physics was also receiving ever greater notice at universities throughout North America. The Biophysics Society, a professional organization aimed at securing firmer disciplinary status for the field, was formally founded in the first National Biophysics Conference at Ohio State University in March I 957. Williams was elected its first president.163 Most of the effort to found the Society was undertaken by characters figuring in this essay: Cole, Zirkle, Lauffer, Williams, Selle, Hartline, Pollard, and Schmitt's brother Otto (an electrophysiologist and Professor of Bio­physics at the University of Minnesota). Schmitt had been working in the back­ground all the while, using his NIH study section platform to help the Society in financial and other capacities - again over objections of impropriety from bio­chemists on the section.1M 

However much the NIH might have supported Schmitt, though, his enterprise was based on a partial convergence of the interests of his circle of structural and genetic biophysicists (with backgrounds mostly in physiology or physical science) and a set of biochemists promoting approaches based in physical chemistry. This leads me to my concluding speculation on one of the major factors in the failure of Schmitt and his allies to establish biophysics as an enduring discipline along the lines they envisaged: they wanted to include the physical chemistry of macromol­ecules under biophysics, and therefore they were in competition with biochemists who sought to include this intellectual and methodological territory in their own discipline. Schmitt did have some physical chemistry-oriented biochemists on his side. As Case Western University's Wilfried Mommaerts saw it at the first of Schmitt's NIH conferences for leading biophysicists, "The main contact between biochemis­try and biophysics will be in the area of the physical chemistry of biological sys­tems. If I read the signs correctly, the majority of biochemists would be happy to drop this nuisance. Biophysics, however, would greatly benefit. ... The unison with so called physical biochemistry would greatly enrich biophysics, leaving to the

orthodox biochemists a more homogeneous field of study."165 But as already inti­mated, Schmitt encountered resistance to his discipline-building efforts as head of the NIH Biophysics Study Section from the biochemists assigned to it; indeed at the first meeting they succeeded in having the name of the Section changed to Bio­physics and Biophysical Chemistry, and afterwards tried to get the "Biophysics" dropped from the title! "'6 The conflict could not have been more obvious than in exchanges between Schmitt and Linus Pauling, that great proponent of introducing physical chemistry into biochemistry, at the second of Schmitt's 1955 NIH-spon­sored regional conferences for leading biophysicists. In a round-table discussion supposedly about how to boost the status of biophysics departments and degrees, three times Pauling raised the issue of whether "biophysics" reaUy meant anything, at one point even suggesting "it may be that biochemistry should just absorb this field". Schmitt riposted by pointing out that only a few decades earlier many people had denied that biochemistry was a discipline.167 Given these signs of conflict, it seems worth considering that if biochemistry had not adopted physical chemistry in the 1950s and early 1960s, there might be a great many more departments of bio­physics today. One might also wonder whether, if Sputnik had not caused a new scientific crisis diverting attention to physical sciences at just the moment that bio­physics was pushing for full disciplinary recognition, things might have been dif­ferent too. 

This account of why the Biophysics Bubble burst, like the rest of this essay, borrows elements freely from several theoretical approaches to scientific disciplines cmTently in use among historians of science, because all offer valuable explanatory power. The fate of disciplines does seem to depend on quasi-ecologic and quasi­economic factors such as opportune 'niches', 'demand' for knowledge, and compe­tition for resources; 168 doubtless, viable scientific disciplines must also offer a productive package of problems and methods by which to solve them;'69 surely too, disciplinary formations locate things in culturally determined semiotic spaces, as discourse analysis can reveal. 170 And some place should also be found for the vi­sionary leaders and other 'great men' of traditional historiography. The phenom­enon of discipline formation is complex, and it remains to be seen whether a single systematic theory of disciplinarity can accomodate all its dimensions. Thus for the moment an approach of theoretical bricolage is justified by practicality, despite any inelegance entailed. 

CONCLUSION 

In the event, the Biophysics Bubble burst. However, many of the constituents (whether viewed intellectually as fields or pragmatically as research programs) of what, to those subscribing to an inclusive vision like Schmitt's, was the discipline of bio­physics are active today either as freestanding disciplines or as elements of another discipline. Thus it can only be due to some set of historical contingencies, and not any lack of intrinsic scientific viability in biophysical research in the 1950s, that several or all of these fields are not still recognized as components of a discipline or supra-disciplinary constellation of biophysics. The physical chemistry and struc­ture of macromolecules, bioenergetics, and protein self assembly all belong to bio­chemistry now, as does some of the problem of gene expression, the remainder of which is central to the contemporary discipline of molecular genetics. Radiation biology now lies within nuclear medicine. The problem of cellular architecture now belongs to the discipline of cell biology, which came to work in tandem with bio­chemistry.171 The problem of nerve and brain function has given rise to what is known as "neuroscience", to which Schmitt increasingly devoted himself in the 1960s as one the field's main organizers.172 All of these fields grew quickly in the 1950s under the aegis of biophysics, and all benefited from the resources made available by the cultural currency of that science, as exploited by the biophysics entrepreneurs in the manner I have described here. 

The strong continuity of authority, and of research problems and programs man­aged by these biophysics entrepreneurs, compels recognition of just how deeply rooted in the biophysics of the 1930s is the 'molecular biology' that emerged by the later 1960s. This recognition of continuity helps solve a historical puzzle recently stressed by Fox Keller:173 not only had physical scientists in the postwar period abandoned determinism, but some even embraced organicism in an effort to ration­alize complexity, with profound consequences for systems theory and information technology; whereas on the other hand the early molecular biologists (including those mainly young physical scientists inducted by leaders such as Schmitt and Stanley) continued working to reduce the organism on a nineteenth-century model of mechanism. Why was physics moving in an opposite direction to the biophysics that later came to be seen as foundational for 'molecular biology'? Jacques Loeb, one of biophysics's founding fathers, would have been pleased with the trajectory of molecular biology-cum-biophysics in the l 950s; and no wonder, for it was not physicists, but the intellectual heirs of Loeb who were in charge. Once we abandon the premise that physicists played the leading role attributed them in the standard story of 'molecular biology', such puzzles disappear. However, the same recogni­tion that dissolves this problem foregrounds another, about where the standard ac­count of physicists' leadership came from - and for whose benefit. Here, the early utility of the trappings of physics to the biophysics entrepreneurs is an obvious consideration.Also implicated is the need of the molecular geneticists of the 1960s, snuggling to establish an independent discipline after the Bubble had burst, to lo­cate a distinctive founder for themselves in Delbrück (as Abir-Am has argued). 174 

I have contended in this essay that the scientific problems and research programs, the institutional infrastructure, and the scientific personnel important in American 'molecular biology' (and other branches oflife science) from the 1960s onwards all owe much to that dramatic postwar rejuvenation of prewar general physiology and related fields that I have called the Biophysics Bubble. This Bubble was itself a symptom of the general syndrome in American culture that Gamow recognized, among his physicist fiiends, as "maladia biologica" -the root cause of the condition being, of course, the Bomb and its terror. And while it might at first seem odd that the connection I have drawn here between the Bomb and certain types of biology in the 1950s has not been fully disclosed by previous history of biology, perhaps it is not so strange considering recent changes in the conditions of our historical work. Here we must count not only practical matters like the new availability of ce1iain archives, but also such changes as the recent end of the Cold War and the ultimate supremacy of 'molecular biology'. However, explaining historiography is a more complex matter than criticizing it empirically, and any explanation in terms of deeper changes in the conditions of histmical knowledge will require social theory ad­equate to the task, and must await another occasion. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

The author is grateful for the help of archivists at the California Institute of Tech­nology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the University of California Bancroft Library, the University of California at Los Angeles University Archives and Research Library, the University of Chicago; also special thanks to Francis Schmitt for access to materials, to Joseph Fmton for his book, and to Angela Craeger and Peter Westwick for sharing their unpublished work. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers and to all those who have discussed and critiqued this project, especially Evelyn Fox Keller, Robert Sinsheimer, and the other participants in the November 1994 symposium at the Beckman Institute of Caltech, organized by Diana Barkan and Jay Labinger. Research has been supported by a Professional Development Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (U.S.A.), and by a University Research Grant from the University of Sydney. Por­tions of this article will appear in Picture control: The electron microscope and the transformation of biology in America, I 940-1960, fmthcoming from Stanford Uni­versity Press, and are used with the permission of the publishers.All rights in those portions are reserved, 

REFERENCES 

1. Alice Kimball Smith, A peril and a hope. rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), chap. 2 et passim; Michael Yavendetti, "The American reaction to the use of atomic bombs on Japan: The l 940s", Historian, xxxvi/2 (1974), 224-47; Daniel Kevles, The physicists (New York, 1978), chaps. 20-21; Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's early light: American thought and culture at the dawn of the atomic age (New York, 1985), chaps. 4-6; Spencer Weart, Nuclear fear: A history of images (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), chap. 6. Oppenheimer was surely not alone in the feeling that moved him to blurt out to Truman that he had "blood on his hands" (cited by Weat1, p. 113, note 29), though fear and not guilt over Hiroshima is the state of mind relevant to the present argument.

 D. Fleming, "EmigrC physicists and the biological revolution", Pe1:\pectives in American history. ii (1968), I 52-89; L. Kay, The molecular vision of life (Oxford, 1993); E. Fox Keller, "Physics and the emergence of molecular biology: A history of cognitive and political synergy", Journal of the history of biology, xxiii (1990), 389-409; W. Lanouette, Genius in the shadows: A biography of Leo Szilard (New York, 1992); E. Yoxen, "Giving life new meaning: The rise of the molecular biology establishment", in N. Elias, H. Martins and R. Whitley (eds), Scientific establishments and hierarchies (Dordrecht, 1982), 123-43. Also see Kevles, op. cit. (ref. l),